DATE: X-X-23
TIME: 20:58
AUTHORS: FIN COUSINS, BEN WHEADON
DESIGNERS: YUSUF S. BOZKURT
IMAGE COUNT: X
TAGS: X
Manchester, 2021. Carved into the face of Spear Street, Soup Kitchen stands wait to witness the first-act climax of an origin story. With this fated launch, music label Fixed Abode materialises, making good on their name and trading digital synapses in favour of physical form for the night. The vibrations are still resounding. Sold out in 24 hours – an overnight success years in the making— a vision is suddenly tangible to Fixed Abode’s orchestrator.
But Rainy Miller, Preston-born artist and label architect, is noticeably absent. While his blueprint blossoms in Central Manchester, Miller is nowhere to be seen. It’s an irony: having spent most of his pandemic fixated on the craft of both his own art and the construction of a new label, it was testing positive for COVID that barred Miller’s entry. It’s a testament to the strength of the creative union that Miller has crafted that it could function so seamlessly, even with his presence limited to a bed-bound FaceTime connection. Burdened by illness, close to the point of hallucination, “[it was] kind of fitting to the themes that surround a lot of the music anyway”, Miller reflects.
He is recalling Fixed Abode’s genesis through a video connection. We’re tethered by the same apparatus as he tells us “I remember thinking ‘this is a really fucking surreal experience in itself’, being live-streamed for the first ever event we’ve done, on my deathbed". His meditation on that moment feels fitting. In spite of all the virtuality, it’s the memory’s tactile impression that still seems to echo for Miller. “We got the t-shirts made, and I was like ‘now this thing has come away from just something sat on my phone’, there’s physical things you can touch and hold now [...] it was really tangible, but really tangible in a way I didn’t expect it to be.” For Fixed Abode, Miller makes clear that “there wasn’t any grand masterplan”. Instead, like most DIY projects, the label’s nascence came abruptly. Formed out of frustration, the obligation to conform to the ‘standard way of working in the industry’ still seems to infuriate Miller: “It was an EP I did, back in 2020 I think, A Choreographed Interruption. I was waiting to put this record out and I just got dead fed up, and I was like ‘fuck all this shit, I’ll do my own label’”. Born largely from a distrust of the inner workings hidden beneath the cladding of most labels, Fixed Abode diverged deliberately. As Miller explains, “there’s a music-industry way of working where if you’re working on a record now, you should also be working on the next record, so the information highway never slows down. It never worked for me”. Fitting into traditional release schedules alongside other artists became a hindrance. According to Miller, even with projects ready for release, “it could take up to a year and a half for the record to come out. I couldn’t move on to the next thing, it’s just going to slow me down”.
The name “Fixed Abode” holds a double meaning. Working out of Preston, it reflected a challenge to put the city on a map while confined by an industry saturated with London-centric dynamics. Playing on the terminology of “no fixed abode”, a category for individuals without a specific geographical residence, fixing their location to Preston firmly identified an oft-overlooked location as a source of local pride. It also sought to provide North-West talent a channel through which to create, wrenching control away from large-scale companies and exploitative contracts: “we’re looking to build a home for people where we can get away from the normality of releasing music in terms of the wider scope of the record industry”, Miller affirms.
He took his ideas to graphic designer Jack Kimberly, and the two conceptualised a visual identity for the label. “This was probably when I was in a little bit more of a ‘fuck the music industry’ type thing”, Miller reflects, “on a rebellious trip”. He decided the logo should be an asterisk, resembling the insertion of small print in record contracts: a form of coercion hidden behind acronyms and lettering; discursive methods of cloaking authority and control.
“We’re big fans of minimalism” Miller explains, “the logo looks great when it’s massive, it looks great when it’s really small, it fits into every window”. The result bears resemblance to Virgil Abloh’s ironic implementation of quotation marks, a symbol that could just as easily appear on an album cover as it might on a skateboard. It’s perception-shifting typography. Malleable enough to exist as a small, subliminal reclamation, or a large-scale stamp of identity. Where it appears, it adds context, calling out the artifice of industry that exists behind a product. With the help of Fixed Abode’s designer and visual artist Alex Currie, it can be traced throughout the label’s discography.
Two years on, Fixed Abode has continued its trajectory. From launching at Soup Kitchen, the label now comfortably inhabits both digital and physical planes. Emerging from isolation, Miller left Preston in 2021. An encounter between Blackhaine and Manchester-based experimental electronic duo Space Afrika precipitated collaboration, with the artists coalescing on Space Afrika’s 2021 LP Honest Labour. An invitation to join the duo again at Berlin Atonal followed, with Miller recounting everything beginning to snowball as he was drawn to the Manchester scene.
“We were all getting to a point where I needed to be working less behind the bar and just be doing the music stuff because the opportunities were coming up and you need somewhere to do it, because other than that I’d just do it in a bedroom or wherever and it got to the point where I needed that separation of space. Just to compartmentalise what I'm doing.”
Assembling a sanctum for precisely that purpose, Miller, Space Afrika and Blackhaine now share a studio space, alongside the operator of N/OM, a Manchester community and events centre. Miller casts his memories back across the spaces that preceded it, with recollections of moving into an old lift shaft, repurposed into a music studio. This was in Cheetham Hill, “which is famously a stone’s throw from Strangeways prison, just around the corner from the fabled White Hotel”, he grins past his faceless zoom window.
The settings that form the scenery behind Fixed Abode’s ascent cause Miller occasional pause for thought when juxtaposed against the scale of their triumphs. He recounts a text from Blackhaine: “I was working at the White Hotel, when I was being told, getting a text that was like: I just emailed tracks to Kanye West. I had to leave. I had to go sit down in the bog for ten minutes. Crazy snowballing”. Miller finds more illustrations, reaching back for highlights:
“Mixing Blood Orange’s vocals was a bit of a fucking surreal experience as well. That was a crazy moment, mixing their vocals in a studio that’s leaking, on £300 monitors. Being like ‘I hope this sounds good enough to put out and be able to sit up against the rest of Blood Orange’s discography’”
Miller takes a hands-on approach to every step of recording and releasing. He recalls with nostalgia the homespun processes behind Blackhaine’s acclaimed Armour and Armour II EPs. “They were me and Blackhaine from the top to the bottom. From the conception, we literally just sat in a room together and made all that music”. This DIY approach and emphasis on close collaboration is indispensable to Fixed Abode. Even mere presence creates a form of artistic cohesion, “physically being in the room while these things are being made means there’s going to be something of a consistency to them”, Miller says. It helps to create a natural protocol for projects to flow through. “Growing up and just being infatuated with Odd Future, we were enamoured by the family unit thing they had, now we kind of feel like we’re in the same boat”.
The resulting landscapes that emerge across the albums of the Fixed Abode camp can be desolate, caught between demolition and decline, but they are also feathered with moments of fragility. Miller is reticent to tie the artists too tightly together, “a lot of the work is so geo-centric and has a lot of onus on where it comes from, it’s not fair to expect people to constantly stick to those things and people naturally want to grow as well”. Despite this hesitance, the growing oeuvre of Fixed Abode accrues parallels with each release, “we’ve got that space now and everything even sounds a certain way in there, the way things are mixed. There’s always a stamp on that when it comes out”.
Fixed Abode’s signees tend towards avant-garde bodies of work. Their output is idiosyncratic, filled with loosely woven images that resist a listener’s desire to piece them together. Look closer, though, and you can uncover a series of signs and motifs that work synergistically between the projects. On Miller’s 2022 single ‘Fire, And Then Ashes’, he utters a plaintive, autotune-drenched, “burn all this / porcelain on my side / my side / burn all this / porcelain, alight”. In the same year, on ‘Stained Materials’, the first track from Armour II, Blackhaine snarls a similar image, “red blood leaked down my chin / these streets porcelain”.
On their 2023 album, Iceboy Violet unfurls the stained materials Blackhaine references. On ‘Street Dogs Have Wings’, these are brittle, forming a triptych of “stained glass”, “stained lips”, “strained kiss”. It feels like world-building, stringing images intertemporally between projects. There is a shared shattering of built environments and fibrous bodily forms, from Iceboy Violet’s bloodied album covers to Blackhaine’s contorted choreography and Miller’s own intrigue with our outer shells—his two full-length projects feature revealing titles, Limbs and Desquamation, a medical term for the shedding of skin.
Whether intentional, the result of physical closeness or shared experience of the North-West and decades of Conservative austerity, Fixed Abode signees create a productive dialogue between appropriation and recombination. It functions like connective tissue, a synovial fluid filling the space between the artists. Miller’s ‘ii Preface, Benevolence’, closes with him repeating the same line, headily, “blood same colour as the rose that I came from”. So far, this shared blood — a corporeal outpour — has been central to Fixed Abode’s sonic identity.
As label head, Miller’s responsibilities as a coordinator are pivotal. Alongside his own output, he’s occupying the producer/curator realm, not dissimilar to Westside Gunn helming Griselda Records. It’s a role he flourishes in, “curation is probably the most interesting part of pop culture for me, it’s where all the crazy intersections happen. You have these weird amalgamations of creative entities. That’s it; it’s just curation now... decontextualising things”. He pauses. “It’s also re-contextualisation of stuff. It’s just the most beautiful thing in the world”.
At times Miller sounds more like an art director than a musician. He speaks about his approach as being “brought centrally” or “put forward”, but “skewed left”. It’s picking up musicality as object, something physical. It needs to be moved, spun, transformed, but also dragged into view. “I’ve got a big thing with accessibility”, says Miller.
For Fixed Abode, this exists in terms of non-normative label mechanics, giving space for artists with an eye for innovation, but it’s also a question of sonics and packaging. “I was really interested in the juxtaposition of how ambient music and noise music is perceived by a wider audience”, he details. It seems obvious, only after Miller points it out, that these genres are not solely the habitat of hermetic expertise. Instead, as he identifies: “when you break it down, ambient and noise music is the most accessible form of music to create. It’s so liminal and it can be anything, it isn’t naturally hindered by technicality”.
Today, making something genuinely new is a near impossible task. “There’s nothing new to make anymore, it all exists, so the only thing you can do is essentially collage things until they look slightly different”. The response is a collision: the crashing of left-field sounds with smaller cities and working-class culture. “You take these people who could just be the greatest pop stars in the world and start papier-mâché-ing their kind of thing with little pieces that you grab from elsewhere”.
Fixed Abode is a label borne from the rupture between a locality and a system that has often attempted to drown it out. In their work, each of the tensions between the accessible and the avant-garde, the body and the building, the North-West of England and the world, are collapsed into a synthetic configuration. The label’s successes exist in piecing together art on the precipice of decay. This ricocheting of genre, location and cultural boundaries has helped the label burst through, towards some air. It is dissemblance and assemblance—both are equally important. For Miller, it’s an act of resuscitation, “that’s probably the only way to get into new territory now. Fuse things to get into new frontiers”.