Elsewhere: Selling through the label

Many years ago a mate and I decided to launch our own designer label. Not a fashion or cosmetics line, just a label.

Our plan - hardly original, we would concede - was to design an impressive eye-catching logo then to plaster it on various products, starting with the ubiquitous T-shirt.

We had been encouraged by the number of people who walked around like peripatetic posters, covered in ads for their sponsor's product or wanting to be seen as a member of some exclusive, fashionably hip club.

Buying by label has become an increasing and obvious trend over the past two decades. These days, however, most of the formerly high-end designer labels are far from exclusive products.

Recognising that there's not enough money at the top, they shifted down the market and into suburban shopping malls.

But if the mall-kids are prepared to buy a $180 T-shirt with your name on it, then why be precious?

My mate and I - like Versace, Gucci and others - weren't going to be fussy.

Music has often been sold by label, too, record label. And that's not as dumb as it might first sound.

Sometimes the record label confers a quality or style.

For about five years in the mid-60s you could hardly go wrong if you bought a record with "Motown" inscribed in the middle.

Jazz listeners knew the Blue Note label inferred a particular kind of music and sound quality, and in the 70s the ECM label out of Germany was a brand identifiable by its austere, intellectual music and pristine production.

The music on Flying Nun may not always have conformed to the media shorthand of "the Dunedin sound" but there was an ethic at work which most people understood intuitively after they'd heard a few albums.

My designer record label discovery of the year has been Irma out of Italy, distributed here by Music World who usually bring you unfashionable reissues and cheap "best of" type products which fill the dump bins.

But the Irma albums, in often wildly colourful gatefold covers, traverse a lot of hip and fashionable territory, from retro lounge-jazz and funky trip-hop to cool cocktail-hour bossa and kitschy grooves.

Among the most-played items round my way this year have been the self-titled trip-hop ambient album by Cybophonia, the "volume quattro"Chill Out Cafe compilation and Black Mighty Orchestra's To the Sky.

Milan's Irma label has sprung more than 100 discs and, after a while, names like Montefiori Cocktail, SLOK, Ohm Guru and Voo Doo Phunk trip lightly off the tongue.

A new batch of Irma releases covers some of the hip end for a cool summer.

The Ninfadelica album, pulled together by DJ Ninja, is a lively, humorous and slightly bent collection of B-grade movie soundtracks of the 50s and 60s.

So there are dramatic Bond-like pieces, woozy lounge jazz, buzzy guitar pop-kitsch (Men and Clubs could be the 3Ds and cries out for some equally dumb lyrics) and even a 68 Hugo Montenegro track.

Ash - apparently taken from a 69 film about a young heroin addict in love with two women but who dies before he can resolve the situation - is just weird, as you might expect.

This is fascinating stuff from what must be equally odd period-piece movies.

Irma carries a far swag of new bossa material (best band name, Bossa Nostra) but they all come with a slight hip-hop skew and sometimes amusing titles.

On the Sister Bossa Vol 2 collection are the tracks Rhodes to Bahia and Nylito's Way (by NYC DJ Jaymz Nylon).

This is a slow swinging affair which includes Black Mighty Orchestra's slinky "ba-da-da-dum" and lightly percussive Rua Escondida, Montefiori Cocktail's schmoozy take on the classic Carlos Jobim One Note Samba and Don Carlos' Sueno de Bahia.

This is best served with drinks which have their own umbrellas.

Belladonna's Midnight House is a nice'n'low-pulse selection of lengthy and leisurely house grooves with usefully hypnotic electronica effects.

It's certainly a midnight mood, but when the maraccas and snare drums kick in there's something here for mid-morning stressless listening, too.

The chief advantage of these Italian albums - and this is important in fashionable circles - is that they seem obscure to most people.

Irma is like that - they release the sort of albums you could build hip radio programmes around. You would just need, though, to give it a label.

The T-shirt would doubtless follow.