Automatic Recordings Revs Up Sunday At Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival

• Aaron Dexter
• Automatic Recordings sampler

If you end up hanging out at the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival’s north stage Sunday afternoon chances are you’ll see a burly man passing out copies of a red cassette housed in a black-and-white paper sleeve—it’s the sampler for a new local label called Automatic Recordings. Label founder Aaron Dexter, the talent buyer at the Owl, will be the guy giving away the tapes. Dexter’s plan for Automatic Recordings is to release music by local rock acts that regularly play in DIY spaces in Logan Square, Humboldt Park, and Pilsen.

Another part of Dexter’s plan to make the Owl a hot spot came in February 2013 when he launched the bar’s in-house cassette label, Parliament Tapes. Originally the label released DJ-curated mixes but these days it traffics in live recordings of bands that play at the Owl. Mike Lust records the shows and the Owl makes 100 cassette copies of each set—Dexter gives each band 60 tapes of their respective set for free and sells the rest in the Parliament Tapes vending machine, which the Owl debuted in September 2013.