LZDXV

15 Years Of Lazy Days

2005-2010

2005. After enjoying a decade releasing music on some of my favorite labels and travelling steadily around the world, I was faced with the question : what’s next. During a long walk in Istanbul with my good friend Hakan, he exclaimed, "You should start your own label!”. I let those words echo for a little while. Wouldn’t it be nice to have my own platform to be able to create and put out music without having to please labels ever changing tastes and agendas? A few months later, while on vacation in Grenada, I came upon a beach bar. There was a sign randomly placed on a speaker with letters carved into a simple piece of plywood. It read:

L A Z Y D A Y S

And I thought instantly, “This is the name of my label!”.

Back in Montreal, I reached out to my friend Mike Fresco, who owned and managed a few labels in the city. We decided to become partners in this adventure. I was already sitting on a nice project I did in Byron Bay (Australia) with collective 20for7. The track was called Friday and I also had a great remix from Trentemoller who I met when we played together in Copenhagen. The project had previously been turned down by a few respected labels. But this first release became an overnight success, even becoming a major track of that summer on the White Island. A few people who originally turned down the project later confessed that they regretted not signing it. But I sure didn’t. And this was how Lazy Days Recordings was born.

For the first few years, we went on to release music from artists like Tortured Soul, Brett Johnson, Shur-I-Kan as well as my own collaborations with Atjazz, Vincenzo, JT Donaldson. In 2007, I relocated to San Francisco. The vinyl market was crashing and we were in the early days of digital sales. Not exactly the best time to run a label But I decided to keep pushing and to run the label on my own. Just hoping I could keep it going for 5 years…

[to be continued]

Fred