Interviewed by: Jenny Francois
Date Published: 05.11.07

Jacob Bronstein is the man behind the Brooklyn music label, CrystalTop. The label recently released an eclectic mix of songs ranging from soul, jazz, electronica featuring up-and-coming artist on a compilation entitled, CrystalTop Music Presents. We had the chance to speak with Jacob about the start of his label, the state of a DRM society and the future plans of CrystalTop.

Aeki Tuesday: How did you get started with the music industry?

Jacob Bronstein: I guess I was a bit of an inspiring musician, or at least an inspiring producer. I guess I was a bit of a frustrated musician. I really love being involved in music and fell like I enjoyed the production aspects a lot, putting together projects, putting together musicians and enjoyed that. I had a partner, Luz Fleming; I use the word partner loosely. We made music together. [phone cuts off briefly] We started on the road together and put something together and started learning over the years.

Aeki Tuesday: Where are you from originally? Where are you located now?

San Francisco.

Aeki Tuesday: And you’re located in Brooklyn right now?

Uh huh.

Aeki Tuesday: How did the Crystal Top Label come about?

I think I told you some of it just now. Luz Fleming and I making music together, producing other artists, sometimes together and sometimes separately, and Luz really saying “Hey we should start a record label.” And then some years figuring out what that meant.

Aeki Tuesday: What were your influences growing up?

Musical influences?

Aeki Tuesday: Musical. Yes.

I would say the two big things from me growing up were Hip Hop and Reggae. I don’t know how specific you want me to get as far as artists.

Aeki Tuesday: Can you tell me about how you got together with Pyeng Threadgil? She does a lovely cover of bill withers “Can We Pretend” - Could you tell me a little bit about how you two got together on this compilation?

I’ve known Pyeng for a long time now, more than ten years. We had mutual friends. She’s always a singer and composer herself. She comes from a musical family and our mutual friends put us in touch [saying] “hey you guys might like working together.” that was maybe 1997 [or] 1998. Pyeng was mostly looking for some folks to collaborate with mostly in a production way. She was writing songs and singing and wanted someone to produce and sort of work out the accompaniment. We started working together in 1997 or 1998. We did demos together for a while and then I produced tracks on some of her albums and she’s sung on some of mine sort of electronic productions. We sort of collaborated here and there. So when I came up with the idea of doing this compilation, I went to Pyeng “Would you like to contribute a song?” I talked about some originals she was working on and I loved this old Bill Withers song that was sort of his more unsung classics. And I said hey instead of an original what do you think about trying this. I think she didn’t know the song beforehand but loved it. She had covered a few Bill Withers before with a great lever of Bill Withers, as everyone in their right mind should be. (laughs) She loved it and so we talked about it, put it together, and hired some of our great friends and took it to the studio.

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Aeki Tuesday: Your band MEGA BASS is on this compilation. Who else is in the band? I wasn’t familiar with the other artist in the band with you.

The other artist is Aidan Hawken, who is also on this compilation alone under his own name. Mega Bass is sort of a loosely formed band. We’ve done a lot of demos together and we just came up with the name Mega Bass for the compilation to give the collaboration some sort of umbrella name. Aidan is another guy who I’ve done music with going back to our teenage years. We were in a band together in high school. He’s had a band in San Francisco and has done his own thing. We’ve always gone back and forth and shared opinions, shared music and collaborated over to different degrees over the years. This is just our latest collaboration and we just called it Mega Bass.

Aeki Tuesday: Some artists are for it and some are against it, What is your take on mp3 file sharing? Do you think it’s beneficial to getting the music out there to the people?

Indefinitely. I mean that’s the wrong word. Definitely. I think that it’s a strange new phenomenon the music industry to have such a great distrust of their customers and I fully support the idea of artists profiting off their music. I don’t mean to say that music should be stolen but I think that you have to trust your customers. I think it’s just smart music to make some things available free and you get your music out there, you get the buzz going. You have to trust that if you are making good music that people will come to it. I think it’s just a stupid approach to look at your customers as your enemy. They’ve got to be your friend. That’s what you want.

Aeki Tuesday: Do you think some labels out there might need to restructure their idea about how music is released to the masses?

Definitely. I can go on and on about this but I think it’s a major problem. I think EMI’s recent move is the first door that’s going to open a floodgate. I think that we will see after we get a few months of DRM-less tracks on iTunes and I think all the majors will start to see how beneficial it is. Basically the industry just needs a major wake up call. They need a knock on the head. If they don’t make some major changes, things will continue badly. I think they have no choice but to try some adaptations.

Aeki Tuesday: What does the future holds for the Crystal Top Label? What can we look forward to hearing in the future compilations?

I think we have projects coming up with Ryan Scott. He has a full length coming out this year that is most likely a joint venture with Velour Music. We probably have a full length from my collaboration with Aidan Hawkens, whether it will go under the name Mega bass or not I’m not sure. Probably not but I think that our stack of demos that we’ve done together will turn into a full-length album. We’ve got a remix album we just released an album from Luz Mob in January. This summer we are putting together a remix project which kind of relates with the question you were asking in some ways about posting tracks on the internet, trusting customers, and building buzz through making some music available for free. This remix project, we’re going to probably post two tracks from this album. All the individual elements of the tracks so that users can go to the website and download all the individual tracks and cut, paste, push, pull and remix the Luz tracks anyway they want and send them to us. I think we are going to pick our favorites and along with some of our producer friends, we know, we are going to do a remix album of Luz’s tracks.

Crystal Top Music Presents is available now via Amazon, iTunes, eMusic and Rhapsody.

More on CrystalTop

Official Site: www.crystaltop.com
MySpace: www.myspace.com/crystaltop