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A Label Man Who Defies One
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The label's hot streak began with a cool, dreamy folk duo from Baltimore called Beach House. After hearing some tunes on MySpace, Hyman quickly won them over with his got-it-togetherness. "I thought he was very businessy," says Beach House's Alex Scally. "But he didn't demand any commitment from us, and that's very uncommon. It made me trust him a lot."
Beach House's self-titled debut dropped in the fall of 2006, garnering blog buzz and kicking off what Hyman describes as the label's "significant growth." ("Beach House" has sold an estimated 10,000 copies, while the band's 2008 effort, "Devotion," has already reached 16,000 -- respectable numbers for this kind of music.) It also brought more artists from Baltimore's burgeoning music scene into the Carpark fold. Now Carpark plays host to Nintendo-addled dance jams (Dan Deacon), ebullient guitar clatter (Ecstatic Sunshine), nightmarish campfire chants (Lexie Mountain Boys), ripples of noise (Wzt Hearts) and whatever else the sonic dreamers of Charm City seem capable of cooking up.
"Baltimore is an inexpensive place to live, which is attractive for artists," Hyman explains. "You've got MICA, the art school, which brings in a constant supply of kids that are into this kind of stuff. When you're around that kind of energy it spreads to other people. Dan Deacon and his friends have a lot to do with it, too."
Deacon is the unlikely scene-mensch with a sound that the Baltimore City Paper recently described as "Lightning Bolt covering John Philip Sousa on Nickelodeon." His 2007 Carpark album "Spiderman of the Rings" has helped draw attention not only to him, but to his peers. He says the scene now is "more about creating a sense of community than a sense of individual success."
Deacon's second album for Carpark, "Bromst," is expected in November. "I didn't really know anything about how to release a record," Deacon says of his life before Carpark. "I had always burned my own CDRs and never put them in stores. [Hyman] was a portal into the realm of legitimacy."
And while Carpark is keeping an ear tuned to Baltimore, aesthetically, the label remains untethered. "There's no Carpark sound by any means," says Richardson at Pitchfork. "And that could be a shift we're seeing. [Fans] aren't trusting the sound of the label, they're trusting the curatorial abilities of whoever's running it."
The curator concurs. "I want to bring music to people that affects them, makes them happy and changes their view of the world," Hyman says. "That kind of thing."
