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.

Just behind the door is a long, concrete hallway; the main passageway and backbone of the Sweatshop. No, this is not that kind of sweatshop. This Sweatshop is one of Williamsburg’s most coveted secrets, considering the growing music scene in the neighborhood. This Sweatshop is a music practice space. For nearly seven years, the Sweatshop has provided the musical communities of New York with a cheaper, more convenient practice alternative. And you cannot have music if you do not have space to practice, making the Sweatshop one of the vital organs in New York music.

“Run by musicians, for musicians,” said Rob Alfonso, one of the three owners and managers of the Sweatshop. “That’s our motto.” Alfonso and co-owner Z Jadwick initially played in a local band together, but the band broke up in 2001. Consequently, that was how the Sweatshop started.

The space was originally a monthly room rental and was primarily filled with bands looking for private practice space. Whenever a band moved out, Alfonso and Jadwick would try to help the landlord by taking the space and renting it out to friends’ bands. “It wasn’t originally a business model,” said Jadwick. “But it was a basement. What else were we going to do besides play music down here?”

“It kept growing on its own,” said Alfonso. Once they had access to all of the rooms, opening it as a business seemed like the next logical step. As for the name, the musicians shared the building with an industrial clothing factory until early in the business’ inception.

The band has long been broken up, but Alfonso and Jadwick have remained behind with the space. Although, not too far behind. Alfonso and his wife, Vanessa Dobre, also co-owner and manager, now live in Rockaway, and Jadwick currently lives in New Jersey. “He’s actually closer to here by driving,” said Alfonso, following with a deep laugh.

The business is no longer about providing a practice space for their friends. Since 2003, the owners have focused on providing their customers with a place they can appreciate. Looking at the Sweatshop’s busy evening and weekend schedules, literally a half dozen giant calendars on the office wall, it seems like they have accomplished their goal.

“The equipment is good quality, and that’s key,” said Mark Kirby, a drummer from just a few blocks away who has been using the Sweatshop since it opened. “They always change the drum heads, which a lot of places don’t do.”

The Sweatshop’s most intriguing quality for its customers might be the great range in price. The cheapest room costs only $15 an hour and fits a four-piece band comfortably, while still providing two guitar amps, a bass amp, a drum set, and a PA. Most of the rooms cost $20 an hour and are a little larger. The owners even let individual drummers practice at the discounted price of $12 an hour.

The main attraction, though, is the $35 showcase room. Atop a small, lit stage sits a Yamaha drum set, decorated by the Sweatshop logo on the bass drum, with three guitar amps and a four-foot tall bass amp. At the foot of the stage is a small lounge area with two broken-in couches. “We throw some parties in hear,” said Alfonso, casually reclined next to Jadwick on one of the couches. “This couch comes out and the bar comes in.”

“The showcase room is the coolest room,” said Melissa Labbadia, a singer for her band L2. “It’s big and it has the stage setup.” Melissa and her sister Jessica Labbadia, also a lead singer, practice at the Sweatshop with their band at least three times before every gig. “It’s kind of gritty, which gets you in the rock mood,” said Melissa.

“The walls are covered with bands’ advertising and you can hear the other bands practicing,” said Jessica. “It gets your ready to practice.”

“And the name is very appropriate,” added Rich Labbadia, the sisters’ father and manager. “There’s no air conditioning or anything.” Alfonso has even lent his guitar playing to L2 as a member of the band, who describe their sound as pop-rock with an edge. “It’s a very comfortable setting,” said Rich.

“The couches are really comfy,” added AJ Javier, another guitar player, sporting a baby blue fender strat, who has played with L2 in the past. “The half stacks for guitar are top of the line, but it does take some fiddling to get your settings.”

“This place has open and warm owners,” said Tom Gehlhaus, who has worked for the Sweatshop for two-and-a-half years. Gehlhaus, who is also a drummer, was born in Queens but grew up in Florida. Now he lives in Flatbush in the Bronx. “It’s really great because there’s practice time available,” said Gehlhaus, who met his current band while they were practicing in the Sweatshop.

“We support their careers as drummers,” said Alfonso. The other two regular employees also play drums and frequently take breaks to go on tour. “We want to give them freedom to be a musician.”

The impact of the Sweatshop is starting to be felt outside of the Williamsburg community. Popular bands that frequently practice there include I Am the Avalanche, The Queen V, Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and The Smashup. Jason Bittner, drummer of Shadows Fall, even filmed an instructional drum video in one of the Sweatshop’s practice rooms.

As the Sweatshop’s influence grows, the neighborhood remains unaware of the musical community brimming literally underneath their feet. “I live upstairs, and there’s no noise,” said the manager of San Marco Pizzeria, who would only give his name as Sal Pizza. The pizzeria sits just around the corner, and the employees appreciate the business the musicians bring. “They come in all the time. They even hosted a show this past summer for the neighborhood. It was great.”

A music practice space would seemingly by trouble with the neighbors, but the Sweatshop has received almost no noise complaints. “Most people in the neighborhood don’t even know we’re here,” said Jadwick.

As the Sweatshop gains notoriety, the owners look to start supporting the local music scene in other ways. Dobre listed numerous concerts and music programs that the Sweatshop sponsors, including Gotham Rocks and BEA Rock Camp, a Brooklyn camp for young musicians.

The owners all hope to adapt the Sweatshop to provide for the changing world of music. “We’re always trying to implement new ideas,” said Alfonso. “We want to add an audio-visual aspect. We want you to be able to shoot a video and get it edited right here.”

For now, they remain happy with providing their clients with a quality experience. “We rock the block,” said Dobre.

Now is an especially good time to check out the Sweatshop. They’re giving a ten percent discount to anyone with a valid NYU ID for the month of February. You can learn more about the place by checking out their website, thesweatshopnyc.com.