By Will York

'BEING AN INDEPENDENT label now is kind of like volunteering your services driving retarded kids to the dentist," Koolarrow label head Bill Gould says. "It's like, 'What a good guy! That's nice, and I'm really glad you're doing it. But I wouldn't do it.'

"People who do the right thing are stupid."

Hey, wait a second.

"No, I'm stupid," Gould freely admits. "Absolutely, I'm totally stupid. I'm gonna do it anyway because I like to do it, and luckily, with Faith No More, I made some money where I can afford to be stupid."

From a music-biz standpoint, Gould's band did a lot of stupid things after going double platinum with 1989's The Real Thing (Slash), from pestering audiences during their opening slot on the 1992 Guns N' Roses-Metallica tour to covering Burt Bacharach and Bee Gees songs to filming an MTV video at a Fisherman's Wharf $10 videomaking booth. Koolarrow could be seen as the logical continuation of Gould's efforts to sully his place in the music industry, if he weren't so dedicated to the label's mission.

Take aim

Gould has kept the lowest profile of any of his old bandmates since they hung it up in 1998. Keyboardist Roddy Bottum has stayed busy writing film soundtracks and working with Imperial Teen, Mike Bordin has drummed with Ozzy Osbourne, and Mike Patton has been annoyingly ubiquitous with his recent array of all-star side projects and cameo appearances. Gould hasn't quit playing music, but his main focus has been running Koolarrow, which means doing everything from recording and mixing CDs in his Lower Haight basement studio to writing band bios and doing promotional work.

Koolarrow's first album, the rock en Español compilation Spanglish 101, came out in '99 and was followed by a slow, sometimes puzzling stream of releases by bands from all over the globe. Hip-hop from Spain? Old-school punk from Russia? There's no aesthetic rhyme or reason to Gould's choices, apart from a desire to expose U.S. audiences to off-the-radar bands – along with a conscious effort to avoid exploiting the Faith No More market by releasing soundalikes.

And for good reason, because the bands that are obviously influenced by Faith No More are almost uniformly dreadful. "I don't think they got the good parts," Gould agrees. "They only got the bad parts. And it's very embarrassing. They got all the vulgar stuff. It makes me feel like a failure."

'The Robbie Williams of Yugoslavia'

The closest the label's come to a no-brainer is Brujeria's Mextremist Hits!, a compilation of non-LP tracks by the fictional band of metal-playing Mexican drug lords, in which Gould played for years under a pseudonym. There are other oddballs on the label, though, whose stories aren't made up, like Flattbush, the Philippines-born, SoCal-based grindcore activists who scream out pro-revolutionary lyrics in Tagalog; and Kultur Shock, a Seattle conglomerate headed by Bosnian refugee Gino Srdjan Yevdjevich.

"He was like the Robbie Williams of Yugoslavia, a big pop star," Gould says. "And then the war broke out, and he totally freaked out and lost his house and everything. So he came here as a refugee." He got together a band that includes members from Bulgaria, Japan, and Seattle, and while the story sounds too "world music" to be true, all you have to do is listen to their records to figure out they're the real deal. Their debut, FUCC the I.N.S., is an album of modernized, and sometimes metallized, Balkan folk tunes that beats the New York Knitting Factory crowd at its own cultural cross-pollination game. But it's the follow-up, last year's awesome Kultur-Diktatura, that may be the label's crown jewel so far. The combination of gypsy brass, distorted guitars, violins, and Yevdjevich's manic vocals is seamless and almost too good to be true. Fans of eastern European rock hybrid acts such as Gogol Bordello, Uz Jsme Doma, Kletka Red, and even System of a Down would be all over this thing if they had a chance to hear it.

That most folks outside Seattle (where Kultur Shock have a following) still haven't is due to no lack of persistence on Gould's part: he sent out 250 promos for the album and got just three reviews – a depressingly low ratio. For Koolarrow's roster of unknowns, these results are about on par. Blame it on a lack of branding identity and niche marketing savvy, or a supposed dearth of that most dubious intangible factor: indie cred. "It's pretty ironic," Gould says of the latter explanation. He recounts Yevdjevich's experiences getting strip-searched by immigration officials and sticking his hand in people's bodies to keep them from bleeding to death during the war. "These people have real-life experience, and everybody ignores that."

He can relate to these underdogs. "I was in a band that was a little strange in the beginning too," he says. Faith No More's first solid lineup featured a gay keyboard player, a black singer, a dreadlocked drummer, and a hair-farming metal guitarist, in addition to bassist Gould. "We couldn't play with anybody. People never returned our calls. When I see something that I really like, and I see that they're gonna have the same kind of problem I had, I feel obliged to get involved and help them."

On a mission

One exception to this helping-hand mission is the label's upcoming release of Sanctuary, the solo debut by Einstürzende Neubauten guitarist Alexander Hacke. The album is sort of an audio travelogue compiled by Hacke during trips through Europe and the United States, and its cameos by members of Unsane and Foetus, Casper Brotzmann, and the Germs' Don Bolles make it one of the only "featuring members of" albums in Koolarrow's catalog. It will likely outsell the likes of Kultur Shock, Danish art-rockers Düreforsög, and the other more obscure bands on the label, but that's where Gould's focus is going to remain.

"I'm looking outside now," Gould confirms. These days he seems as excited finding out about covert Saudi Arabian metal bands as he was when he discovered Yugoslavian industrial pranksters Laibach back in the mid-'80s. Having toured the world and elsewhere several times, the globe-trotting Gould – who speaks Spanish and is learning French – has friends and connections all over, which accounts for Koolarrow signees such as Naive, whom he recorded during a long, cold, vodka-fueled month in 1997; and Not from There, whom he heard in Australia while doing Faith No More business there. But he also has a nose for underground happenings here in the city. Recently he took me to see Russian eight-piece Auktyon playing their peculiar dub-gypsy-ska sounds for a packed house at the Richmond District's Last Day Saloon on a Sunday night.

"I think that being different now isn't being [from] here anymore, because I think everybody here's been kind of spoiled in a way," he says, explaining his need to explore new territory. "I think the whole gene pool's been kind of worked out at this point. And I think that you have to go outside of here, where things still have meaning somewhere ... and doing that can open things up over here too."

He offers one final, more crude analogy for his approach: "It's like you're in the desert, and you don't have any water, so you urinate in a bottle and you drink the urine. And then you drink it again. I mean, how many times can you keep drinking your own urine?"