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 such 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 33: 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. 

Last month, Ulyssa released 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. Before Double Mug, she had just 15 monthly Spotify listeners.

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.”

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 sold in small numbers by regular people without fancy recording contracts, and re-releasing them for a wide modern audience. 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.”

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 shots 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. 

A couple of times in our interview, Williamson mentions Ulyssa’s interest in modern vernacular music, otherwise known as folk music, in the old, pre-Bob-Dylan sense. 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, and the scene is called Toejazz; to create and impose a vernacular where none was before. 

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 seven 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: “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. “David 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.”

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 beatific 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.”

The founders characterization of Ulyssa as an art project is apt. Like any worthwhile artwork, it raises more questions than it answers: about who the music industry elevates and why, who deserves compensation for their labor, 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? 

They don’t think so. Anyway, 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 and all the other musicians who never got to weigh in one way or the other about their tracks' inclusion on Ulyssa compilations? At some point, Ward's “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.

Below you’ll find a guide to essential songs from the Ulyssa catalog that’s only available to paying subscribers. If you have yet to sign up, why not do it now?

David Michael Moore: “Buster Buster”

I first learned about Ulyssa after meeting Eric Deines at a bar in Berlin a couple of years ago, during a music festival. Getting pitched by a label owner about his new release at an industry function is not exactly a novel experience for a music journalist, but the stories he told me about David Michael Moore and Ulyssa itself were too compelling to brush off. (Deines is a charming guy.) I listened to the Moore compilation Flatboat River Witch: 1994-2015 as soon as I got back to my room and “Buster Buster” knocked me out with its ’65-Dylan surrealist brain-dump lyricism and cascades of homemade percussion. It was the song that turned me into a diehard fan of both the artist and the label. Maybe it will do the same for you.

Guerra / de Paiva / Hornsby / Konradsen: “Big Time Sensuality 2”

One significant Ulyssa release that I couldn’t find space to mention in the article itself is Contrahouse, which pairs the Brazilian dance-music producers Gabriel Guerra and Lucas de Paiva—with whom the label has a close and longstanding collaborative relationship—with the Norwegian indie-pop singer Jenny Konradsen and Bruce freakin’ Hornsby, an absolute legend whose career has been much longer, stranger, and more interesting than you might expect if you only know that one song. Hornsby’s involvement takes it out of the <1,000 framework, obviously, but it’s still of a piece with the Ulyssaverse, if only because its slinky and nocturnal jazz-house grooves would not have come together at all if not for the label introducing the key players and encouraging them to collaborate: It’s A&R-ing as performance art.

Wold: “Lovey Dovey”

If Contrahouse represents the Ulyssa worldview at its most slickly appealing, Wold’s Working Together for Our Privacy is on the far opposite side of the spectrum. The mysterious Canadian behind the Wold project—he goes by Fortress Crookedjaw—has a background in black metal, but this album makes even the gnarliest exemplars of that famously brutal genre sound like they were recorded by superproducers Steve Lillywhite or Mutt Lange. “Lovey Dovey” is like a portal opening violently in the center of your brain. If you’re not accustomed to 12-minute-long, no-fidelity harsh noise explosions, it may sound like nothing is happening in the music other than the assault itself. But listen closely enough, for enough time, and you’ll hear all manner of iridescent colors emerging and receding.

Derrick Graves: “Spanish Rice”

For a little breather after the intensity of that last one, here’s a relentlessly upbeat selection from The Shape of Toejazz to Come, Ulyssa’s original primer for their favorite made-up genre. This one has robotic slap bass, massively dramatic drum fills that I have to assume were programmed with great care in GarageBand, DX7 patches all over the place, and some legitimately shredding lead guitar. If, by chance, you are a fan of Nonlocal Forecast, Angel Marcloid’s avant-garde sendup of and homage to the music of the Weather Channel, you might enjoy “Spanish Rice.”

Jack and God Is Gracious: “6'1" Babe”

It was tough to choose just one song from the Hotdogging and Peacocking series, which are filled with music that sounds like nothing else on Earth. You could accuse the Ulyssa guys of gawking, but their curatorial care over these mixtapes is very clear. It would be easy to make something like this with music that is obscure but unremarkable. But every song on Hotdogging and Peacocking is a small wonder, coming with its own slightly different set of rules for what pop music is supposed to be. The rules in the world of Jack and God Is Gracious, an impeccably named Christian (?) rapper and singer from New York, seem to be: only whisper on the mic, but in a sort of demonic baby voice; slather everything in echo effects; never stop talking about your own height. The chorus to this one goes, “I’m a 6'1" babe/My dad did it/You are defeated.” If you like it, I implore you to also listen to the following song on the compilation, a surreal lounge-singer ballad, Auto-Tuned within an inch of its life, called “Sophisticated Lady.”

Julie Ragbeer: “Mary Whiton Calkins”

Internet-addled pop stans may remember Julie Ragbeer, who went briefly but intensely viral earlier this year after paying for a sponsored tweet to promote her music on the popular music news and gossip account PopTingz. (It’s a long story; people are still making memes about her.) Naturally, after the hubbub, Ulyssa got in touch with Ragbeer to arrange for an official cassette release of her album Perplex, full of highly idiosyncratic but not-not-slapping bedroom pop. My favorite track is “Mary Whiton Calkins,” a sort of mumble-rap tribute to the pioneering psychologist and philosopher—the first woman director of the American Psychological Association, among many other distinctions—who, I have to admit, I first heard about through Julie Ragbeer.

A Certain Frank: “Wald”

When the ’90s German trip-hop/lounge/downtempo/New Age duo A Certain Frank came up in my interview with the Ulyssa guys, there was some disagreement about whether they truly qualify for the <1,000 label. On one hand, as Williamson pointed out, “Their shit was released on a real label the first go-round,” lending them a veneer of professionalism in contrast to the strictly self-released music that Ulyssa mostly works with in that category. On the other, as Deines countered, they literally had less than 1,000 plays on all but one of their songs when the label came across them. Some of their music does feel a bit more clearly tied to a version of industry and commerce, however small-scale, than true outsider art. But “Wald” (not to be confused with Wold) has that same “where the hell did this come from?” quality as other Ulyssa releases: swooning horns, bleeping synths, an upright bass somewhere deep in the mix, and a clicky percussive pulse that implies the existence of a big dance beat that never arrives.

Craig Peyton: “Si-Do-Ne”

Craig Peyton has lived an interesting life: He studied vibraphone under Gary Burton, one of the instrument’s greatest players; worked on sessions for James Brown and Levon Helm; contributed music to various TV shows; and eventually pivoted to a successful career in aviation and aerial cinematography. Here’s one of my favorite tracks from a sprawling Peyton compilation that Ulyssa released last year, whose combination of crystalline synths, chopped-up voices, and live vibraphone reminds me a little of the Art of Noise’s forays into similar territory.

Mellencamp and Reed: “Sweet Jane”

Ulyssa’s very first release didn’t yet have the <1,000 trademark in place, but the anarchic spirit was already there. It’s a cassette bootleg of a 1987 show that took place in the label’s Bloomington hometown, where heartland hero John Mellencamp and NYC ne’er-do-well legend Lou Reed both showed up to play for a crowd of just 100 people or so, ripped straight from YouTube. (Apparently it was a secret warm-up show before the two played at Farm Aid.) The version of “Sweet Jane,” with Mellencamp chiming in on backing vocals, is absolutely raging, with what could be the most excited crowd I’ve ever heard on a live recording. I’ve been to the Bluebird, where show took place, and I can only imagine how sweaty it was in there.