Wax Thématique has been surreptitiously heating up the musical underground for a decade. Led by Seattle- and Kunming, China-based DJ/musician Nathan Womack, the record label's made a gradual, irrepressible ascent by championing both local and international talent. The former includes Afrocop, Gel-Sol, and Joel Ricci; the latter Israel's VuVuVu, England's Grandbaby, and Germany's Feed LA. These artists are renowned for their beatmaking prowess, sampling savvy, improvisational ingenuity, and supreme funkiness.
Womack and company will celebrate 10 years of sonic excellence on July 27 and 28 at the Tractor Tavern and the Olympic Rooftop Pavilion at Stoneburner, respectively. So, now is an opportune time to relate this local business success story. (Full disclosure: I've written liner notes for Wax Thématique.)
Womack grew up in a peripatetic military family. As a child, he used music, as he put it in an email interview, as "a sort of emotional refuge when we’d land in new, unfamiliar places. So, there’d always be a Walkman by my side to help make sense of the landscape."
In his 20s, while living in St. Louis, Womack was heavily into the city's hip-hop and drum & bass scenes. But a skateboard injury led him into focusing more on his own musical production. Fortuitously, one of Womack's pizza-shop coworkers turned him onto the CD-ROM version of Acid Pro, which changed his life. "I stayed up all night trying to figure out how to sample, arrange, and reconstruct loops into my own pieces." You can hear his aptitude for these skills on WT albums such as Lagu Loops and Tropikoro.
A few years later, Womack began DJing basement parties around St. Louis, mostly for freestyle rap battles. "I’d find as many instrumental records at the local shops as possible, for the best tunes. I started to notice there was a through-line of beats that got the MCs really hyped. That’s what really taught me early on about the different energy music has and how that plays out in the live situation where you’re playing it."
When Womack moved to Seattle in 2010, he was "blown away by the level of showmanship and artistry of the music scene. I knew this would be the place to start the label; I just had to find the right people to jump in."
Some of those key folks included Afrocop and Select Level's Noel Brass Jr. and Andy Sells and Joel Ricci (The L.B.s, Soul's Path Ensemble, Lucky Brown, etc.). They became WT's Seattle nucleus, but Womack always has had his antennae up for interesting music bubbling up around the globe.
The inspiration to start WT derived from Womack's childhood love of old skateboard mail-order catalogs and the graphics of the decks therein. The latter, he says, "all had their own aesthetic, and I daydreamed that maybe there was a group of people and designers sitting in cool workspaces behind a brand that were all dedicated to putting out amazing work. Later, in my teens, I noticed record label logos on the back of some of my favorite CDs and imagined they must also operate in this way. Ever since, I tried to do this myself. Spray painting skateboards with my own made-up company names, stenciling beat-tape CDs, ripping the original tags off of clothes and stenciling those, as well. All of this would naturally turn into what Wax Thématique is today."
For his roster, Womack has tried to work only with "solid, decent, (if not a bit wild) artists." He insists that "Each record should at the very least be as good as or better than what came before it. You must make sure the artist's vision is coming through and they agree with every aspect of the final work. The album art has to look how the music sounds. And it has to be so good that if it’s on the wall at the record shop and someone walks in that doesn’t know what it is, it catches their eye."
Brass can attest to Womack's commitment to that ethos. "Working with Nathan has been great for my creative process. He already gets and understands what we do in our respective projects and seeks to find ideas and works that sometimes even elude my ear. Finding the gems and providing the polish.
"Nathan as a label boss is much easier to deal with than most labels," Brass continues. "Front office and receiving, it's all one man, so that makes it a less bureaucratic process. I still don't understand how he does everything himself, but definitely love supporting a label that allows as much freedom as he provides."
Sells says, "[Womack] is pretty hands-off, allowing the artist to deliver something we believe in fully. He always listens and values our opinions, and there is usually some push and pull between us during various stages in each project resulting in a greater end product. Because he respects us, and wants us to retain our creative control, it makes it easy to work with him. I think both Select Level and Afrocop have benefitted from Nathan's attention to detail, keen eye for design, and high standards when it comes to releasing our LPs with him. We became natural partners through a shared love of deep cuts in the world of jazz, DJ culture, electronic music, and the high aesthetics surrounding such music."
When I recently ran into Ricci at the Rendezvous, where Womack was DJing at the Global Grooves night, he said, "Whenever there's a decision to be made regarding the label, Nathan always chooses the soul route."
Running a record label in the 21st century, of course, is fraught with risks, but WT has stayed afloat thanks to die-hard customers whom Womack calls "Wax Headz," because they grip every release. "We've recently picked up more shops that we wholesale to. Shipping is consistently an issue, but mostly, things are good. We’ve got a few solid mastering engineers that we stick with and the artists we work with are always cooking up intriguing new sounds and designs."
Some of those intriguing new sounds can be heard on the new, self-titled Afrocop album, which comes out July 27. The seven tracks here reflect the veteran trio's improvisational telepathy as they explore the outer and inner spaces of soulful jazz, elegant funk, and celestial ambient. It should be the release that expands the group's stellar reputation outside of Seattle.
As for near-future developments, Womack waxes enthusiastic. "We’ve just wrapped up an album by myself and an incredibly talented producer that I used to beat-battle in St. Louis named Trifeckta. It’s a monster of a record—maybe the most contemporary album Wax has ever put out, yet it’s still pretty underground. The first single will trickle out in August. VuVuVu has some great music coming out with a Turkish singer they’ve been working with, Alice Libertas. And we’re close to completing Gel-Sol’s solo LP, which is one of my favorite projects thus far. The quality and creativity of the demos we get nowadays has shot way up. We can’t release everything, but we’ve certainly got lots of options.
"We’re getting into licensing agreements more and there’s a few in the works that will help label artists financially and get them more exposure and opportunities. We’ve been so focused on vinyl for so long, a lot of this part of the business was neglected. We’re finally at a point where we have the capacity to dive in."
Womack now divides his time between Seattle and China. He moved to the Asian country two years ago after many visits since 2017. (As a serious crate-digger, Womack has found Far East Asia to be a gold mine for sample-worthy records.) While working at a Seattle Apple Store, he pounced on an opportunity to relocate to China for the company. "Seattle’s still home, but I’ve been hooked on China ever since. They’re pretty strict about visas there; you can’t just hang out indefinitely, so I started teaching English. It works out—I get summers and winters off, so I use that time to focus solely on my music and running Wax Thématique."
Wax Thématique 10th Anniversary show with Afrocop, FUNKWAYS, and Soft Release happens July 27 at Tractor Tavern. On July 28, Wax Thématique and Maiden Voyage collaborate for a listening session on the Olympic Rooftop Pavilion at Stoneburner at 5:30 pm.
