The Brussels label that treats its catalogue as a set of historical artefacts, and whose noise-and-electronic anthology is the single best chronology the form has.
Sub Rosa is the Belgian avant-garde label the Bureau files at Tier I. Guy-Marc Hinant, born in Charleroi in 1960, came to Brussels in the 1980s to study cinema, met Frédéric Walheer, and the two began making publications, collages and performances before turning to records at the end of the decade. The name comes from the opening sentence of Deleuze and Guattari's Mille Plateaux, which sets the tone: a label run as an idea rather than a business, resistant to trend and hype, in Hinant's words not part of the record industry at all.
The catalogue is the point. Across more than 250 titles, Sub Rosa has published experimental and electronic music, musique concrète, drone, noise, ritual and film music, and treated each release as something closer to a cultural artefact than a product. It has issued archival material connected to Marcel Duchamp, William S. Burroughs, James Joyce and Kurt Schwitters, and records by composers such as Tod Dockstader, Henri Pousseur, Luc Ferrari, Nam June Paik and Francisco López. Alongside these run the world-music field recordings, Inuit and Tibetan sound, the Master Musicians of Joujouka and others, the same documentary impulse turned outward.
Its monument is Hinant's An Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music, seven volumes on fourteen CDs released between 2002 and 2013, a chronology that runs from the 1920s to the present and is the most ambitious single map the form has. The label also kept a brief offshoot, Quatermass, in the early 1990s for more listenable electronic material, and Hinant runs a film outfit, OME, making documentaries on postwar avant-garde music.
The Bureau's reading. Sub Rosa is filed at Tier I as a foundational and cult-status documenter of the noise-and-experimental tradition, the rare label whose discography functions as a working history of the music it carries.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Anthropocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene