Atavistic Records is an American rock and jazz record label based in Chicago, Illinois, known particularly for its No Wave and free jazz recordings. It has released albums by Glenn Branca, Nels Cline, Lydia Lunch, Peter Brötzmann, various Ken Vandermark projects, Pinetop Seven, Swans, Elliott Sharp, Larry Ochs, Mars, Davey Williams, Brian Harnetty, and Poem Rocket, among others. The label was founded in Columbus, Ohio in 1985 by Kurt Kellison, initially as a video label producing live VHS recordings by bands such as Live Skull and The Flaming Lips. The label was relocated when Kellison moved to Chicago in 1988.
Atavistic's Unheard Music Series imprint focuses on the reissuing of out-of-print free improvisation/ avant-garde jazz recordings.
Famous quotes containing the words atavistic and/or records:
“It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius.”
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)
“Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)