![]() ![]() Some of these people, they’ve had nobody being interested in their music for 50 years,” says Roig. “It would be senseless to reissue something and just make a copy of what was there. ![]() This isn’t the most cost-effective choice-he prefers the phrase “bloody expensive”-but it’s essential. Context like that is key for Roig, who includes multi-page booklets with photos and detailed liner notes (often in multiple languages) inside his vinyl reissues. Pizarro’s two-year stint in Argentina, it bears mentioning, was political exile from Pinochet’s regime. Take, for instance, the recent reissues of solo albums from Jorge López Ruiz and Matías Pizarro, which have arrived just behind the reissue of De Las Colonias Del Río de la Plata, Ruiz and Pizarro’s joint 1976 effort (with percussionist Pocho Lapouble) made during the latter’s two-year stint in Argentina. Roig regularly refers to what he’s doing with Altercat as “research,” and the interconnectedness of the catalog reflects as much. “Who knows if in three years I get deeply into minimal techno or something? Then hey, nobody can say I can’t do it.” “I give room for things to happen,” he says. That’s deliberate too, right down to his decision to not name the label something with genre-specific implications. ![]() Rediscovered South American soul, funk, bossa nova, and especially jazz-the freer, the better-now comprises the majority of the catalog, although not its entirety. Still, Roig gravitated progressively closer to ‘60s and ‘70s Brazilian jazz, particularly the kind made by Brazilian musicians outside of Brazil. For the label’s debut release, he put out In The Land of Aou Tila, a dizzying psych and Afro-jazz fusion record by Athens-based collective Afrodyssey. His initial vision for Altercat was a mix of new music and reissues. “You DJ, you play once and it’s a great night, and that night’s gone.” “I realized that with everything I was doing with music, there was nothing that was left as a witness,” he says. As in, Roig couldn’t bear not to collect, not to have something solid to hold, especially now that he’d spent years DJing. ![]() His girlfriend, he’s pleased to report, is “great” about it.Īltercat-“altercation” in Catalan-was born from the same collector’s impulse. “ The line between work and private life is very thin,” he says. The space situation tends to grow more chaotic when shipments of fresh-pressed releases arrive, particularly since Roig does the grunt work himself. It’s not messy, just voluminous, and at one point during the pandemic he busied himself with organizing the “600 or 700” Egyptian 45s he has on hand. A CD reissue of Os Mutantes, given to him by a friend sometime in the late ‘90s, was a formative treasure, which he initially listened to “as if it was the strangest, rarest thing ever.” These days, the floor-to-ceiling shelves that line one wall of the living-room-turned-label-HQ in his apartment are full, and what can’t fit overflows into nearby crates and cabinets. He spent his teen years in his native Catalonia tracking down the more obscure sides of ‘60s psych and garage rock. Sergi Roig, head of the Berlin-based and self-described “one-man orchestra” Altercat Records, will freely admit he’s a collector to the bone. ![]()
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