Ashley MacIsaac feels badly fiddled by his record company and wants to be released from his contract with the label.

"I don't want to be with a record company that s--ts all over me in a newspaper," an angry MacIsaac said yesterday, responding to Loggerhead Records' news release a day earlier disassociating itself from his conduct at a New Year's Eve rave.

MacIsaac said he was shocked to wake up yesterday and read Loggerhead president Andrew McCain's public criticisms of him.

"They should have said, 'No comment' if they had any sense about a negative situation. Obviously, they're not a good record company and I don't want to be involved with them," said MacIsaac, who owes Loggerhead two more albums on his three-album deal.

As of late yesterday, that obligation stood. MacIsaac said he had phoned Loggerhead to ask that it release him voluntarily. The label refused.

The 24-year-old Cape Breton Celt-rocker is unrepentant about the Dec. 31 appearance that got McCain so exercised. MacIsaac was pulled off the stage at a Halifax club after shouting vulgar, sexist and racist remarks at his audience for 20 minutes, something he does not apologize for.

"People can get hurt pretty easily in this world, and I do think people can be hurt by a lot of things -- words I would hope people can't be hurt by. It's a free-speaking country," he said, insisting that he'd done exactly what he had intended.

His aim was to mark the millennium with an explicit, Alan Ginsberg-style, stream-of-consciousness, "rock and roll screamer" rant.

"Offensive? Yes it definitely was in my mind to be that way. I didn't just talk about black people. I talked a lot about lesbians, I talked a lot about faggots, I talked about a lot of things that are very crude," said the openly gay MacIsaac, a non-drinker who said he was sober other than a single toke off a borrowed joint as he took the stage.

"It was the turn of the millennium, it was 2000, I was having fun. I figured I should be able to have fun and maybe I have fun in a weird way but, gosh, I think everybody knows that already, don't they?"

MacIsaac wasn't overly concerned, either, by reports that a Halifax club where he's booked for three dates later this month might be reconsidering his booking.

"I heard that and I was like, 'Great.' Because I think I've already got the deposit. I'm going to go cash it tomorrow."

Nor is he immediately worried about finding another record label if he can convince Loggerhead to let him go -- or, ultimately, if he wins his freedom in court.

"Sure I want to make a living with my music, but I only want to make a living with my music to the point that it doesn't alienate my own ethical beliefs in what I want to do as an artist."