Leonardo Sabatto's Quito imprint, running since 1995: the chief document of the Ecuadorian noise underground, and one of the routes by which South American noise reached the rest of the world.
Bizarre Audio Arts is the noise and experimental label founded in Quito, Ecuador, in 1995 by Leonardo Sabatto, and the Bureau files it as the key label of the South American noise scene this archive touches. It is a small operation in the literal sense, hand-made CDr editions in stark packaging, later a digital catalogue, but its reach across thirty years has been considerable, and it carries the same documentary weight for Ecuador that the larger imprints carry for Japan and Europe.
Label and founder cannot be separated. Sabatto has worked in the underground since the late 1980s, runs the harsh-noise project Armenia, which dates to the same 1995 founding, and treats the imprint, the project and the scene around them as one continuous activity. Armenia supplies much of the catalogue and most of its international splits, and the label's stamped motto, "Only noise is real", doubles as a statement of method: violent, saturated harsh noise with a strain of death industrial running through it.
The catalogue's archival value lies in its compilations. Extreme Music from Chone (2003), Extreme Music from Nowhere (2004) and Live Under Extreme Magnetism (2005) gather the Ecuadorian underground and its visitors, naming a scene the rest of the world had little means of hearing. Quito holds an outsized place in South American noise, sometimes called the regional capital of the form, and Chone, on the coast, turns up as a second pocket of activity. Roster names beyond Armenia include Defektro, Dark Cavern, Transfiguration and Daniel Pico, a small but real local network.
For all its remoteness from the usual centres, the label has been thoroughly outward-facing. Its splits and collaborations run to Japan's Thirdorgan, the American noise figure Emil Beaulieau, who is Ron Lessard of RRRecords, Brazil's S.R.M.P. XXI and many others, with co-releases through Australia's Janus Tapes and small labels worldwide. The traffic ran both ways: Bizarre Audio Arts was a route out for Ecuadorian noise and a route in for the international scene, the same networked practice that defines the form elsewhere.
The operation later extended under the name Bizarreshampoo, also styled Bizarres Digital Anti Entertainment, carrying the same editorial hand into a fuller digital catalogue and continuing the split-and-compilation programme into the 2020s. The Bureau files Bizarre Audio Arts as a small label of real consequence: the chief document of the Ecuadorian noise underground, and proof that the form built and sustained its own infrastructure far from the places usually credited with it.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Holocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene