The term "limited sector" derives from the short story "An Evening with Ramón Bonavena" by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares, from their book Chronicles of Bustos Domecq. It tells of a visit with the fictitious Bonavena, an author who, in his quest to write only what he could describe realistically, hits upon the idea of limiting his subject to the objects sitting on one corner of his writing table. Using a powerful magnifying glass and a carpenter's rule, he fills six 1000-page volumes with descriptions of unimaginable detail.

I imbue the term with a related meaning: "stick to what you know," and I am attempting to apply this tenet both as a guiding artistic principle and as a way of doing business.

Applied to music making, the philosophy of limited sector means I worry first and foremost about making pieces that please me, as that's the only aesthetic judgment I truly know. If, then, the resulting music also pleases others, then that is a happy coincidence, but I will never allow it to be the primary motivating force. I have an interest in selling my music only to the extent that it may bring other people some of this pleasure -- I am not attempting to do this to "make money," and I will not think about "marketability" while I am creating the music.

Applied to a business venture, in this case a "record label," limiting sector means reducing operations where necessary to those I can conduct personally, even though there may be a "better" way that is beyond my abilities or resources. Instead of saying "Do it right or don't do it at all," the way of limited sector says "Better to do it wrong than not to do it at all."

As an example, having CDs commercially pressed and printed costs more money than I have available at the moment. Instead of waiting for that to become economically feasible, I have chosen to make CDs in small quantities using a CD-ROM burner and by assembling the packaging materials by hand. This in turn means that I can "bring to market" music for which there is a potentially a very small audience without expending great amounts of my own money on things like CD pressing and printing, and as a result, I can offer many more choices to a potential buyer than if I went the 500- or 1000-CDs at once route.

Note that limited sector does not mean "don't seek to learn things you don't know." I am not terribly experienced in the art of getting one's music distributed. I am eager to learn this though, and will be trying to find out how it all works. Limited sector simply means that, in the meantime, I will not turn my nose up at selling the CDs directly to stores and individual listeners.

It also means to be realistic and accurate about what "Limited Sector Recordings" is and is not. I will not pretend that I have an office full of people working on things; it really is (at this point, anyway) just me. I strive to run the enterprise on an honest, uninflated, low-pretension basis. In this I am also greatly inspired by the example of Robert Fripp and his Discipline Global Mobile company.

Special thanks must go out to my friend and collaborator Andrew McGeary, who planted the seeds for limited sector when, once upon a time, he told me: