Q003:
Why did you start your AMT label?
A003:
At first it was just because I wanted to release a solo guitar record. But I knew that it would never sell that many copies, so I was too embarrassed to ask anyone else to put it out. As well, for me improvised solo guitar records are like fresh fish they go off quickly. It would be hell trying to sell hundreds of copies of some piece I'd recorded five or ten years ago. Then I discovered the CDR format, and I realised that with this there would be no need to stock boxes and boxes of old releases, and in addition it would be possible to do releases very quickly. So I decided to set up the label. Higashi and I got together the money to start the label, and we created it as a means of releasing whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted. The whole process is carried out as a cottage industry recording, the burning of the disks, the assembling of the jackets, parcelling up, and shipping. The reason why we limited each release to a hundred copies was that we thought there would only be a hundred people who would want to buy them. Burning more any more than a hundred CDRs gets to be a problem as well. But at the moment, it looks like a hundred copies is no longer enough, so present releases we do between two and five hundred copies as regular CDs.