MICHAEL Kasparis is shattered. It is the morning after the topsy-turvy night before of the General Election when The National speaks with the man behind Night School Records, the impressive Glasgow label which counts among its roster acclaimed Swedish synth-pop artist Molly Nilsson, current Scottish Album of the Year Award shortlister Ela Orleans and Happy Meals, the kosmische-pop duo serving up just the platter of optimism our relentlessly dystopian culture could well do with.

Dejected by the latest polls, some of us had comforted ourselves with the prospect of an early night. And then there was that exit poll. The jammies would have to wait. “I just thought I would watch a few of the results, see what was happening,” Kasparis says. “But then it got really exciting and before I knew it, it was 5am.”

Kasparis had also played a gig on election night as part of discordant hardcore band ANXIETY, the home-town kick-off date of a UK tour. Having gained a rep for their bristling, hectic live shows, The National asks why ANXIETY aren’t on the label but instead released their frenetic recent debut EP on London noise label La Vida Es Un Mus Disco.

Though Kasparis might cough on his coffee were the dread word “brand” suggested, he admits the release would have jarred with the current identity of Night School. Nevertheless, perhaps they would have featured during the early days of the label, which Kasparis has run since 2011. It was through the band Divorce that many came to know the Night School imprint. A snarling, three-woman, one-bloke noise band, they were more Butthole Surfers than Belle and Sebastian. People loved them. Shortly after their 2012 record Seance Fiction, they reluctantly split.

“We were good friends, and I still love the fact they wanted to release their album on my label,” explains Kasparis. “But maybe it would have done better on a more dedicated noise label.

So I don’t think ANXIETY would work on Night School.”

He pauses to laugh. “I’m also really bad in general at promoting my own music. And I don’t like the idea of being a tastemaker, of telling people what they should like. But you can do a band a disservice if you don’t have a degree of consistency.”

As is common with fledgling projects, the bands Night School released in those early days were often friends of Kasparis, such as Golden Grrrls, a much-loved lo-fi trio two-thirds of which now form the SAY Award-shortlisted Sacred Paws. It's likely musical pals have rarely been in short supply for the amenable Kasparis. For much of his adult life he’s worked as a promoter and a musician and in record shops. Nevertheless, he admits that around the tenth Night School Records release, he began to have an idea of the label’s identity going forward.

“I had put out a couple of releases by someone I really admired called The Rebel,” Kasparis says, referring to the solo project of Ben Waller, the front man of confrontational taboo-busters the Country Teasers. Then I put out [LA -based musician] Julia Holter’s record [the highly acclaimed Tragedy] in the UK. She wasn’t very well known but now she is, so all power to her. But it was really between those records that things began to take shape. It felt I wanted to draw more attention to things that might otherwise fade away. Musicians like that might always have some kind of underground following, but I wanted to bring them into some kind of mainstream.

“It’s not that these people wouldn’t continue to make the music they do if they weren’t putting actual records out but a lot of the artists I work with like the idea of having a document of what they’re doing at a particular time, and I think that’s really exciting. Apart from anything else, I wanted to do things with as little cynicism as possible, if that makes sense.

To do things with an open heart and an open ear.”

That openness is consonant with Night School’s forthcoming releases: the debut “vinyl document” from industrialists The Modern Institute, out on June 30, a new EP by AMOR, the soulful – minimalist funk unit comprising the mercurial Richard Youngs, Turner Prize-nominated artist Luke Fowler and Franz Ferdinand drummer Paul Thomson – and a new single by statuesque Swede Nilsson.

Kasparis explains he is also working with Helena Celle, aka Kay Logan, the bassist in ANXIETY, and Cucina Povera, aka Glasgow producer Maria Rossi, who he describes as “one of the best things I’ve seen in Glasgow”. Both musicians combine a singular personality, a diverse palette and an artful approach informed by a pioneering, searching spirit.

This is certainly the case with Glasgow-based polymath Ela Orleans, also on the SAY Award’s shortlist for her stunning album Circles Of Upper And Lower Hell. Inspired by Dante’s Inferno and the poetics of Arthur Rimbaud and Aleister Crowley, it’s an intensely atmospheric, dizzingly accomplished work and is this writer’s tip for the £20,000 top prize, with the winner to be announced at Paisley Town Hall on Wednesday.

The Polish-born Orleans is a compelling, highly talented and charismatic figure, and Kasparis notes that an instinctual feeling for an individual artist plays a key part in his decision to work with them. It’s rare he puts out a musician’s work without having first met them.

“I find I make a decision quite quickly, quite instinctively,” he says. “I’ll listen to the music and know fairly quickly whether to meet them, get chatting, maybe strike up a friendship. I’m really lucky that I’ve never worked with anyone who’s an arsehole, basically.”

Much of how Night School Records functions is framed by constraints of resources. As well as ANXIETY, Kasparis plays in hardcore band The Lowest Form and also records his own solo uneasy listening as Apostille. Tricky enough combining all that with a full-time job behind the counter at Glasgow’s Mono record shop, never mind running a label with artists from as far afield as San Francisco (Group Rhoda) to Petrozavodsk in Republic of Karelia (Love Cult). Kasparis lived in London for 10 years until 2014, and says the roster was perhaps more international then. Now about 70 per cent of the roster are local bands and artists.

“When I came back to Scotland in 2014 it definitely felt like a homecoming and I find I am putting out more Glaswegian and Scottish stuff – it just felt more natural and there’s just so much strong music out there,” he says. “I have always liked the ethos that labels like K Records and Dischord have, of working a lot with your local community, and the thing about Glasgow is that there could be a few labels doing that and there would always be enough great artists and bands to go around.”

“I’m still going to be doing at least two more releases with people from America this year, and I think it’s good in a lot of senses as to how the internet has changed things with fewer barriers and borders – it’s quite utopian in that sense, but there are lots of practical and geographical considerations which can make life difficult sometimes. If you’re shipping records to Russia, it’s going to cost you about the same to ship the records as to get them made.”

Kasparis says he has never taken a wage from the label, and the day job at Mono is about more than maintaining networks and keeping an ear out for the next compelling artist to work with: it’s economic necessity.

“I do often wonder what I could do, what the potential of the label could be, if I had a budget to work with,” he says. “When I invest in a record, it means I have to give up something else. Although I work in a record shop I had to give up buying records for myself a long time ago.

But I’d much rather be making records than buying them.”

As well as the limitations of time and money, the ethos and methodology of Night School is informed by Kasparis’s experience as a musician. Every Night School release has a physical component, many of which, like those from crowd-funded, vinyl-loving label Last Night From Glasgow, are lovely things in themselves – The Modern Institute’s album, for example, will be available as a limited run in clear vinyl with a screen-printed sleeve.

Kasparis says: “It’s funny, I know I was just talking about how good this kind of post-geography world can be, but I am old fashioned in the sense that it’s always been really, really important to me as a musician to have a document, a physical thing. If a label were to say to me as a musician that they are going to do a digital release of my stuff, I’d think: ‘Well, I could have just done that myself’.”

“I think it’s my kind of job as a label to produce something physical,” he says, before adding with a laugh: “Also, it wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t have the extra stress level of worrying about records not selling.”

Another Night School constant is no multi-release deals.

“I do have paperwork but I’ve never signed anyone up for anything because I don’t like the idea of owning people’s music. That just does not feel right to me. Everything I do with the label is based on me saying: ‘I really, really love this record, and if you let me try and sell it for you hopefully we can both benefit’. I would feel really uncomfortable signing someone for, say a three-record deal and you’re finding yourself saying to them: ‘Where’s my record?’. I don’t like that approach myself as a musician.

"Maybe if I had more of a ‘business sense’ in inverted commas I’d be signing people up and stealing their souls but that’s not for me. Then again, maybe I’m only saying that because no-one’s ever offered me a three-record deal.”

Nightschool artists Ela Orleans and Cucina Povera play with Mark Vernon and Klaysstarr as part of sound art live event Inter#10 at Glasgow's Stereo on July 20, 7.30pm, £7. Tickets: bit.ly/INTERJul20

The Modern Institute’s self-titled album in released on June 30. www.nightschoolrecords.com soundcloud.com/nightschool