Anti-Viral Label Ulyssa Records Is Looking for the Next Big Miss

Late last year, Spotify announced a plan to cease paying royalties for any song that had collected fewer than 1,000 streams over the previous 12 months. On social media, independent musicians and record labels reacted with the indignation you might expect to the new policy, which effectively declared a huge swath of the platform’s library to be worthless. “Starting in 2024, I’m removing any song that hasn’t had 1,000 plays from Spotify,” read one representative post, from the popular YouTuber and electronic musician Benn Jordan. “Very basic precedent here: Don’t let someone sell your music w/o paying you.”

Spotify’s decree resonated a little differently for John Williamson and Eric Deines, who run the tiny label Ulyssa. At a time when even the independent side of the music industry can seem to treat viral internet success as a top priority, Ulyssa is pointed squarely in the opposite direction. The label, which Williamson and Deines founded in Bloomington, Indiana, four years ago, specializes in music from below the 1,000-stream benchmark.

The 2020 cassette compilation <1,000: Hotdogging and Peacocking Vol. 1, Ulyssa’s second release, was a trial balloon for their unconventional approach. It involves using a backdoor Spotify search function that Williamson discovered, which displays only results within  that range, then listening through for stuff that transcends its humble origins. 

Some of the music on Hotdogging and Peacocking achieves that transcendence in large part through its strangeness: a sense that its creators were working outside of certain guidelines of songwriting and production by which most musicians, consciously or not, tend to abide. Courtney Michelle Ward’s “Sometimes I Wish,” for example, sounds like an Aaliyah song playing on a demented loop in an unfinished basement, its single repeated verse echoing endlessly against the damp concrete. Other songs, like A&E’s “Something Else,” which comes off a bit like Deerhoof trying their hands at drum’n’bass, are just good, requiring no backflips of qualification to explain their appeal. 

Ulyssa’s co-founders are not particularly concerned with qualitative distinctions between weirdly inspired amateurism and more straightforwardly legible talent. If anything, the outsiders seem a little closer to their hearts. “I’ve gone back to that song so much over the years since we put that out,” Williamson says of “Sometimes I Wish.” “It scratches some itch that I genuinely don’t think any other music could ever do.”

Ulyssa’s release count is now up to 29: a sprawling, maddening, and often astounding catalog that includes a compilation of outsider Christian music (<1,000: Of Biblical Proportions) and four mixtapes of rinky-dink, home-recorded jazz-electronic fusion that Deines and Williamson have collected under the invented genre banner of “Toejazz.” Each tape’s title is a riff on a canonical jazz album: The Shape of Toejazz to Come, Bitches Toe, Toejazz for Debby, Toe Hunters.

Alongside the compilations, there is a growing body of releases focused on individual artists. Some of these musicians, like the prolific L.A. saxophonist Sam Gendel, have established careers but still fit into the label’s skewed sensibility. But Ulyssa’s most distinctive releases are from musicians that the co-founders encountered in their <1,000 Spotify trawling, like Double Gee, a wigged-out Christian Auto-Tune rapper from South Africa, or Inga McDaniel, a retired accountant who spent decades making lo-fi synth-funk at home on nights and weekends. 

In TK MONTH, Ulyssa will release Double Mug, a career-spanning collection of McDaniel’s music, full of fractured drum machine rhythms and asymmetrical keyboard lines that would not sound out of place as a new release on a left-field electronic dance label. “I’ve found a Toejazz queen,” Williamson remembers writing to Deines after stumbling on McDaniel’s Spotify profile, where there are 14 albums with names like Slamming Jazz and What’s Up, many of them festooned with surreal art that looks like it was collaged together from stock imagery, printed out onto paper, then scanned back into the computer. 

The pair reached out to her about working together and found that she also lives in Bloomington, around the corner from Deines. “Her sense of rhythm, the sort of homemade sounds she was getting—there was a sense of humor to the music, which I always cotton to,” Deines says. “Song by song, we each found things that we loved, and that’s how you really know. It became very clear it was special.” At the time of this writing, McDaniel has just 15 monthly Spotify listeners.

Williamson and Deines, who have music-industry day jobs and run Ulyssa as a passion-project in their spare time, consider it as an analog to labels that operate in the private-press reissue market: hunting for old, forgotten records that were pressed and sold in small numbers by regular people without fancy recording contracts, and re-releasing them for a wide modern audience. Ulyssa is focused on more recent history. Rather than combing through boxes of dusty vinyl at small-town estate sales, they do their hunting on the internet. “Over the past 20 years, private-press vinyl has become this known entity, in that some cool label’s gonna find a record, get the rights to it, put it out, make it a huge success—which I think is good, it has its place,” Deines says. “This is some bleeding-edge version of that. Whether it’s worth it or not, time will tell.”

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Even over video chat, with Williamson and Deines phoning in from their separate homes in Bloomington, their banter has a boisterously fraternal quality. Deines is the class clown; Williamson seems to wait to speak up until he’s sure he has something good to say. 

They refer to Ulyssa as an “art project and label” when introducing themselves to musicians they’re interested in working with. Both men are also visual artists, and Ulyssa arose from a shared studio where they would convene to kill time and work on creative projects at the height of the pandemic. Williamson, who handles the label’s striking graphic design—old snapshots juxtaposed against garish digital detritus, type careening past the edges of album covers—tells me that Deines sometimes paces behind him as he works, “yelling and squealing” if he doesn’t like what he sees. Deines writes short essays to accompany each release, filling them with absurdist lingo and wiseass aesthetic proclamations. (“ULYSSA believes in the End of Ambient Music,” one of them begins. “Ambient Music must be buried alive, its screams dulled by wood and soil.”) All of this contributes to the feeling of the label as a self-contained universe, with its own elaborate mythology and lexicon of inside jokes. 

I ask the co-founders to tell me more about Toejazz, a keystone of the Ulyssaverse. Deines describes the sound: “Synth bass, synth horn, sounds like the Seinfeld theme song, PBS’s Ghostwriter theme song, Charlie Rose theme song, Toejam and Earl Sega Genesis soundtrack, Miles Davis’s Tutu.” Williamson focuses on process and historical context: “Late ’90s to 2000s, advent of the personal computer, CD Baby, a DAW in your living room.” 

Beginning in the heady late-’90s era Williamson mentions, DAWs, or digital audio workstations, and music distributors like CD Baby, which allow anyone with an account to upload their songs to streaming platforms and download stores, have enabled an unprecedented surge in the amount of recorded music that humans produce, along with an increase in listener access to these homemade trap bangers and DIY power ballads, intimate outpourings and misbegotten attempts at pop stardom. At this point, depending on whose numbers you believe, anywhere between 23,000 to 60,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify every day. Even if you take the smaller number, and estimate an average of three minutes per song, it would take you more than six weeks of round-the-clock listening to hear just a single day’s uploads. One way to look at Ulyssa is as an attempt to reckon with that vastness: to make sense of it, or at least pay it some attention. 

Williamson refers to Ulyssa’s interest in modern vernacular music, otherwise known as folk music (in the old, pre-Bob-Dylan sense), a couple of times in our interview. This initially strikes me as apt: with old traditions struggling to maintain purchase in a world where global connections over the internet can seem closer at hand than genuinely local ones, it makes sense that the new vernacular music would take cues from commercial genres, like funk, jazz fusion, or TV show themes. Vernacular, a term borrowed from linguistics, also implies a certain sociality and community, suggesting that practitioners are using music to talk to their listeners and one another. Ulyssa music sometimes feels like that. But just as often, it gives the opposite sense: of atomization, outsideness, of people working alone at their DAWs and then uploading songs to CD Baby for no one to hear. Another way to look at Ulyssa is as an attempt to bring all these isolated voices into conversation with one another; to collect dozens of solitary tinkerers and declare that they’re all part of the same thriving scene; to create and impose a vernacular where none was before. 

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If Ulyssa has a flagship artist, it is David Michael Moore, a septuagenarian composer, songwriter, and inventor from the tiny city of Rosedale, Mississippi, population 1,584 and shrinking. Beginning in the ’90s, he self-released an untold number of albums under various aliases for an audience that didn’t extend far beyond his hometown, much of the music performed on instruments he’d designed and built himself. Ulyssa has reissued four Moore albums so far, and one greatest-hits collection of sorts, with plans for several more. His music ranges from propulsive instrumental suites for homemade percussion to wonky keyboard miniatures to funny and wistful songs about people he knows in Rosedale. Some of it sounds like classical minimalism, some like junkyard jazz, some like folksong, some like the indigenous dance music of a fictional swamp civilization. All of it exudes puckish personality and barstool wisdom, down-home and avant-garde at once. 

Moore’s work may be a little too rural and unkempt to ever get the ex post facto canonization of an Arthur Russell, but its breadth and richness deserve that sort of recognition. (He might also be disqualified by his penchant for PG-13-raunchy song titles like “Butt Deluxe,” “Yank My Doodle,” and “Four Views of Uranus,” to name a few.) He is the best-case-scenario artist for a label like Ulyssa: a genuine visionary who’s done little in his life to pursue a wide audience on his own, but was receptive to the prospect when Deines and Williamson came calling. 

When the pair first encountered Moore’s music with their Spotify search hack, the only other thing about him online was a brief YouTube video, so they contacted the person who’d shot it and got a phone number. There were many unanswered calls. Eventually they got through, then traveled from Bloomington to Rosedale for a meeting with Moore, mediated by a friend of his who goes by Dr. Jim. 

“[Jim] just said, ‘Here are the keys to everything, just do right by him, you’re two of the only people in the world really paying attention,’” Deines remembers. “[Moore] is a bit of a hermit.”

“A lot of a hermit,” Williamson adds. 

After our interview, they attempt to put me in touch with Moore. I email him a few times and get no response. Eventually, Dr. Jim chimes in on the thread to explain that Moore’s dog has just died. I get the sense that, even if it weren’t for the loss of a beloved pet, an interview with a journalist in New York might have landed low on Moore’s list of priorities for that week. 

I have better luck reaching Inga McDaniel, the Toejazz queen, who is gregarious and sharply funny. She tells me about her musical influences—funk legend George Clinton, jazz pianist and singer Patrice Rushen—and about her first single, “Oriental Special,” released in 1989 on her own private-press label. You can’t hear it online, but it has something of a reputation among certain DJ and collector types: A vinyl copy sold for $84 on Discogs last year; “SUPER RARE SYNTH BOOGIE FUNK” reads the seller’s description. It’s just the sort of thing a more traditional reissue label might try to snap up the rights to and rerelease. True to form, Ulyssa didn’t include the song on Double Mug, opting instead for tracks McDaniel released in the 2000s and 2010s, on CD-R, or straight to streaming, uploaded via her CD Baby account. 

McDaniel has been a musician her entire life, but never quite professionally. In addition to her old job as an accountant, she also once ran a nightclub and a limousine service, making beats whenever she could find the time. Music, she says, “is like therapy to me. It keeps me from being at the casino.” Her encounter with Ulyssa gave her reason to consider it a little differently. “I didn’t know I had fans like John and Eric,” she says. “When they finally found me, they were so excited about meeting me and the music that I did. So I’m all in.”

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Williamson and Deines are quick to draw a line between their ongoing work with artists like McDaniel and Moore, which involves close collaboration—not to mention payments and paperwork—and the more casual nature of the <1,000 compilations, which they think of as bootlegs, compiling them without the involvement of the musicians on the tracklists. 

Their rationale for this arrangement is complicated. The cassette releases of the compilations don’t generate much revenue, and what little money they do make goes to recoup the costs of manufacturing them. The compilations also exist as Spotify playlists, which can direct more streams the musicians’ way, and, in theory, might eventually help them reach the play-count threshold at which the platform actually starts paying them. 

Above all, it seems, is the challenge of tracking down dozens of musicians based on nothing more than an artist name on Spotify, in hopes of licensing a single song for a compilation that will almost certainly never make them any money. “I actually hope in some way that some of these artists who John and I treat as heroes in our little interpersonal conversations might send us a cease-and-desist,” Deines says. Then, they’d at least have some contact information and could start a dialogue about a more formal release. “God, to hear from Lou Flute,” Deines adds, talking about the elusive artist behind Hotdogging & Peacocking Vol. 1’s smooth-jazz cut “Birds of Fusia.” “‘Hey guys, I found that you’ve released one of my songs.’ I’d be like, ‘Glad to meet you, Lou! Let me pitch something to you.’ But we don’t know where to find his ass.”

Like any worthwhile artwork, Ulyssa raises more questions than it answers: about who the music industry elevates and why, who deserves compensation for their work, who really owns a recording when it can be reproduced digitally in an instant, and what we mean when we say one song is good and another is bad. At one point, I ask Deines and Williamson whether they feel any compunction about placing an artist like David Michael Moore, who has dedicated his life to his music, alongside one like Courtney Michelle Ward, who for all we know might have abandoned the pursuit after a single recording session. Does the madcap Ulyssa approach risk making someone like Moore seem like a joke? 

Deines and Williamson don’t think so. Plus, humor is an important part of music, they reason. “He named his songs ‘Butt Deluxe’ and ‘Yank My Doodle,’” Deines says about Moore. “I didn’t name those songs. He’s funny and weird, and to me that gives a little allowance into it. I’d rather die poor having a sense of humor about our releases than treat it like a white-walled gallery space and write artistic statements and make $3,000 more.”

What about Courtney Michelle Ward, who never got to weigh in one way or the other about her track’s inclusion on a Ulyssa compilation? At some point, “Sometimes I Wish” was removed from the streaming services where Ulyssa first found it, meaning the Hotdogging and Peacocking Bandcamp page is now the only place on the internet to hear the song. Who knows why it disappeared. But if Ward wanted it gone, does Ulyssa have some responsibility to oblige her? 

Earlier in our conversation, Deines recounted a trip he took as a child to a folk art museum in Williamsburg, Virginia. He was amazed by the artifacts inside—“This glass cabinet of walking sticks that were crafted by myriad people, and some had this weird Abe Lincoln head on it, some had these crazy skulls and shit”— and disturbed when he learned that the artists’ names had been lost to time. Ulyssa’s project of attending to music like Ward’s, which no one else that I know of is attempting in quite the same way, strikes me as akin to the museum’s display of the walking sticks: worthwhile not only for the sake of the artworks themselves, but also for what they might reveal about the historical moment that helped to shape them. If you want to learn something about vernacular music in the age of epidemic loneliness, you could do a lot worse than spending an hour with Hotdogging and Peacocking Vol. 1. And if Ward or any other artist on a Ulyssa compilation would like to request a takedown, well—the label’s email address is on their website. I’m sure the two jokers who run it would be delighted to hear from you.