Ryan Proctor threw up his interview with James DL of No Sleep Recordings which was originally printed in Shook Magazine Issue No. 3.
What initially made you decide to set-up No Sleep?
It’s funny because there wasn’t really any impetus to make me start the label, it was more something that I gradually just got into. For the last few years I’ve been working with Lord Finesse and one of the things him and me got into was doing simple CDs to sell as merchandise at his shows, one of which was the Rare & Unreleased project. I thought that was too much of a good CD just to sell at shows as there was a lot of material on there that his fans would want who perhaps couldn’t make it to a Lord Finesse performance. So we added a few things to it, put it out with proper distribution and it did pretty well, particularly overseas in places like Japan. At that point, Buckwild had reached out to me and we did a similar project containing a lot of his remix and production work from the 90s for artists like Organized Konfusion, Artifacts and Brand Nubian. I was also involved in putting out the unreleased Ill Biskits album Chronicles Of Two Losers. I’d say that was probably when I decided to start No Sleep because I was putting out these CDs on separate labels, but at the same time, all of the CDs were really coming from the same source, which was me. I was using the same guy for all of the cover art, the same mastering guy, the same distribution, so I decided to set-up my own label to enable me to keep putting out similar projects but also be able to cross-promote them better. I wanted to establish a brand name so that when fans and collectors see something from No Sleep they know it represents a certain sound and level of quality from hip-hop’s golden era.
