Isla

I’m from Bogota, Colombia, but have lived in Canada (Vancouver/ Montreal) for the past 17 years.

The music that my parents played on road trips has always stuck – The sounds of Armando Manzanero, Pablo Milanés, Mercedes Sosa and Gipsy Kings all playing against the expanse of the Cundinamarca region.

I also have a distinct memory of being 4 or 5 in Disneyworld for NYE and seeing a DJ mix for the first time. I was struck by the way he would seamlessly mix La Macarena into Scatman and so on. I just remember dancing and sweating in ecstasy, not believing what I was experiencing and knowing then that I really loved dancing and wanted to do it for as long as I lived.

The label was started in the hopes of creating space for the friends and musicians around me whose music I felt needed to be shared and was perhaps overlooked in place of the more ‘digestible’ electronic music that was happening in Vancouver at the time (2015-2017). I had also wanted to start something of my own which had no real vision sound wise and was open to being influenced and taken into different directions depending on the mutation of my tastes, surroundings and people I meet. Since starting the label, what’s kept me doing it is the fact that it constantly serves as a vehicle to connect with people and various diasporas of music and culture. Isla is definitely rooted in a grassroots effort to grow the community and empower all the amazing artists that we get a chance to work with.

I’d say there’s no particular sound for the label. I’ve strived to create a label that was more about a vibe than a certain sound/ genre. The mission since the start was to open up a space where all types of sounds are welcome and if at any time it felt like we were going in a certain direction then our point would be to go the opposite way.

The mix is an amalgamate of disparate inspirations behind the label. Here you’ll find music from some of my friends who inspired the label and who were also behind some of the first releases (Scott Gailey, Yu Su, Spencer Davis). Likewise, there’s a lot of formative records across various genres and labels which were some of the instigators behind starting a label. A lot of these I found working at Dandelion Records which was a shop I frequented and worked at during my teens/ early 20’s in Vancouver. Shout out to Jeff Knowlton and Les the record man – my music dads!