How were your relationship with some other underground experimental or post-punk label, like Cordelia records? Was there a form of solidarity between different labels?

TERRY BURROWS: In the sense that we often helped one another. I’d like to paint it as being a part of some cool scene, centred around me as Suffolk’s own Andy Warhol! But actually we were all pretty geeky, and generally preferred being in our fledgling home studios and watching arthouse cinema to being out at gigs or clubs!  When I realised that I didn’t really like the sales and promotion side of running a label, other small labels started releasing my music. I guess Cordelia was the closest label as they not only releases my Jung Analysts and Yukio Yung albums, but Alan Jenkins and I started a band together (The Chrysanthemums). I do recall a Saturday afternoon in about 1989 at my flat in London, where by then I lived, where I had about a half a dozen friends over; we were sitting around drinking when someone commented that every single person in the room had their own record label! But connected to that, I was only last week sitting around drinking with my friend Martin Howells who has been in several Hamster/Chrysanthemums/Onoma projects, musing that most of my life-long friends have come about through music, and many through the label.

What put an end to the label ? Was it your own musical projects ? 

TERRY BURROWS: Well, although Hamster became a two-man operation, I don’t think Mark would be particularly affronted if I said that it was me that largely drove things along, sorted out production, pressing, distribution and the like. But it was dull stuff that led to me “leaving” Hamster. I decided to set up something on my own that encapsulated a lot of different business activities – not only my own music but music production, computer consultancy and later writing and university lecturing – and so I just handed the label name over to Mark. I think he only released one further album after that. But I think the main reason I put the idea of a label on a back burner was that The Chrysanthemums started to become quite a cult band, especially in Germany, and we did several tours and used to get in the indie charts over there, so bigger labels became interested in what we (and then I) were doing. None of that worked out terribly well, though!

Can you tell us about this beautiful and very short collaboration with Lydia Tomkiw? How did you meet?

TERRY BURROWS: I think Algebra Suicide (her duo project with her husband Don) and I both appeared on the same compilation album and one of us wrote to the other. I probably suggested the collaboration as I liked her voice and poetry but wasn’t so keen on the backing music she used, and thought something gentler would work. She send me over three pieces with her voice and a drum machine and I worked around them eventually dropping the drum machine out altogether. I always thought that was a nice track. I only ever finished one piece, but I recall there’s another that I worked on but just never mixed. We never met in person, although she did phone me up quite a few times after her and Don broke up. The last time we spoke we were both fairly drunk and she kept asking me weird and funny questions, one of which I recall clearly as whether I would I prefer to sleep with Ethel Merman or David Bowie! After a long silence we picked up email correspondence in 2007 and then things went quiet again, and a few months later I found out she’d died. From what tributes people wrote about her she seems to have been a complex, self-destructive and troubled soul, but I’d have to say that all of my interactions with her were great fun. (And she told me that she used some of my Jung Analysts tracks as part of her MA show.) It’s a sad tale.