Constellation Records

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Constellation Records
Founded 1997
Founder Ian Ilavsky and Don Wilkie
Genre Post-rock
Country of origin Canada
Location Montreal, Quebec
Official website http://www.cstrecords.com

Constellation Records is an influential Montreal, Quebec independent record label known for its contributions to post-rock. It is most famous for releasing the albums of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band, and Do Make Say Think.

The label was founded in 1997, operating out of a loft in Montreal's inner city. Its founders had intended to begin by providing a live performance space for the musicians of Montreal's thriving underground music world, with the label to follow, but bureaucratic difficulties put an end to this plan, and the stage was skipped. Instead, the label and the live performance series—entitled Musique fragile—began concurrently. The label later moved to larger quarters in Montreal's Mile End district where it resides as of 2004.

Constellation was fiercely anti-corporate, anti-capitalist, and anti-globalist; its mission, according to its founders, was to "enact a mode of cultural production that critiques the worst tendencies of the music industry, artistic commodification, and perhaps in some tiny way, the world at large." It also hoped to recover and rebuild an independent music ethic that it saw as commodified and corporatized. To this end, Constellation tried to avoid selling its music through large corporate chains such as HMV and Virgin Records, preferring instead to deal directly with small and local businesses. Constellation releases are now available, however, from major media retailers such as Amazon.com.

The packaging of Constellation's music also reflects this ethos; they eschew the ubiquitous jewel cases and ship their albums in unique hand-designed cardboard packages, which are made, as far as is possible, by local artists and artisans. Constellation says that they spend 3-4 times as much on developing packaging as the average label, and that all of the packaging is hand-made by a small in-house team.[1]

The package of the Godspeed You! Black Emperor album Yanqui U.X.O. was especially noteworthy, containing an extensive chart which demonstrated the links between four major record labels—AOL Time-Warner, BMG, Sony, Vivendi Universal—and various arms manufacturers. The band later apologized for some extensions of the chart, conceding that some of their research had been inaccurate. This chart accompanied a photograph of falling bombs.

Items ordered through Constellation's Mail Order service are sent with a handwritten note of thanks.

The music on the label is usually categorized as post-rock (a label which Constellation abhors, regarding it as an invention of "hipper-than-now taste-makers").

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