Ron Lessard's Lowell, Massachusetts shop, opened in 1984, that became the American clearing-house for noise music · the retail counter behind the RRRecords label, the source of the first US Merzbow and Hanatarash vinyl, and the home of the 2 O'Clock Matinee in-stores.
RRRecords is the shop at the centre of American noise, and the Bureau files it as the section's clearest case of a record shop and a record label being one and the same project. Ron Lessard opened it in 1984 at 219 Central Street in downtown Lowell, an old Massachusetts mill town, and it became, improbably, one of the most important physical points in the international noise underground.
The shop's historic role is as a conduit. In the pre-internet mail-order era, RRRecords was one of the earliest routes by which Japanese noise reached the United States: the label Lessard started in 1986 issued the first American vinyl by Merzbow, Hanatarash, Masonna and others, and the shop counter was where American buyers actually encountered them. The archive files the label separately; this page files the shop, the retail point that did the crossing.
Lessard himself performed as Emil Beaulieau, "America's Greatest Noise," and ran the shop in character with the scene: no pressure to buy, an encyclopaedic memory for where every record sat, elaborate packaging and conceptual releases (lock-grooves, anti-records, the RRRecycled series of over three hundred releases on re-purposed cassettes). The retail counter, the label and the performances were a single continuous practice rather than separate businesses.
From the late 1990s the shop hosted the 2 O'Clock Matinee, unadvertised free Saturday-afternoon in-store concerts that became the community hub of the American noise scene, with early appearances by figures including Howard Stelzer, Greg Kelley and Chris Cooper. The Bureau files RRRecords at RS·004 as the single most important shop in the American noise tradition: the Lowell counter through which the music crossed oceans and a scene found its room.