More history
If you look at a map of Kentucky, you’ll have a hard time finding Dundee. It’s an unincorporated community wedged somewhere between Owensboro and Bowling Green. Hell, even if you’re driving down Highway 69, you’re likely to pass through without realizing it. Its population has dwindled to fewer than 90 people, its only convenience is a rundown gas station, and these days even the churches are having trouble staying open.
But for a few years in the 2000s, Dundee was not always so quiet.
The noise began on a cold winter day: January 21, 2006.
Before there was West Riff Records, there was Infection Records. It started with two middle-school kids who had fallen in love with the now-kitschy skate punk of the ’90s and decided, against all common sense, to pick up a guitar and bass and make some of it themselves.
After about a year of not quite enough woodshedding, they produced Infection Records #001: Sourgrass93’s Goes to Stimpyville.
It was a mess.
Naturally, that meant there had to be more.
Throughout the rest of the 2000s, INFECTION RECORDS went on to release a cacophony of little “albums” made by a small circle of friends. The label was barely a label, and the bands were barely bands, but for a while they created their own tiny punk scene in the middle of nowhere.
You could hear them howling, feeding back, and snarling away in garages and backyards; at birthday parties in muddy fields; inside rented community-center buildings and school cafeterias; and, in at least one case, an alternative-school bathroom.
Through the fog of memory, I can still recall the idea behind it all. These crude, lo-fi punk records were supposed to be an antithesis to the polished daddy’s-boy metalcore albums coming out of the nearby Owensboro scene at the time.
Whether any of us could play, mix, record, or produce an album was beside the point.
These weirdos, nerds, geeks, and freaks just wanted to rock.
That is the spirit West Riff Records carries forward now. It adopts the vision, history, and questionable canon of that insignificant inside joke of a record label—only this time from Nashville.
Much love.