After COVID and turmoil, a female-led indie label reemerges as a safe space for noisy women

The artists on the venerable L.A. heavy-rock label Sargent Home are identified for his or her clamor. However over the course of the pandemic, they discovered to understand whole quiet as effectively.

“We had been in search of properties to construct a studio, the place artists can write and chill, and stored not having any luck in L.A.,” mentioned Cathy Pellow, who based the label from her hilltop residence in Echo Park in 2006. Pellow offered the home and moved the label right into a rambling compound in Sunland-Tujunga in 2016, and though it took a while and financial savings to construct out (the label is “100% self-financed and has by no means had any buyers,” Pellow mentioned), by 2020 Sargent Home had “this magical, insane place that’s six acres on a mountain, an enormous transformed barn and a pool, visitor bungalows, beautiful gardens and the yard is mountains.”

It was an ideal COVID-19 hideout. The label’s roster of metallic and experimental acts like Chelsea Wolfe, Deafheaven, Emma Ruth Rundle and Lingua Ignota might come up for contemporary air. After 15 years of championing the harshest fringes in rock, the label discovered its stride at this bucolic haven, the place the wildest noises have been the howls of Pellow’s seven canine.

As touring returns after Omicron, Sargent Home’s acts, whose visceral reside performances are an enormous a part of their attraction, are coming again to a special scene. The experiences documented of their music — isolation, worry and rage — are all of the extra tangible after two years of the world falling aside.

Then this staunchly progressive label needed to reckon with abuse allegations in its close-knit neighborhood as effectively.

“The information was a traumatic expertise every single day,” Pellow mentioned, describing the final two years. “It was mentally exhausting to reside by means of all that. It affected us all. However in a wierd method, there have been silver linings for lot of individuals.”

Even from the label’s new exurban redoubt, Pellow stays each bit the cool Echo Park music mother (she has an grownup daughter who works within the movie business). In her 20s, she managed style photographers in New York and moved into movie manufacturing and making music movies for Island and Atlantic Data acts. She began Sargent Home in 2006, jaundiced about each main labels and independents the place artists signed away copyrights for close to nothing. “I bought so sick of taking a look at these horrible offers,” Pellow mentioned.

She and enterprise accomplice Marc Jetton didn’t explicitly create a label for ladies in excessive music. However Sargent Home and its four-person workers ended up being an essential residence for them.

“I got here up in music as a single mother, so I gravitated to working with feminine artists and have a reasonably distinctive concept of what it’s wish to be a lady in that very male world,” Pellow mentioned. “It takes further effort. It’s at all times going to be robust to place out heavy bands with no pink state attraction as a result of we’re not bro-rock.”

The sort of acts she wished to champion — too heavy or bizarre for mainstream rock, too songwriter-y for a lot of the metallic circuit — didn’t match into straightforward niches or harbor clear business attraction. However for artists just like the L.A.-based Wolfe, who might be savagely heavy however had ambitions to do extra, it was the one place to be.

“Sargent Home helped me to embrace each my weirder facet and my extra conventional songwriter facet,” Wolfe mentioned. “To honor each and never really feel like I’ve to be just one method or one other.”

Cathy Pellow and enterprise accomplice Mark Jetton.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Instances)

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2021, for all its grief, was a banner 12 months for the label creatively. Its flagship black-metal/shoegaze act Deafheaven broadened into somber, exactly sung rock on “Infinite Granite” that recalibrated the band’s place in metallic. Wolfe teamed with metallic/hardcore veterans Converge for the textured, compellingly moody LP “Bloodmoon: I,“ and the label produced a concert-length movie with the Michigan noise-punk collective the Armed that’s an entire inversion of a conventional tour documentary — no audiences, for starters.

Ignota, the alias of SoCal-raised composer Kristin Hayter, left behind a lot of her harrowing noise in favor of doom-stricken Appalachian folks preparations on “Sinner Get Prepared.” (She headlines the Regent Theater on June 9.)

“Everybody had a second to get actual with what they wanted to say, and a variety of them mentioned, ‘I’m going to make use of my quiet voice now,’” Pellow mentioned.

Laina Dawes, a metallic scholar in a doctoral program at Columbia College and creator of “What Are You Doing Right here? A Black Girl’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Steel,” is a fan of many Sargent Home acts like Earth, Chelsea Wolfe and Russian Circles. She describes the label as “a rather well curated residence for these post-metal or experimental metallic acts, which is a reasonably new phenomenon. Lots of these acts wanted a house like this.”

Dawes mentioned just a few of the marquee acts “match an archetype of a sure sort of femininity” however added that “one of many points with metal-adjacent music are these preconceived notions round tropes of who’s a metallic artist. Youthful generations of underground followers need to see far more variety.”

Like many underground labels, the Sargent Home roster usually makes extra money on vinyl than streaming. The label’s greatest hits sometimes peak underneath 10 million Spotify performs. “When your lead single is 9 minutes lengthy, it’s robust to get playlisted,” Pellow mentioned with a shrug.

However holding these bands afloat over the last two years generally meant, fairly actually, intervening to maintain them shifting.

“In my explicit case, I all of the sudden wanted backbone surgical procedure I couldn’t pay for as a result of I had no insurance coverage and all my touring fell by means of,” Hayter mentioned. “Cathy took the helm of a marketing campaign that raised cash for my surgical procedure by means of my fan base. I’m not exaggerating once I say I most likely wouldn’t be strolling as we speak if this hadn’t occurred.”

“Sargent Home made the selection to remain actually constructive and supportive, particularly at first of COVID when many individuals went into disaster mode,” Wolfe mentioned. “Cathy was securing loans to assist a few of her artists and pointing us all in the proper route to assist ourselves and others keep afloat.”

Whereas the label soldiered on in its compound, hope was generally arduous to maintain up. Each time she’d revisit her previous Echo Park haunts, Pellow questioned what sort of scene could be left standing when the pandemic ended.

The category divides of L.A. arts and music, which already helped nudge them out of city, turned extra palpable.

“It’s truly an actual drawback as a result of I need to be hiring,” Pellow mentioned. “However now younger individuals can’t afford to reside right here.”

However probably the most unsettling second of the previous couple of years got here on the finish of 2021, when Hayter accused her former romantic accomplice and Sargent Home labelmate Alexis S. F. Marshall, the singer for the longtime noise-rock band Daughters, of sexual and bodily abuse.

In December, Hayter launched an extended public notice throughout social media stating that “I endured psychological and emotional abuse and sexual abuse leading to bodily hurt. … I used to be subjected to a number of sexual assaults/rapes the place I used to be absolutely penetrated whereas sleeping with out my consent.” Hayter mentioned within the submit that the expertise drove her to try suicide. (Reached once more this month, she referred again to her earlier assertion.)

Marshall, reached by means of a former consultant, declined to remark. In a December assertion, Marshall mentioned that “I completely didn’t have interaction in any type of abusive conduct in direction of Kristin. … I can guarantee anybody studying this that I completely didn’t abuse her, mentally or bodily.”

In December, Sargent Home said that “We ceased working with Alexis Marshall again in August. We made no public assertion at the moment as a result of we wished to respect Kristin’s privateness and her timeline for when she felt prepared to come back ahead. She has now and we proceed to face in solidarity along with her.”

The allegations shook the close-knit label, which prided itself as a haven for feminine acts in a heavy rock scene coming to phrases with abuse.

“The scenario that occurred between them affected me on so many ranges,” Pellow mentioned after months of serving to Hayter behind the scenes in her choice to come back ahead. “It emotionally destroyed me and I discover it very tough to touch upon it nonetheless. I don’t condone abuse of any form.”

Dawes mentioned extreme-music labels don’t at all times reply so forcefully to allegations of misconduct of their midst. “Steel labels can generally be horrible for this. There may be an emphasis on the music itself the place anything like sexism or assault or racism will get dismissed,” she mentioned.

After the shock of the allegations in opposition to Marshall, there’s an urgency to chart the subsequent period for the label. Movie scores may be a technique — Wolfe and Ben Chisholm co-scored Ti West’s new A24 horror film “X” out this month, and Rundle scored Riley Stearns’ sci-fi movie “Twin” (starring Karen Gillan and Aaron Paul) out later this 12 months.

“Once we began, we simply wished to guard underdog bands,” Pellow mentioned. “Now I need to make the stuff I like extra standard, for younger individuals to see it in their very own state of riot. 2022 goes to be our heavy 12 months.”