History
Calvin Johnson formed K in Summer, 1982. K began as a cassette-only label, focusing on Olympia's embryonic downtown music scene. Prior to this, there had been one label in Olympia, Mr. Brown, which released four singles and two compilations. The K releases were on a much more modest scale. Another advantage of the cassette format: you could manufacture titles at a reasonable cost per piece in much lower quantities. The usual run of a K release was around 100 copies. The cassette-only release by the Olympia trio the Supreme Cool Beings was the first release on K. Entitled Survival of the Coolest, it debuted in 1982.
Specialties
K: a conspiracy of gravediggers, spies, swim instructors and international pop stars. There are hangmen and there are saints. K as a label has released cassettes, phonograph records and compact discs documenting the audio works of over 150 artists. The main focus K of has been artists working in and around Olympia, Washington, where K is based, but has included comrades from across the U.S.A. and as far away as Japan, Scotland, Australia, Canada, Germany and England. Yes, K explodes the teenage underground into passionate revolt against the corporate ogre world-wide. Colleagues in the International Pop Underground collide at the K vanishing point. The sounds cross back and forth through a number of genres, some known and some less so: punk, hip hop, atom-powered folk-pop, haunted garage, restless singer songwright, epic soul shock, noise exp., blurred-eye visionary psychedelica, roadhouse mod and the silent film soundtracks composed by Timothy Brock, as performed by the Olympia Chamb