Factory Label Shipping Express is an album released at the end of 2024 by Sun Yizhou and Liam Kramer-White. Sun Yizhou is a Beijing-based experimental musician who also runs the Aloe label. Liam Kramer-White (Beige, LMFAO, Winter’s Treasures, B33N) currently lives in Philadelphia and runs the Phons label. Factory Label Shipping Express is the first album they made together, via an exchange of emails and sound files, based on phone recordings.
Technically incorrect, weird, and related to our lives
Factory Label Shipping Express is an album released at the end of 2024 by Sun Yizhou and Liam Kramer-White. Sun Yizhou is a Beijing-based experimental musician who also runs the Aloe label. Liam Kramer-White (Beige, LMFAO, Winter’s Treasures, B33N) currently lives in Philadelphia and runs the Phons label. Factory Label Shipping Express is the first album they made together, via an exchange of emails and sound files, based on phone recordings.
Liam Kramer-White :: We made this record through exchanging files online. We would record things independently, and take turns sending material, listening, and responding with more recordings. I was mostly working with my phone and wireless earbuds to record. Generally documenting different already existing processes (like driving over a rumble strip) or inventing some procedure in response to something I would discover out in the world (like some empty pill bottles and a pile of tires found atop a hill).
At some point I sat down and edited some of these recordings together. Me and Yizhou talked about what we liked and did not like about these edits, changed some things, discarded some material and this is what we ended up with. We started recording things with this collaboration in mind at the end of February 2024; intermittently returning to it all year, not working on it for a few months, talking about working on it some more, and then deciding together that it was actually done.
Yizhou :: We spent almost a year on Factory Label Shipping Express. We started by talking about no-input feedback and started with a concept. At first there were other ideas, and slowly it became about not playing with the usual equipment (which distanced it from regular collaborative recordings, and the project became special). Eventually it became a non-professional field recording. When I first started recording, I was in Hong Kong and Zhongshan City, and then off and on, mostly I think in Beijing. I used an iPhone some of the time, sometimes a toy parabolic microphone. Sometimes I forgot that I had this project but it’s part of the online collaboration and I’m happy with that.
Igloo :: What kind of record did you want to make?
Yizhou :: In the original words of the email at the time: I wanted it to be technically incorrect, weird, and related to our lives.
Liam :: When we first got in contact we each mentioned some ideas we had, but ultimately those ideas sort of faded, and the emergent qualities of the work took over. I was mostly interested in what the ideas that we had about music and about each other’s work would produce.
How did you got to know each other?
Liam :: I would say we mostly know each other just through exchanging recordings and working on music.
Yizhou :: It was Liam who first emailed me. But before that, I had already heard the B33N album ‘Whole Kernel Niblets’, I think through the recommendation of the Chinese listener neciakiad.
How did you got to know each other’s work?
Liam :: Not sure how I initially discovered Yizhou’s music but at some point I ended up following his YouTube page and was getting to know his work there.
Why did you decide to do something together?
Yizhou :: Who wouldn’t want to do something with another person if there is a point of attraction to his or her work?
Liam :: It just sort of seemed to me like our aesthetic sensibilities would be compatible, and the idea of collaborating felt interesting, so I reached out.
What do you have in common?
Liam :: Not sure, I think we have yet to really get to know each other in that way. We have really only interacted over emails.
Yizhou :: We haven’t met in person yet but I think one of the common threads is the lack of haste in sending emails.
If I would ask you: what am I listening to when I listen to Factory Label Shipping Express, what would you say?
Liam :: Music.
Which music influenced you for this album?
Liam :: I don’t think Yizhou and I really talked about other artists much while composing this. Generally I think the most immediate influence I experience is from music (often performances) that I find energizing or enlivening. These tend to be performances that I find funny, alienating, confusing, or demonstrate a kind of focus and attention that I admire. Also music that I find really offensive or in conflict with my sensibilities is a big influence. A push and pull.
I moved from Western Massachusetts to Philadelphia this past year. The people making strange music and the noise scenes in both these places have been important to me, but lately my sense of relatedness to other artists around me has felt ambiguous, and the obscurity of context—or maybe just the new context of a bigger city—has made it more apparent to me that relatedness is something I experience as dynamic and composite. I mostly just feel partially and in varied capacities (intellectually, aesthetically, emotionally, etc.) related to the artists around me or those who I intentionally interact with otherwise. Sometimes this relatedness feels identifiable in some shared quality of our work and sometimes it feels extra-musical or extra-artistic, part of some other (maybe interpersonal) aesthetic exchange.
Factory Label Shipping Express is available on Phons. [Bandcamp]
