Bands & Performers

A Rich Jensen Intensive

Richard Jensen worked at Olympia, Washington’s KAOS radio during the 1980s, leading to a fruitful association with Calvin Johnson’s fledgling label K Records. Jensen was later hired by Sub Pop Records to run the business operations of their perennially insolvent company. Unusual market conditions in the early 1990s saved the company from ruin and provided Jensen with nine years of employment as their general manager and president. In 1994, he helped to found Up Records (Modest Mouse, Built To Spill) with his roommate and friend Chris Takino, working there until Chris’s death from leukemia in 2000. His involvement in Clear Cut Press follows from conversations with co-founder Matthew Stadler about poetry and economy.

As a business and artistic venture, Clear Cut is inspired by early 20th-century subscription presses Hours Press and Contact Editions, and by the midcentury paperbacks of New Directions and City Lights. These historical models seem well-suited to the independent economies that emerge every generation or so around the cultural movements and new demands of global youth, whether punk, grunge, hip-hop, hippie, beatnik or flapper.