When Stony Plain native VISSIA released her new album, it was on the label she co-founded
Alex Vissia (who performs as VISSIA) just released a new album, Place Holder — a personal folkrock record she feels is her best yet.
The 28-year-old musician grew up in Stony Plain, starting piano lessons at five, then adding guitar and voice, and forming a successful country-folk trio with her two sisters in 2000.
They played together at the Edmonton Folk Music Festival, the Vancouver Olympics and earned two nominations at the Canadian Folk Music Awards.
Vissia struck out on her own in 2011 while she was earning a diploma in composition at MacEwan and discovering jazz and blues at school. She’s released other albums independently, but this one has a label: Hurry Hard Records, which she launched with Nich Davies, another local musician, last week.
Starting their own label was a “natural progression,” Vissia said, after years spent studying the music scene. As a teenager, she attended evening courses on aspects of the music industry with her mother and she dabbled in business and professional writing classes before committing to MacEwan’s music diploma program.
“As an independent artist, you’re always hoping someone’s going to want to work with you, because it’s so much work to do everything yourself,” Vissia said.
“Rather than trying to seek out these other outlets, we thought we would just pool our resources and start building our own label.”
As royalties from recordings have become less important to artists than live performances and online branding, record labels are not as crucial to emerging bands’ success as they once were.
Running their own record label also means having more control over booking and marketing decisions.
Vissia received grant money from the Jim Pattison Foundation to record her album, as well as grants from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Foundation Assisting Canadian Talent on Recordings (FACTOR).
She and Davies have already started receiving music submissions for Hurry Hard Records, but they don’t plan on signing any other bands over the next six months.
Once they do expand, Vissia said the label will consider artists from a wide range of genres. Over the long term, they aspire to create sustainable careers for musicians.
As for their curling-inspired name?
“We just really wanted something that would strongly resonate as a Canadian term,” she said.
“At the same time, if someone doesn’t (get it), that’s also OK. I think the words ‘hurry hard’ can mean a lot of different things, and the name doesn’t pigeonhole us as a specific genre.”
Last Friday, Hurry Hard Records held a launch party at the Old Strathcona Performing Arts Centre, where Lucas Chaisson, a singer-songwriter from Cochrane, opened for VISSIA.