Tim Levinson and Kenny Sabir from Elefant Traks: ‘You can look at ticket sales and see things aren’t working.’Tim Levinson and Kenny Sabir from Elefant Traks: ‘You can look at ticket sales and see things aren’t working.’ The way Levinson tells it, Elefant Traks became another casualty of an increasingly ruthless music landscape. “You can look at streaming numbers and ticket sales and see things aren’t working like they once were.
Sabir remembers the “activist roots” of Elefant Traks, citing early gigs at Reclaim the Streets rallies. “We were on the protest line with a mic and a little amplifier, rapping and playing beats,” he says, dialling in from his current job as an exec at livestock management startup AgriWebb. The “completely DIY” operation, run out of makeshift spaces in Surry Hills, Redfern and Enmore, included working bees to burn CDs and distribute them to record stores.
As it happened, the label’s biggest breakout success was not a hip-hop act, but electronic duo Hermitude. After years of steady releases on Elefant Traks, Flume’s sleek 2012 remix of HyperParadise brought the duo to the attention of Nettwerk Music Group’s Rachel Cragg, who pushed Hermitude’s 2015 single The Buzz to a worldwide dance fanbase. “Elefant Traks was the first time that I’d worked with an artist-run label,” Cragg says over Zoom from her home in Canada.