Farewell fete for Buzz-Oven bigwig Aden Holt, leaving Deep Ellum for Denver

by Teresa Gubbins

DEEP ELLUM — About 40 friends and supporters gathered on Sunday night to bid farewell to Aden Holt, founder of One Ton Records and Graphics, who's moving to Denver, Colo.

Holt's 17 years in Dallas pretty much reflect the goings-on of the local music scene during that time. After graduating from UNT in 1993, he launched One Ton Records in 1994, releasing CDs by his own band Caulk as well as Doosu, Slow Roosevelt, Buck Jones, Fixture, Jump Rope Girls, and Cottonmouth Texas.

The label folded in 2001, by which time Holt had already founded Buzz-Oven, a free-CD and concert entity sponsored by Coca-Cola with a social-networking component that pre-dated MySpace.com. Buzz-Oven issued 17 sampler CDs, helping to break acts such as Fair to Midland and Radiant before calling it quits in 2006.

Attendees at the party ranged from high school friends to local musicians and music-industry-ites, all of whom signed best wishes on a massive Texas flag.

"I hate to leave Deep Ellum and say bad things about it because it's been so good to me over the years," Holt said. "It's in a bad phase right now -- but everybody already knows that."

Like many of Dallas' high-society figures (hey, that's why we have a high-society slide show to mark his departure), Holt has visited Colorado "a couple times a year" for the past 15 years.

"I've always wanted to live there but never could because I was so entrenched with my work here," he says. "But the nature of technology in the past few years has given me the freedom to live somewhere else."

He'll maintain One Ton Graphics, his art and graphics company, responsible for Observer ads for Trees, Curtain Club, and more, for which he'll keep a small local office in Deep Ellum.