2024 Year End Retrospective

We put out music that, as is often the case, felt far too good to keep to ourselves. And yet, here we are (and here I am) months later, still playing those tracks on repeat, marveling at the fact that we have the opportunity to work with such mind-blowingly talented artists. 

At one point this year, I remember clicking through Google Drive files at some ungodly hour, trying to decide if what I was listening to was either the best thing I had ever heard or if my mind was beginning to unravel from sleep deprivation. Deciding it was good, actually, I cranked the volume on the open-back studio headphones that I keep in my office, fairly certain the neighbors were going to stage a protest if I raised the volume any higher. But this is one of the best parts: discovering something so special, so unexpected, that you can’t help but rinse it 100 times in a row. That feeling is exactly why we’re still here—why we trudge through the avalanche of emails, late-night sessions, and frantic last-minute show planning. It’s that electric jolt of “this is real, this is happening,” and it doesn’t seem to be getting old. 

As exciting and fulfilling as it is, the nature of the material realities that both constrain and drive this industry is that a lot of the time, as a label, it can feel like what we’re doing is building commercial products out of art and then marketing them, using art as merely a building block in a product-shaped puzzle. However, our real purpose, our raison d’être is to make dreams, visions, ideas themselves, into real things.

Which leads me to perhaps our biggest and, as it happens, most recent undertaking of the year: Thank You, Dream Girl. Working on this release felt both surreal and, in a strange way, inevitable. From the outset of Tabula Rasa, my goal was to build a space for music so immersive, so singular that it demands a universe of its own. Ramon joining me on this mission early has helped refine TR, and the tireless support from Aro, Adrian, and so many of our friends, we’ve been able to get closer to that original blueprint than I ever imagined. 

Working with Travis (Machinedrum) and Drew (of Matmos & The Soft Pink Truth) on Thank You, Dream Girl was a dream but mostly just felt like hanging out with friends with the addition of a bit (a lot) of admin. Seeing my friends, label mates, and artists like EPROM get so excited about this weird music with an insanely fast tempo, weird time signature, and the widely interpreted, “super crunched out sounds” in exactly the same way, brought me and thousands of others respite from how commodified a lot of music is right now. Of course, there will always be plenty of spreadsheets, phone calls, and marketing decks to keep the lights on, but all in service of this collaborative, alchemical process of making dreams into realities. 

Nowhere was this process in clearer focus this year than it was with Hit ‘Em, which began as a near-pure concept conjured from Drew’s dream life—no focus groups, no influencer campaigns, just an unfiltered idea made real. Robert Beatty took that concept and crystallized it into a visual identity that said everything we didn’t know how to say. Because so many people were already tuned into this moment, we had to capture a whole subcultural surge on something roughly the shape of an album.

In the end, we all voted on our favorite tracks—picking the final list by consensus—and still felt it didn’t go far enough to represent the full scope of the movement. That’s when Travis suggested creating an online Jukebox to showcase every single submission, so I built www.hit-em.net (with some help from my friend and very talented producer/DJ Clearcast) over a couple of days, where every track that we received can be heard. And, because the entire project emerged so organically, it never felt quite right to profit from it. We’ve worked with Musicians Foundation (est. 1914) the oldest artist support foundation in the United States, to donate all profits from sales and streams of the record to them, ensuring that those funds are immediately put to use helping artists who need it, and in turn, so they can continue making art for, and with, all of us.

This year was far from short on other galvanizing moments, as well—like returning to our roots in San Francisco for a party at Monarch, a club I’ve been to countless times growing up, headlined by our friend Demotapes in partnership with closessions. The energy in the room that night was almost disorienting in intensity, in that magical way you definitely can’t force, or even really plan for. I’d like to think that it’s because we were tapped into the same unfiltered current we try to capture in every release. More recently, we also had Crosstalk in our second home of LA from São Paulo for a show we threw at heds alongside our friend Left/Right. By the end of the night, it felt like we’d bottled lightning—fans, friends, and total strangers all connected by the sheer force of the music. And of course, there were the releases themselves: from our ambient compilation Tabula Rasa Records: Altrove and our club/bass music compilation Tabula Rasa Records: 212F, and everything in between, every one a testament to the artists’ singular visions that we’re lucky enough to champion.

Looking Ahead

Between welcoming new artists to our roster, reinventing previous releases, sold-out parties and packed rooms across the globe, and dipping our toes into a few more genre-bending experiments, it’s been an incredible year. But none of these milestones or buzzy releases would mean much of anything without you listening, sharing, and showing up with heart. So whether the music found you on your couch, in your car, or in some sweaty club at 2:45am, I’m glad it did. As we close out 2024, I’m already feeling excited for the new songs, tours, and brilliant moments that lie ahead. 

More to come—always, and thank you for listening.