Label Spotlight: Allergy Season

On a recent YouTube binge of track digging I stumbled across John Barera & Paul Morse’s track ‘O.G.’. A blissful but banging record, easy on the ears, but what really caught my attention was the inventive EP artwork, mimicking some sort of painkiller or medication (see picture below). Delving into the uploaders YouTube channel ‘Allergy season’ I soon realised this was much more than cool EP artwork.

Allergy Season, a record label set up and run by NYC’s Physical Therapy in 2013 to promote ‘genre-free, highly emotive dance music.’ It’s seen a string of well received releases from artists like Norman Nodge, Blondes and Umfang and has been a platform for him to release two of his own EP’s. The labels USP is unmissable in the creative artwork on all its releases, playing on the idea of music being medication for the mind, with the tracks themselves of pharmaceutical-grade quality.

One notable release from the label would be the 42-track charity/protest compilation ‘Physically Sick’, co-presented by Discwoman, the NY based dance collective. Released in January this year to ‘relieve symptoms of fascism, bigotry, violence, and demagoguery’, the collection features a wide range of experimental dance producers working across numerous scenes and sounds. Released on bandcamp, you can choose what you pay with all proceeds going to The American Civil Liberties Union, Callen-Lorde, The National Immigration Law Center, and Planned Parenthood. On the Facebook event description for the launch of the compilation, the organizers describe Physically Sick as an "extremely listenable fuck you from the underground electronic community to the future powers-that-be".