New Focus Recordings

New Focus Recordings is an artist led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded by guitarist [a644885] and composer Peter Gilbert in 2003, with engineer/composer Ryan Streber playing a large role in its development since 2004. As with many other independent labels, we started this project because we wanted to have creative control over all elements of the recording and post-production process, and aspired to craft full length recordings that were cohesive artistic statements in their own right -- a challenge in the download era. As the label grew, we discovered that several artists wanted to preserve that same creative control over their projects, and the primary service they needed from a label was to facilitate a distributed release within a catalogue of shared sensibility, and to make the music widely available. The New Focus catalogue has expanded in wonderful ways since those first nascent projects as long-standing artists and new faces have contributed their personally sculpted recordings. New Focus currently distributes a few sub-labels that represent different strains of curation by various colleagues and organizations. NFR also handles the series of annual releases for the SEAMUS collective.