VIDEO: Ian Russell of Flemish Eye Records

There’s been a synchronicity to the popular rise of Flemish Eye Records and its marquee artist, Chad VanGaalen.

Flemish Eye founder Ian Russell, the guy who lured VanGaalen’s fertile, brooding psychedelic mind out of a Calgary basement and into the public ear with his 2004 album, Infiniheart, has managed to sniff out and assemble a whole community of artists with a similar affinity for offbeat musical beauty.

Meanwhile, VanGaalen has created and put out another three-plus albums worth of often stunning material (plus a handful of joyfully metamorphic animations as music videos), expanding beyond a one-man band and building a huge audience for his brand of folk rock.   

Flemish Eye’s story traces a remarkable arc from the grassroots of Calgary’s arts scene to a new benchmark for the country’s independent music labels.

While the label’s growth has matched VanGaalen’s journey from fabled local busker to two-time Polaris Prize short lister and CBC Radio 3 darling, Flemish Eye has flourished because its whole reason for being is to guide, advise and help organize a bunch of musicians while allowing them complete control over their art.

Russell has long been a key member of Calgary’s independent music scene, playing drums for a band called Fake Cops before he ever managed other musicians. He started Flemish Eye as an offshoot of Catch and Release, a label he co-piloted (with long-time local music scene spark plug and Cripple Creek Fairies’ songwriter Cam Hayden) from 1999 until around 2004. Whereas C&R was a co-operative established as a tool for a loose community of local musicians to gig and record by pooling their resources, it was clear to Russell that VanGaalen’s work needed something more than C&R could provide, so he started Flemish Eye.

“Chad’s record, I just felt it deserved to have its own context,” says the easygoing, sharp-witted Russell.

The resulting album, Infiniheart, was a homemade undertaking that never stopped blowing up, eventually spawning a worldwide distribution deal (outside Canada) with Seattle’s esteemed Sub Pop Records and turning VanGaalen into a hipster-household name.

“I don’t think he’ll ever make [another] record like it, of course,” says Russell. “It exists uniquely in a place and time, specific to his environment, and no one was listening except for a handful of friends. Really he was just playing for the audience of himself. You can hear that.

”As his total album sales in Canada have climbed to more than 20,000 copies, VanGaalen’s work has matured and mutated. So, too, has Flemish Eye’s. Half of the $6,700 Alberta Foundation for the Arts grant that launched the label with Infiniheart in early 2004 was used to produce a second record, The Cape May’s Central City May Rise Again. That band, led by a gloomy troubadour named Clinton St. John, would quickly make a second album called Glass Mountain Roads (pictured left) and then tour Europe and the United States with folk songstress Nina Nastasia in 2006, building a solid fan base. After that, The Cape May hooked up with Victoria, British Columbia, indie band Run Chico Run and hashed out a self-titled collaboration as the Pale Air Singers, which was released by Flemish Eye in 2009.

To say the third band on Flemish Eye’s roster, Women, has made a name for themselves among indie music fans is to call a spade a shovel-shaped thingamajig. Famously recorded on ghetto blasters and old tape decks by label-mate VanGaalen, Women dropped their eponymous full-length debut in late 2008 and spent most of the next year trying to keep up with demand for their live show all over the Western Hemisphere. A reviewer for pitchfork.com wrote that the four-piece band’s low-fi, drone-infused songs had “the cool, hard weight of something created under duress,” and were made up of “the best of post-punk ingredients: curiosity, noise and sly artifice.”

Given that Women’s members are all young men, those three ingredients seem fairly innate. The idea of creation under duress is a layer that’s perhaps a bit tougher to hear, but it’s a description Russell agrees with.

“Women are a product of the suburbs, which is totally foreign to me,” says Russell. “I’ve never lived in the suburbs. That kind of remoteness, and the fact that they’d have to drive around for hours to get anywhere in Calgary, definitely seems to be a part of what made them as a band. Or that they’d rent a whole house out on the outskirts of the city rather than rent a jam space downtown because it’s so prohibitive to do so.”

 A daunting real estate market and a lack of cheap, accessible creative space are definitely major hurdles that any Calgary-based artist has to deal with. So the label’s artists perseverance also speaks to Flemish Eye’s strength as a creative force, and to the wise, calm and careful approach that Russell brings to running a record label.

Flemish Eye exists to strengthen and support a community of musicians, as opposed to an ever-inflating level of cachet with music consumers. While each band has its own niche, their members overlap and collaborate almost by rote — multi-instrumentalist Matt Flegel, for example, makes noise for nearly all of the label’s projects, from laying down Women’s bass lines to playing accordion on “Willow Tree,” the opener from VanGaalen’s 2008 album, Soft Airplane.

Russell also tries not to sink money into his industry’s conventional marketing schemes. “I still rankle at spending money on advertising and various marketing schemes,” he says. “Even if we have funding, the idea of doing lifestyle marketing or spending lots of money on videos, they don’t jive for me. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

Instead he prefers to stoke fan loyalty by loading LPs with B-sides or releasing a free digital EP. And last May, in perhaps the label’s most overt display of self-promotion to date, Russell put together the inaugural Flemish Eye Ball to celebrate the label’s five and a half year anniversary. The event packed both floors of the Royal Canadian Legion downtown, and featured performances by a full slate of Flemish Eye artists (including the label’s newest addition, Ghostkeeper), as well as friends and contemporaries such as East Coast alt-rock pioneer Julie Doiron and ethereal local band Azeda Booth. Riveting soundscapes filled the Legion that night, and it was easily one of 2009’s best live shows.

“I think people were coming out to really celebrate the history of the label and the success of the artists on it, and the fact that we’ve been able to keep this such a community affair,” says Russell. “The fact that Chad’s chosen to stay in Calgary, and the fact that a band like Women can become successful outside of Alberta, outside Canada, outside North America, while staying in the city and not moving to Vancouver or Montreal or Toronto, that just blows me away.

“[Usually,] the first thing you do if you want to be successful is leave Calgary. But we’ve shown that it’s possible to do that here ... I hope that what people are excited about is the fact that we’ve been able to do that on our own terms.”

Flemish Eye’s success has certainly come as intended: gradually, in very measured doses, and always with the artists pulling the strings.

With VanGaalen and Women both planning to release new records and tour at home and overseas in 2010, the label’s next generation of local talent is setting its sights beyond Alberta.

Next month, Flemish Eye will put out the second album by Ghostkeeper, an intriguing, gritty-yet-gorgeous roots rock band whose charming anchors — singer/guitarist Shane Ghostkeeper and drummer/singer Sarah Houle — hail from Peace Country.

“They come from Northern Alberta, they’re both Métis, they definitely already have an Aboriginal fan base. They’re making music which draws upon that, as well as a whole history of North American blues and contemporary indie rock,” says Russell, his voice crackling with excitement. “I think they’re also really pushing the envelope in terms of the music that the community they come from listens to, and I think they’re really excited about being kind of ambassadors for a new face of aboriginal music. At the same time, they’re just making cool music that anyone can get into: a noisy, sloppy, updated and skewed sort of blues.”

Ghostkeeper definitely doesn’t have any blues about their new relationship with Flemish Eye. “We’re releasing this next record with strong and ambitious support behind it,” says Houle, noting their seven-date tour around B.C. and Alberta last year was their first.

Shane Ghostkeeper concurs: “Ian made it happen and let us make the record we wanted, which is a classy move.”

Truth is, Ian Russell couldn’t make it happen any other way.