HatHut Records

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HatHut Records is an independent Swiss record label that is mainly at home in the field of free improvisation , avant-garde and new music .

General information about the label

Werner X. Uehlinger founded HatHut in 1975 initially with the aim of selling the work of saxophonist / trumpeter Joe McPhee . HatHut can now boast established musicians such as Anthony Braxton , Peter Brötzmann , Steve Lacy , David Liebman , David Murray , Lauren Newton , Cecil Taylor , Mal Waldron , John Zorn and others in its repertoire. In addition to Brötzmann, the label has also made other European musicians and groups such as Theo Jörgensmann , Franz Koglmann , Max Nagl , the Vienna Art Orchestra or Kate and Mike Westbrook accessible to a larger audience through publications. In the field of new music, the sub-label hat [now] ART recorded compositions by Pierre Boulez , John Cage , Cornelius Cardew , George Crumb , Morton Feldman , Charles Ives , Kurt Schwitters , Karlheinz Stockhausen and others.

In addition to the very high production standard, a feature of the HatHut publications was the elaborate packaging, which could contain extensive text inserts, in some cases such as John Zorn's double CD Cobra even further extras in the form of two postcards and other things.

Like other labels, HatHut relies on collaborations with broadcasting companies and / or support from foundations for larger productions; in the years 1985–2000 there was also financial backing through cultural sponsorship on the part of the UBS bank (since this was only created in 1998 through a merger, until then it was listed under its previous half Swiss Bank Corporation = Swiss Bank Corporation (SBV)). In December 2000, UBS decided to remove HatHut from its cultural sponsorship portfolio. This was countered, among other things, with a redesign of the packaging concept, all (re) publications appear only in a cardboard sleeve without the previous additions. In addition, the cover concept based on black and white photographs for publications outside of New Music, which complements the existing puristic design for the New Music area in the form of large sans serif fonts on a white background, is a consistent identification feature.

In the past, HatHut consistently limited re-releases to an edition of 3,000 copies per CD. The annual publication volume (re-releases and new releases) is around 25 productions.

Due to the orientation of the program towards a limited target audience, the sales of the label are significantly below those of other labels, some of which are comparable, such as ECM or Winter & Winter , which also publish recordings from the area covered by HatHut, but are particularly popular in the case of ECM to compensate Can offer box office hits like Officium by Jan Garbarek or The Köln Concert by Keith Jarrett , whose sales figures go into the hundreds of thousands or higher, and these labels are stylistically broader. In the field of free improvisation there is a conceptual similarity to the labels FMP , Intakt and Ogun . This is also expressed in the fact that the work of some musicians can be found both in HatHut and in some of the above-mentioned related and other labels.

Articles about albums (re) released by HatHut

Web links