Kota Tones

An independent record label & international artistic collaboration I founded in 2023, centering the needle on expressions of North Eurasian "ethnofuturism" and decolonial perspectives from this vast, diverse, and little-understood region of the globe (occupied by the Russian Empire, USSR, and now Russian Federation for much of modern history), with a special emphasis on artists from Uralic, Turkic, and other minority and indigenous cultural backgrounds.

kotatones.com

Aside from running Kota Tones and overseeing the production of vinyl records & cassettes, my roles have included many different hats: graphic designer, mixing & mastering engineer, product photographer, photo & video editor, social media manager, liner notes editor, 3D modeler, animator, and whatever else my skills can fill—often in direct collaboration with a variety of other artists & media makers working around the globe.

The initial seed began from seeking to (re)connect with Uralic roots and an interest in the linguistic and ethnographic histories of this region bridging Europe and Asia, but blossomed into a platform to promote regional artistry on a global stage as I connected with a variety of likeminded musicians and creatives seeking to express their local cultures, languages, and identities in unique and exploratory ways.

Acts that Kota Tones has released include Yat-Kha, Post-Dukes, Veri, TATAR KYZ:LAR, Kuturar, HMOT, Alone In Deer Park, and Kokonja, with many more in conversation for future releases. Stylistically the label is genre-agnostic: ranging from abstract experimentalism to folktronica, feminist electro-punk, psychedelia, folk-metal, techno, industrial, and spoken-word, and more. However, common themes unite the label's output: dealing with intersections of modern & traditional, colonization & decolonial practices, the local & the global, and resistance to the status-quo or commercialistic approaches.