The pink cotton story

Who are we?

Pink Cotton Candy is a Copenhagen-based independent label founded by Nikolaj Bruus, Rasmus Jon and Brian Raaby Andersen, dedicated music nerds releasing the music we absolutely adore. The label was originally envisioned primarily as a platform to release Quiet Sonia, and other personal side-projects, but the ambition quickly grew to encompass other primarily local talent. We all have our particular musical background and history, and this will inevitably be reflected in our roster – but we will try to grant ourself the joyous freedom of being in essence non-genre based in our musical curation. We DO DARE TO DREAM, though, that some sort of aesthetic coherence will arise from emotions, perspectives and attitudes “within” the music.

What is our background and history? We all have our background and history in the music scene of Odense among acts such as The Love Coffin, Tettix Hexer, First Flush, Scared Crow, Dorias Baracca and Jonas Munk/Manual, a music scene once intimately connected with music scenes of other cities such as Svendborg (Visage, Af Med Hovedet), Sønderborg (Collider), Århus (Narcosatanicos) and Copenhagen (Molina).

WHAT KIND OF MUSIC DO WE LOVE?

We love music that forces you to take a break and contemplate. We love music where head and heart meet, that which is equally physically and intellectually stimulating. We love music that possibly brings us the imagination and empathy necessary to visualize another, different and perhaps better world.

We love music that seems to make you acutely and instantly alive and present in the very moment. We love music that perhaps makes you just a little bit wiser about yourself and the dearest ones around you.

We love music that has its own (perhaps depraved, perhaps bittersweet) take on beauty.

We love music that enables you to endure a terribly stressful or trivial or emotionally overwhelming week, that carries you safely through unhappy love and grief, where you’re allowed to dream and drift away, take a much needed vacation from the constant pressure and demands of our totally screwed up Western culture in neoliberal consumerist, individualist, late-capitalist, blooming nationalist societies.

Music can be an energycharger, a dream-craving, a constructive escapism offering visions of strange distant utopias, or a violent cleansing confrontation with what you perhaps didn’t even know you contained inside.

What KIND OF MUSIC DO WE RELEASE?

At Pink Cotton Candy we have a huge passion for music that has a singular and unique aesthetic vision, feeling and language; that which draws selectively and meaningfully on the past and present, and dares to point towards the future; that which becomes it’s own artistic consciousness, an alive and breathing organism in it’s own eco-behavioral circuit.

We have a very special place in our hearts for music that dares to point beyond the local or global duck pond’s – rather random but yet surprisingly conform – stylistic, fashionable and profitable profile.

Music that has an uncompromising insistence to take artistic risks, to research, to explore, an art that has the intense will-force and life-giving breath to create new (and possibly better!) worlds with all their joy and misery (rather than just reproducing status quo).

Music that is perhaps ethically, environmentally and politically minded, though (preferably not) in any 70’s social realist explicit dogmatist way. Music that directly or indirectly is rooted in a certain sort of philosophy or viewpoint on life, that is like smelling the air a certain way, tasting the rain a certain way …

EASY

So at Pink Cotton Candy Records, it’s easy. We just like everything that’s spherical, dark and abstract, easy, light and dry; intense, euphoric and energetic, sad, flat and heartbroken; violent, brutal and confronting, friendly fragile and bittersweet. Also things which are intime and grandiose, pretentious stuff, and music straight from the pub.

And that which you cannot immediately delineate and understand (which cannot be instantly consumed like a readymade) – AND THAT WHICH YOU EAT IN ONE BITE because it just taste so fucking good. It could be shoegaze, folk, punk, indie-rock, american primitivism, ambient, electronic, jazz, modern classical, metal, pop, alternative country, etc.

Doesn’t really matter.

NOW CLEANSE YOUR HEAD...

PINK COTTON CANDY RECORDS.

When you want your heart intentionally broken. When
the record’s created just for you and has the potential to be the soundtrack of your life (at
least for a little while, you know how it goes…). Staring life death joy passion pain directly
into the eyes……

OK, that’s probably enough. AND THEN ALL THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT WE JUST
WROTE. For instance, the DELIBERATELY SUPERFICIAL, PERFORMATIVE, SYNTHETIC,
PERFUMED, NOSTALGIC. Or music that doesn’t force the listener to relate and engage in
the music, but invites you into a room of CONTINUING EXISTENCE. Perhaps.

You know, one of the great things about music is that there are no rules or formulas.

Sorry for ending with a cliché. But it’s true.

All the best,

Nikolaj, Brian and Rasmus