Everyone remembers the first ACC album they heard
They might not know it was an ACC album. After all, how many of us really pay attention to labels. For most of us, it’s the artist that’s important and labels are just, what? The middlemen? The suits who take the money while the artist shakes their tin cup hoping for a few cents, maybe a t-shirt sale? That’s certainly the case today when you’re talking about the big labels.
But there was a time when a label meant something. Whether it was Blue Note, responsible for releasing some of the most important jazz albums of the 20th century. Or Dischord, started by Ian MacKaye to publish his own band and going on to represent dozens D.C. punk rock acts. Death Row Records helped spread voices that the traditional labels were scared of. And Deutsche Gramaphone is a sure bet when you’re faced with 20+ recordings of Mozart’s 25th piano concerto.
See also: Ninja Tune, Ruthless Records, Sub Pop, Def Jam, Warp, Kill Rock Stars, ESP Disk, and others.
These were (in some cases still are) labels with a personality. Labels with their sights set on (ears tuned to) a sound, a genre, a message that certain artists are sending out - but only very specific artists - and very specific messages. These labels had something to say more than they had something to sell. ACC was one of these labels.
Different sources offer competing answers to the riddle of what ACC stood for. Some recordings spell it out, but not always in the same way. Sometimes it’s „Astral Cartographers Collective“, other times it’s „Acoustic Collage Club“. I’ve also read that it stands for the initials of the founders, though who exactly they are is surprisingly hard to establish.
As far as we know, ACC‘s first pressings appeared in the early 60s when the label could be described as part vanity project and part social experiment. Liner notes mention chance meetings in art school, and encounters with what was at the time called „world music“, which was basically anything not from the US or UK. It can only be assumed that the liner notes, and everything around the LPs themselves was a bit of a prank. From one album to another it’s unclear what’s the name of the band and what’s the name of the record. Until we can collect and document all of ACC’s contributions to the history of music, these questions will remain.
Part 1 of TBD.