by David Hajdu
We here at Infini are deeply committed to the art of experimentation, on every level of production and presentation of our product. We not only facilitate experimentation by the artists in our catalog and promote the experimentation they do for us—as a record label, we ourselves are experimenteurs. We push the envelope. We pull the envelope. We tear it apart and smash it up into a little ball. You wouldn’t know it even was an envelope. But we know.
At the time I was transitioning out of manufacturing into A&R, I took notice of the fact that we had accumulated a number of tapes with technical idiosyncrasies. Had a recording from Czechoslovakia of Schubert, if you’ve heard of him, recorded at a warbling speed, a session of the Hungarian State Philharmonic playing something that couldn’t be properly identified because a system overload had produced a low, sustained buzz sound in place of the music. I looked over this material and challenged myself to apply myself creatively as an experimentative marketeur. I arranged for this material, along with a few other things with fascinating errors, to be packaged as the lead-off title in a new line we called The Infini Archive of Anomalies of Musique Mechanique. I commissioned liner notes from a professor at the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village, who also gave us the name for the series. The records sold only modestly, but cost us very little, and you can’t put a price tag on experimentation. That was the start of our avant-line, as I call it.
My friend Biran brought in several cassette recordings of performances by Adry Geffel at one of the lofts in SoHo. I thanked him and told him to leave them with me, and I would give them a listen, which is what I always told artists’ reps, as a matter of policy, and, I’m proud to say, I sometimes did. Biran shook his head and put the tapes back in his briefcase. “No, no—never,” he said.
Biran said, “These are priceless one-of-a-kind documents of compositions impossible to duplicate. I would no longer leave them with a record-company executive, no matter how esteemed he may be, than I would leave them with the member of the audience who sneaked a recorder into the loft and made the tapes.”
Now I was intrigued enough to want to hear the music. Called my secretary Karen in and had her play one of the cassettes on the stereo on my desk. I said, “Thank you, Karen”—remember—and leaned back in my chair to soak in the music.
Next minute, I was leaning in to hear the sound more closely. Minute later, I’m sitting straight up, shocked at the power of this music. It was like nothing I ever heard before. It was free. It was exciting. It was dissonant. It was painful. It was something different every minute. I told Karen to turn down the volume for a minute, to give me a break from it, and I said to Biran, “What is this, exactly? What music is she playing?”
Biran said, “She’s playing what she’s feeling. It isn’t music as it has ever been known before. You could say it isn’t music at all—it’s pure feeling.”
I instructed Karen to turn off the stereo, and I said to Biran, “Let’s talk.”
I said, “I’d like to see this person who makes this music that’s not music. Let’s make a plan to do that, and then we can all talk business.”
Biran got a twinkle in his eye. I could tell there was something . . . special . . . on his mind when he talked about Adry Geffel. He called her “my Adry,” and I think that says it all. Lowered his voice to a whisper, and said, “I’d love to surprise her with this. Let’s work up the contract together, and we can bring it to her at her next concert, wrapped with a bow.”
Karen Gigliardi (former executive assistant, Infini Records):
Such a sweetheart, he was, that little Biran. Funny-looking, with that silly peanut of a chin he had, but who noticed? Such a charmer—you could see how a pretty girl like Adrianne could go for him, even if she might have done a lot better in the physical department.
He doted on her, took care of everything for her. All the business, the contracts, the paperwork, the decisions—everything. She didn’t have to worry about a thing but her music and keeping him happy. He handed her everything on a big, polished, silver-plated platter—signed, sealed, and delivered.
Remember that song by Stevie Wonder? If he was on Infini Records, I would have died and gone to heaven! That’s more my kind of music than the kind Mr. Mendelman got us into. He was what my late husband Doug used to call an intellectual. I would call Mr. Mendelman a lot of different things. Doug would call him “intellectual,” and that was his prerogative. We didn’t agree on a whole lot, Doug and me. I loved him even though we didn’t have all that much in common, honestly—like Biran and Adrianne, you could say, though they were connected very closely forever by the record contracts. Doug and I were married, so we had our own contract, in a way—a marriage contract—but that’s not as complicated as a record deal.
You could tell how much Adrianne meant to Biran. I didn’t know they were living together at the beginning. All the original correspondence, in the beginning, he had me send to a lawyer’s office. Then, he asked me to mail him things to his home address, which was on East 3rd Street. Tax time, I had to get a W-2 from Adrianne, and there it was, the same address. I should have known!
[Gigliardi is asked for her impressions of Adrianne Geffel and Biran Zervakis as a couple.]
Oh—I’d have to think . . . I’m not sure if I ever saw them together physically, in the same place. I can’t really picture them together. Maybe once. Biran came to the office and took care of the business on his own, as long as she was on the label, and when she was dropped, I didn’t see much of him for a while, till after Adrianne—how am I supposed to put this?—went away? He came around again after that, and he helped Mr. Mendelman with the albums they put together from all the . . . I guess the best word would be the dribs and drabs.
Biran Zervakis:
I know there’s no need for me to tell you how wonderful Adry’s records were and how gratifying it was for me to see my hard work for Adry reap the rewards it so dearly deserved. It’s a matter of record, so to speak, that I produced all the albums released over the years under the contract I negotiated for us at Infini Records, from her debut release, named for Adry herself—we showcased her name in the actual title—and the others recorded live in the lofts and galleries to the beginning of her career in the studio, with Chords and Baffling, and on to the projects released more recently, comprising a variety of archival materials and outtakes I’ve edited on Adry’s behalf.
I’ll share with you how it all began. I could practically feel the creative energy of Adry’s music bursting off the tape when I first found someone in the audience recording one of her loft concerts and brought the cassette home and played it. To set the record straight, incidentally, I did not push the woman on the floor to grab the tape from her. It would have been clear to anyone—if anyone had been looking, they could have seen that she lost her balance and fell. Yes, it’s true, it might have been a very sweet gesture to pay her for the tape, but seriously, how much did a cassette tape cost in those days? A dollar ninety-nine?
[Zervakis is asked about the decision to use Biran Zervakis Presents Adrianne Geffel as the title of Geffel’s first album.]
Thank you for pointing that out. I appreciated the fact that the album was titled that way, at the suggestion of one of the people involved in the production.
[Zervakis is asked if he was the person.)
I don’t know who would deny that I was absolutely, most definitely involved in the production. That would be outrageous.
For the albums that followed that first one, I didn’t want anyone to think I was trying to steal Adry’s thunder, so I had that line removed, and we simply added a phrase below the title, “A Biran Zervakis Presentation.” As a matter of fact, the designer reduced the type size on that line for most of the records or one of them, I think. I didn’t complain, not to Adry. I certainly didn’t object to that in a public way. Adry—Adry . . . wonderful, pretty, capable in many ways—earned the credit I made sure she received as the primary creator of the albums. Someone knowledgeable w
ould say, well, that goes without saying, but, don’t forget, the producer is also a creator—to produce is to make something. But I’ll leave that for others to say.
[Zervakis is asked about the publishing of Geffel’s compositions.]
That’s a woefully complicated question. I wouldn’t want to tax your readers with such technical mumbo-jumbo. I can’t tell you what it all means anyway. I shouldn’t even try to tell you until all the suits are resolved. I can say this: Adry herself wrote the title for every one of her compositions. In that sense, she can be said to “hold title” to the music. She holds the titles! The underlying rights are surely another matter, legally. However, the titles themselves were totally her creation.
[Zervakis is reminded that copyright law does not protect titles.]
You’re so right! As you know, apparently, it may not mean anything legally or financially to say that someone owns a title. But it means something to me to be able to say to you here today that, however complicated the rights to Adry’s music may be, it was my Adry alone who came up with the titles.
Harvé Mendelman:
See for yourself—the packaging was first-class, four-color, on every title in the entire Adrianne Geffel catalog here at Infini. Even the one with the plain white cover and lettering, we had printed on a color-capable press, during the press downtime. That’s the kind of class we put into our product.
[Mendelman gestures toward a row of five Geffel album jackets framed and hanging on a wall.]
The photography—artistic. The typography, the printing, the card stock, the lamination, everything—artistic. Look at So Far, SoHo, the second one, right there.
[Mendelman points to the wall.]
That’s the cover we commissioned from Ann Athema. We printed her description of what the art would look like in a box of text in the right corner. If you get close to it, you can read it. It’s not very long. In most of the stores, it ended up covered by the price sticker, so the album cover looked blank, but that never hurt sales from people who mistook it for the Beatles’ “White Album.” And next to it—see [the album titled] Oh, Negative—the way the title is painted in red? That’s actually blood that Athema’s artist friend Marina Abramovic used like finger paint to make the lettering. We had it photographed and superimposed above Adrianne’s head in the cover photo. The original idea was to hand-paint the title on every copy of the album in the blood, but—I don’t want to sound harsh, but we were hoping to sell more copies than you could paint with the blood you’d get from a single artist.
Every package—artistic. And inside—pure Adrianne Geffel. Before every one of her albums was released into the marketplace, I listened to it all the way to the end. Forgive me for boasting, but that’s the truth, and it wasn’t easy, let me tell you. Have you heard her music—I mean, actually listened to it without other, normal music playing at the same time, to drown it out? It’s no fun to do. But I’ve done it myself, for every album. Not straight through in one sitting—I took breaks and came back when I was ready to take some more. And I have to say that, even though I can’t claim to understand what she was playing or like it, quote unquote, I appreciate the music for its uniqueness and its value to the culture and our record company—and I’m talking not only in terms of branding and revenue, but also market share.
Ann Athema:
Geffel the recording artist—now one of us was officially an artist. I knew a fair number of art-making artists from Cooper Union and the galleries and the bars, but Geffel was the first person I knew who became a recording artist. It was as if being known for making recordings made her an artist in the eyes of the world, and not merely a person playing music of a kind the world had never known before, in somebody’s loft. It elevated Geffel’s visibility so dramatically that I was almost thankful to that Biran for setting up the deal. But I wasn’t.
You’ve heard the records, so you know the first couple of them were pressed from tape recordings someone in the audience made. There was a story in the SoHo News that Biran wrote a big check to the person who made the tapes, to acquire the rights. Jon Geldman wrote that up. I saw Geldman at one of Geffel’s shows and he said, “It’s true—Biran told me so himself.” So . . .
Geffel asked me if I would do the artwork for her second album, and I loved the idea. It made no sense. She gave me the title, So Far, SoHo, and I wrote up a little description of what the art would be, so the record company could print it on the cover. I wrote: “Abstractions, egos, and dreams, eight square blocks wide, four feet deep, and half a million people high.” I read it to Geffel, and she said, “Exquisite! Now, tell Biran he can have it for five hundred dollars,” and I did. I never got the check, and I told Jon Geldman, but that, he didn’t write up.
When Geffel went in to record her first studio album, she invited me to watch, and I went. The studio was on the fourth or fifth floor of an old industrial building on Broadway, off Prince Street. There was a wholesale electronics distributor on the ground floor. I know that’s not particularly helpful information, since there were wholesale distributors on the street level of every building in SoHo. We got to the studio a little late, because I wanted to make sure Geffel had something in her stomach before the recording session, and we couldn’t find a restaurant or coffee shop anywhere. There was no place to eat in SoHo, unless you had an appetite for wholesale supplies. We still had to wait for quite a while in the studio, because Biran had not yet arrived.
They were both living in the 3rd Street apartment at this point. He told her he had some sort of trouble with his family at home, and he needed a place to crash, and asked Geffel if he could stay in her little office room temporarily, and she felt like she couldn’t say no, since he got her the place. You’d think they would show up at the studio together, since they were coming from the same place. But I’m sure Geffel left on her own, while he was getting his beauty sleep.
Geffel was wearing one of the headscarves she usually wore on the street, to keep out ambient music. She unraveled it with a swirl of a dancerly flourish and announced, “I’m ready—where’s the piano?” The engineer told us he had strict orders from the producer, Mr. Zervakis, to do nothing without him. We just sat there for almost an hour, sweating on the plastic sofa, waiting for that Biran to show up. Geffel was getting agitated and started bobbing her head back and forth and patting her hands on her legs to the beat of whatever music she was hearing in her head. By the time Biran walked in, she was humming something loud and strange.
Biran gave us a big, ridiculous grin, waltzed into the control room, and started gabbing with the engineer. After another ten or fifteen minutes, he came out and said, “Hope you ladies are hungry—I just had some Chinese ordered in for us. It should be here in half an hour.”
Geffel rose up slowly, put her face in front of Biran, and said, “If we’re not recording in half a minute, I’m gone.”
The engineer brought Geffel into the recording studio, and Biran followed them in. And the engineer moved into the control room and started pushing buttons and moving levers. Biran stayed with Geffel, and I watched them from the control room through the giant glass window. Geffel settled in on the piano bench and tested out the keyboard while Biran walked around the space, examining random things like a night student in an improv class doing a hammy Sherlock Holmes skit. He tapped the microphone positioned over the piano. He bounced his hands along the baffling on the walls and squeezed a pair of the foam pyramids like they were little boobs. He blew his breath onto the glass window to the control room and, when some condensation formed, drew a smiley face with two buck teeth on the smile. Tapping onto the window, he yelled to the engineer, “Roll tape!” He leaned back against the glass nonchalantly and waved a finger at Geffel. She gave him an icy glare and, with her eyes still locked on him, started to play.
You know from the album how fiery Geffel was at that moment. She improvised the whole piece that takes up half the first side of the record in one take. A couple of times, I almost burst in to stop
things, for Geffel’s sake. She was hurling fire straight at Biran, and he just smiled, leaning on the glass with his hands in his pockets like he was watching the sunset on his veranda, and that only made her rage even more. I got up close to the window glass, so Geffel could see me, and shrugged my shoulders to send a message of “Who cares? Don’t let him bother you.” That seemed to calm her down. Then Biran turned around to the window and blew his breath on the glass again, and drew a heart with an arrow going through it, and turned back to Geffel and grinned. She sounded like she could break the piano. That’s the track they titled “Pane Relief.”
N. D. Nieve (former music critic, the Village Voice):
There’s a kinetic audacity of a rarefied kind in Adrianne Geffel’s music—an unpredictability, an indeterminacy, an instability, and an uncertainty that, when you listen close, are truly neither “un” nor “in.” Her records are a free assault on everything that recording itself represents. They’re not formal statements, inscribed for the ages in musical notation for entombment in the great canon of canonicality. They’re screams, and they’re whispers. They’re outbursts so vital, so mind-rattling, soul-fuckingly extreme that they burst out and fly straight through you and out of your room and around the whole world with so much speed and power that they come back into your house from the other direction, and never knock. They’re more than outbursts—they’re inside-outbursts, outsider-artbursts. They’re artsider out . . . art . . . All that.