La Mission
La Mission is a Berlin record label founded in 2012 by Pablo Roman-Alcalá, Luis-Manuel Garcia, Mandie O’Connell and Johannes Brandis. For almost a decade, he carried around with him the idea of a label, explains Roman-Alcalá, who is active as a DJ and producer under the name Beaner. Besides the four core-members, of whom, all live in the German capital city apart from Luis-Manuel Garcia, there are still a series of other people involved from all over the world. The distribution of roles is not fixed, rather individuals concentrate on certain projects, an anarchistic principle, Roman-Alcalá stresses. »It was our motivation, to give something back to Dance music, which in our opinion was missing, in particular a feeling of urgency in respect of neo-liberalisation and commercialisation of our culture.« So does that mean critical theory of House-beats and Disco-arrangements? What was the mission about, which has given the label its name? »An eccentric mess, who sits in the back of the bus with worn off make up and jerks off, whilst reading a text book about participative economy.« Of course.
Elements referring to queer and political traditions also define the aesthetic of the publications by La Mission. A colourful confusion of references. »The Situationist International, the Nikkid Cult Of Hickey, The Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers ( a New Yorker leather-art gang from the 70’s) and a whole series of further mindsets, projects and things«, lists Roman-Alcalá the spectrum of influences. That sounds terribly theory-like, however published records on La Mission skip light-footedly and take exciting turnings time and again. Free Jazz-elements find themselves together with House-beats, edit-artists like Chrissy (the Chicago Disco-lexicon) blend a potpourri of Hi-NRG, Rock and Dance-beats with catchy records with guaranteed campy artwork. A wild mixture, that is neatly unravelled by this anarchistic orientated collective; in the La Mission Lost Records series, previously unpublished or digitally published material appears. Under the title Edits and Beats, Dance music is investigated on, not solely with scissors and glue, but also with short essays. Currently in the pipeline there is the series Propaganda of the Deed which is supposed to deal with Techno and politically, radical actions. Central to this were the releases by the temporal, limited series kunst/WORK, which came with a small magazine with texts. As a result, La Mission lost approximately 1 Euro per record. »Why did we do it?, asks Roman-Alcalá. »Because art, culture and music should not revolve around profit!« Of course not!