Infinite Repeats – C-VILLE Weekly

Printmaking is a messy art requiring space that isn’t always available at home. Artists Thomas Dean and Jeremy Taylor are hoping to help solve this problem at Infinite Repeats, a gallery and studio that offers creatives the space and equipment to work on their projects, including screen printing, etching, and risograph printing.

“It’s a great opportunity for a lot of folks who live in a tiny apartment in Charlottesville and don’t have room for a giant etching press and the facilities to wash out everything,” says Dean, who is the managing director at Infinite Repeats. “We know printmakers who are working out of their kitchen sinks.”

The musician and illustrator first became interested in printmaking when designing merchandise for his band, eventually becoming a full-time screen-printer who has designed posters for The Southern Café & Music Hall and The Jefferson Theater. He currently prints shirts under his brand Lostwoods Prints. Dean found a like-minded creative partner in Infinite Repeats’ studio manager Taylor, an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art at PVCC who earned an MFA in printmaking from UNC Chapel Hill. Together they turned warehouse space next to Visible Records in Belmont into a community printmaking studio and venue.

The partners added plumbing, electricity, and large sinks where artists can wash out screens. Other printmaking equipment includes an etching press that allows artists to attempt more ambitious pieces than would be allowed by smaller presses, as well as locally built shirt presses that offer customization for printing on clothing.

Membership with Infinite Repeats offers artists 24/7 access to the space and the equipment inside. Although artists usually provide their own materials, including ink, screens, and shirts, the studio offers printmaking opportunities that Taylor and Dean say are not fully available at UVA or PVCC, and they hope to attract working artists to use Infinite Repeats in their practice. “It’s really hard, as a printmaker, to find this gear that we have,” says Taylor.

Several local artists have already taken advantage of the space, including Emily Ruth Prints and DEUS DETRITUS, whose work can be seen at area farmers’ markets.

Infinite Repeats versatility also allows for hosting events such as The Fruit Market with Critter Butts and Baker No Baker, which was held in conjunction with Visible Records’ punk rock tribute to the former Charlottesville venue Magnolia House. “I think it was important for us to have a community space for making things, but also a community space for gathering and events and music,” says Dean.

For those who want to learn the craft, Infinite Repeats offers workshops targeted toward beginners. June classes included lessons on shirt screen printing, creating zines with risograph printing, and an all-ages linocut workshop accessible to kids.

“We want to break that barrier to getting people excited about it and show them the possibilities of, being in front of the press, what it can do,” says Dean. “And then the wheels start turning: ‘Oh, I can do this.’ You start coming up with a lot of ideas once you get into it.”

More information about Infinite Repeats can be found on Instagram @infiniterepeatsworldwide.

Keeping tracks: Thomas Dean loops in Virginia-based bands on his new indie label Infinite Repeats

Thomas Dean takes unusual pleasure in digging through crates of junky records.

It’s partly the aroma of acidic paper inserts mingling with that of musty cardboard sleeves. It’s partly weirdo cover art, bonkers band names, and eyebrow-raising (or head-shaking) album titles.

But mostly, it’s the music. Dean loves the thrill of sliding a random slab of vinyl out of its sleeve, placing it on the turntable, and finding a really cool rock ‘n’ roll song or, even better, an album full of them. They’re often songs from 25, maybe 30 years ago, hiding in plain sight in a thrift store dollar bin because neither the band nor the label has big-name recognition. Music that, if it hadn’t been pressed to wax, very likely would be completely forgotten.

Dean also loves the idea that, decades from now, someone might be digging through another crate of records and find one released on his record label, Infinite Repeats, toss it on the platter, and say, “Hey! This is cool!”

That’s entirely possible, because Dean, a musician, DJ, and screen print artist who’s been a fixture in Charlottesville independent rock music for close to 20 years, is releasing some pretty cool music, most of it local, on the newly-minted Infinite Repeats.

It might be fair to say that the idea for Infinite Repeats started spinning when Dean was growing up in Lynchburg and skipping school at lunch to drive up to Plan 9 on the Corner, where he and his friends would flip through records and scope out flyers for upcoming shows at Trax nightclub.

In 1999, Dean and a bunch of his friends moved to Charlottesville, into a house on Summit Street in Fry’s Spring. They had a band, a “pretty noisy” one, says Dean, and played and hosted shows in their basement. He’s gone on to play in Order, Invisible Hand, New Boss, Orange Folder, and Good Dog Nigel.

<a href="http://gooddognigel.bandcamp.com/album/the-implied-sunrise">“The Implied Sunrise” by Good Dog Nigel</a>

Dean has great memories of seeing shows at Trax, Pudhaus, and Tokyo Rose, and later at Dust Warehouse, memories that he can jog with a few band recordings, some photos, and a couple of VHS tapes. But a lot of that music is lost to time, and he often wishes he could hear it again, share it with folks who missed it. It’s something he’s very aware of now, too, as he attends and plays shows at Tea Bazaar, Magnolia House, The Bridge PAI, The Southern, and IX Art Park.

He also wonders about all the Charlottesville bands nobody remembers, or knows about, because they never made a recording—or if they did, it’s sitting on a hard drive in a basement, or in a box of tapes at the back of a closet, or on a CD in a cracked jewel case at the bottom of a desk drawer.

“This town’s had an interesting scene for a long time,” he says. “There are plenty of phases of it that have gone pretty poorly documented. Though there were plenty of people there to enjoy it, I think there was some pretty enjoyable stuff for the folks who missed it, too.”

“So much gets lost,” says Dean, and with Infinite Repeats, he hopes to minimize those losses, and give current fans of these bands something to have and to hold, to take home after a show.

Infinite Repeats’ first official issue, in May 2018, was the vinyl release of New Boss’ No Breeze EP, six songs by Dean’s own indie rock power-pop band. Dean followed it up with The Implied Sunrise, an EP from Parker Emeigh’s Lynchburg-based experimental psych rock power-pop project, Good Dog Nigel, in February 2019. This week, the label releases Cosmic Miasma, a four-song, 7-inch record from Charlottesville punk band Wild Rose.

<a href="http://wildroseva.bandcamp.com/album/cosmic-miasma">Cosmic Miasma by Wild Rose</a>

There are others in the works, too, says Dean, like the Night Prancing LP from his longtime friends, Shrouded Strangers, a Good Dog Nigel full-length, and something from local garage punk band The Attachments.

In some cases, Dean’s had a hand in the recording process as well. Good Dog Nigel, Wild Rose, and The Attachments have recorded their Infinite Repeats releases at Dean’s in-home studio, Studionana, named for a nearby sticker of an anthropomorphic banana wearing sunglasses and playing a guitar. Studionana is actually located in Dean’s kitchen, where there are drums stacked on shelves alongside pots and pans, amps on the counters, guitars leaning on cabinets, microphones standing in front of the fridge, and where the recording console itself isn’t far from the stove. For a long time, Dean didn’t have his own recording equipment (most artists don’t) to get his bands’ music down, and now that he does, he wants to share that wealth.

Infinite Repeats, which presses a couple hundred copies of each release at Blue Sprocket Pressing, a vinyl pressing plant that opened in Harrisonburg in spring 2018, isn’t the only independent label working to get Virginia rock music on the literal record (and cassette tape, and CD). We’ve also got WarHen, Funny/Not Funny, Beach Impediment, and Feel It Records, to name just a few, making sure some of the great music being made in the Commonwealth right now is out there in the world, being enjoyed, and less likely to be lost to the sands of time.

It seems like a lofty goal, and in some ways it is. But it’s not impossible. And, if you ask Dean, (business and money aspects aside) it’s not terribly complicated, either. “I like things by cool people, bands that I like,” he says. “I’m just going to keep watching for things that I like and see what needs to come out in the world.”