Although our main activity revolves around sound and music, we also like to continue the tradition of merch that has always gone hand-in-totebag with musicians and fans. Merch is a cool way to support your favourite artists, and most people own at least one favourite band t-shirt, right? I personally have proudly worn my Underground Resistance sweatshirt and Trail Of Dead t-shirt for decades.
Cancel Eject by Consume circa 1996
Looking back, its not such a new thing for me to be self-producing merch - in the late 90s and early 00's myself, Emma Sola and a few other Brighton UK deviants formed a collective called No-Future and - alongside kickstarting a unique brand of 90s electronic music, we also managed to setup and run one of the earliest examples of a self hosted global webshop hosted from our site www.no-future.com and fulfilled from our office in Brighton UK. Not much remains of the online store code, because the PHP 1 driven shop URL got stolen. We launched on www.nofuture.com in 1998. It was a really nicely designed online shop - but then some dark gasmask-loving individual managed to steal that domain name from us and we had to start all over again with a hyphen in the URL. But that is another story to be told.
Anyway - the memory I was grappling for - was that from 1998 onwards we were behind a nice line of hand printed merch, which included lots of Mosquito Records shirts, Defunkt (our club night) and some very collectable NO FUTURE designs done for us by Radiohead's Stanley Donwood in collaboration with Thom Yorke. They were screenprinted by hand at the Slack HQ in Brighton. Sadly and weirdly, I do not have any of those precious items in my personal collection.
This is the way.
And now it is 2023 - I still come up with self-perpetuating electronic sounds, occasionally release charming music but also have developed many visual designs for all of that activity. Truth is, I have learned so much about style from so many inspiring designers and artists in my 3 decades as a musician. Shout outs to Red Design, Consume, Slack, Dope, NoDomain, LaPrisaMata and more.
An amazing thing is that in this dizzying age of generative AI, not only can I create cool album art, but I can also sculpt imaginary models to show off my merch designs! The diversity inherent in this new process makes me deliriously happy - even though these figures probably might never resemble my real customers, it is still a blast. It feels like we have arrived at the dream within the dream. The moment under the moment. The weird under the wonky.
For manufacturing, I am partnered with Everpress in the UK who are rather cool in many ways - as a merch manufacturer should be. They will be printing and fulfilling *only what is needed* that is why I call it Limited Edition - meaning there are only enough garments out there to exactly fit demand. That means that a new design or a relaunched campaign needs to receive orders before it goes to print. The process might take a little longer, but is much better on resources. Check out our Collectibles category to see what is available right now.