ABOUT CITY SLANG

It's not all that interesting and certainly not worth too much space to write about. Oh well. City Slang is an independent record label, based in Berlin, Germany. (that's really exciting!)... Formed by a former tour agent (Christof Ellinghaus), it became, almost by chance, a label for US bands that needed a release in Europe. Started exclusively to put out the Flaming Lips album „In A Priest Driven Ambulance (With Silver Sunshine Stares)“ it just so happened, that other bands, namely The Lemonheads, Das Damen and the mighty Yo La Tengo all were looking for somebody to release their respective albums in 1990. The story of the catalog can be found elsewehere on this website but the label ist still around today, 15 years after ist inception and that alone is good news. As it happenes with licensing contracts, they run out sometimes and thus our past catalog includes records from bands like Hole, Tortoise and Sebadoh, but in reality, today, we do not have the rights to these records anymore and can not sell them to you for that reason.

But if you like us as a label, thank you kindly.

Hell we don’t know what makes us jump either. It’s got to be good. There are no real boundaries, but chances are you won’t find a Schlager record here or a Jazzrock workout. We like songs. We like originality. We like depth. We like it if you have a sound of your own. If you send us a demo and you tell us that you sound like Tortoise and Sebadoh mixed with Lambchop, why would we want to listen to that? We have been incredibly fortunate that we got to work with some of the greatest musicians and bands out there. So, once you have released a masterpiece like Neon Golden by The Notwist there’s no point in going back to an Italian version of the same kind of stuff, just not as good. Does that make sense?

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