With record sales declining precipitously and major labels dishing out pink slips like candy, some are eager to declare the music industry, as we know it, dead. But for Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance, members of indie-rock band Superchunk and owners of the Durham, NC-based record label Merge, business ain’t bad. As McCaughan says in the new book Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records (Workman Publishing, 2009), “People may be buying fewer bad records, but I don’t see them buying fewer good records.”

Since its inception in 1989, Merge has released good records in spades. In fact, the label has garnered so much good will in the music industry that it has chosen to celebrate its 20-year history with this thoughtfully put together volume. The book, written by music journalist John Cook with McCaughan and Ballance, documents the label from its humble beginnings up through its current successes, profiling, in succession, many of the bands that helped establish Merge as a premier independent label.

With over 300 color and black-and-white photographs of everything from performances by the label’s bands to reproductions of handwritten lyrics and other Merge bric-a-brac, Our Noise is destined to grace the coffee table of your friendly neighborhood music fan. But as a document, the book is more than just a collection of pretty pictures. The story of Merge Records is the story of Superchunk, which is itself the story of McCaughan and Ballance’s relationship. The two dated in the early days of Superchunk, and then separated while remaining bandmates and label owners. A fair portion of the book discusses the fallout of the breakup and how the duo powered through their personal issues to continue creating and releasing music.

The majority of the chapters in Our Noise, though, are devoted to bands in the Merge family. Some of the groups featured include Neutral Milk Hotel, Spoon, The Magnetic Fields and Arcade Fire. These chapters function as mini-biographies of some of the best bands of the last two decades. Fans of Spoon, for example, might be eager to read about the various different styles of music the band experimented in before settling on its current sound. Because the book does focus on Merge, the biographies primarily discuss the bands’ relationships with the label. But this focus can yield interesting nuggets, such as the fact that despite its almost universal popularity, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea has only sold 254,000 copies. Or that Arcade Fire, though courted by numerous major labels, never believed any of them could offer the band anything that Merge couldn’t.

Unlike some other books on bands or labels, Our Noise is written interview-style. The various chapters read like long interviews with all of the members of the band, fans of the band, people who worked with the band, all with some occasional commentary by Cook linking the quotations. The presentation can be confusing, as sometimes the reader may find himself having to turn back multiple pages to determine a speaker’s relationship to the band. But the style does contribute to the informal feel of the book, and the more personal interview style is especially fitting for Merge, a label that has a reputation for forging personal relationships with its artists. Our Noise reads like the people themselves are sitting in a room discussing the music.

As an insight into the inner workings of a record label, Our Noise is also illuminative. In the early days, Merge did not use written contracts with its bands, preferring instead to operate on a handshake (however, after getting burned one too many times, the label now uses quasi-standard independent label contracts). Part of the label’s growing pains consisted of learning hard business lessons. Though McCaughan and Ballance created a record label solely to release music they loved, eventually they also needed it to afford them a decent living and pay the wages of their growing staff. However, the appropriate balance between passion for music and business acumen was not always easy to strike. As McCaughan says in the book, sometimes capitalism creates “tensions between artists, consumers and businesses that are not always easily squared.”

Our Noise demonstrates that Merge is successful because—to many music fans—the label’s imprint signifies quality. That element of consumer trust is often what’s missing in the major label world. Yes, the music industry as defined by the actions of major labels is probably dying. But as Cook writes, “Merge was an outlier and holdout in a corporate-dominated business; as the behemoths fail, it could become a forerunner in the devolution of the music business back to the sort of small, competitive independent labels that made rock ’n’ roll possible.” Congratulations to Merge on a well-conceived and executed book, and here’s to 20 more years of success.

John Seay