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mkdk records

MKDK Records is one of the oldest active alternative labels in Estonia. It's birth can be traced back to 1997, when the first festival Pilvepillerkaar took place. A year later the first tape was published - Beggars Farm "Live". In many ways both of these events defined the principles of the activities of the label - all aspects of the creative process such as recording, mastering, design and distribution amongst others were to be controlled by the artists themselves with the help and abilities of the other artists and friends. The following records and concerts cemented the model where design, promotion and production was all circulated within the label. The festival in the meantime was organized similarly, the artists played without fee and it was free for everyone. In some ways it was an ideal model of participatory democracy or perhaps some form of anarchism, if you will. In order to keep a system running, according to the laws of thermodynamics, you need to put energy into the system. So it's a minute miracle that more than a decade later we can say that the model was tested and we have some of the results on these pages. Furthermore, some part of the lab has taken on a life of it's own and the experiment continues. The keyword is still Do-It-Yourself, from soldering to mastering. Perhaps that's the closest definition we can find to MKDK.