When local musicians Kieran Danielson and Adam Porter sought to release new albums this summer, the idea of letting them float into the abyss of online streaming entities seemed counterintuitive.
So with the help of New Orleans native and local musician Graham Hamaker, an idea was born: release the albums under a new record label, one that could also help bolster music like theirs and music they like.
“The music that we wanted to put out — mostly just Adam and I’s music— it kind of fit under the same umbrella. And we noticed other bands in Oxford kind of in that mold, and not even in Oxford, but just music that we like from friends in other places, and we wanted to represent that as a united thing,” Danielson said, sitting with his co-founders on Hamaker’s porch in Oxford during a recent interview.
On June 10, Danielson’s act, Bonus, released “II” on their new record label called Muscle Beach, 
officially bringing the project into existence. Porter’s Starman Jr. released “Noodles” later that month, and since, the trio has released three more albums digitally and on cassette tape. Rather than releasing artists’ work on vinyl or CD, Muscle Beach gravitates toward tapes as a concrete way of sharing music. And while they all agree tapes aren’t making a comeback, they are collectable, portable and cheap.
Before creating the label, Hamaker knew Mussel Beach as an island in the middle of Louisiana’s Caney Lake, nicknamed by his family in reference to the clam-like creatures that live in its sands. After a few months’ struggle of finding a proper name for the venture, Muscle Beach stuck. Hamaker’s childhood friend, Delia Perez, penned a clever logo depicting a mussel with human arm muscles, and more than ever before, the boys felt empowered to take on their little pocket of the music industry.
What might be Muscle Beach’s defining quality is a promise not to take itself too seriously. In fact, that quality at first had Danielson slightly confused about his place at the label.
“For a second, I didn’t really know if I was in or a part of Muscle Beach,” Danielson admitted to his fellow founders. “I just knew we were going to put Bonus out, and that was it. Graham and Adam came up to me and said, ‘Can you hold this, like, sledgehammer or something? We’re making a little commercial for Muscle Beach,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah.’ And then after that I was like, ‘Huh, I think I’m with them.’”
“It was kind of natural,” Porter said. “It’s something Graham wanted to do for a while, and then I kind of latched onto it, and then Kieran. It was just kind of natural. It worked out that way.”
For the three, the label is a labor for the music they love while they build a solid base of releases.
“It’s definitely not about the money right now,” Danielson said. “And if it were about the money, that’d be awkward.”
They all hold a stake in Muscle Beach. For the artists they’ve signed, agreeing to release an album with them is an entrance into a mutual relationship. An artist who might have normally released his music himself could, through Muscle Beach, have his music released through the label both digitally and in a concrete format.
By the beginning of next year, Muscle Beach will have made at least eight releases. Until now, Danielson, Porter and Hamaker have honed in on what they know best: young creators and bedroom pop makers who aren’t on the radar for larger labels.
Photo by Ariel Cobbert
Muscle Beach focuses on qualities like originality and simply the ability to catch and keep each founder’s attention. The first handful of releases were from artists that exist in a network with Danielson, Porter or Hamaker, both in and out of Oxford.
The label’s first international artist, Harry Permezel of Melbourne, Australia, was a gem buried in a haystack of Bandcamp pages that Porter happened to be poring over.
“He put up the album, like, two weeks before I found it, and I wanted to listen to it,” Porter said. “So I reached out to him … It was pretty far in [Bandcamp]. I think he was just excited for someone to be excited about his music.”
Early next year, Muscle Beach will make its first vinyl release for atmospheric folk artist Casey Golden of Tucson, Arizona. While most of what they’ve been putting out, aesthetically, calls for tapes (as does their budget), this particular artist presented a golden opportunity to delve into the time-consuming and expensive act of pressing vinyls.
“With Casey Golden, with that kind of genre, I think it’s good that we pressed it on vinyl because it’s kind of more…” Danielson started.
“Gourmet,” Hamaker finished. “It’s a studio album, and a lot of the stuff we put on tape is kind of bedroom-pop stuff.”
However, that’s not to say making tapes isn’t just a little bit rewarding for the trio, even if the music medium is hardly lucrative.
Nationwide Audio Company is the go-to cassette tape maker for just about every label in the United States, according to Porter. Send in an MP3 file, customize the color, send in a design and any graphics, and they’ll do the rest. Muscle Beach’s collection of tapes spans colors and design, but the satisfaction of getting material reminders of their work and the work of up-and-coming artists remains with each shipment.
“The last tape we did was for Jeff Lownsbury,” Danielson said. “He let us do whatever we wanted … So Adam and I got to design it. We added a bunch of random stuff, like little bubbles, little worms. It looks like a little kid’s tape.”
Muscle Beach will release Lownsbury’s album on Thanksgiving day.
Photo by Ariel Cobbert
By next spring, Muscle Beach will have four more works released. Bonus, Danielson said, has a third album in the works. Porter also quietly announced that Starman Jr. is set to release an album December of this year, something they’ve all been closed-mouthed about until now. Although Porter denied going into any more details, Hamaker said it’s going to be an epic.
For Porter, Hamaker and Danielson, Muscle Beach is a hobby, one that might one day grow into something bigger. For Muscle Beach artists, it’s an important first step in getting music to listeners. Muscle Beach, for Oxford, is another source for music one might never find on his or her own time. Nonetheless, the room for growth is endless, but they’ll take it as it comes.
“I think we’re just planting little seeds,” Hamaker said. “We never want it to be something that we got tired of or we took too seriously. I think it’s something we’re going to build over time and kind of develop and see where it goes.”
