Knoxville-based Gezellig Records specializes in niche world music
For Ben TO Smith, music is a calling.
From his salaried position as a concert production manager for Live Nation (formerly AC Entertainment), to his recurring freelance role with Big Ears Festival, to booking a few shows a year at the Pilot Light, to his rotating gig as host of “The Indie Aisle” on WUTK 90.3, the University of Tennessee’s student radio station, it is one that has permeated every facet of his professional life.
It is regarding his small independent label Gezellig Records, though, that Smith’s enthusiasm for the art form is most evident. Conceptualized in 2013 when he was still an undergrad at UT and started in earnest a couple of years later at the behest of Wil Wright and Matt Honkonen of Peak Physique, Gezellig is a labor of love for its founder, who bankrolls the operation with residual income from his aforementioned day job and oversees it from his home office in his spare time.
That he is the imprint’s lone employee keeps overhead costs low, but it also means that he is responsible for each aspect of the enterprise: talent scouting; maintaining spreadsheets; doing media outreach; advertising; updating business pages; preparing digital files; securing distributors for physical editions; and all manner of other minutiae the venture requires. Smith credits his girlfriend for helping to box and ship cassettes and LPs, and he has begun to entertain outside help for some things – writer Nadine Smith (no relation) recently contributed the press release for The New Romantics’ formal debut, and Keith Hadad of Record Crates United penned blurbs about the label’s two other October releases, for instance – but Gezellig has been a solo endeavor since day one.
“I’m really independent and stubborn, and I’ve always been that way,” Smith acknowledges. “My eagerness just to do everything myself really is overpowering. [But] with these last three releases, I actually let go of that a little bit. So I’m making steps.”
To be clear, he is very much amenable to working with others. Spearheading what he calls a “hugely collaborative effort,” Smith gained valuable combined experience by curating the celebrated overnight 12-hour drone sessions at Big Ears in 2018 and 2019. Citing the elaborate packaging for an Earwig Deluxe record and an EP by mssv and Nels Cline, he identifies Striped Light as an ideal partner for future cooperative opportunities. And he also expresses his interest in teaming up with a local underground label that produces cassettes of ambient recordings.
Smith’s magnanimity extends to his relationships with imprints outside of Knoxville, too, and he says that cordiality is reciprocated across the board by similarly sized independent labels. Rather than carrying a roster of performers contractually obligated only to Gezellig, he instead licenses albums on an individual basis. Consequently, he is quick to credit anyone who may have put out a prior release by a mutual act, and he views his company as a conduit for facilitating future success. Such a dynamic, he stresses, strengthens the bond between artist and brand.
“I’ve always seen the label as a steppingstone,” Smith explains. “If I can help that artist get to the next level, that’s great. I’m not trying to sign the next big artist; I’m trying to sign someone that it’ll help with their momentum, sustainability and get them to the next place.
“If I do a good job, they’ll want to come back. Even with some [larger] independents like Domino, you can see that capitalist pressure to extract as much value out of the artists as they can. [My] goal is to break even, so as long as I do that and the artist feels good, that’s cool.
“Also, I don’t want to learn how to do contracts,” he jokingly adds.
The impetus for Smith’s career path stems from his family, which he says has “a whole historical music-industry background.” His mother worked at Record Bar, the well-known store that once graced Cumberland Avenue; his father was a longtime tour manager, with much of that stretch spent with Metallica; and both parents filled his childhood home in Karns with all kinds of music. His dad also would create carefully constructed mix CDs that he would play on long car trips and distribute as “really sentimental, meaningful” gifts on birthdays and holidays. The younger Smith caught the bug and began making mixes for himself and others when he reached middle-school age.
“The way I always did it, there was thought and intention behind every song chosen, whether there was a message or some sort of theme,” he says. “I think what motivated me was … the love of sharing music that I like because I’m just through-and-through a music fan. The act of musical discovery has been really big always.”
As he grew older, the infatuation only intensified. It first manifested in deep dives into various genres and subgenres, aided by the mushrooming popularity of online forums, blogs and news/reviews sites, as well as by the advent and proliferation of peer-to-peer file-sharing platforms. It transitioned to a job at Disc Exchange where “every paycheck just went right back to … getting all these special orders” and then to WUTK where, during his first semester on Rocky Top, Smith took over co-hosting duties of “The Indie Aisle” from Carey Hodges and Doug Johnson.
Broadcasting the weekly show from the bowels of Andy Holt Tower with a revolving cast of characters led by Henry Gibson resulted in, firstly, a change of majors (from international relations to journalism) and, secondly, the incentive to continue obsessively searching for new sounds from around the globe in order to assemble fresh, painstakingly sequenced playlists. After a couple of years, Smith left East Tennessee to study abroad in the Netherlands, with the city of Utrecht serving as the setting for the most formative musical experience of his young life.
The 2012 edition of the avant-garde festival Le Guess Who? gathered a wide-ranging array of artists that included standout rock bands (Deerhoof, Clinic), exciting rising artists (Sharon Van Etten, Ty Segall), future Big Ears vets (Grouper, Tim Hecker) and a wealth of acts hailing from the U.K., mainland Europe and beyond – and Smith was blown away by the lot of it. “‘Oh, they can have festivals like that,’” he remembers thinking. “As a 19 or 20 year old, I was like, ‘This is incredible!’”
With the experience being enough for the thought of a record label specializing in diverse experimental music to begin percolating, Smith fashioned a logo during the early incubation stage with a hand-drawn rendering of a building in Holland and even gave it a Dutch name. Roughly equivalent to the Danish concept of ‘hygge,’ ‘gezellig’ doesn’t have a direct English translation, either, but refers to a general notion of coziness. Unlike its Norse counterpart, however, the latter term more particularly references a group of folks achieving such a feeling in a communal way.
“It’s what I’m trying to capture with all the artists I like,” Smith says of his objective for the modern realization of Gezellig. “And all the artists I like, I try to do something with. And, you know, I think [music] can bring people together, which is the whole idea of the label.”
While that idea followed him back to Knoxville, it existed as an abstraction until 2015, coming to fruition only when Wright and Honkonen approached him about issuing a physical release for their joint pursuit. Though he since has reapplied to the label best practices gleaned from years of experience as a production manager, what occurred back then was a crash course in sourcing materials, comparing quotes, implementing graphic design and several other processes Smith was forced to learn on the fly.
One of the simplest yet most effective methods of establishing contacts and forging connections, though, has involved the most basic of digital interactions. “Over the last eight years, I have learned of the power of just an email,” he says.
Watching the epic, moving 2018 film “An Elephant Sitting Still” by the late Chinese director Bo Hu and being struck by the beauty of its soundtrack prompted Smith to spontaneously send a message to Hualun, the band that provided the score. “I emailed them that night: ‘Hey, I’m just a guy in Knoxville, do you want to do something?’” he recalls. “And within two days, they emailed me back.”
A partnership developed from that initial communication, with the imprint releasing a Hualun EP that sold out and, later, a full-length album, Gezellig’s first vinyl pressing, which moved all of its units, as well. A feature about the group in influential British publication The Wire ensued, and the alliance culminated in a wonderful full-circle moment for Smith last year when he returned to Le Guess Who? and caught a recorded live performance by the band that was screened during a showcase of Chinese artists.
“The email to Hualun changed the trajectory of the label,” he says. “It changed the direction of my life, too,” he adds, describing how he had gotten to know the Wuhan band right before the pandemic hit. In addition to the overall unease surrounding COVID, Smith had been concerned about his new friends who were trapped in the epicenter of the outbreak. And, like many who made their living in the entertainment industry, he then was furloughed from his job. However, he made the most of a bad situation by seizing the opportunity to invest all of his energy and a good amount of his unemployment bonus into the label, which in turn was able to produce physical copies for those Hualun efforts.
The forced work stoppage also afforded Smith the free time to scour Bandcamp, torrent boards, festival undercards, social media sites and other resources for more intercontinental acts he could share with listeners. Explaining that he is tired of pigeonholed genres and stale phrases like ‘international music’ and ‘global music,’ he says that he now wants to know more about specific scenes in places like Thailand, Germany, Korea, Argentina, Turkey and North Africa.
“I’ve kind of gotten more worldly,” he says. “Over the last four years, it’s been bands from Brazil, Taiwan, Indonesia. … It’s helping me fuel my urge to discover more. I’m hoping that this same curiosity affects other people.”
On that note, being careful not to conflate his modest aim with that of a world-renowned festival, Smith likens his mission to that of Big Ears: to cultivate a deep, rich local arts scene by bringing the world to Knoxville rather than by presenting Knoxville outwardly. “I’m a label that’s local, not a local label,” he says about its strictly niche appeal. “I’m not trying to reach the widest possible audience, you know? I’m just trying to reach the right audience.”
Projects by Wright, Honkonen and Brandon Biondo notwithstanding, Gezellig tends to mainly represent artists from other regions and cultures because it is an accurate reflection of its proprietor’s discerning personal tastes. “It’s a vanity project,” he admits. “But I’m not releasing my own music. It’s a, ‘Hey, listen to what I listen to’ kind of thing.”
Still, as he readily asserts, Smith is a fiercely proud local who makes a point of stipulating where his setup is based in every press release he sends. “I live here, I love living here and I want Knoxville to be seen,” he says.
To that end, he recently took the first steps toward growing a hometown fanbase. He already had been advertising new and upcoming releases before trailers preceding movies at Central Cinema, and he just began reaching out to area record stores about starting to stock his label’s wares. He also is formulating the design of a comprehensive database of Knoxville musicians both past and present, active and inactive. Lastly, he hints at nascent plans to develop a separate imprint that would be more welcoming to and supportive of local acts.
“I have been thinking about how to make a local label work,” Smith says. “Where it is more of an open call but functions in the same way … where a small college band from UT is signed to this label. They can go to Pres[ervation] Pub, Barley’s, somewhere in Nashville and say, ‘Hey, we’re an up-and-coming band, we’re already signed.’ … This would be my way of giving back.
“I’ve thought enough about it that I have a name for it, I have a logo for it. … I think at this point, it’s the right time.”
