Avoid big labels / Mistrust France

Today: Mark Yarm, author of Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge and contributor to Long Lead's Depth Perception; and Jídé Salawu, writer and editor at Olongo Africa.

Issue No. 218

New Wave
Mark Yarm

The Last Kick of a Dying Horse
Jídé Salawu

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.