Every great record label is a universe.

In Leaving’s case, the cosmos seems to stretch forever. Kicked off during the zenith of LA’s Low End Theory heyday, back when a young Flying Lotus traded CDs in the Stones Throw mailroom with a younger Matthewdavid, Leaving Records welcomed music that glowed with curiosity. Earth-bound ambient, tesseract synthwork, jazz in the name of Coltrane and Sanders, space opera and Celtic new age… It all found a home where contracts matched the aura.

Since 2008, Leaving has retained 0 copyright ownership and near-zero exclusivity. Artists are free to release their music on other labels with 30 days’ notice. Its particular brand of mycelial interdependence (symbiotic exchange + psychedelic camaraderie) can both rub off on others and rub people the wrong way. Overall, a years-long run of hand-marbled physicals, concerts in parks under trees, earnest midnight support emails, and self-enforced quality control across 100s of projects has magnetized fans turned kin, who add wattage to the beacon.

Everything coalesced this year with Staying: a rapid response, 98-song, 133-artist fundraiser compilation assembled within days of the wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles. To me, it’s the label’s most significant act to date. The effort quickly raised $60,000 for the Black Families Fund and artists who lost their residences. Also: its hit-to-miss ratio is strong. Despite / because of the time crunch, literal state of emergency, sheer volume, and dozens of genres covered, the album flies through its seven hours. There’s V.C.R’s assured, harmonized optimism; Samantha Urbani's inspired cloud pop; and Surya Botofasina’s warm intonations over goosebump-raising woodwinds. Tate EC manages to channel, with a single instrument, what it must feel like to step foot on the moon. Alia plays the Theremin through a forest’s chorus. Anenon’s sax might give you wings. The Growth Eternal’s bass and splintered vocal shimmer hint at rebirth. Laraaji, Mndsgn, Lionmilk, Arushi Jain, and yes, André 3000, all contribute alongside other talents.

Staying underscores, I think, the ongoing and overt politicization of Leaving Records. The people behind it are trying to convert good intentions into practical actions, explicit stances, and the lingering flaws that inevitably accompany them. The goal when the label began was to do the best they could in a notorious industry. Today, their endgame is to break from it. Defunct 2021 explorations of a collective ownership model haven’t deterred their desire to try again. Their outspoken antizionism hasn’t wavered in a hyperzionist sector. The rising awareness of Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, and countless other entities’ direct links with genocide, ecocide, surveillance, and drone warfare require each of us to reckon with our own compromised positions and work together to improve them.

Six months before more artists and labels caught wind of the impish Daniel Ek’s thirst for blood money, Leaving refused to distribute Staying on Spotify. At the same time, they’ve continued to earn funds from other aforementioned DSPs complicit, at the very least through their parent companies, in the worst shit imaginable. I don’t write this as a gotchya moment: Matthewdavid’s upfront about their current status and where he hopes to help steer the ship toward. I find this candor important because it’s outcome-oriented. I’m increasingly of the belief that we do our enemies’ bidding when we clamor for a purity that does not exist, rather than commit to sustained, strategic actions and alliances we can win with.

We spoke with Matthewdavid of Leaving about boycotts, industry constraints, and the making of the Staying compilation. In a separate talk, we spoke with both Matthewdavid and Lani Trock, another integral part of Leaving’s operations and experiments, about their worldview influences, their first-ever cassettes, their theories of change, and more. Thank you for being here. 100% of proceeds from Staying purchases on Catalog go toward victims of the LA fires.

P.S. If you haven't, learn more about BDS adherence and Boycott Room's efforts against KKR. Low Leaf, another artist we love and a Leaving Records alum, recently highlighted Bridge of Solidarity, an on-the-ground mutual aid effort for Palestinians in Gaza. We'll warmly encourage readers to contribute or share that if they can, as well as The Sameer Project.

Matthewdavid On Staying, Boycotts, & Evolution

Siber: Compiling 98 solid tracks with some really high highs is a feat on any timeline, let alone the rapid response crunch that led to Staying in the wake of the LA fires this year.

Matthewdavid: The idea came to me the morning after the fires. I was in the kitchen of my sister-in-law’s ranch outside of LA where we evacuated to, which we were super fortunate to have access to. I began immediately reaching out to everyone, acting on gut instinct. Blessings to my wife and family and all the people involved for the seven days that followed because I set a tight deadline for myself and all the artists to release on January 17. I pulled a few all-nighters. Carlos [Niño] remained a spiritual advisor and mentor throughout the whole process. He also said he'd bring in Dré [André 3000]. Getting Dré involved was a miracle. I can die happy. He helped make the compilation a success, hands down.

Siber: How did the coordination and logistics unfold?

Matthewdavid: I compiled an initial draft message that ended up getting more refined and tighter with every pass. I’d ask artists and friends in our community to send out the message. I received a lot of submissions and accepted mostly everything, but not all: there were a few ‘higher-profile’ artists that didn’t make sense for Leaving, and some close friends who I also intuitively turned away because of the rush, not having time to A&R. I found a few cuts in my own archives from Celia [Hollander] and Photay, Ohma, Reggie [Watts], and Laraaji, which I edited and mastered and got their approval for.

Siber: What did Dublab’s fiscal sponsorship mean in practice?

Matthewdavid: Taxes. We couldn’t afford to bear that burden. Thank God for them being a supportive nonprofit and day-one supporter to me and to Leaving. They agreed to help us in a squeeze; it’s quite complicated with Bandcamp, but we figured it out. Bandcamp’s backend tech won't allow multiple payees across a label's profile or discography. We have 100-plus releases available on the Leaving profile; I’d love to designate a portion to our old distributor, a portion to us directly, a portion to an artist directly, etc. But they won’t support that functionality, apparently because of taxes, so this benefit compilation couldn’t live on our regular profile because there’s no technical way to make Dublab, our fiscal sponsor, a payee. We had to create a brand-ass-new profile for Staying as a workaround instead of activating and engaging with our 17,000+ followers who get notified when we drop something.

Siber: I can imagine the challenges with the scale of the project, all the contributors involved. Several months ago, I think you had raised about $60,000, split 50/50 between the Black Families Fund and affected artists. Are the aid efforts ongoing? How much have you raised to date?

Matthewdavid: The efforts are ongoing, though we plateaued around $60,000. We've been directly selling through Leaving’s site and selectively wholesaling the few remaining physical copies we have left to help pay off various project expenses. The fundraiser park event we held in Elysian raised around $20,000. Half of that I handed to Caroline Zorthian in cash to assist in the rebuilding of Zorthian Ranch in Altadena. We also helped restore Spencer Hartling aka tp Dutchkiss’ Wiggle World home and studio in Altadena, which is a huge win for the community as we have cut many records up there and will continue to.

Siber: Did LA Recs & Park or the California State Parks services offer any exceptional or additional assistance at all with this concert?

Matthewdavid: Hell no they didn’t. On top of that, they abused their position of power day-of and locked us in. Fuck them. Still mad at what happened. This is why we are now trying our best to work with LA State Historic Park, moving away from the LA Recs & Park system and directing energy there instead. The two main supervisors (shouts Stephanie and Luis) at LASHP love us and have a shared vision for public spaces. Free live music outdoors isn’t a product. That’s an experience we give and receive from as humans. In whatever we do, we want to be a bit of a trickster. Stir the pot. Add our own little spells. That’s the human element. That’s part of what shows we care about your quality of life on the receiving end. That the stuff that inspires me, so we want to do the same thing for you.

Siber: From the outside in, Leaving has a track record of creating physical works that feel like artifacts (marbling cassettes by hand, for example) and refreshing irl gatherings that people consider worth buying into. It’s a win-win-win for label, artist, fan. Also! The constraints around material support are ever-rising here, there, everywhere, while it feels like many people who can afford to pay will value natural wine well above any independent show. Is Leaving as resilient as it looks? Have you noticed a decline in support?

Matthewdavid: There’s definitely been a decline since 2009 due to saturation of art and music flooding social media and the reliance on DSPs, pressures on artists to be content creators, AI bull shit, the pressures of American society on music lovers and our dwindling economy, attacks against the working class, etc. When we started, people would buy downloads. That was cool. We sold tapes by announcing our new releases on Twitter, just pointing to our humble blog. Now we gotta bang people over the head and put out boosted Instagram posts, paying Meta, just to get visibility. The newsletter is cool but I’m just one person and cannot afford hiring a whole team. I’m in a constant state of burnout recovery to be honest. I’m trying to refocus my attention this year on my health and family because it’s hard running a label full time and supporting a family. I can’t run the label and rely on the label to be the sole source of income. If I did, the label would have folded by now. I grind and hustle on the side constantly like so so many of us are forced to do as artists in this country. Local LA community channels at venues and shops and centers help but we aren’t fully resilient in the slightest. I believe there’s some fortification through solidarity of our values and standing strongly in the proclamation of such. Leaving is vocal in reminding people that art and music are undervalued, and that artists deserve better systems to achieve their dues. We are also vocal about our struggles and how our struggles relate to the current, worst struggles of other oppressed people. I remain grateful for our relative position but I also remain pissed and I pray my kid can see a day where artists are higher-valued in this country.

Siber: It’s important to be candid about those challenges, particularly when they’re endured even by a renowned label with a platform and partnerships. Despite those challenges, Leaving still opted not to share the Staying compilation on Spotify in January, after Spotify donated to Trump’s inauguration. This was six months before more recent news broke about Daniel Ek’s gargantuan role in a drone warfare firm. What are your present thoughts around the growing push to boycott Spotify, and the growing campaign against Boiler Room and its parent company KKR as part of the BDS movement? Does you aim to eventually cut ties with major DSPs?

Matthewdavid: KKR is shit. Spotify is shit. Amazon Music and Apple too. All the major DSPs are problematic. Major labels, major festivals and venues… this is old news for most of us. But these fuckers are the ones with all the money. To that point, it may shock folks to know Leaving has a distribution partnership with Universal’s 'indie' distro arm, Virgin, because they stepped up to save the label a few years back, when no one else would. They advanced us the money we needed to stay afloat. We negotiated a great deal that stayed true to our values and retained all our artists’ rights, but the cost is having any affiliation with that system and having any proximity to gross CEO energy like UMG’s supporter of the [Israeli Occupation Forces] Lucian Grange. He can fuck off, for the record. That deal's supposed to end soon.

Virgin, Spotify, all of them are likely either fully aware of where we stand on human rights issues, or choose to say nothing to us. Our entire ethos is tied to our leftist, socialist politics. All that being said, we’re doing our best to figure out a way out of this mess. Not a day goes by. Right now, the label relies on these industry relationships to survive. As ‘weird’ and ‘underground’ as our entire catalogue may seem to some people, it still manages to make around $20,000 per month across streaming, on average, with lots of fluctuation. We split that 50/50 with the artists so Leaving comes away with about $10,000 per month off that, but our operating expenses are way higher than this. We'll hire out people to help do this music justice, from our project manager on retainer to the interns who work on our events who we want to pay. We could lessen our output, but I have a problem, which is that I'm a huge music fan and I get excited about helping share music I love. We're operating in the red, constantly. [Laughs] Our goal is to fully break away, but it’s hard to be hopeful about viable competitors without a public consciousness shift, which is what we have to work toward together, and that's partially why I get so upset at celebrities with much more sway who stay quiet or ‘neutral’ on politics. We’re up against the dehumanization, the devaluation, of life itself, so of course art and culture are on the chopping block.

Siber: I was just with Austin from Subvert, another music project I appreciate, and he had a related thought about the limited willingness people have to even point to, let alone champion, alternatives until they’re more proven out, be it Subvert, Nina, Tone, Catalog... I sympathize with that because every org deserves skepticism, and that proving phase is also when many alternatives die out. Putting aside my cynicism best I can, I do feel a sliver of hope when I see someone like Anthony Fantano, in his more outspoken politicized era, breaking from his typical programming to speak adamantly in support of Palestine, and to encourage his audience. Or much more recently, he shared a “F*ck Spotify” video alongside Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart and it received an overwhelmingly supportive reception. Even if there isn’t much of a solution on offer and the conversation’s largely restricted to the ‘least bad’ DSP, there's a surge against the power structures and it's spreading.

Matthewdavid: Too many of our heroes don’t say shit. You'll see a whole spiel about some relatively insignificant thing, but can you say anything along the lines of Free Palestine and Fuck Spotify? I love how Chapel [Roan] uses her voice as an artist signed to a major label to advocate for artists' rights, and human rights. But we're all compromised. There’s someone at Amazon Music, on their editorial staff, who programs a flagship Alexa meditation playlist featuring select songs from our ambient music catalogue. That generates 100s of thousands of 'passive' streams per month for us. They're adding this music in large part because its really good ambient, but it’s still a devaluation of music and art, without a doubt, and passive listening is weird. And it's Amazon. And that revenue is something we need to keep on keeping on. We are perpetually experimenting with and on the lookout for new upcoming systems and platforms, various arts and music grants from our government at all levels, and other miscellaneous outlets (is there a humanitarian benefactor out there for Leaving?) for funding to serve artists and artist communities like ours. There are a few upcoming platforms and tools we're interested in and will be trying out soon, but nothing right now is substantial enough for me to feel like we could divest entirely and survive. I am grateful for Catalog, and your commitment to artists.

Siber: It’s an alarming mirror, maybe, of the real and rising scale of repression around the world, but, much more importantly I think, the collective lack of courage in this moment, that even bare minimum virtue signaling is deemed ‘too risky’ or ‘too political’ or ‘cringe’ by so many people still. And at the same time, I think those of us who do speak out need to push way, way beyond statements of solidarity and pair them with action, which is one thing I do appreciate about the Staying project and the decisions made around how funds got divvied up. It’d be really incredible to see Leaving break from Amazon Music, given its parent company’s direct supply of AI and cloud compute through Project Nimbus to the zionist military’s violence against Palestinians. I know you know YouTube’s inextricably linked to that same project, given Google’s involvement. Meanwhile, Apple, on top of its mineral sourcing, matches employee donations to ‘Friends of the Israeli [Occupation] Forces,’ has acquired Israeli companies, operates research labs in Occupied Palestine, and punishes employees for wearing pro-Palestine clothing or accessories. If I remember correctly, about 20% of every dollar spent on ChatGPT is going to Microsoft, which plays an enormous role in genocidal violence as well, on top of all the other huge concerns. It all can feel impossible. Not one of us using an internet device can claim full immunity. What I like about BDS’ approach is it recognizes that ‘purity’ is an unobtainable goal, and instead prioritizes targets to boycott, divest from, and sanction together, with a united focus, to give us any chance of achieving a material goal. Figuring out what that means for Leaving would be powerful, I think, and another step in continuing to lead by example.

Matthewdavid: It’s an enormous challenge. I do feel like we shouldn’t shame artists, and Leaving will not demonize artists, for staying on Spotify or major and problematic DSPs during this time, especially if they’re in a position of financial dependence. Legitimate sustainable alternatives almost don’t exist, and I think it’s unlikely ‘average’ and ‘above-average’ music consumers or fans will change consumption habits anytime soon to enable a broader departure because I feel like this has been hardwired into us. I also fall into these traps.

Siber: There's an onus on 'direct-to-fan' platforms, on alternative platforms in general like ours, to really imagine different forms of sharing, surfacing, experiencing, valuing music that make cutting ties with DSPs more feasible for all of us. Or else, except for a few outliers, you risk repeating a common critique of that model, which is that it overwhelmingly favors those who already won the game. Ultimately, all of this reflects the abysmal failure of the state, or maybe the lethal success of lobbyists and big donors corrupting the state. Like, Spotify has to pay artists more in part because they simply should, but also because our government and economy are organized and operating to largely fail its people.

Matthewdavid: We have to continue fortifying and reaching for solidarity across continents. We’ll keep finding our people and they’ll keep finding us. We should all be encouraged to be more courageous in riding the waves of risk relating to our values. If we get dropped by our distributor or a few artists leave because they feel unaligned with our politics, it’s worth it to me. That’s also an enormous privilege I have running Leaving.

Siber: What behaviors do you hope to see more of?

Matthewdavid: I remain hopeful and curious about experimenting with newer, more innovative, favorable digital music platforms, and I hope more are on the horizon. We all need to campaign for fans to become more directly involved, and buy directly from great labels, collectives, and artists. Prioritizing physical media. Buying downloads, if you have the ability. Organizing, collaborating with, and attending local events that function as cultural hubs, community centers, and safe houses for gathering. I know it’s hard to be adamantly in opposition to the algorithm, to cut through the noise and saturation. It’s often prohibitively expensive, too. Even if we do cut through, how to we shift peoples’ default go-to place to get the good stuff? I used to have RSS feeds for my fav niche homepages. Now it seems like it’s uncommon to check any site at all that’s off socials. I encourage fans and artists to prioritize leavingrecords.com, but even still people will default to Bandcamp. [Laughs] Bandcamp at the end of the day is also just another big tech platform, which is why they succeed in this industry system. Bandcamp is not real community. You’ll find real community through direct methods: on a homemade website, in a brick & mortar, at a show. People ask me why I’m still boxing up merch, going to the post office, troubleshooting courier issues at 11 pm, but it’s inspiring for us and for fans to know we’re just people here. It’s not this soulless, automated thing.

Interview Pt. II: Lani Trock <> Matthewdavid

Siber: Okay, we’ll be starting this joint interview off with some warmup questions that might probably certainly feel silly… Do either of you remember the first cassette you ever bought or received?

Matthewdavid: Michael Jackson’s Bad.

Lani: Oh my god, it might have been the same for me. This is a trip. One of my mom’s best friends took me shopping at Tower Records when he was babysitting me. 1989?

Matthewdavid: That year sounds right. I have this distant memory I still hold onto: being on the playground in preschool and asking other kids if they knew about the tape. I had a red briefcase full of tapes, but that one stood out the most. I was pretty obsessed. There’s also this bootleg of a radio showcase of 80s electronic dancehall production that my parents brought back from Jamaica. I still have that. It’s one of my most prized tapes and I’ll still dub that and gift it to friends to this day. We used to host it on the Leaving blog back in the day as a free download.

Siber: What song would be a contender for the Most Mycelial Record award, if you got to nominate one?

Lani: Probably anything Matthew has made. [Laughs]

Matthewdavid: Conjured organic noises and textures from the earth. Bees buzzing. I don’t know. [Laughs] A record? I’m trying to think about records that sound like the buzzing of insects, or electricity. These elemental sounds. It could be quintessential ambient or spiritual jazz. There’s an amazing bridge built from free jazz… I think it’s something that feels like a breath of fresh air, the flinging open of a window on a spring day. Maybe some moment from Pharaoh Sanders or Alice Coltrane or Laraaji. I’m thinking about this record from Bryan and Dustin Wong that feels mycelial to me, and percussive. I’ll just stick with that I think.

Lani: That helps feed my own consciousness to answer this… Matthew’s mycelial music does spring to mind, but I’d also love to include Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, specifically her compilation album The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, released posthumously on Luaka Bop in 2017. This album was gifted to me soon after its release, welcoming me into the swirling, cosmic waters of her earthly presence, and in the time since, her unique expression has meaningfully inspired and influenced my own work in so many ways. The improvisational repetition, slowly evolving, awakening through many voices, deep feeling, high vibrational energy, it so beautifully embodies a multidimensional vision for the vast spectrum of life that coexists on this planet. There’s also the title track by Green-House from their most recent album with Leaving, A Host for All Kinds of Life, that carries this feeling of emergence and interconnectedness; honoring all beings in their uniqueness

Siber: What do you feel is the most musical flower?

Lani: Mine’s a tie between two: the African Blue Basil, which I’ve had in most homes I’ve lived in. It grows into this gigantic bush and it’s always covered with bees. A pollinator attractor for insects. In tandem with that I’d say bougainvillea , which isn’t technically a flower but looks like one. Its spectrum of colors feels musical to me, like a beautiful song.

Matthewdavid: You use that flower a lot in your installation work, too. It’s a very close one for you. What’s the tropical flower people put behind their ears?

Lani: Plumeria.

Matthewdavid: I’m gonna say plumeria then. It reminds me of shrines and prayer and worship when I was learning about Hinduism.

Siber: Thank you for taking that question seriously. [Laughs] We’re almost done. You’ve spoke about Leaving as a digital garden; outside of Leaving, what other digital gardens do you love to visit, maybe one you consider under-appreciated?

Matthewdavid: I’m just going to say Soulseek. People still grab stuff from there to this day. I was at a rave last weekend and the bartender was talking about it. Napster, 1998, P2P, file-sharing networks… I get chills talking about it. It was so formative to be young and naive navigating this space that was so new. Like a lot of people, I kind of got in trouble.

Siber: You didn’t get sued by the RIAA did you?

Matthewdavid: No, but I had a friend who got served a federal fine at his dorm room in Central Florida and had to pay a fine. I got in trouble because my personal library leaked to my high school. Some upperclassman bullied me to no end because of all these early rap demos I recorded on my mom’s computer. So embarrassing, but probably why I’m here today. I don’t know. [Laughs]

Lani: I’m increasingly interested in that garden metaphor because I feel like it’s a helpful framing to ask ourselves how and why we’re creating spaces online to hang out in. The Internet Archive is a place where I spend a lot of time pulling old videos from the public domain and just exploring the vastness of what people decide to release for others to dig through. It’s such an incredible time capsule with so many different subcultures and mainstream expressions. It’s an endless source of inspiration. I’ll turn to it a lot for my video projections. Lately, I’ve been pulling lots of educational short videos from the 60s and 70s about symmetry and computer-generated animations and semi-psychedelic imagery, though it probably wasn’t intentional. [Laughs] I’ve been loving a video called pas de deux, a dance for two in French, that are between animation and live action. The videos have the dancers’ silhouettes and they oscillate between one person and their light trail, then you see them move back through their flight path into their prior position.

Siber: I owe Internet Archive for my copy of The Battle of Algiers… Lani, these pas de deux clips sound like one hell of a find. Last warmup slash segue to the big whopper questions: how did you two meet in the first place? What do you think makes you click as collaborators?

Lani: I think it was Carlos [Niño] right?

Matthewdavid: Yeah it was, damn. I think y’all were dating at the time.

Lani: He had wanted us to know each other. It might have been at one of Carlos’ shows.

Matthewdavid: That’s it, we met at La Tierra de la Culebra where we were initially hosting Leaving’s park series, this community art park in the Highland Park neighborhood of LA. But Lani was doing art installation and photography stuff that I was also privy to through mutual friends. This must have been 2017 or 2018?

Lani: I worked with Leaving on the cover art for Carlos’ record, Bliss On Dear Oneness. Or maybe that was a bit later, like 2019. But I think we click because we have this shared vision and a mutual desire to build.

Matthewdavid: A lot of our close artist friends, we all share that same thing Lani and I do, this network of alignment.

Lani: There’s a kingship among the community of wanting to support each other’s practices and collaborate and intermingle. There’s a beautiful mutualism, a tenderness, maybe a sweetness. There’s a resonance that’s apparent and comes from these communities being born out of friends and friends of friends and on and on.

Matthewdavid: It’s kind of become a beacon or a magnet that attracts likeminded people. Some people might not understand it, or think the vibe’s weird, and that’s okay too. It’s a different thing.

Siber: I see Leaving as a beacon too, and I’m interested in the other side of that: how communities organized around values stick together and avoid fragmenting. In other words, how groups achieve conflict resolution that preserves relationships, or potentially severs them if a certain line is crossed.

Matthewdavid: I do face a lot of moral and ethical dilemmas. I’ve had to be accountable: calling friends, having roundtable discussions around vulnerability and responsibility. Whether it's someone trying to force their way in with bad vibes or other issues... I’m very outspoken online, so sometimes a friend of a friend will say, “Yo, Matthew’s doing that white savior, virtue-signaling thing. This doesn’t sit right.” And I’ll end up having a group discussion with mutual friends. I’m lucky to have this space to learn. I try not to get overly defensive. I acknowledge when I’ve been impulsive or hurtful. If there’s a misstep or some negative energy, I try to right it. There can be a generational gap, too, and I’m lucky that I can go to younger folks and say, “Please school me,” and they're generous enough to do that. I come from a different social programming, and I’m always trying to unlearn and reprogram how I navigate the label, social media, my tone, everything.

Siber: Where do you trace your aligned values back to? How much of that came from your formative years in Atlanta, Tallahassee, or Honolulu, and what emerged from more acute political moments

Matthewdavid: I grew up with a very politically engaged, very left mom. She and my dad were raised Southern Baptist in the deep South, in Alabama and Tennessee, and met in Atlanta. My mom’s always been vocal, calling me every day to rant about Trump, the state of the world. She hasn’t stopped since day one. That definitely shaped me, though over time I’ve created my own values. Still, growing up in that environment definitely formed my political core. I don’t know if Lani experienced something similar, but I haven’t met many people who had that kind of loud, leftist parent in the deep South with the confederate flags everywhere. In Atlanta, I went to public school and was surrounded by families who shared those values. My mom went to Emory, so there was a progressive community around us. But then we moved to northwest Florida, the Bible Belt, in the 8th grade, and that’s when things got rough. This was 1999 and there just seemed to be this massive emotional void. Kid just didn’t give a fuck. They’re like rich suburban-doctor-lawyer kids on the football team. You also learn about some of their households being shit shows and you feel for them too. The same kid who would pants me every day and put dissected frog guts in my backpack ended up overdosing on oxycontin. I don’t mean to stand on some moral high ground. I really just had to develop an unconditional love for the bullies in my life and give grace. Unrelated but there’s an X-Files episode about that school because of UFO sightings in the area, where there are beautiful quartz deposits in the sand. Anyway, I felt total alienation, but that’s also when I found Acid Pro and Fruity Loops. Making beats was my way of reacting. When I got to Florida State University in Tallahassee, I joined the college radio program, met other artists, and went to my first experimental noise and punk shows. That’s when I began to understand my identity and values through art. Clearly being into alternative music, rap from Atlanta, skate culture, Nine Inch Nails, I was met with a lot of hate, and that formed my values for sure. Over the last decade, especially the past five years, I’ve matured a lot and felt more emotionally driven to show our values publicly, which fortifies them further. I’ve become more secure in our mission as a label that represents artists, many of whom are marginalized. With that confidence comes risk, especially when you’re outspoken. But the foundation was there from those beginning phases.

Lani: I didn’t even know a lot of that. It’s helpful to hear these personal histories. I was raised in a very love-centering, peace-centering home. My parents are both meditators and I was lucky to be raised in a pretty progressive and conscious environment in Hawaii that prioritized operating from the heart. There’s an ecocentric view imbued in society there, in the public schools, to care for all creatures big and small and see them as interrelated, and all of this stems from indigenous Hawaiian tradition. It engenders care for all aspects of the whole, and I’m excited that I think more and more of our generation is becoming attuned to this, expressing love for people they’ve never met. I spent my teenage years in San Diego, which was more conservative than Hawaii but still a deeply multicultural place. I think the more we cross paths with experiences different from our own, our empathy and understanding gets stretched. I went to UC Santa Cruz as well, which was also a pretty radical place. Democracy Now and Amy Goodman’s work really expanded my sense of the world back then.

Buckminster Fuller influenced me a lot, too, with his philosophy that you don’t change things by trying to explain why something’s wrong or broken. You just build the new thing and if it’s undeniably better, people will gravitate toward it. In recent years, I’ve connected with the work of evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris — rest in peace, she passed in 2024. She was a traditional scientist until she experienced a spiritual revelation, visited her hometown on an island in Greece, and wrote a book called EarthDance: Living Systems In Evolution. The book’s thesis is that despite the challenges we currently face, humanity is not on the brink of disaster, but instead on the cusp of evolving from selfish adolescence into mature adulthood as a species. I think a goal with Leaving is to increasingly serve as a microcosm for this shift toward care and stewardship.

Siber: You both have optimism in troves. I think it’s beneficial to try to understand even those who cause us immense pain, and search for frameworks like Fuller’s that restore any sense of agency in ourselves, even if I personally see a necessity in explaining why things are broken as well, to imagine antidotes or alternatives. How do you think these personal formations have materialized through Leaving as a business?

Lani: Leaving will never own your masters, for one. Thinking back to the GenreDAO co-ownership experiment, I think I had too strong a faith in the technology itself. And maybe not enough understanding of the time it takes for behaviors to really change. We're all kind of dancing in between worlds in this liminal space right now where we know that the way things have been is not working for us, as artists, as creatives, as people. And that’s accelerating, right? It’s gotten worse, and that time offered a real hopefulness.

Siber: It felt different, detached from the same megatech systems. There was a little more space to imagine than I think we were used to, in this tiny pocket of that world that wasn't overrun with greed.

Matthewdavid: Trying to sustain yourself, recovering through burnout, going against the established financial models of music to self-serve and keep capital flowing at all costs... I’ve thought about quitting so many times, but I’ve got amazing people around me, and we’re fighting a bigger battle.

Lani: The lesson there for me was not to put all of my faith in one solution. What we’re really after is agency, freedom of choice, open source and the decentralization of power. Bringing more collective decision-making into our processes. Governing is complex. I find myself, in the absence of a centralized authority, creating one in my mind. What’s a better garden look like for us? How can we best build real, true community in third spaces, outside of centralized platforms like Instagram and Spotify? Who else is going to steer this ship we’re all on? It’s fascinating to be part of this grand experiment, exploring new tools, to see how we can evolve into new modes of mutually beneficial collaboration, while embodying the future world we wish to see come into being through us.

Matthewdavid: It does feel great to not own the music. That’s actually the easy part. [Laughs] That liberty. Give us 30 days notice and you can leave whenever you want. We’re almost at 300 releases, and maybe five to 10 artists, over 15 years, have parted ways with us for whatever reason. Daddy Kev is a mentor and I first learned of this model through him and his Alpha Pup label. I used to work for him and on my first day, he showed me their deals and said, “You’re going to need to know how we operate.” It was a licensing deal, zero master ownership to the label, with a 30-day termination notice period. We keep our deal memos really short and easy to read. One page long. Five or six clauses. I’m happy to share a deal memo with you.

I was asked to sign a 12-page artist agreement for a remix the other day. I called the guy and I was like, “I love you, and I’m gonna do this remix, but what ludicrous thing am I signing right now?” I was like, “Hey man, why don’t you tell your label you got some pushback? I’m sure they’d love to hear it.” Labels aren’t shit without artists, and if you’re not giving your label feedback, you’re kind of missing out as an artist, I think. I get that it’s not every artist’s responsibility to dive into legal language and contract formatting. Most don’t want to deal with it. But he goes to his label and says, “Hey, Matthewdavid might not turn in the remix because he can’t afford to hire a lawyer to approve your 12-page agreement.” When I worked at Stones Throw, we had a similar situation with a music video art agreement. I was working with a photographer, and he got handed this contract. It wasn’t super long, but it had all these outdated clauses. I asked our label manager, “Where is this from?” And they were like, “I don’t know, it got passed down to me.” Turns out it hadn’t been updated since 2000.

Siber: Like a cursed family heirloom.

Matthewdavid: I was like, “You should change this. What exactly are you scared of?” But you know, a lot of labels are afraid. and rightfully so. It’s hard to make money in this industry for artists, labels, venues. Everyone’s just trying to protect themselves. I get it. I’m listening from all sides, fielding every corner of the conversation, but still. We’re not making much money, but we’re still transmitting. The beacon’s growing brighter. And that’s worth it to me. These relationships, we’re like family. You can’t buy that. No amount of money can replace it. No way.

100% of earnings from Staying go toward victims of the LA fires. If you haven't, learn more about BDS and Boycott Room's efforts against KKR.