Hey everyone. This is a free edition of Heathen Disco, which I like to get out there now and again so that all of you can enjoy it, and hopefully be enticed to read the issues that aren’t, now and through the archives on the site (https://heathendis.co).

There are plenty of reasons why one would want to avoid our present day, and likely a near future when we’ll wish we had it as good as we do on this unassuming St. Patrick’s Day. Four records below speak to elements of the past; one looks back to more recent times that feel like a lifetime ago, one plays fast and loose with times in which the performers did not inhabit, one manipulates an earlier work by the artist into a context that is modern in concept, and one threatens to unwind time itself through degrading repetition. The fifth spot is left intentionally blank for all that’s happening.

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On with it…

VARIOUS ARTISTS Red Xerox LP (NEW NOW/Desert Island Recordings)

The mood around young bands in Chicago has been celebratory, and Red Xerox, a compilation assembled by hallogallo lynchpin Eli Schmitt, feels like a yearbook in a lot of ways. In the span of about six years, we saw their scene grow first regionally, then nationally, young people supporting one another’s efforts in expression through music, be it playing in bands, writing, booking shows for the all-ages set, college and high school radio stations and the like, the way bored generations made these things happen before the Internet took over. Given that none of this is new, this spirit of togetherness was the catalyst to foster an autonomy among those who saw the barriers of entry fall down, some of the most productive peer pressure I’ve ever witnessed. From 2019-2021 or so, hard yards by any societal metric, these youngsters put their heads down and used the time to woodshed their bands into something ready to roll once the restrictions lifted, and those groups who were there when this all began – Horsegirl, Lifeguard, Post Office Winter, Friko – have since multiplied here and beyond, touring and spreading the word and welcoming bands to come out to Chicago and make something. Red Xerox blends early tracks, demos and some re-released stuff by the abovementioned, as well as two more of Kai Slater’s projects (Sharp Pins and Dwaal Troupe), the uniformly great Uniflora, TV Buddha in a nascent garage zone, Current Union TM (this scene’s representative of no-waveish dubby postpunk, like The Eternals Jr.), and a bunch of acts that take the quieter, folkier route. You’ll hear influences that are proudly intact and possibly instilled by parents, aunts, uncles and teachers whose past is now their present, but within all that there’s something that can’t be taught: a sincere excitement at the ability to create something meaningful as a direct result of societal contact, support, goodwill and memory. I don’t need to tell you how much completely dead music there is out there, and the bitterness that wells up behind people who didn’t have the luxury of growing up around bands and shows. They’ll gladly show you who they are. But anyone involved with this knows themselves better for making a community around one another.

DIE KNÖPFE DEMO TAPE CS (self-released)

Here’s further evidence that we’re looking gloriously behind us: student-style Berlin residents deciding it’s their turn to run, with Gudrun Gut-style vamp vocals fighting with at least two synths, guitar and rhythm section in a way that marries a mid-late ‘90s garage/proto-wavo goth femme glow-up (Subtonix, Slant 6, Glass Candy and the Shattered Theatre, The Vanishing) with the anarchic antiquity of NDW bands from 40 years back (in turn touched by the cabaret of it all). They call it “pillow punk” but it sounds like people who lived in the shadow of the church and shook the parish pipe organ til the snuff box fell out. Sounds casually driven and confident, but also careful in ways that rules for living inspire, and assembled with more than a little grit. There’s so much talk these days about the end of things, that people are going back to things like physical media and trying to make sense of a world that ran on these discarded and secondhand artifacts of how things used to be, but let’s face it: people want things that they can see and feel and hold, and there’s so many things you can do that with. It’s not a graveyard, not a museum, it’s a re-engagement with other ways of doing things, and Die Knöpfe’s music plays as if it was made to live in and with that mindset.

PAPERCLIP MINIMISER II LP (Peak Oil)

In another nod to what can be done about the past, UK producer John Howes relegates the sparse releases of his Paperclip Minimiser project within the reach of things that can still be found from about 15 years or so prior to the release date. His first full-length for Peak Oil relied on the kind of gear one might rely upon in 2006, a grayed-out animist brought to elastic life on the WMP Visualizer feature. For this round, it’s dug-out unreleased recordings he made in 2011 from the outboard gear and memory cards used to make it, using the sounds engineered for that effort to build something new. Forcing oneself to reconcile with the past in such a manner, be it through artifice or methodology or whatever, extends one’s life, resuscitating what would have been a potentially hard lesson or a stumbling block into an alternate timeline where we didn’t see a commercialized mystery or some sort of hyperstylized urban nightscape we could project our digital selves upon. Methodwise you can sense reliances on older tech (a la Christoph De Babalon or Bogdan Raczynski), but freed from the notion of an environmental imperative to this music, he can simply let the wobble be the wobble (“II B1”), he can let the wind be the wind (“II B4”), he can grid-block the beats and underline the organization and space between them while the synths and whooshes are given the dubular purpose they were meant to have, and do so without thinking you need the overdone, twitchy accoutrements of something like Burial to mean something. Imagine that sort of Hyperdub action but not jammed up with the pressures of the self and the now, because the now is soon gonna become the then, and what you did in that moment is what we remember. Howes ultimately gets the better of his past, while others can only sit with what they did.

DAGMAR ZUNIGA In Filth Your Mystery Is Kingdom / Far Smile in Peasant Music LP (AD 93)

Here’s a past-present-past, a wider release of a 2025 cassette that takes time completely out of the picture. Like early Grouper, Dagmar Zuniga has created levels of engagement that determine how closely you listen, to where version control loses its purpose; the opening track “Even God Gets Stuck In Devotion” returns only a few songs later, in a different milieu with a different duo, and this is the bread between two other modulations on another remarkably similar pair, one titled “Plenty for All the Masses” and the next “Plenty (For All of Life’s Messes).” This conceit fades as the album goes on, but provides such a complete reset amid such careful, faded, textural songcraft that it’s as if the music becomes unstuck in time, corraling your attention and pulling you towards the fragile chamber of Zuniga’s vision. In under nine minutes you’ve been threaded in, and that the record actually does move along, but how it moves, as with the stalled progress of one-hand-tied-behind-one’s-back Stereolab mod-isms on “Photography the Hard Way,” the patient rhythm ace march of “Her Master’s Voice,” and the cold spot melancholy of “Why I Remember (Each Day of Summer)” reveal that the trap was set all along. Far from mere nostalgia, this record locks you into an anaerobic chamber of antiquity where movement is impossible, and if you choose the beauty of restraint, you won’t want to leave here.

A GLAMOROUS DUSK awaits you — DM