Ah, there you are. Enter! We’ve been expecting you…

You may think you have happened upon this website by chance or mistake – but NO. Our gamma-radiated brainwaves locked themselves in to yours and commanded you, via the hypervibratronic klaxon implanted into your cerebral cortex, to present yourself here at this exact moment.

No! Don’t lunge for the ceremonial broadswords! You’re amongst friends…

According to our data banks (stored in our subterranean lair, 20,003 feet below one of the more obscure Tibetan monasteries on the 37th parallel), you have of late been observed by our agents, slumped and grumbling, “How did it come to this?” Picking the dream-snot cowering in the corners of your eyes, you elaborate, “Music was once so wildly diverse. It would fire me up, cool me down, take me deep into uncharted territory – yea, even through the gates of the forbidden citadel – and it would carry me safely home. But now? NOW??? It’s all so calculated and automated, polished to faceless perfection. Why am I forgetting songs even as I listen to them? Have my memory banks been erased? Why are the groups and singers so interchangeable, almost identical? It’s a case of ‘Send In The Clones’. Why the rage for beige? Why, you pedestrian fools? WHY???”

We couldn’t have put it better ourselves… Like you, we decry the mirthless, mechanical and mediocre music scene with its ever-narrowing scope of done-to-death subject matter, its insipid greetings card sentimentality and complacent musical structure. This is why we have vowed to avert the peril of terminal boredom by creating a series of recordings expunged of click-track tedium and Autotuned phoniness and, instead, we loudly present a glut of real songs about real things crammed with real feelings played by real people on real instruments in real time. Some of it’s real funny. Some of it’s real messy. Some of it’s real catchy.

Smoking Ant Records is a label with a supremely significant difference that sets it galaxies apart from the herd of other music companies: None of our artists are under contract. They produce and release work only when they wish, thereby ensuring that their respective catalogues are free from putrid swill reeking of the noxious vapours of contractual obligation and compromise.

“But if you’re so brilliant,” you teeth-clenchingly demand to know, “why has absolutely no-one ever heard of you?” We never said we were brilliant. We are simply different, that’s all. Our art is not merely off-the-wall; it hasn’t even been accepted by the gallery. Whether we’re good or bad or absurd or irrelevant is purely for you to determine. And you can do that by investigating our releases on Bandcamp or probing our videos on Vimeo. There is also a cluster of (mostly dissimilar) videos on YouTube for you to ponder and scrutinise. Feel free to click on the website appellations in an attempt to satisfy your insatiable curiosity.

Yes, you are free to depart. Farewell – but not, we hope, forever.