‘I never had any aspirations for it and I still don’t’: Inside the slow, steady rise of Clean Demon Records

At some point after Long Odds had their new album The Dry Land finished and in hand, singer and songwriter Adam Elliott asked bandmate Joe Camerlengo to send the record to any label that might be able to get it into the hands of listeners.

“He said, ‘Just send the album to everybody,’” Camerlengo said by phone in mid-August. “And I didn’t know what to do with that. … And I think he was just at his wit’s end, like, ‘Can we just send it to whoever?’ So then I sent it to only Mario, and I texted Mario and said, ‘Would you like to hear the new Long Odds record we just finished recording?’”

The Mario in question is musician Mario Malachi, who founded the label Clean Demon Records when he was living in Columbus in 2019, first establishing it as a landing pad for the various bands he was part of at the time, including Hydrone and Snurch, and as a place to sell the cassettes that he then duplicated by hand using a pair of tape machines.

“Two of my favorite bands at the time were Thee Oh Sees and King Gizzard, which were very DIY-minded, ran their own labels,” Malachi said in mid-August from his home in Cleveland, where he’s lived the last two years. “And I had seen interviews, read about them, admired their bands and labels, and wanted a place to put my music and other projects I was a part of, and that’s what it was for a few years. … There was really no research or planning at all. It was kind of just like, fuck it, I’m going to do something.”

Of course, Malachi has been part of so many endeavors – he currently minds the kit in both PAL and Winston Hightower’s Perfect Harmony and this fall he’ll be hitting the road as the touring drummer for the great Burlington, Vermont musician Greg Freeman – that even in the label’s nascent days it could seem strangely active to a degree that it fooled some outsiders.

“When Hydrone put out their ‘Underwater’ single in like 2019, I think I was like, ‘What the heck is this label that only puts out Mario?’” said Nate Wilder of the Columbus band Big Fat Head, which has since released a trio of albums via Clean Demon, including the excellent Global Voyeur, from July. “And I guess I eventually reached out to ask, and he was like, ‘Oh, that’s just me.’ And I was like, wow, that’s a good idea. It’s automatically legitimizing to be on a label. … It wasn’t just in the void of my lonely Bandcamp with one download from a friend or whatever. I mean, it was still that and is still that, but at least it rests in a library. … The whole thing is to help it not get lost in history. Things go away and people forget their accounts and yada, yada, yada. So, it’s good to have some place to be like, yes, this band is from Columbus. Yes, they did put this out in 2017. And I’m not fucking crazy, because there it is.”

Over the last couple years, Clean Demon has released a stream of lovingly skuzzed-up rock records from the likes of Big Fat Head, Manic Splits, Brian Damage, Jackoff Demons, Jocks, Spitcurl, Perfect Harmony, and Golomb, the fast-rising Columbus trio recently inked to Jack White’s Third Man Records. (Wilder joked that the label would one day exist as a distant “Nardwuar-type question” for those looking back on the crew’s ascent, “like, ‘What is Clean Demon Records?’”)

And yet, Malachi still approaches Clean Demon as an intensely DIY endeavor – “I hesitate to even call it a label,” he said – relying on handshake deals and operating in such a way that the idea of making a profit barely enters into the equation. When producing a run of cassettes, for example, Malachi said he essentially does some back-of-the-envelope math to see how many cassettes he needs to keep and sell to at least break even, with the remainder going to the band at cost. “I don’t really profit, and if I do, it’s negligible,” said Malachi, who estimated his combined total income from the label at somewhere around $10. “And I guess that’s part of why I feel like it’s not a legitimate enterprise. It’s more like … a passion project.”

Wilder echoed these ideas, saying that Big Fat Head’s embrace of the label is rooted in being part of a collective rather than any rooting business interests. “It was never going to be about the money, like, ‘Alright, Mario, it’s time to pay for this,’” he said. “We knew we all had similar goals and tastes, so it was just good to be able to form some kind of collective.”

The label has expanded in incremental ways, however, with Malachi posting an email address to the Clean Demon Instagram page for demo submissions. Big Fat Head’s Wilder has also taken on an expanded role – Malachi described him as “unofficially/officially my partner in crime for Clean Demon” – helping to recruit bands and spearheading the Ohio for the Record compilation, from 2022, which Malachi said stands as the label’s best-selling release with more than 300 cassettes sold. And most recently, the label pressed its first two vinyl LPs with the new albums from Long Odds and Big Fat Head, which released on the same day and culminated in a dual-headlining July concert at Rumba Cafe, where Malachi worked the merch table.

“Now we have people submitting stuff, and we’re starting to get a bit more financially involved,” said Wilder, who first met Malachi pre-Covid when he and Olivia Stefanoff would venture from Athens to Columbus for concerts where they would routinely spot the musician in the audience, coming to refer to him as “yellow jacket Mario” on account of the coat that was then standard to his wardrobe. “And I think people have started to notice the label, and I think they think it’s bigger than it is, which is part of the trick, I think.”

Long Odds’ Camerlengo said he first became aware of Clean Demon years back through the label’s association with Brian Damage – a project spearheaded by Brian Baker, whom Camerlengo played alongside in Brat Curse – and has since come to view it as a vital documenter of the Ohio music scene. “Clean Demon really owns the corner on really cool, dingy rock records,” said Camerlengo, who noted that he was further drawn to being part of the label by the sense of community it fosters. “Clean Demon has such a strong roster, and to be included on that roster comes with a very specific seal of approval. … For such a great label to single out Long Odds as someone who gets the 001-vinyl imprint from Clean Demon, that’s a really cool thing.”

Even months removed, Malachi still sounded dumbfounded in recalling his earliest conversations with rhe members of Long Odds, and in particular Adam Elliott, a founding member of the great underground Columbus band Times New Viking. “Joe reached out to me and was like, ‘Hey, I’ve got this band. It’s the guy from Times New Viking.’ And I was like, ‘What the fuck? Why are you reaching out to me? I’m not a real label,” Malachi said, and laughed. “But I was excited, so Joe was like, ‘Alright, I’m gonna start a group chat.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, I guess I’m in a group chat with Adam from Times New Viking now.”

In spite of this new association and the growing national profiles of Clean Demon-linked bands such as Big Fat Head and Golomb, Malachi said his aspirations for the label have essentially remained unchanged.

“I never had any aspirations for it and I still don’t,” he said. “I think it’s an honor and a privilege to know the people I know through it, and to put out the music that I have. I guess it sort of feels like a magnet that pulls the things I’m interested in closer to my direction, where I get to be a part of a bunch of cool stuff. And I guess if I had to think about it or name something, I guess I aspire to as much as possible give the artists and bands I think are cool some kind of service or community. … I would love to press more records for people, and I want to keep doing tapes, too. It’s just something I believe in and that I think is cool, especially when it can push people a little further in the direction of continuing to do what they’re doing than maybe they would have on their own.”