Irida Records – Hybrid Musics From Texas & Beyond

Irida Associates U.S.A., an obscure and short-lived record label formed by composer-performer Jerry Hunt, offers a glimpse into the revelatory world of new music and composition in the artist’s native Third Coast. Based first in Dallas and later in Hunt’s home outside the rural town of Canton, Texas, Irida presented the innovative and daring experiments-into aleatoric methods, environmental acoustics, improvisation, homemade technologies, and more-pursued by Hunt and his select collaborators, primarily working in or near Texas between 1979 and 1986. Irida’s brief and compact output-seven non-sequentially numbered LPs released in unknown quantities-shared work by artists whose practices often challenged the limitations of vinyl recording. Hunt called the label a “vanity project” and frequently talked of a tax loophole he could claim if it all went belly up, but in its short lifespan Irida captured a tremendous period of creative experimentation by the artist and his friends and collaborators.