Love Noise Freedom Festival is coming to The Dome!
For over 25 years, Exile on Mainstream has been releasing strange, heavy and uncompromising music that major labels wouldn’t touch with a barge pole. This September, the label is bringing Love Noise Freedom Festival to London for the first time ever.
Andreas Kohl grew up in East Germany and was deep in the underground by his twenties booking shows, writing fanzines and doing all the unglamorous work that keeps our culture going. He eventually became the German PR representative for some of the most important underground labels on the planet including Southern Records, Dischord, Constellation, Touch and Go, Thrill Jockey and Alternative Tentacles. When the company he worked for folded, he started his own agency with his wife, kept the clients and in April 1999 he founded Exile on Mainstream Records.
What started as a simple desire to press vinyl for overlooked bands grew into a full booking agency, backline rental, amp repair, van hire and eventually a festival. More than a label, Exile of Mainstream became an entire infrastructure, and have now released over 115 titles touring bands across Europe and beyond.
On 19th September, Exile on Mainstream brings Love Noise Freedom Festival to London as well as bringing the EOM Roadshow to Leeds, Nottingham and Brighton featuring crushing heaviness and noise-rock experimentalism from across the label’s roster. Featuring Might (Germany), Bulbul (Austria), Confusion Master (Germany) and Noisepicker (UK), Love Noise Freedom Festival is a low-cost, must-catch heavyweight for anyone who can’t stand the mainstream.
We caught up with Andreas to find out more:
Hi Andreas, you seem to have done a million job roles over the years, so how would you describe what you do?
Ha, good question right at the start. According to my dad I only had one job so far, since he describes what I do as “working with records”. And that’s pretty much what I do. From writing about them to releasing them on a label, promoting the artists behind it, setting up tours to get the damn records sold, buying a van and building guitar and bass cabinets to make the tours feasible up to working in a manufacturing plant, helping labels and artists to get their records made up to now even promoting the craft, magic and artistry behind manufacturing vinyl in a conference and a magazine.
Can you tell us about what it was like working as a distributor for independent labels in the pre-internet days?
Behold! Old white male content: it was beautiful. I mean, what would pretty much all of us answer when asked about something you did in your twenties, right? Seriously, a lot of things have changed since we sat on the floor in an office folding and enveloping 5000 printed newsletters that would go out by post to media folk and record stores, running to the repro guy down the road to have films made for adverts in magazines and record sleeves and leaving office on Friday night just to spend the whole weekend in the Gabber dungeon at Tresor Club just to go back to the office on Monday morning. That’s grandpa telling war tales. I apologise. I worked for one of the first companies in the industry to have e-mail. Pretty avant-garde. Back in the 90s music was all and everything for us kids. Coming of age was the decision whether you buy a motor bike or a proper stereo setup. Some had to do both and listen to Motörhead. The question whether you would release a record and not recoup the manufacturing and promotion costs wasn’t asked. Because it always worked. Music didn’t have to compete with other assets of youth culture, like computer games, sneakers, iPhones and what not. Here you have your difference. But please, this in no way should be taken as a sentimental moan. I am glad and happy to have lived in these times but I don’t shed a tear back at them because what happened was a societal progress and it came with technology. In the same way my kid will hopefully be happy to have lived now when she’s in her fifties and all retrospective and shit. And we both learned it from my parents who lived the true rock’n’roll spirit in the 1950s in East Germany where and when it was dangerous and challenging. Every time has its soundtrack. And yes, a few things were easier back in the day as much as everything was easier when you were younger, just like getting out of the bed in the morning with no stiff back or knees.
What made you decide to start your own label?
I’d like to say it happened to me and I got up one morning and it hit me like “I can do this, someone has to do it. I do it.” The truth is more profane: the band Payola, who I was a fan of had four songs left over from a recording session and asked if I would be up for helping them to release them as 7inch. And boom, there I was with a label. It hasn’t changed much, neither the romantic, nor the profane. Someone’s gotta do it and there’s all that great music out there, so we do it.
The catalogue spans from noise rock to doom to folk to post-rock and beyond, and is obviously defined by quality rather than genre. What makes an album worth putting out?
You said it: quality. Every release on Exile On Mainstream has something very unique. They sit in some genre but they also challenge the genre. It might just be to my ears but I know some people who see this as the asset of the label as well. But it’s never the music alone. It’s the shared vision, the community and the people behind the music. The artists and people involved with this label either are friends or become friends by sharing an approach, an attitude, a vision or sometimes just a few hours at a festival, a gathering, an event where it clicks and we kind of swing in the same frequency. It’s hard to explain and might come across as some kind of elitist club, but it’s as close as I can come to an explanation. There is this moment where we feel this has to happen: me, the artists and other people involved with the label. And then it happens and we put the noises to wax.
What are some of your favourite records that you’ve put out over the years?
“Positronic Raygun” by Zen Guerrilla. Oh shit, wait, this wasn’t on Exile On Mainstream…but I wish it was. Best album of all time. Runner up to this one would be ALL the releases on EOM, literally. EACH. ONE. OF. THEM. I love every single one to bits and I’m glad I had the opportunity to work with all these lovely human beings.
Can you tell us more about the bands who you’re bringing on tour?
How much space do you have? Each band would deserve a whole wall painted with hype text. I am well aware that these bands might not be too known to a UK crowd and that’s exactly why we do it. It needs to be changed. NOW. You all remember these shows where everyone in your peer group claims to have been there, like the first Sex Pistols gig or something? I saw Nirvana play in front of 20 people in the early Nineties but I know at least 60 people claiming to have been there. Well, here’s your chance to actually REALLY BE at such a gig. This will make history and you can tell people in 20 years that you were there and it won’t be a lie! All the bands on the bill are different, ranging from Endure’s deep, dark and bleak Doom through the doomy, heavy psychedelic urgency of Confusion Master, the Blues-infected Noise of Noisepicker to the challenging yet humble Post-Metal of Might. And then there is Bulbul, who are like no other band on the planet, a force that you need to experience, that can’t be described but will leave everyone who ever saw them in absolute awe. And I mean it, I am not exaggerating, you hear me? Find me one person on the planet that doesn’t like Bulbul after they saw them and I will give this person a free ticket and a beer. I mean it!
We discovered you through Harry Armstrong of Noisepicker, who put out our favourite blues-sludge-doom-punk album of 2025. Can you tell the readers about why Noisepicker are on your roster?
Because they are meant to be. Perfect relationships can exist. There are marriages out there that work, stand the test of time over 70 years and beyond. Because there is an unwithfuckable force of love underlying human existence that is able to bring the ones together that are meant for each other. Nature has tried and failed a gazillion times but it also has succeeded, like here. There just isn’t a version of this world where Noisepicker wouldn’t be on the roster. Harry has been a friend, a bringer of guidance and absolute force of passion for what we do since the early days of the label. Kieran could be the lovechild of this, although he isn’t that young anymore as he used to be when they started 10 years ago. But seriously, the vision shared, the love and passion for what we do and for what we have been put among you earthlings was never stronger than the emotional bonds between Harry Armstrong and Exile On Mainstream. And the music’s great too. Insanely great.
Why should people come to Love Noise Freedom Festival?
Apart from all the self-praise and shameless promotion in the answers above give me your reason for not coming down on September 19th! If you want to support independent music culture, if you are serious about supporting bands and even more serious about curiosity and discovering new sounds there is really no excuse not to attend a night full of sounds at the price of 3-4 pints. Leave snobism, ego and laziness in the closet just for that one evening. You will have plenty of nights for watching Netflix, visiting your parents or mowing the lawn. It doesn’t need to be that night, because your best friends that you don’t know yet are in town! I am that confident. If you don’t like what we have on offer, come up to me after the show and I give you your money back. No shit.