By Eugene Reznik

Oliver Ackermann makes Total Sonic Annihilation—the stompbox, that is. With a flick of his pick, strings vibrate sending a signal to the magnets of a humbucker pick-up. Then down a cable it goes, through the metal casing of a tin box, bouncing in and around a series of cleverly arranged resistors and capacitors, up a cable once more, and into an amp with the volume cranked. Out comes a screeching, amorphous sound, unleashing an all-out assault on those tiny bones in your ear, sending them into frantic vibration. Out comes tone so gut wrenching and dirty it might just make your stomach turn. It’s a face-melting, mind-blowing mess of noise, heaping with a mix of feedback, overdrive and fuzz with a vengeance, a thirst for bleeding eardrums.

Since 2002, he’s been fabricating stompboxes out of his industrial warehouse space in Williamsburg under the label Death By Audio—a name for the record label, performance venue and practice space for A Place To Bury Strangers, his three-piece band in which his effects get put to use. Through his electrical ingenuity and the performing prowess of his band, the group achieved some steady local popularity. In 2007, they earned the title, “New York City’s loudest band” from several online reviewers. In August of that year, they released their first full-length album, earning consistently favorable reviews from online music magazines and high acclaim from Pitchfork Media. This would mark the beginning of their national attention.

Their exploration of noise, feedback and textural music led them to be termed The Jesus and Mary Chain revivalist, or more broadly Post-Punk revivalists. Their resemblance to The Chain is fairly obvious, leading some to call their music heavily influenced, others, lightly sampled (note the chord progression in APTBS’s “I know I’ll See You” and The Chain’s 1985 “In a Hole”). So it’s fairly easy to plug Ackerman and APTBS into a lineage of independent artistry. On an aesthetic level, one may draw a line back to Punk and New Wave. Marked by the do-it-yourself ethic and the elusive aesthetic of DIY, APTBS’s what we would call “Indie” a few years ago, “Alternative” a decade back, and so on and so forth. On the ethical level, considering the idea and the attitude, their forerunners go much farther back.

Self-reliance—we can go all the way to Thoreau, even Emerson, but lets not. Every time Ackermann strums his guitar, he alludes to the man that gave Rock and Roll its instrument. His initiative in constructing Total Sonic Annihilation, in tailoring and crafting his own sound, reflects the same ambition that Les Paul exhibited in 1945 when he slapped a pickup and a fretboard on a strip of 4×4 lumber, thereby inventing the first solid-body electric guitar. Most of all, it mirrors the audacity implicit in first amplifying sound in such a sense. Les Paul rid the performer of old barriers and institutions, allowed his escape from the logistical and social confines of the academies, orchestras and concert halls. He gave power to the individual, freedom to perform, to play, and to play loud. In one aspect, he had a heavy hand in prefiguring the narrative of independence and originality in Rock music.

Now, whereas Les Paul’s initiative might be considered audacious because of what it meant to first amplify sound like this, what Ackermann does goes one step further. It’s subversive and dissociative, aesthetically, because of what it means to do what he does to the sound. He does not merely amplify the frequency emitted by the pluck of a string; he bends, tweaks, scrambles and destroys it. He makes noise; neither its melodic potential nor its tonal qualities are very apparent. As a result, he is forever in conversation with the culture of subversion that Les Paul’s audacity helped foster.

In the 25 years after Les Paul, came the LP and music finally became a “thing.” The industrial machine took hold and new institutions and barriers were erected. Corporate-run record labels put a premium on big stadiums, big album sales, and big profits, and so too on glossy, crystal clear and expensive recording. Thus was born, Arena Rock. Then, in the early-to-mid seventies, scores of artist and musicians swarmed the dirty, decrepit, and cheap land of Downtown New York, “a dark and dangerous place,” according to art critic Marvin J. Taylor, with a “spirit of insurgency.” He writes: they “rejected the marketplace of commercialized music and returned rock to its roots. Instead of large orchestral, overproduced theme-albums performed in massive stadiums, [they] stripped music down to basics…and played small local venues.” They were self-made, self-packaged, and self-promoted. Small clubs, lo-fi college radio and gritty, often caustic photocopied fan-zines were their equivalent to stadiums and mass media.

In 1974, Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell convinced the owner of a blues, country and bluegrass club, a “dank dive on the seedy Bowery,” to let their unrecorded band Television play. Punk Rock was born. Taylor writes, “CBGB’s deserves credit for what would become a permanent underground in the rock and roll field…later taking on the designation of ‘Indie Rock,’ never fully crossing over into the mainstream.” It is out of this tradition, the flock to vacant space, the independent, DIY ethic/aesthetic, the subversive character from which Ackermann and APTBS come out.

However you label the underground, it’s clear it had as much to do with the real estate market as anything else. A touch of subversion may have always been present in Rock music. Punk and New Wave and its offspring are different because they were fostered by concentrated urban communities of people embodying and emphasizing these attitudes toward business practice and artistry. Driven by sympathetic venues and receptive audiences of crusties, ruffians and some kids it just went from CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City to Market Hotel, Death By Audio and Sweatshop.

The revival movement that Ackerman represents coincided with a yuppified village, soaring rents, and ultimately the exodus of artists to the cheap, sprawling land of Williamsburg. New York Magazine referred to this on the cover of their November issue as “Brooklyn’s Sonic Boom.” Unfortunately they’re about half a decade too late. Land developers and speculators have been vigorously at work and today’s real estate market poses new changes, new problems, and new frontiers. Moreover, what we’re looking at now might just be “Williamsburg’s Sonic Glut”—a stale feed of delay-pedal Rock and over-hyped avant-pop. How cutting edge are the revivalists?

Since Les Paul, and since Television, with the arrival of the digital revolution, maintaining this DIYethic has become infinitely more accessible and far cheaper. In 1991, My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, the paradigm of shoegaze—a genre where you stare at your feet and churn out a wall of noise—cost nearly $500,000 to produce and almost drove their record label into bankruptcy. Ackerman sells Total Sonic Annihilation for $150 plus shipping and handling. Developments in recording equipment and software have given every musician the opportunity to produce near pro-quality recordings at a considerably low cost. The rise of the mp3 and peer-to-peer file sharing networks single-handedly revolutionized the entire music industry, vastly shifting distribution practices in favor of small artists and fans.

Eric Harvey, contributing writer for Pitchfork, says in his dissertation-length “Social History of the MP3,” “[MP3s] facilitated the rise of an enormous pirate infrastructure; ideologically separate from the established one, but feeding off its products, multiplying and distributing them freely without following the century-old rules of capitalist exchange.” He argues that “[As] individual pieces of recorded music made to flow through a network more quickly than their predecessors [MP3s] relied on independent music for the creation of an expansive new music market […] which put a serious dent in the existing major label market share.”

As a technological development, the mp3 empowered independent musicians like APTBS, satisfying and reinforcing their dissociative ethics, breaking significantly from the old model, corporate-driven record industry. This new digital music commerce has largely done away with the middlemen, between artist and fans, between expression and consumption. According to Fuller, the new networked model is “radically decentralized [and] has few barriers to entry.”

The promotional side has changed as well. The nature of mp3s makes them especially vulnerable to leaks, to be ripped from online storage accounts giving fans outside the industry “the privilege of hearing completed albums well in advance of their official release date.” This provided music fans with the “built-in capacity to double as promoter and distributor,” paving the way for countless new fan-critics to engage in conversations about music and encourage readers to consume music by instantly offering it up to them. From about 2003, hundreds of diverse music blogs sprouted up, often with more creative, sophisticated writing than that of many professionals. “Pitchfork’s own rise,” says Fuller, “coincided with the mp3 market glut.”

As the decade progressed, however, “the sheer number of mp3 blogs started to outpace the amount of writing and conversation about music.” According to Fuller, “Thousands of new blogs started up over the next few years, including those that mimicked gossip and news blogs by posting a dozen updates per day and selling ad space.” With the old, industrial model of music and advertising wasting away, PR firms “quickly developed strategies to repurpose them by exchanging access to pre-chosen tracks for free promotion. As a result, mp3 blogs have become one of the key examples of small-scale, curated promotional model.” As such, they had also had a hand in reestablishing, in part, the old profit driven model and subtly disempowering the independent artist once again.

Fuller says that as a direct result of the explosion of such “Indie Rock” blogs, by early 2005, coverage in major news outlets and music magazines surged and “led to that bane of every subculture: widespread exposure.” This explosion paved the way for major organizations like the Associated Press to issue articles like “Indie Rock Goes Mainstream…Almost” and make sweeping generalizations about the “Indie” culture based on a grossly unrepresentative “mainstream” fringe artists. AP claimed in 2005, observing bands such as Death Cab for Cutie and Bright Eyes, that, though once priding itself on being underground, today Indie Rock has no desire for cultural change, and is much more acceptant of the corporate world.

Though Fuller refrains from lamenting this outcome and crying for “what could have been”, he nevertheless mourns what he sees as the endangerment of music criticism and journalism. He claims that publishers and advertisers have lagged behind, leaving competent and talented writers “in the lurch”, and said, “We desperately need people to get paid to listen, discuss, contextualize and critique on a full time basis.” Perhaps this is a call for competition.

Matt Tyson, founder and editor-in-chief of EARFARM.com, a music blog with a bent for long-form journalism, is one of those competitors. From about 2006 on, Tyson said in an interview, “For better or worse, there have risen a good 10-15 indie music blogs that established themselves as ‘the voice’ of the entire music blog community.” Little has changed since then, because their popularity is derived not from content, but rather the common, traffic-related snowball effect, which “goes a long way towards explaining why the Indie ‘scene’ has been so stale and motionless the past few years.” Many of these blogs climbed to prominence with the help of “the old bait and switch technique”, building readership on celebrity gossip and then converting content to music.

Tyson said, “The junta of music bloggerati clings to their traffic, a behavior that’s caused many of them to forgo taking risks…bloggers have taken traffic numbers and let them go to their head, let the numbers drive the content.” He states, “There’s little independence left when all of the ‘top blogs’ are posting the same twenty songs, or artists, or press releases. In a way, they’ve become the same kind of machine they were seemingly raging against when they started blogging.”

The closest thing we have today to a “blog of record”, Tyson believes, is Pitchfork Media. And though he considers it to be “an essential modern music publication”, he still says that, “[They are] guilty of a bit of a bait and switch. The site started out showing off personality and uniqueness… and then they got too big for their own good and lost focus… that’s the nature of their becoming today’s RollingStone.” It is this kind of monotonous coverage, the singular voice that has had a detrimental fragmentary effect on the Indie Rock community. This type of behavior slowly reestablishes the old profit-driven model, infusing it under a mask of “independence,” and perhaps fosters and reaffirms coverage of the type found in the AP article.

Two years after they earned a coveted 8.4 from Pitchfork, APTBS signed to Mute Records, a subsidiary of EMI, one of the Big Four music labels. To the club musician, playing dingy dives for 20 people, most of whom showed up for the $2 Pabst and free tater tots, they were going to produce a major label release, and they were going to make a whole lot of money doing it. Exploding Head debuted on Oct. 6 and earned reviews far less favorable than expected. It appeared that they had lost some momentum, and lo and behold, this time Pitchfork put it best. Zack Kelly writes, “About halfway through Exploding Head you really start to forget why A Place to Bury Strangers sounded so exciting on their self-titled debut two years ago…[Exploding Head] doesn’t put up much of a fight…revealing it’s secrets too fast and too loose. It’s more than a little greedy.” Their once refreshing take on noise music and feedback had devolved into dull, repetitive and unimpressive drivel.

At one point, Indie Rock was not as much a genre label as it was a descriptor. Nothing about the word “Indie” actively invokes any type of image or sound to describe music. It describes music in terms of what it is not: not corporate, not mainstream, not establishment, not profit. Does APTBS still fit? Maybe not.

“Indie is dead. What’s next?” concludes Rachael Maddox in her epic February Paste Magazine article. Well, duh. Get with it, man, your “resounding 8000-word ‘yes’” is a little behind the times. Lets try keep in mind that language is inherently flawed and imprecise to express something so elusive as music, to represent that which is representation in itself. So beware of reductive epithets, of labels and numeric grading shrouded in a false air of scientific empiricism. What’s next? How about more than one word and more than one blog. Or, maybe less.