Sunday, September 18, 2016

IT GETS WEIRDER - Tape - Compilation - 2015


   Olympia, Washington. Love it or hate it. For whatever reason, it's a small town that brings up a lot of different emotions for people, but I've rarely met anyone who feels indifferent about the place. I myself have been on both sides of the wall at different points in my life. Once, I went there for a week just to lay on a couch while it rained.
    It's gotten a lot of attention in the past because of K Records or BIKINI KILL or whatever-the-fuck and now they're maybe getting a lot of attention because of G.L.O.S.S. or K Records or whatever the fuck. I've come around to liking the place again (and I have for years now) but I'm not about to pack my bags and move on up. I think it gets a bad rap, but imagine fighting to live your life in new and interesting ways while being somewhere small enough to see real, actual results. I'm not saying it's easy by any stretch of the imagination. I'm mostly telling you this convoluted shit to bring light to the fact of all of the hard work that my friend Meg and a lot of other hard workers do in Olympia. They helped to open the Interfaith Works Overnight Emergency Shelter, which is a shelter for people living on the streets of Olympia. I can't get into the details of the whole thing because I don't really know them. What I can tell you is that I went to a party at the shelter while a hardcore fest was happening 2 blocks away and all of the interactions I had there were so genuine, real and positive that I had to walk around the corner at least 5 times and just fucking cry. I know it's not like that all the time and I know it's a lot of hard work and I just wanted to point that out. Going back over to the fest felt like a step down, even though I would literally kill someone to relive that CCTV/BIG ZIT/VEXX show again.
   Also, I like eating tater tots at the Reef...a diner downtown that has burned down like 2 or 3 times.

   Oh yeah, there's music here. This tape was compiled by Sadie (G.L.O.S.S./DYKE DRAMA) and Joey (a true genius/madman who is responsible for most of the sick recordings you like from Oly) to showcase the myriad of punk shit coming out of the basements and dives of this small town. I love that this tape is truly all over the map of punk...it's not just hardcore or pop-punk, but those things are there too. I think my favorite discovery from this tape is DEFACEMAN, who I'd never heard before...just true fucked, chaotic, messy, brilliant beauty. I want to hear everything by them now. Other heavy hitters featured here are VEXX, GAG, G.L.O.S.S., BROKEN WATER, CC DUST and NASTI. The entire tape is worth your time though and provides a perfect glimpse at all the new shit going on there...or at least what was happening in 2015. Some of these bands have broken up already. Get into it.


I don't think this tape is available anymore. 
I took a long break from the blog for many reasons and one of them was archiving makes me feel weird now. That's all I'm gonna say about it, but I'll keep doing it for the time being.
If anyone in the Bay Area wants to give or sell me a functional cassette console, please get in touch. I had 4 break in one week.
Thanks to Alex Turner for digitizing this one. 

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh no - I love your archiving! Don't feel weird :)

Lucy said...

since when is "feeling weird" a bad thing?

Harvester said...

Good point.