Sound the victory gong: Britt and Amanda Brown have finally reclaimed their living quarters. After years of running the gutsy underground label Not Not Fun out of their Eagle Rock apartment in Los Angeles, where inventory clogged the arteries and overtook space like some kind of vinyl kudzu, the husband and wife team have relocated to a house in nearby Highland Park that’s equipped with a proper office. The perimeter of their new dining room is neatly lined with shelves of records and cassettes from their personal, rather than business, stash. And when your home life and work life overlap as much as the Browns’ do, it’s psychically liberating to have spaces designated for each. Helpful, too, since in the past year, they’ve added a dance imprint, 100% Silk, to their already staggering workload.

It is hideous but kind of tempting to describe the Browns as a power couple for LA’s eastside music scene, although the term implies a calculation and concern for coronation that’s totally at odds with their vibe in person: gregarious and thoughtful, with stabs of verbal flamboyance. Maybe a better way to put it is that their creative bona fides have earned them tastemaker status here: She co-founded Pocahaunted with Bethany Cosentino of Best Coast; he’s a vet of drone duo Robedoor; together, with Nick Malkin, they continue to spin webs of gothic psychedelia under the name LA Vampires. Being in bands is important, but since starting Not Not Fun seven years ago, the label stuff has become their true work.

The idea for 100% Silk came out of a desire to push that work even further. There was plenty of psych-rock, garage and noise floating around the NNF world, but Amanda became curious about stuff she loved that she wasn’t hearing much of: hip-hop, dance and R&B. “These are things that, for a long time, you could put out giant welcoming signs and you wouldn’t get those demos,” she says. “And as people are starting to listen to more electronic music over the past couple of years and have gotten more into beats, I thought the day was going to come when we were going to start seeing dance music, that we were going to start getting demos of people being forward-thinking and outside of that normal underground box.” To usher it in she tossed out the thought of launching a dance-specific offshoot of NNF. “I love all Amanda’s ideas, but I was just like, we’re already so busy with our own music and Not Not Fun that it seems like the last thing we need. But I’d also seen the same thing, that friends of ours have been evolving into different realms and working on things that were more overtly dancey. And right away I could see it was a good idea,” Britt says.

Since January 2011, Silk has averaged two 12-inches every other month (“I think staying active is the best press you could ever do for your label,” Britt says), starting with Ital’s Theme by Daniel Martin-McCormick bka Ital, and Muddy Tracks by The Deeep. Newer releases range from libidinous and bent Ace of Bassy stuff courtesy of London-by-way-of-Estonia’s Maria Minerva to the glamorous retro-futurist experiments of Pharaohs, but the unifying aesthetic, Amanda explains, is a kind of groovy decadence—
total luxury material, as the name suggests. Interestingly, most Silk artists function as well a la carte as they do in the club. “A lot of the early Silk releases were supposed to ride that line of being influenced by dance music and culture, and not supposed to not function as that, but also sideways. I was saying the other day that a lot of the really good stuff to me sounds like krautrock: artsy and hypnotic,” says Britt, who, unlike his wife, did not grow up with any particular soft spot for the high BPMs.

The Browns aren’t sweating the heavy legacy of the dance genre, which includes a pair of obvious cautionary tales from decades past: how dance music’s moment of creative fertility can give way to joyless, old-guard purism; or alternately, how quickly the excitement and innovation of that moment can fade into some kind of cynical diffusion line at Urban Outfitters. “It’s partly the culture of gluttony in America,” says Amanda. “We turned it into rave culture so fast, and we turned ravers into these things no one wanted to be, and we consumed dance music so much that we actually made it gross for awhile.” But for whatever reason—the economy? The shitty political climate? The existential straitjacket we all seem to be wearing lately?—dance music is energizing again. “Sometimes it’s cool to stand still with your arms crossed and sometimes it’s cool to cut a rug,” Amanda says with a shrug. “I’d like to keep on putting out dance music for as long as people will have me, but if it stops being trendy I’m not going to stop enjoying it. It’s good. We could all stand some loosening up right about now.”

Ital, “Ital’s Theme” 12-inch
This is what happens when noise music gets some structure and goes pop. Ital takes harsh sounds and makes them into something worth dancing to.

Maria Minerva, “Noble Savage” 12-inch
Maria Minerva’s music is offbeat, unsettling and sometimes sounds like listening to a warped disco record while on acid.

Innergaze, “We Are Strange Loops” 12-inch
Super damaged music that could soundtrack a dance party that had Blade Runner on constant loop from a projector.

Magic Touch, “I Can Feel the Heat” 12-inch
Initially, Magic Touch feels like normal house music. But the more you listen, the more it feels like an outsider’s take on insider music.

CAROLINE MCCLOSKEY