Cheeses International is a small British experimental label, and the Bureau files it at Tier III as a connector node of the cassette-and-small-CD network rather than a scene-defining imprint. Based in Bournemouth, Dorset, it belongs to the web of tiny, mail-order labels that moved experimental music between countries in the 1980s and 1990s. It earns its file through that network role and through one release in particular; it is not a founder of anything, and the Tier III filing is honest about the modest scale.
The network is the context that matters. Before the internet, experimental music travelled through a dense web of small labels, fanzines, tape-trading and mail-order, and labels like Cheeses International were its connective tissue: low-volume operations, often run from a home address, that put out a handful of releases and linked their corner of the underground to the rest of it. The Bureau files such labels for that connective function, not for catalogue size, and is careful not to inflate a small operation into something it was not.
The release that places Cheeses International here is Doc Wör Mirran's The Music Of Blood (1994), the Nürnberg project's first recording planned specifically as a CD. Recorded across 1988 and 1989 at Joseph B. Raimond's Two Car Garage Studios, it is very experimental and often close to industrial, and it drew on Doc Wör Mirran's open-membership approach to pull in Asmus Tietchens, GX Jupitter-Larsen, Jello Biafra and others. Fifty copies went out as a numbered edition with band member Peter Schuster's blood squirted behind the tray card, a small-label gesture of just the sort the network produced; by most accounts even committed fans preferred the standard edition.
The Bureau's reading. Cheeses International is filed at Tier III as a small connector-node label of the international experimental network. Its place in the archive rests on its role in that network and on the Doc Wör Mirran release that ties it to the rest of the field. It is cross-referenced to that record and its collaborators, and recorded here as one of the many small operations through which the underground actually moved, no larger claim intended.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Edwardian era · last revised c. the Holocene