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Jochen Oberlack is a German writer, radio producer, musician and independent label owner behind the long-running project Rübenrock.

Here, Jochen explains the fascinating background to his record label, Bellerophon...

Bellerophon Records – A Rather Unreasonable Idea

Or: What Happens When Collecting Records Is No Longer Enough

My record label, Bellerophon Records, did not begin with a carefully considered business plan. A few months earlier, my then band Scarlet Utopia had released an album called Adventures Under Black Light through an independent label. In theory, everything should have been fine. We had recorded our music, somebody wanted to release it – that, after all, was what record companies were for. Or so I thought. There was a slight problem. The label wanted an additional track. A short and slightly odd intermezzo had to go, and there were discussions about the cover. In the end, our original design did not fit the label’s “visual identity”.

I thought this was a rather peculiar argument at the time. Unfortunately, it was a sentence I would find myself using as a label boss not very much later. The alternative cover, incidentally, was excellent. My nephew Patrick Keuthen, known to everybody as Percy, had designed it. His brief had been roughly: “Do something with animals.” He did. Still, for the first time I had discovered that “independent” did not necessarily mean that you were independent. To make matters worse, I did not make any money from the record either.

So I started Bellerophon Records, more or less out of nothing. My wife Lotte asked the perfectly reasonable question: why start our own record label just when we had found one willing to release our music? My answer was less reasonable. “I can make no money perfectly well on my own.” And with that, the essential business model of Bellerophon Records had been established.

A Hero, a Spaceship and an External Hard Drive

Various myths surround the name of Rommerskirchen’s most important record label (population: 15,000). The persistent story was that I had named the label after Bellerophon, the hero of Greek mythology who rode Pegasus and defeated the Chimera. This was not true. I had actually picked up the name from the 1950s science-fiction film Forbidden Planet. Before I could correct the Greek mythology story, however, I read a little more about the original Bellerophon and discovered that the poor fellow eventually came to grief through hubris.

I liked that considerably more than the heroic version. So rather than correct the false story, I adopted it. Hubris seemed appropriately optimistic for entering the music business. There was only one problem. We did not have a winged horse. But we had an external hard drive.

Percy and Me

Bellerophon was never exclusively my label. Percy was part of the story from the beginning. He was a musician, a designer and, most importantly, somebody who could turn ideas into objects. He designed record covers, inner sleeves, postcards, advertisements and eventually almost the entire visual world of Bellerophon. In his own portfolio he later described the label as his “personal design playground”. That is a pretty accurate description, although he played on that playground too. Peru, Like the Country was his own project. I was naturally called upon whenever guitars were required, but it was his thing. Later there were projects including Laaud and 82J6. There was never any particular reason why everything we made should appear under one artist’s name. Quite the opposite. New music was allowed a new identity. That applied to Percy as much as it did to me.

If I made electronic music rooted in the Düsseldorf tradition, it could become Das Blaue Palais. There was The Orpheus Replica for post-punk. Der Petunienmann von Metaluna Vier was free to be something else entirely, and Helicon Wave certainly was. At some point I stopped counting the projects and pseudonyms. There was no great secrecy involved. Anyone sufficiently interested could find out who was behind them. I simply became less and less interested in whether anybody recognised the name Jochen Oberlack as an artist.

The music needed an identity. I didn’t. Neither, for that matter, did the label. In the early days we attributed the whole enterprise to a certain Ümit Artegun. Patrick became Perceval Konompatzky. There was no particular reason for this, but it worked well enough for Karl Bartos – who, together with Mathias Black, had been an early supporter back when we were still recording at Skyline Studio in Düsseldorf – to sign an autograph: “For Ümit Artegun.” By the age of Web 2.0, attempts at this sort of concealment were obviously doomed.

We carried on anyway.

ÜMIT!

One birthday, Percy gave me a record. Across the wrapping paper he had written one word in large black letters:

ÜMIT!

I looked at it. “Listen,” I said. “That looks like a record cover.” Percy looked at it too. “Then make a band out of it.” So I did. There was one minor difficulty: I had no band. I sat down with Cubase and recorded an entire album in two days, playing everything myself. There was very little post-production. What came out of the computer was, more or less, what went to the pressing plant. Naturally, The Spirit of Ümit! became our most successful record.

A band required band members, of course, so we invented Ümit A, Ümit B and Ümit C. We even took a band photograph. Two of the musicians pictured on it had not played a single note on the album. Our answer to Milli Vanilli, perhaps – although we were considerably less ambitious. Ümit! worked remarkably well. A German reviewer later made a serious attempt to discover who this mysterious group actually were. Since Ümit is a Turkish name, he considered the possibility that they might be three Turks living in Germany. From the very limited information available, he reconstructed a possible history of the band and speculated about various side projects.

We were so touched by the amount of work he had put into it that we adopted his reconstruction as the band’s official biography. It seemed only fair. More importantly, he thought the record was terrific. And that was the point. We behaved rather frivolously around the records. We were considerably less frivolous about the records themselves.

Twenty-Seven Copies Is Still a Pressing

Der Petunienmann von Metaluna Vier provided another useful lesson. One of his records was released in an edition of 27 copies. This did not immediately suggest that a takeover of Universal Music was imminent. It did, however, receive a five-star rating in a British progressive-rock magazine – accompanied by a review almost more peculiar than the record itself. I drew another useful conclusion from this: the number of people who buy a record and whether it was worth making in the first place need not necessarily correspond.

As the productions became larger, our attitude towards the actual objects did not change. Welt am Draht by Das Blaue Palais was mastered by Eroc. The vinyl was professionally cut and manufactured at an established pressing plant. Percy handled the design. I can still remember receiving the message from SST in Frankfurt telling me that the lacquers had been cut and were on their way to Optimal for pressing. I was delighted.

That may sound trivial. For somebody who had spent most of his life buying records, it wasn’t. Suddenly records were no longer things other people made. I was on the other side.

And Then Other People Arrived

At some point our private playground became interesting to other musicians. We had not planned this. There was no artist-acquisition programme, and certainly no strategy defining the sort of acts with which Bellerophon wished to position itself in the marketplace. People came through other people. At first they came from our immediate surroundings. Increasingly, they came from all over Germany. One of them was Danny at Flight 13 in Freiburg. Initially he was a record dealer to whom we sent our releases. In one of his emails he was wildly enthusiastic about the artwork and packaging.

He was slightly more cautious about the music. Later he liked that too. Today Danny is a friend and has even curated a compilation for me. Connections with musicians such as Eberhard Kranemann, Franz Bargmann, Klaus Röder, Mani Neumeier and Zeus B. Held developed in much the same way. Some released music with us; with others there were recordings, texts, performances or completely different projects. Greta Schloch became a friend. Later I played on one of her records myself.

There were no contracts for any of this. Not because of some particularly noble philosophy. We simply did not need them. If somebody wanted to release their music with us, we made a record. Their music remained their music. That was it. Bellerophon was becoming less a company than a machine for turning opportunities into things.

Keith Kept Turning Up

And then there was Keith Jones. If you are reading this on the Fruits de Mer website, there is a slight problem with any attempt I might make to tell the rest of the story objectively. Fruits de Mer has long since become part of it. Keith kept turning up, and I can no longer remember precisely how it all happened. At some point there was a perfectly ordinary conversation about producing a small run of CDs for the wonderful The 13th Dream of Dr. Sardonicus festival. Being an old Randy California fan, I suspected I had encountered a kindred spirit.

Somehow, joint releases followed. Bellerophon music began appearing on Fruits de Mer compilations. For one of them I recorded a version of Faust’s Krautrock – an idea that was extremely easy to suggest and turned out to be perhaps the most complicated piece of music I had ever attempted. Helicon Wave contributed For Edgar. For that particular project I called myself Waldemar P. Naturally. And it did not stop there. In 2021, Keith introduced me to Marc Swordfish of Astralasia. The original idea was simply for Marc to “spice up” an album by Das Blaue Palais.

As so often with Bellerophon, something went wrong. We started making new music instead. Other musicians became involved and eventually there was an entirely new project for which we lacked only such minor details as a band name, an album title, a final mix and a production. A Bellerophon classic, in other words. Fortunately, Keith eventually came up with the right name: Himmelaya.

“It Shouldn’t Turn Into Work”

From time to time I sent Percy status reports on the label. One of them covered roughly fifteen projects simultaneously: LPs, singles, compilation tracks, cassettes, artwork, mastering, a possible film festival and various musicians who might participate or had, in the meantime, decided not to take up drumming again after all. At one point I had to admit: “Sorry. I’ve partly lost track of everything.” Percy replied: “I think that’s probably better. It shouldn’t turn into work.” The sentence was adopted as company policy with immediate effect.

This did not mean that we did not take the releases seriously. Rather, I had begun to suspect that Bellerophon would stop working the moment we restricted ourselves to doing only what appeared sensible. Sometimes I would rediscover an almost completed project on a hard drive. Once, after sending Percy a particularly lengthy inventory of everything that was going on, I added one final thought: “Oh yes – Orpheus. I’ll have another look. There’s still an entire album lying around somewhere.” There was.

Success

After seventeen years, I still find it difficult to say exactly what Bellerophon Records is. A label, obviously. But also Percy’s design playground, my musical laboratory and, eventually, a meeting place for people with whom we simply enjoyed making things. Some releases sold reasonably well. Others hardly sold at all. Some received astonishing reviews. Others are probably still sitting, factory-sealed, in the boxes in which they arrived.

This does not particularly bother me. I never released four albums in one year in order to prove that I could release four albums in one year. It happened because there happened to be four different ideas – and we could find no convincing reason why three of them should not exist.

Perhaps that is the real luxury of having your own label. Today I can make an atonal noise collage. Tomorrow, art rock. The day after that, post-punk. Then perhaps a CD with Eberhard Kranemann on which we have not agreed a single note beforehand.

Nobody has to decide whether it fits the previous release. If necessary, the music gets another band name. Success can mean something other than sales figures or recognition. An idea did not have to remain an idea.

There is, of course, a danger in being able to do almost anything. It is only a very small step from complete freedom to complete arbitrariness. Keeping an eye on that requires a certain amount of humility. But not too much. At the end of it all there is a storage room full of music. Cover designs. Cassettes. Vinyl records. CDs – formats we continue to love partly because people keep declaring them dead. For much of those seventeen years, running the label felt like a slightly intoxicated ride.

Yet the most important thing happened almost by accident. A network appeared. It now stretches from the engine room to the stage: producers, designers, record dealers, musicians, writers, promoters. Friends. Keith is still one of them. And when I look back now, I have no sensible explanation for how any of this happened. Perhaps Bellerophon would. After all, the ancient hero defeated the Chimera and then attempted to ride Pegasus to Mount Olympus. His hubris eventually brought him down.

I sincerely hope that particular part of the story is not compulsory for the record label. We still have things to do.

Jochen Oberlack | Bellerophon Records |

Part two very soon....meanwhile, please visit Jochen's record label on Bandcamp CLICK HERE

Read Jochen's conversation with Zeus B. Held... PART ONE - CLICK HERE PART TWO - CLICK HERE