A New Wave

by Mark Yarm

“Some of your friends are probably already this fucked,” concluded the late Steve Albini in the classic Baffler essay “The Problem With Music,” by whom he meant musicians trapped in the predatory clutches of the major label system. A second pillar of early-’90s DIY music writing is more solution-oriented: a how-to pamphlet, published by Arlington, Virginia’s Simple Machines record label, that eventually came to be titled An Introductory Mechanics Guide to Putting Out Records, Cassettes and CDs. Over the years, an untold number of independent musicians looking to put out a 7-inch or launch a label of their own have made use of this free resource.

The Mechanics Guide, as it’s known for short, is largely the work of Jenny Toomey and Kristin Thomson, onetime housemates who ran Simple Machines and founded the indie rock group Tsunami, whose original run was from 1990 to 1998, and whose sound rock critic Joe Gross describes in the liner notes of a new career-spanning box set as “the music of a sunny day partially obscured by stratocumulus.” Tsunami released that box set, called Loud Is As, on the Numero Group label last month, and in the spring, the band will embark on a co-headlining tour with similarly reunited indie rockers Ida.

And you can expect more writing from Toomey, a founder of the Future of Music Coalition and, until just recently, the director of the Ford Foundation Catalyst Fund. She says she’s at work on a book “about what punk can teach you about taking on really big problems and wondering why the people who were best positioned to constrain the power of unregulated tech didn’t think they were capable of doing that.”  

I recently spoke with Toomey and Thomson about assembling Loud Is As, navigating the ’90s music scene, and planning their upcoming live shows. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

What prompted you to put together the new Tsunami box set?

Thomson: We’ve been communicating with Numero Group for a number of years. [Numero cofounder] Ken Shipley received The Mechanics Guide when he was a young fella. He had a label called Tree Records way back in the nineties.

Toomey: It feels like a full circle moment. [Grassroots activist group] Positive Force did the first guide to putting out records as part of [Dischord Records’] State of the Union compilation. When we realized we were gonna be featured in Sassy magazine, friends let us know we should expect bags and bags of enthusiastic letters from young girls. We didn’t want to blow those girls off, but we also didn’t have time to answer every single question they might have about running a record label. So Kristin and I updated the guide then so that, for two stamps, we could send that information out to everyone. It feels really nice to think that Ken used that guide to start on his record label journey.

When you went back through the archives to put this box set together, was there anything you found that blew your mind?

Thomson: We found so many things, like our faxes to Lollapalooza headquarters, trying to convince them that there should be a record shop on site at Lollapalooza shows.

Did those faxes work?

Thomson: For a few shows.

Toomey: We thought, Let’s have all the cool, independent music there, and let’s let people have access to it. Of course, what we didn’t realize was three things: One, records melt. Two, nobody wants to carry an album around when they’re in the pit. And three, most of the people going to Lollapalooza don’t give a shit about independent music.

What was that experience of playing on the side stage at Lollapalooza like? This is 1993, with headliners like Alice in Chains and Tool and Primus.

Toomey: Being on Lollapalooza was actually a little divisive. Anything that Tsunami did that touched the Man in any way was polarizing for a period of time. In most places, we were cordoned off in our own separate areas. But getting to see Thurston Moore and [Free Kitten’s] Kim Gordon and Julia Cafritz, and Sebadoh, play every day was awesome.

The other funny thing we did was we would run around and interview people in the audience. So I have cassette tapes of us saying, “Hey, why are you at Lollapalooza?” And people saying, “We’re here to get fucked up!” or whatever. The funniest thing was there’d be people who were wearing a Sonic Youth T-shirt and they’d be rushing to the front of the main stage just to watch Tools’ guitars get tuned—while Thurston Moore was playing on the side stage at the same moment.

Listening to the box set, “Enter Misguided,” which is about the corporatization of the underground music scene, really stood out to me. You were a young band when Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” changed everything. Did the major labels come a-courtin’ for Tsunami?

Toomey: There was a little bit of interest in us in the early days, but we never were interested. I don’t know that we even took a meeting. Our holy grail was to work with Southern [Records], because Southern were the backend for Dischord and Touch and Go.

Thomson: Once in a while we would visit a mid-sized label—meaning just pop by their office because a friend was signed to them or whatever. It felt much more corporate. It was usually, like, there’s records on the wall and people have desk phones. It was an environment that you knew existed, but it just wasn’t our vibe at all. You know, we were pretty scrappy and running in the basement.

Tsunami recorded at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio studio. Given his recent passing, what are your memories of him?

Toomey: When we recorded The Heart’s Tremolo, Steve gave me and Andrew [Webster of Tsunami] his bed, and he went and slept at his girlfriend’s house. He was just insanely generous. He was insanely opinionated, and I miss his voice so much right now because of the confidence and the arrogance of his belief in his positions, particularly when it turned more towards punching up. You know, there was a kind of a punching down that was part of zine culture, and he grew out of it. I wish I could read his tweets right now about what’s happening in the world, because they made you feel a little bit less alone, like there were really powerful brains on our side.

Thomson: We got to play the [UK’s] Phoenix Festival in ’94, and [Albini’s band] Shellac was playing the same show. And they had this very questionable bungee jumping setup where for like 15 quid they would take you up in the cherry picker and you could jump off of it. It wasn’t hard to get Steve up there. I have photos of him in a harness—he was very skinny—just jumping off. He was super-brave.

Toomey: Even funnier, they weren’t drinking, I guess. So they traded their whole rider, like a huge case of beer, to the people who were in charge of this death-waiting-to-happen machine. They were just like, “How many jumps can we get for this case of beer?” Like, “Let’s get them more drunk while they’re managing people jumping with a rubber band tied around their waists!”

One of your better-known songs is “Punk Means Cuddle,” which features the lyrics “You think punk means asshole/I know punk means cuddle.” What does that song mean to you today?

Thomson: I think the punk scene is nicer now than it used to be. But I’m on the periphery of things usually. And I’m talking about the actual physical periphery. Like, “Look at the kids in the pit. I’m going to stand over here.” There’s always the feeling of “Whose mom’s here?” But it feels a little kinder. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m not going to the right shows.

Toomey: “Punk Means Cuddle” was a reaction to shit punk guys, who were rampant in the scene back then. To what Kristin was saying, people have gotten nicer. There was this kind of incredibly aggro, “I’m hard, fuck that bitch” kind of music and that kind of stance that legitimized it. It was “That’s hard, that’s real punk.” It’s a lot harder to be nice than it is to be dicky.

But also it was just a super-silly song. We wrote it in five seconds, and it was largely just about those people behaving badly. I think we basically came home, and there were some mean messages because they hadn’t gotten their mail order quickly enough. And we’re just like, “Come on, guys. We’re not Sony. It’s gonna get to you.”

You’re doing a tour with Ida in the spring. Do you think it’s going to be like old times? Or will you do things a little bit differently in 2025?

Toomey: Do we even remember what touring’s like?

Thomson: We were pretty austere, and relying on friends and things like that: “Hey, can we stay at your place?” And now that we’re all 30 years older, we want to make sure we don’t default to that, because it wouldn’t work. I don’t think we could be on tour for that long and not stay in hotel rooms.

But we also are planning all kinds of fun things, and it’s a chance for us to connect with friends in all sorts of different cities that we’ve known for 30 years that can maybe pop onto stage and do something at a particular show. We’re doing this coin flip thing. So who headlines every night will be determined on stage at the beginning of the show.

Toomey: It feels like Old Home Week a little bit. It is sad to do this at a moment where the country is sad. Because it feels tone deaf to to feel joyful at a moment where there’s such precarity for people in the world. But that’s a kind of schizophrenia that I think we need to learn to live with and so, within reason, expect us to be insanely joyful—and sad.