Size doesn't matter. Least of all with a label like Klein Records. Bigger, faster, louder? Not necessarily. Klein Records, the name, already defines the agenda ("klein" meaning "small" in German).

Klein Records came to life in 1996. Somewhere in the grey area between club culture and the indie scene, there was an untapped melting pot of guitar-based pop and digital, electronic sounds - influenced by Creation and Warp, The Fall and Public Enemy, dope beats and feedback, different worlds of sounds that sometimes merged and sometimes just co-existed right next to each other. There was no place there for purism and blinkered ideas, no fast food on dubplates for desperately trendy DJs. Instead, this was a game played simultaneously to all the different rules of various musical codes on an open pitch without lines or markings. Music made to be played and heard equally in clubs, on the radio or in the bedroom.

The idea of Klein Records is all about keeping up the momentum. So much so, that incalculable risks become part of the plan. It's about aural eclecticism and community spirit instead of a slick mainstream masterplan. And in the process, all those lazy clichés of Viennese "Gemütlichkeit" get a good kicking. While around them, some may have got stuck in their complacent bohemian lifestyles, Klein Records are still far from satisfied with those all-too smooth ways of the Vienna groove scene. They feel more akin to the spirit of anarchism than that of the coffee-table chic brigade.

It's no easy spliffin' on the shag pile carpet, more like toing and froing between the familiar and the alien, the obvious and the obscure; sometimes comfortable, at other times decidedly not so. And if the music frays around the edges, so much the better. That's what gives it its identity, its character. Be it the Sofa Surfers' tar-spitting, grease-spilling dub sounds or Mika's playful electro-pop, Uko's nocturnal funk, Mum's thunderstorms of ballistic beats or Seelenluft's weird easy listening soundscapes.

Following the vision of creating their own sound, Klein Records have evolved continually. With release after release, what at the beginning seemed like a plethora diverse projects, moves to join up to a unique picture in which all those kinds of music that record shops like to file under neat labels like "headz", "breakbeat", "downbeat", "trip hop", "dub", "electronica" or "avant garde" are somehow included.

And in the end, it is that continuity which marks out the music on Klein Records.The music will evolve and keep on moving. So much is for certain.