GROWING AN EMPIRE GUIDED BY MUSIC
A CONVERSATION WITH CARLO LIO & NATHAN BARATO OF RAWTHENTIC RECORDS
Roaches are slang for both the tail end of a joint and pesky (apparently) nuclear war proof insects. The term combines the rock-solid resiliency and adaptability required to forge a partnership at the cusp of its 20th anniversary, with the sweet haze offered by that very last puff.
Nathan Barato and Carlo Lio form the DJ duo Roaches and run their record label, Rawthentic Records, that was established in 2005. Collectively and individually, they have forged a strong imprint on the Toronto techno and house music scene which has translated into a robust, multi-pronged, and ongoing international presence.
Their enduring partnership got its start in the late 1990s and early 2000s when they both discovered techno and house music, enjoying it as partyers first, and then moving well beyond that.
Soon they were both DJing and creating these reputations for themselves and in a way parallel lives. In a quirky (and funny) side note they started to be confused for each other while DJing because, as they put it, in the darkness of clubs their bald heads made them look the same; techno glimmer twins in a manner of speaking.
“Even before we knew each other Nathan was one of my favorite DJs that I would go watch, almost weekly at a (Toronto) venue called the Comfort Zone,” says Lio.
“I just kept running into Carlo. He was getting really popular,” says Barato.
Eventually this critical mass of run-ins, similar music tastes and bald heads coalesced into what today appears to be a bedrock strong friendship.
“We became friends, and I was just starting up to be a DJ and started producing music.”
CARLO LIO
That friendship resulted in starting to play gigs together.
“During our first gig actually playing together there was a lot of chemistry and things just snowballed from there,” says Barato.
The Rawthentic Music label was started by Barato and his brother Jason in 2005 and focusses on techno, tech-house and house genres.
“From my perspective,” says Barato, “when we started the label, we were really rookies with it and, you know, learning as we go. We were kind of just trying to get the music out to the world.”
“Carlo was making a lot of amazing music,” continues Barato, “we really loved this one house track called “Everybody” which we released. We just kind of rolled with it to the point where it was like, why don’t we work together? You know, and let’s grow together basically. And then it all went from there.”
The relationship was thus forged and has continued to be shaped and shifted over the intervening 20 years. They started playing on the same bills and eventually started performing together.
“We started getting a lot of B2B booking requests, in Toronto, as Carlo Lio and Nathan Barato, and it grew until basically until we were playing almost all of our shows as a duo and started calling ourselves the Roaches.”
The final plank of this partnership is that when Jason left the label, in around 2009, Lio joined it, as an owner, and has been with it ever since.
Life is never truly static. Things change and Barato eventually left the label.
“For me personally I was going through some things and I kind of hit a wall in the music business. Truth is I wanted to keep going, but I just didn’t, you know, try hard enough. I didn’t get through the hard part,” says Barato.
Lio kept running the label as he started to blow up internationally, around 2010, with top DJs starting to play his music.
“So I went from being a local DJ to literally flying every week. There was no gradual, a flight here and a flight there. I was basically taken on tour by Dubfire, who signed me to his agency. I was his opening act for a good two to three years. Somehow, through all of that I kept the label running.”
Around 2018 the toils of producing, touring, running a label and having a child came to a boil and something, in this case the label, had to be dropped from the mix. It wasn’t like we closed. I just stopped releasing. I just couldn’t do it all,” says Lio.
But it wasn’t long before Barato wanted to get back into the game.
“I realized I was not happy because I was not operating in music. And I just started making my own music. I happened to have a couple of impactful releases and I started developing an international presence. Fast forward and all of a sudden, Carlo and I are both touring and playing the same gigs again. At some point we said let’s bring Rawthentic Music back and in 2018 we relaunched it.”
Lio agrees and describes how it came together. “Everything just took a kind of a full circle and the puzzle pieces, you know, fit again. And, you know, he is making music. He started touring, getting international recognition, and like, obviously he’s back. So, it’s like, you know, we’re doing it on a bigger scale together now. So, you know, there’s no better time to relaunch Rawthentic.”
Through it all it is clear that both Barato and Lio have an art forward philosophy when it comes to producing music, DJing, running the label and finding artists to be on the label. A quick scan of Beatport shows that both Lio and Barato’s catalogues are each 150 tracks + deep and genre wise has (mostly) settled in at tech house.
Says Barato, “We’re always releasing basically very unknown artists on the label. We really don’t think or stress about it too much. If we hear music we like we’re going to put it out.”
Lio concurs “We have been around for so long that we are now running Rawthentic 2.0. We get lots of music sent to us from very new artists and some established ones.”
In reality this label labour of love appears to operate as an artist and music incubator.
“We’re always happy to push new artists,” says Lio ‘We want to keep releasing music and help artists grow, kind of breeding them, scaling them up and moving them towards a bigger stage.”
NATHAN BARATO
What helps Barato, Lio and Rawthentic Music is that while the aesthetic stays the same, they stay fresh by consistently pushing out new releases.
“We release new music about every two weeks on platforms including Beatport, Spotify, and Soundcloud,” says Lio.
In recent weeks this has included artists such as James Wyler, Danner, Aldo Cadiz and Léo Franco.
In their most recent venture Rawthentic Music partnered with Tulum radio to host a weekly Rawthentic Radio show. This collaboration allows them to showcase their music and connect with a wider audience through the radio platform. The show provides a platform for both established and up-and-coming artists to share their music and talent. It gives their label artists some much needed exposure and a pathway to greater success.
Continues Lio, “As a brand, we want to grow ourselves, our profile. We want to get to that next level in status. Having a label that is doing very well and is hot and having DJ’s playing our stuff, well the next step to building this little empire is growth. That includes doing actual label events which gives us booking power, which, you know, turns heads, which means people will want to send us music, if they know that we could potentially get booked by this label.
One of the final missing puzzle pieces was our own radio show. It’s just another tool to keep Rawthentic Music in people’s minds.”
The world has spawned a lot of musical partnerships but only a small minority succeed in the long term. Barato and Lio have a friends first relationship that is clearly guided by music and not so cluttered by money and business.
“At the end of the day, it’s like, it’s a marriage to an extent,” says Lio.
“We’re actually really lucky because you know there is no difference between our friendship and the business of running a label. To me, it doesn’t feel like business,” concludes Barata.
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