A label that began in a kitchen, a cassette series and a six-day convention. How K Records turned Olympia, Washington into an indie scene with its own rules.
The Electric Eels played five shows in Cleveland, lost their last venue to a lawnmower, and became a legend through one Rough Trade single and decades of archival releases.
In 1965, the biggest song in Peru was about blowing up a train station. “Demolicion” was a national radio hit, its band had its own television show, and its four members were teenagers from a middle-class Lima neighborhood who had never heard the American garage bands they are now compared to. Outside Peru, almost nobody [&h
On November 2, 1989, a support band nobody outside Olympia, Washington had heard of opened for Tad at a club in Groningen, in the north of the Netherlands. About sixty people showed up. The band was Nirvana, two years before Nevermind, and the room they played had a legal capacity of five hundred. That gap, […]
Cosmic disco was never really a genre. It was a club on Lake Garda, a DJ who played records at the wrong speed, and a cassette network that carried the room far beyond its 700 capacity.
Montreal post-rock is usually explained as a sound. It is better explained as real estate: an Anglo exodus, a loft above a garage, 500 hand-glued LPs, and two venues opened by a bass player. How Mile End built the infrastructure first.
The story of the Monks is almost always told as a costume. Five American GIs stationed at Gelnhausen, two German design graduates, shaved tonsures, black habits, a manifesto. It is a great story and it is also the least interesting thing about the record they made. What produced Black Monk Time was not an art […]
The story sells itself, which is the first reason to distrust it. Five boys at St Gregory’s College in Obalende, Lagos, borrow instruments, get signed by EMI, and cut a psychedelic rock album while still in school uniform. Try and Love came out on EMI Nigeria in 1973, catalogue NEMI (LP) 0032, with a parallel […]
Sanremo Rock was born in 1987 in a separate building, with its own presenter and a satellite link back to the theatre. It took 31 years to get inside the Ariston.
Marseille has no Paris style club economy and a thriving electronic underground anyway. The reason is structural: a converted tobacco factory, a rap festival that adopted the machines, and collectives that double as political spaces.
