Some years earlier I had met a kindred spirit by the name of Callum (aka Cam). He had worked successfully for another company 8DIO and was interested in working with me in my big company. It was clear to me on meeting him in 2021 that we were on the same page. We liked similar noisy music, and enjoyed the adventurous of sampling. It struck me that we would work well together egging on our ever-more-maverick ideas.
Our successes at the big company were a folk library called Solstice, an action library called Colossus and two insane projects that stamped our whimsy on the landscape of sampling. The Stack, 60-odd guitar amps on scaffolding in Air Studios, and Tape Orchestra. Just as stupid with stupid amounts of tape machines and cassettes to go with them.
Cam is a native (-ish, he spent formative years in Malta) Scot and when the big company decided to relocate the Scottish office to London he politely declined. At which point we went for a peaty whisky and cracked a very simple alternate plan.
“What if we carried on doing the mad shit we did at the big place and sold this stuff to the really rich composers we knew who had an appetite for it”. We would set up a subscription plan where rich composers would give us $1000 a month for a never-ending supply of bat-shit-crazy. We would then take small nuggets from this treasure trunk of mad, plus all the R&D we’d have to do etc and put them in a vault which we would make available to everyone… for free.
Done!