The independent Chicago tape label recreates the waning pleasure of finding a box of old stuff
Reviewed by Max McKenna
Dumpster Tapes has a broader reach in the Chicago music community than might be expected, given the boutique nature of what they do: that is, making cassette tapes to be sold on the DIY circuit. Specializing in garage rock—specifically, the music coming out of Chicago’s sizable garage rock scene—the local tape label has become a fixture at shows, thanks to both its eye-catching analog offerings and its tireless support for its scene. In a world where everybody checks “Interested” on every Facebook event, and, in the end, attends nothing, Dumpster Tapes remains on the ground, creating a kind of gravitational presence around the bands and shows it supports.
Part of that presence comes from the sheer amount of music Dumpster Tapes has managed to release. In just over four years, the label has put out, on average, nearly one cassette per month. That consistent output combined with the quality of the acts they release has paid off. On Monday, November 13, Dumpster Tapes hosted a four-act bill at the Empty Bottle as part of the Bottle’s recurring “Free Mondays” series, which doubled as a release party for their latest cassette (their 35th), the lovely four-song Gemini Moon by Chicago-based musician, Mia Joy. It was one of the busier rooms you might find on a Monday night in November.
Joy was supported by two other Chicago acts, Cupid Youth (whose own EP recently came out on Dumpster Tapes) and psychedelic rockers, Head; as well as Rosali, a singer-songwriter from Philadelphia. The acts covered the range of traditionally lo-fi genres that have always shadowed a more popular mode of alternative rock, itself shadowing mainstream rock: shoegaze, psychedelia, punk, dreampop—modes that come out of a domestic tinkering with the rudiments of pop songwriting and performance, be it in your bedroom, garage, or attic.
There’s little reason to be coy about your influences anymore; a lot of bands wear them on their sleeves. Cupid Youth, for example, is an excellent homage to Sarah Records–style dreampop; meanwhile, Mia Joy easily draws comparisons to Mazzy Star. The echoes feel intentional. What counts as innovation at this moment is less the cavalier model of the avant-garde and something more representational: a revisiting of the male-dominated indie music canon to open it up to women and people of color. (Mazzy Star, it should be noted, was fronted by Hope Sandoval, who, along with a couple other women artists in the 90s, was already working to expand alternative music communities in these lateral ways.)
But these bands aren’t throwbacks by any means; their songs feel very current. Take “10,000,” the lead track from Joy’s Gemini Moon. It’s a gradual washed-out crescendo, content with skirting pop song structure, instead stacking vocal harmonies and varying the melody with uplifting chord changes. Joy sings, “I should be doing 10,000 things but I’m not / I should be thinking 10,000 things but I’m not,” and over the course of three minutes, the burden of those 10,000 things lifts. The angst gives way to a cathartic refusal fitting for an age where our imaginations are so easily crowded by all the things we’re told we should be doing.
DIY music scenes are famously tight-knit. However, in recent years, those scenes have thrown up bands like Waxahatchee and Mitski that have been able to enjoy crossover success while maintaining their DIY ethos. Although it’s rare that you’ll hear an explicitly political DIY band, the DIY ethos is increasingly defined by progressive politics and efforts to increase representation in the music industry. “DIY,” here, is to be distinguished from “indie,” which is less a scene or even business model and more an aesthetic—much as it is with “craft” in beer. Moreover, many “indie” labels, like Matador or Merge, while not subsidiaries of the majors, have become significant players in the music industry and are no longer the scrappy operations they once were. They’ve become tastemakers in their own right as the line between “independent” or “alternative” music and mainstream pop blurs, exemplified so well in Chicago by the multimillion-dollar, corporate-sponsored Pitchfork Festival.
This is not to pit pop and “authentic” music against each other, which has long been the M.O. of music aficionados, and a stance that Kelefa Sanneh has rightly called “rockist.” There’s still some reckoning for critics to do on that front, but for artists and listeners, the loosening of rock’s stranglehold on “serious” music-making has made room for other identities. But there’s a familiar bigger-picture trend happening, too: money keeps getting concentrated in select pockets of the music industry at a time when digital audio and high speed Internet has made it possible for almost anybody to distribute music, their own or others’. What then, in this landscape, can a label accomplish—a label, no less, that specializes in archaic media?
For Dumpster Tapes cofounder, Ed McMenamin, it’s about community. “Labels can help solidify or bring together a scene,” he told me. “They introduce bands to each other who might not have already been friends, and they introduce listeners to bands they may not have already known.”
The spirit of forming open communities based on friendship is a mission critical to the politics of DIY and stands in contrast to the connoisseurship that long defined alternative music appreciation, where elite male-dominated clubs guarded their fandom at all costs. That Balkanizing of creative communities feels out of step with today’s crises.
It’s precisely as a catalyst for community building that Dumpster Tapes proposes the curious format of the cassette tape. It could be argued that, in the twenty-first century, tapes are antiquarian, creating a high barrier for appreciation: few people have cassette players anymore, whether at home or in their cars. While the label does not sell digital-only versions of its releases, it does offer a download code with a purchase of each tape (and sells tapes online via Bandcamp and Big Cartel). Nevertheless, the choice to sell physical things in an ephemeral market has an interesting effect. According to Alex Fryer, the other founder and owner of Dumpster Tapes, the presence of either herself or McMenamin (or often, both) at all of the shows they support allows them to sell a good number of tapes in person. There’s an undeniable aura about the materiality of tapes, too. “As tape and record collectors ourselves, we understand the sentimental value that comes with owning your favorite music on a physical format,” Fryer said. “It connects you to it in a different way.”
That connection plays out in a few different ways. There’s an immediacy to tapes, a gritty instantaneousness, like a Polaroid. Whereas small bands might wait more than six months to get vinyl LPs pressed, with tapes, it takes about four weeks tops to assemble the finished product. They’re cheaper, too, and much more portable than vinyl. The course of action that DIY proposes is not as rugged and individualistic as it might seem. Rather, DIY advocates for a way of working that’s steady, that makes filtering out the noise a priority, that’s democratic, and, finally, that’s joyful.
And finally—crucially—tapes are fun. “A tape reminds people of childhood,” McMenamin said. “There’s that element of play to it.” It’s true: for a generation in its twenties and thirties, tapes might have been our first musical purchases. They were a big part of being in the car, of listening to a Walkman, of making mixes, of the work that used to go into copying and sharing music. Dumpster Tapes recreates the waning pleasure of finding an old box of stuff and getting to share it with a friend. And while nostalgia seems like a mood antithetical to the progressivism of DIY, Dumpster Tapes isn’t merely trafficking in nostalgia. There’s a sense that the label is revising the blind spots of the past, going back to an earlier moment in music fandom to uncover new ways forward. Encountering their eclectic catalog is like one of those dreams where your home has an extra room you’ve never been in before—it’s a feeling of possibility that limbers up the imagination.
December 2017