The Stockport label Leyland Kirby and Andy MacGregor founded in 1996: plunderphonics worked through crude sleeves, joke catalogue numbers and free downloads · a founding document of British antimusic and glitch.
V/Vm Test Records is the label as prank, and the Bureau files it as one of the early documents of British plunderphonics and the antimusic and glitch micro-scene. It was set up in Stockport in January 1996 by Leyland Kirby, who recorded as V/Vm, and Andy MacGregor, who recorded as Jansky Noise, as the in-house imprint for the V/Vm project and the circle around it, and it ran until around 2008.
The catalogue opened electronic, with the 12-inch Up-Link Data Transmissions, and quickly turned toward the plunderphonics that made the label notorious. From the compilation Privileged Frames For Reference onward, V/Vm Test treated the whole artefact as the work: crude but lovingly detailed sleeves, joke catalogue numbers, deliberate mis-filing in record shops, and pressings of only one to five hundred copies, so that collectability and the prank were built into the object itself.
The clearest case is the Help Aphex Twin series, catalogue HAT 01 onward from 1997, a run of 3-inch CDs of mangled Aphex Twin source material with the tracks grotesquely retitled, packaged to slip into the Aphex racks in shops and be bought by listeners expecting the real thing. It is the V/Vm method working all the way through to the retail surface, and it sits beside the label's copyright provocations, the ZTT action over the Frankie Goes To Hollywood treatment among them, that turned legal trouble into a working principle.
For all the provocation, the label did real curatorial work. It was a home for artists awkward for the majors, releasing V/Vm and Jansky Noise themselves alongside About This Product, Goodiepal, Fast Lady, Chris Moss Acid and many others, the British wing of the antimusic and glitch circle that also held Stock, Hausen & Walkman. And it gave its audio away: free, unrestricted downloads from the V/Vm Test site and a web of microsites from 1997 on, the anti-commercial position made into label policy.
The Bureau files V/Vm Test Records at Tier III as the label as prank: a Stockport imprint that made the sleeve, the catalogue number and the giveaway as much the work as the audio, that documented the British plunderphonics and glitch scene, and whose method ran the joke all the way to the shop rack. It went quiet in the late 2000s, succeeded by Kirby's History Always Favours The Winners, but it remains one of the founding documents of its micro-scene.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Edwardian era · last revised c. the Edwardian era