Philosophy
Relay Recordings was founded in 2011 by Chicago-based percussionist and composer Tim Daisy — a central figure in the city’s avant-garde music community and a long-term collaborator with Ken Vandermark, Mars Williams, and Per Åke Holmlander. Like his peers in the Catalytic Sound cooperative, Daisy created Relay to manage his prolific output entirely on his own terms, without ceding creative or economic control to external parties.
The label’s policy is explicit: Relay releases only music that Daisy performs on or produces. It is not accepting outside submissions. This discipline keeps the catalog coherent and focused — every release is a direct document of Daisy’s practice, not a curatorial exercise. It also means every purchase goes directly back to the musician who made the work.
Aesthetic
Relay releases reflect the utilitarian clarity of Chicago’s improvised music scene: the focus is on the music, not the packaging. Covers tend toward clean graphic design — bold type, geometric abstraction, occasional photography — without the elaborate art-object framing of labels like Audiographic Records. The aesthetic is workmanlike in the best sense: designed to communicate quickly and last indefinitely.
Limited physical editions give each release a collector dimension without fetishizing the object. Relay is a label you discover through the music first, not through the design — which is itself a statement about what the label thinks matters most.
Emblematic Catalog
Relay’s catalog covers the full range of Daisy’s ensemble activity: the Steel Bridge Trio, Vox 4, and a substantial body of duo recordings that pair him with improvisers from both sides of the Atlantic. Because percussion and rhythm are at Daisy’s core, the catalog has an unusually strong focus on rhythmic exploration and solo percussion — but always in service of composition and structured improvisation, never as pure display.
Relay has evolved from a CD-first operation into an active Bandcamp presence, where Daisy releases live recordings, sound experiments, and performance documentation with minimal delay between event and release. Key recordings include duo sessions with Ken Vandermark, Fred Lonberg-Holm, and Elisabeth Harnik, as well as Steel Bridge Trio documents that showcase Daisy’s compositional range.
