“Whenever there’s bullshit involved in your life, you really are fooling yourself in a lot of ways. You don’t want to acknowledge certain things that may be true. By ignoring that, or steering clear of things that might potentially be painful, you really compromise yourself, and when you have to face those things, it can be devastating. What I’m trying to do, at all times, is to try to be as direct and unflinching as possible.”

The honesty and intensity of former Anodyne frontman Mike Hill is carried across in his voice. He speaks clearly, calmly, but with a firmness of someone whose skin has been thickened by a life of touring and living day to day while pushing himself hard against the retaining wall of his personal limits.

Anodyne began in 1997 and ended in July 2005. During their tenure as a band, they released only two full-length albums, The Outer Darkin 2002 and Lifetime Of Gray Skiesin 2004. Albums were never what it was about for Anodyne though. Anodyne were about the live experience, about touring, about getting the fuck off your ass, getting out there and working for what you believed in. It’s a work ethic rarely seen in these days of bands getting signed before they play a show.

“I’ve never had much of a social life,” Hill admits freely. “I’ve always devoted everything either to being in a band or recording, working with bands in a studio, and now releasing records. Just trying to keep myself busy and avoid that downtime of sitting in your apartment by yourself with nothing to do. I guess the work ethic comes out of fear of being a normal citizen. What motivates me is to strive further and further away from the pack.”

It’s a noble goal and one well met. Anodyne’s music, a furious conglomeration of hardcore density, poetic lyrics and a force that comes from heavy metal but far surpasses the simple title of it, was never mainstream, was never accessible, and above all else, was always true to where it came from.

“I just think we got to the point where we weren’t going to have a lot to say musically anymore, at least with the three of us playing together,” Hill recalls about the band’s breakup. “We’d been battling for months, trying to write new material. We’d written a few new songs, scrapped ’em, we were working with maybe three or four new songs towards the end, and the energy just wasn’t there.”

“When you write a new song and everybody’s excited about it, there’s this energy and it’s alive.We were to the point where we had these songs and we were rehearsing them and it just wasn’t flowing anymore. I sensed that in the other members of the band and I sensed it in myself.

“We had another tour booked to go to Europe, and I thought about it one night over the Fourth Of July weekend, ‘Should we do these tours?’ because I’d hate to go out on a note of, ‘Well, those guys seemed like they were really at the end of their rope when they did that tour.’ I’d rather end it, not have a last show, or a ‘This is our last tour.’ Just end it and have people remember us the way we were last year, playing as hard as we could every night.”

In the wake of Anodyne’s demise, Hill has already undertaken several new projects, among them a new band featuring Dave Witte from famed grinders Discordance Axis, Myles Karr from Books Lie, Jarrod Alexander from The Hope Conspiracy and Jamie Getz of Lickgoldensky. First and foremost in terms of priority, however, is record label Black Box Recordings, owned and operated by Hill himself in Brooklyn.

“I’ve run into a lot of bands, just from all of those years of being in Anodyne, just great bands that I felt deserved to have their material enjoyed by other people, or at least appreciated,” Hill states. “Even if 20 people bought their record and were turned onto something new that I thought was exciting, it would have been worth it just to turn people on to good stuff.”

For the label, Hill is excited to help bands who exercise a similar work ethic he has managed to maintain over the years. He’s looking for, “someone who believes enough in what they do to lay it on the line and go for it. That’s how I’ve done everything; as hard as I could, all the time, and I’ve tried to push everything as far as I could. Those are pretty much the only types of bands I’m willing to work with, people with that same type of perspective.”

He adds, “They believe enough in what they’re doing, just on a creative level, not necessarily like, ‘We’re gonna go out and sell 40,000 copies of a record,’ but people who are passionate enough about the music and the energy they put into it, that’s what their life is about. That’s pretty much the way I approach things as well. That’s the stance I’m taking with this label too.”

The first release on Black Box Recordings came earlier this year in the form of a partial Anodyne discography entitled The First Four Yearsin homage to one of Hill’s heroes, Greg Ginn of Black Flag/SST Records.

“Black Flag and SST, first and foremost, the music was intense and urgent, and as I found out more about the band and mainly Greg Ginn, he’s a guy who laid it on the line and went for it and completely immersed himself in what he was doing, and that really resonated with a lot of my own ideas about things. I’ve always either been on or off, I’m either doing something or not doing it.

I don’t approach things in that, ‘Let me do this for now and check out other things at the same time.’ I’m in it.” “I started out with a credit card,” he says of the early days of BBR. “I had $3,000 on a credit card, and I had saved up some money from working the various jobs I had, and I put that Anodyne thing out. Money’s starting to slowly trickle in. At first it was a little bit, then the checks started to get bigger, and I was able to sell a bunch to distros and online, started paying off that credit card debt, as well as having a nice infusion of money for future projects.”

In addition to Anodyne’s First Four Years, Hill has released a discography from Black Army Jacket and The Heuristic’s debut album, Paraplexes. Plans for future releases include a seven inch and subsequent full-length release by The Wayword, who already have their 10-week tour booked—sharing in that shut-up-and-do-something mindset.

“I’m addicted to working,” he declares. “I seek things out because there’s a lot of work involved. I’ll take the hard way because there’s more to it and I’ll feel more satisfied about executing the work and getting to point B. But doing it myself, there’s more satisfaction in that, in that you have complete control over pretty much all the aspects.”

“Not to say that I don’t depend on other people. I work with guys like Ryan Patterson, who does a lot of the layout stuff associated with the label, and Ira Bronson, who does all my web design, but I have pretty much the final veto power whether I want stuff to look a certain way or how I want stuff to be perceived.

“Regular life is full of compromises. You have to spend whatever amount of time you spend doing your day job. That’s a compromise of your time. Certain things just shouldn’t be compromised, especially when it comes to being creative.”

“Working my day job has become more of a part of my life since the band split up and I’m stuck here, living a normal life, sort of. I’m living in New York City, working and doing the label. I battle that every day, thinking I’m starting to become like all the citizens I see on the subway, looking at advertising.”

“Next thing you know I’m going to get cable tv and all that sort of stuff,” he laughs.

Don’t count on it. More likely Hill will continue to toil away on what he does because he loves it, his label and his music. Through it all, his sense of realism permeates: “At this point, I know it’s a limited audience that the kind of stuff I’m interested in doing has.”

“You can only really do this sort of stuff for so long, I think, before it’s not really viable to continue with it. It’s sort of like this Yukio Mishima ‘Destructive angel’ kind of thing where you want to destroy yourself and just push it as far as you can.”