Even if you don't know the name Kranky, you probably know a few of their records. Since launching 25 years ago, the American label has touched on ambient, drone, post-rock, techno, Krautrock and other genres without inhabiting any of them fully.

Flipping through the label's catalogue is like a digging through the annals of experimental music in the last 25 years. Godspeed You! Black Emperor's Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven!. Stars Of The Lid's And Their Refinement Of The Decline. Loscil's First Narrows. Low's Things We Lost In The Fire. Grouper's The Man Who Died In His Boat. Keith Fullerton Whitman's Playthroughs. Windy & Carl's Consciousness. Tim Hecker's Harmony In Ultraviolet or Ravedeath, 1972. The label has released more than 200 records. With newer signings like MJ Guider, FORMA and Saloli, it remains a driving force for contemporary experimental and electronic music.

Kranky is independent and old-school, adhering to the strictures of a DIY indie rock label from the early '90s. They let artists do whatever they want without interfering, and they almost never run ads—one of the last they ran simply featured the logo and the text, "Heads down, blinders on." There are no long-term plans for aesthetic guidelines. Instead, Kranky operates on the whims and mores of Joel Leoschke, a no-nonsense, almost monastic Midwesterner who has run the label from Chicago since 1993.

Leoschke is loath to try and describe any sound or feeling the label might have. So we asked some of the people around him what they thought. "It's mood and temperament," said MJ Guider, a New Orleans-based composer of ethereal, electronic pop who debuted on Kranky in 2016. "There are so many different styles, but it's all very introspective and heady, very comforting but very alien at the same time."

"It's a single-minded curation that comes from Joel's gut feeling," said Christina Vantzou, who makes beguiling electroacoustic music. "Even if Joel wouldn't be able to formulate a sentence that encapsulates the vision of the label, he's still made all the choices." Scott Morgan, AKA Loscil, put it this way: "Joel picks things honestly, things that he really he likes. It's not always strategic. There's no hype machine guiding things, and he consciously avoids signing things that you might think should be on the label. That's what makes all the music fit together—its uniqueness."

"There's a lot of difference in the sameness," said Brian McBride from Stars Of The Lid. Tim Hecker compared Kranky to the independent book publisher Verso, where the only thing you can predict is a certain level of quality.

When Leoschke sat down on a recent visit to Los Angeles he was affable but severe, cracking what seemed to be jokes and then questioning me for laughing. Leoschke is intensely passionate and dead serious about music and also professionalism. He's said that the record labels he looked up to the most were the ones who paid the artists on time. He told me that transparency was one of the most vital aspects of how Kranky works. (Almost every artist I spoke to mentioned how reliable and fair the label was.) But for a label so obsessed with running itself correctly, Kranky has an air of spontaneity to it. Things tend to happen almost accidentally—even the release that started it all in 1993, from Labradford.

"[Cofounder] Bruce Adams and I kept making half-serious jokes about starting a record label," Leoschke told me. At the time, the two were working at the "bottom rung" of a music distributor in Illinois. "Then Labradford's first 7-inch came across the music buyer's desk. It was completely out of leftfield, unlike anything else going on then. The vocals weren't clear, it was droney. It wasn't an attempt to be commercial in any way."

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Leoschke and Adams contacted the band, who were based in Richmond, Virginia, and signed their first LP, Prazision, on the spot. It's about as close to a blueprint for Kranky as you could get: the barely-there vocals, the dirge-like instrumentation streaked with melody, the stately ambience. It was post-rock before the term was coined, and it still sounds fresh today. Prazision was more successful than the band or Kranky had anticipated, allowing them to soldier on, picking up stranger bands and dipping into more electronic realms, too.

From Prazision onwards, the label started to welcome bands and musicians who made music that sounded hollowed-out: the depressive slowcore of Low, the airy post-rock of Godspeed, or the melted modern classical of artists like Stars Of The Lid and Christina Vantzou. They've become key players in electronic music, with veteran artists like Tim Hecker and Loscil alongside newer signings Earthen Sea, Dedekind Cut and kosmische worshippers FORMA.

"Kranky tries to fill a void within a certain parameter," explained Brian Foote, who works on the label with Leoschke from his home studio in Los Angeles. "Take Deerhunter for example. Around that time, there were one million CD-Rs, one million tape labels. Difficult ambient music was being covered by limited editions in the extreme. It was like—what are we not hearing? And what fits the parameters that isn't already represented? Deerhunter was a striking example, and a striking demo, when that came in."

Deerhunter, a psychedelic indie rock band who later signed to 4AD and achieved worldwide popularity, epitomise the serendipity that surrounds the label. Just as Prazision struck an unexpected chord, Deerhunter's first album for Kranky, Cryptograms, was a runaway success that stood out from the other releases of 2007 but still made sense. Deerhunter helped drive the label into another era of success, and introduced Kranky to a younger audience, a process that seems to repeat every few years. After Deerhunter there was the transportive drone-folk of Grouper. This year, there's a handful of new artists, as well as Tim Hecker, who Kranky welcomed back into the fold after his stint with 4AD.

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"Kranky has magical timing, having the right thing happen at the right time," said Christina Vantzou. "Every few years when you think, 'How are they surviving?' Something like Deerhunter comes out that just lands in their hands at the right time. The label is an admirable example of what's possible despite the obvious pitfalls of trying to do what they want to do."

Leoschke also used the word "surviving" when I asked him about the label's biggest accomplishment. And though Kranky has been quick to adapt to streaming and the resurgence of vinyl—they're currently in the midst of reissuing previously CD-only albums on vinyl because "music should be available," in Foote's words—not much has changed in 25 years. Kranky is doing a rare tour to celebrate the 25th anniversary, a massive accomplishment for any record label. But Leoschke doesn't have time to look back, because he's always looking forward. Heads down, blinders on.

We spoke with some of the artists who have helped define Kranky.

Mark Nelson

If any one artist could define Kranky as a label, it's probably Mark Nelson, founding member of Labradford. The group connected with the duo behind Kranky almost instantly, and were surprised at their eagerness to release music from such an unusual band. "Even just going to New York seemed like a crazy ambition considering the kind of music we played," Nelson told me. "And despite ourselves, we found a perfect match."

Labradford's progression into darker and more ambient sounds mirrored the label's growing sense of experimentalism during the '90s, while Nelson's solo project, Pan•American, worked in dub and techno influences. All of Labradford's records stand the test of time, from the momentous and stark Fixed::Context to the feeling-through-the-darkness brilliance of Prazision, a record that somehow avoids almost every early '90s indie rock cliché and still feels like a journey every time you put it on.

Pan•American, too, sounds impressively ahead of its time. Records like 1999's 360 Business / 360 Bypass could have landed on Mille Plateaux or even Kompakt just a few years later. 2004's Quiet City, which mixes bubbling electronics with pastoral instrumentation and folksy melodies, still sounds like nothing else. And then there's Anjou, the project Nelson started with fellow Labradford member Robert Donne, which combines the majesty of the previous band with a new emphasis on electronics, decay and almost jazzy sensibility.

Fixed::Context

MJ Guider

Melissa Guion has only released one record on Kranky so far, but she's one of the most exciting artists on the roster. 2016's Precious System was a record that synthesized many strands of the Kranky sound: post-punk, dream pop, ambient, even techno (check out the ten-minute stunner "Evencycle"). It should come as no surprise that she's a student of Kranky. Like so many of the artists on the label, her first experience was with Labradford. She said that about once a year she goes on a heavy Labradford "bender," revisiting the band's entire discography. She singled out the band's second album, A Stable Reference, as her favourite, and it's easy to see why: that record's gaseous mixture of ambient soundscapes and gently drifting rock songs is a good match for Guion's own work, where song structures hang uneasily over yawning abysses of reverb.

"It feels really good to curl up in that album and stay there for a while," she told me. "Labradford create this intense space where there's always a sound that feels very open and enveloping, but not overwhelming. It's very comforting."

Precious System

Loscil

Scott Morgan is another artist who has been with Kranky for his entire musical career. Leoschke picked up on Morgan after the Vancouver artist released a 1999 demo called A New Demonstration Of Thermodynamic Tendencies, a collection of slick and atmospheric techno.

"Joel had been in touch with [Vancouver record distributor] Scratch, and was basically doing a background check on me," Morgan said with a chuckle. "I was excited, but also realized he was doing his due diligence—he wants to know who the artists are as people. Then he said that once you're part of the family, you can put out whatever you want on Kranky."

Morgan's music developed from the sleek techno showcased on Thermodynamic—which was collected and expanded on a debut album called Triple Point—and crystallized into a new, more mournful aesthetic on 2004's First Narrows, an album that stands tall in the Kranky catalogue. Carefully combining the pulse of dub techno with chamber instrumentation, First Narrows charted a course for Morgan's career that would continue on revered LPs like Plume and Endless Falls, inspired by the contrast of natural beauty and industry he experiences in Vancouver. Most recently, he collaborated with cellist Mark Bridges as High Plains on a new album called Cinderland.

First Narrows

Brian McBride / Stars Of The Lid

As one half of Texas-born duo Stars Of The Lid alongside Adam Wiltzie, Brian McBride has made some of the most enduring drone music of the last 30 years, whether you want to call it electronic, ambient, modern classical or post-rock. The duo luxuriate in the decay, resonance and sustain of guitars and other stringed instruments, letting notes ring out in lengthy, meandering paths. They first came to Kranky's attention through a record buyer at an Austin shop called Waterloo Records, after their first two albums, which had a more sample-heavy ambient style. It was after they signed with Kranky that their sound started to develop, from the desert-rock-turned-drone of The Ballasted Orchestra to the majestic Tired Sounds Of Stars Of The Lid, which introduced an orchestral approach perfected on their most recent album, And Their Refinement Of The Decline, back in 2007.

"We jumped at the chance to connect with Kranky," McBride told me. "And they believed in us in a way that was inspiring. They were people that actually believed in integrity, and it showed. I remember when Joel would get cardboard from behind Kinko's every day just to package mail orders. That kind of integrity and dedication is rare in this day, even with independent labels."

Tired Sounds Of

Grouper

Liz Harris, from Portland, Oregon, is another one of Kranky's most prominent artists. Her music as Grouper is whisper-quiet, riveting and atmospheric, with a compositional style that fits Kranky's drone-heavy M.O. to a tee, even when it's just Harris and a piano. (A song like "Labyrinth," from her 2014 album Ruins, makes a distant piano heavy with emotional weight.)

Harris has been releasing music since 2005. She first appeared on Kranky in 2012 with a CD version of her self-released two-part Grouper album A|A, as well as her collaborative Mirroring project. The next year Kranky released The Man Who Died In His Boat, an album made up of spectral, ghostly folk recorded around the same time as her 2008 landmark, Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill. Kranky also reissued Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill in 2013, and that record's blur of fuzzy textures and soft vocals makes it an integral part of the label's discography at this point. In just five years she's become one of Kranky's most crucial voices.

"Honestly? I was hesitant to send them a record because of a disclaimer on their website," Harris told me over email. "But I heard over and over from people about Kranky's reputation for working hard for artists they work with... I can remain independent, release on my own Yellow Electric or with other small labels, and also do work, as it makes sense, with Kranky. I need this kind of an open arrangement."

The Man Who Died In His Boat

Christina Vantzou

Christina Vantzou is one of the stars of Kranky's recent output, with four albums since 2011. Her tenure with Kranky actually goes back to 2004 and a collaborative record of ambient and chamber pop with Stars Of The Lid member Adam Wiltzie, under the name The Dead Texan. Her solo work has gone far beyond that style thanks to a unique working method. Her first two records, called No. 1 and No. 2, were written by Vantzou solo on synth and sampler, and then transcribed for a seven-piece orchestra that transformed it into an electroacoustic marvel. In other words, pure Kranky. "I only had Kranky in mind for my first album," Vantzou said. "Everyone told me to have a plan B, but I didn't want one."

Christina Vantzou

Tim Hecker

For an electronic music fan, Tim Hecker might be the most impressive name on the Kranky roster. He's helped define the landscape for ambient and experimental electronic music of the last two decades. And his work in blending the acoustic with the electric—smudging sounds until they're unrecognizable, or building them up into supernovas of distortion and white noise—is incomparable.

The Canadian artist knew of the label through his friends in Godspeed You! Black Emperor, who were the glue binding a hectic Montreal music scene together, and was later connected with Kranky through Keith Fullerton Whitman. Hecker's debut Kranky album, Harmony In Ultraviolet from 2006, is one of the watershed releases of his career, the apotheosis of his louder-than-thunder drone sound, split up into multi-part compositions. Ravedeath, 1972, from 2011, is another highlight, inspired in part by a history of anti-music movements, turning the sound of pianos and pipe organs into something completely otherworldly, overwhelming and almost violent. Hecker later signed to 4AD before returning to Kranky this year.

"Labels are less important and their roles are changing—you can do things yourself," Hecker said. "A lot of labels flip in so many aesthetic directions, and you're like, 'What is this?' The situation with other labels is really poor. Kranky is an easy place, I've worked with them for a long time. They've been great to me over the years. It's a pretty rare arrangement."

His return to Kranky might be his best record yet. Konoyo, made in collaboration with Kara-Lis Coverdale and a Japanese gagaku ensemble, fosters a new sense of dialogue in Hecker's music, where instrumentation and effects processing live side-by-side. It's no surprise that Tim Hecker would come back to Kranky—a label that has been pushing experimental music forward for 25 years—to make his most creative and out-there record yet.