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Expanding on the annual Press Play Fair at Pioneer Works, the

 column showcases independent publishers and record labels that radically build new creative infrastructures.

Dean Allen Spunt was driving in Hollywood in 2000 when a car pulling out of a gas station ran into him. After exchanging insurance information, the driver left; a paparazzo approached Spunt and asked if he knew who the driver was. He didn’t. It turned out to be a member of the Backstreet Boys. Spunt, who plays as one-half of the long-running LA noise rock duo No Age but was then a teenager, eventually received a small but impactful settlement. In 2001, the independent record label Post Present Medium was born.

Twenty years on, the universe of PPM is made up of artists that traverse the boundaries of genre. Its roster includes Behavior, a band with roots in powerviolence that now dabbles in experimental rock. Visual artist Otis Houston Jr. experiments with spoken word laid over smooth beats, like Gil Scott Heron crossed with Wesley Willis. Brontez Purnell, who came up playing in the electropunk outfit Gravy Train!!!!, put out the EP 

, his stylish take on white mod rock, itself an appropriation of countless Black rock progenitors. For Spunt, the throughline of PPM’s acts—many of which are based in L.A.—is passionate dedication to one’s artwork beyond audience or critical reception.

Before his serendipitous car accident, Spunt had already been considering starting a label. To him, it was a natural way of contributing to the punk scene he’d become part of—going to shows at storied venues around L.A., like the PCH Club and The Smell, a small, volunteer-run space known for esoteric, cross-genre shows. Spunt had always appreciated underground record labels and their region-specific contexts, pointing to SST in Long Beach, CA, and Dischord in Washington, D.C., as iconic punk labels that illuminated his path: “Dischord revolved around a scene of individuals, from multiple bands. I thought that was a cool way to be involved in that music world. They're supportive of the people, not necessarily based on the genre of music they were playing. SST was the same way.”

Spunt knew he wanted to channel a similar approach, though he admittedly had little idea what he was doing when he approached the Olympia, WA, political post-hardcore band The Intima, who he’d see at the PCH Club when they toured through town, and offered to release a 7-inch. That would become PPM’s first release, 

. He pressed 500 copies—a relatively big run for the label’s first release—and silkscreened the covers himself, though a sizing miscalculation made the first batch unusable. He sold a few dozen to record shops, saved a few for himself, and sent the remaining hundreds of copies to the band. Though putting out this first record wasn’t seamless, the instinctive, DIY process set the tone of PPM’s twenty-year run.

“Allowing things to happen, and allowing mistakes to just be part of it, has been eye-opening,” says Spunt, whose label’s name is meant to evoke forward-thinking sensibilities. For a while after putting out 

, Spunt shelved the label idea, until his former band, Wives, wanted to put out their own record. Wives’s self-titled EP became the second PPM release, with Spunt repurposing the messed up batch of The Intima covers.

Things have proceeded intuitively, more or less. The decision to work with a particular artist happens mostly organically, through relationships or recommendations from other label artists. “I'm lucky that people I'm working with now are prolific and they're making lots of music with different friends,” he says. “I’m able to focus on a DIY world of music that's spread out all through the country.”

Spunt first heard an unreleased CD by one of the label’s more recent artists, Otis Houston Jr., through his friend Jacob Robichaux, who works with Houston as a gallerist. Released in March 2020, the 15-song album plays like a freewheeling rap session. Houston’s poetic spoken word comes across as brilliant, spontaneous utterances, with lines like, “they want me to be dull, don't want me to use what's in my skull.” Over simple, pre-recorded 90s-hip hop style beats, Houston combines autobiographical fragments with uplifting incantations and blunt evaluations of social ills.

In May, PPM will release a limited edition lathe cut 7-inch with Houston, which will include a silkscreen by the artist. Though they're divergent in sound, Spunt likens the drive of Houston to that of a band like Behavior. If there's an ethos connecting all of PPM’s releases, that is it: “When people are working hard on a singular vision, and they're just obsessed with it,, that's what I'm drawn to.”

Scenes emerge out of necessity. We're just trying to do stuff in the midst of all of this collapse, to make sense of life.

Nicole-Antonia Spagnola, who has worked with PPM as part of the experimental punk bands P22 and Purity, calls the label an “open space” to articulate creative ideas, and appreciates the sense of community it has helped create. In November, she was part of PPM’s twentieth anniversary showcase at Zebulon in L.A. Bands and artists from the label’s past, present, and future—including the Texas band Chronopage, who will be putting out a record with PPM later this year—played sets over the course of two days. Spagnola said the show felt generative, bringing forth a sense of kinship and inspiration: “I feel like I'm motivated to respond to what's being produced in a positive way.”

The longevity of PPM is ultimately a testament to the web of friends and collaborators that have coalesced around the label over the years. “I owe credit to the integrity of the artists that I've been working with,” he says. He also praises the supportiveness of the artistic community he’s part of in LA, where friends have stepped in to help with mail orders when Spunt’s touring with No Age. “I feel very fond love and kinship for people out here and the support that everyone gives each other.”

Playing in bands for years has also taught him how to treat artists. For him it’s never been about numbers; to date, the label has put out 75 releases, a slow but sustainable pace. PPM may operate on a smaller scale, offering perhaps less financial support than larger labels, but it does offer creative support and a platform to reach more listeners.  “There's a sea of noise,” he explains. Labels can be a navigational tool; if you like or respect a label’s choices, it will likely lead you to peruse its other offerings. In the digital age when there is a glut of music available to stream, that is perhaps one of the most meaningful roles of labels today.

Though Post Present Medium has evolved from how it started, Spunt still connects to the desire to do things yourself. “Creating your own world is an important thing to remember, especially if you’re playing music or making art,” he says. “If you wait to get into those doors, you could be waiting forever, so it's important to just do what you do. And by any means necessary just make your art and go it alone if you have to. You’ll find people who are like-minded.”

Spagnola agrees. “Scenes emerge out of necessity. We're just trying to do stuff in the midst of all of this collapse, to make sense of life.” ♦

Press Play: Post Present Medium

In January 2021, Suzi Analogue tweeted an audio clip of a cassette tape recording she made when she was only ten years old. In the recording, young Suzi is excitedly talking about the future: “I’m trying to be a girl, I’m trying to grow up, I don’t need a boy bossing me around. I could be the next Ricki Lake. I could be an actress, talk show host, scientist, math… no, not mathematician. I HATE math!”

In her post, Suzi reflected on the recording lovingly. “Shout out to being 10 years old,” she wrote. “Shout out tape recorders. Shout out my bayang. Shout out to this girl who knew what she wanted in life.” It was a rare, endearing Twitter moment from the vocalist, producer, and label founder, who has been touring the globe and releasing records since the late 2000s. The tweet also spoke to a larger truth: Suzi Analogue has long used technology as a means of mapping out her dreams and building herself a new world.

A creative child early on, Suzi was born in Baltimore, and grew up singing gospel in church choir and performing in the theater. In the 90s, consumer-grade cassette recorders were plentiful and like many young people at the time, Suzi would write and record her own songs to cassette tape, an early engagement with technology that would foreshadow Suzi’s work today.

“It wasn't until recently I realized my obsession for putting things together and technology prob came from my dad's side of things,” she reflects on a Zoom call. “He was an engineer and I always downplayed his genetic contribution but I think that type of rationale had a lot to do with how I pieced the early ideas together. From my mom, I got a love and understanding of the culture, Black arts movement and poetry.”

While attending Temple University in Philadelphia, Suzi continued making beats and recording her own songs. In 2007, a Myspace message from emerging, sample-based producer Knxwledge—who was also living in Philly at the time—would spark a working relationship that challenged Suzi to expand her own individual sound while diving deep into the joys of collaboration.

“I was recording over Madlib beats and stuff and he was like, ‘this is dope, I want to link with you,’” Suzi recalled. She grew up in chat rooms, so she was used to making connections this way. “He was staying in Center City at the time and I just came over to jam one night and then he invited Ringgo [Ancheta, a.k.a. Mndsgn] over and it was just very organic. We were chatting with different producers from everywhere, and then devonwho chimed in, and we were like, let’s put it all together.”

What Suzi, Knxwledge, Mndsgn, and devonwho “put together” was Klipmode, a radical production collective who—alongside West Coast kindred spirits like Flying Lotus, Ras G, and Samiyam—formed a vanguard of Dilla-inspired hip hop producers whose sound would point to the future of electronic beats and sound. During their time together in the late aughts and early 2010s, the music that Klipmode and their peers made would lay the groundwork for the global instrumental hip hop movement that would eventually be branded and mass-distributed as “lo-fi.”

After collaborating with Klipmode, Suzi spent five years touring the world as a solo artist. Both experiences informed what she’d do next: building a platform for her own work as well as the like-minded creators that she crossed paths with. Founded in 2014, Suzi’s label Never Normal and its ancillary, Never Normal Soundsystem, has supported a diverse range of artists including RaFia, Queens D.Light, EZRAKH, and more. From JWORDS’s dreamy, synth-guided opus, 

, to Suzi’s own explorations of everything from footwork to ambient, the label has established a well-earned reputation for pushing electronic music into exciting and unpredictable places.

“Never Normal is about bringing together people from all sorts of backgrounds and not discriminating by placing these set-in-stone music industry standards on artists.”

Suzi describes Never Normal Soundsystem as “a decentralized collective of rotating members who are all Black technologists making music, visuals, and everything in between.” The concept of both the label and the broader collective grew out of her own industry experiences––looking back on the dates of Klipmode and asking herself, “

what was it that we needed then? Why did we need each other?”

With a desire to highlight and collaborate with friends and up-and-coming acts, Suzi embedded an open and egalitarian ethos into Never Normal’s core philosophy. The label not only provides a home for artists’ projects, she explains, but also seeks to shield them from the exploitative practices that are all too common in the music business.

“Never Normal is about bringing together people from all sorts of backgrounds and not discriminating by placing these set-in-stone music industry standards on artists,” she says. “Or expecting them to know everything, or taking advantage when they don’t know everything. So it’s about education as well. Never Normal is the label, that’s the business, distribution, the tapes, and merchandise, but the community is the Soundsystem. The Soundsystem is all of us coming together, making this wall of sound so that we can determine what we can do as Black artists to innovate change and transform experiences.”

Suzi had long been inspired by niche underground labels, but none of them “spoke to the quantum experience of Blackness and culture” that she and her peers lived everyday. “My goal from the start was to highlight innovators, especially Black and Brown,” she continues. “Sonically, everyone who is a part of Never Normal makes electronic-based music, but for some reason people don't want to recognize hip-hop as electronic music too. It always has been, so Never Normal gives space for us with that know-how to navigate our styles and releases.”

In 2015, Suzi traveled to Kampala, Uganda, as part of Next Level, a hip hop cultural diplomacy initiative sponsored by the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Suzi lived in Kampala and taught beat-making workshops that allowed her to tap into the creative potential of Uganda’s blossoming hip hop scene. Upon arriving in Uganda, Suzi was determined to bring some of U.S. beat culture to her students, showing them that they could perform electronics live like Low End Theory in L.A. or the Beat Society in Philly.

“I led a class of like 20 young dudes,” she says, laughing. “I went there with the mindset that I’m going to put them on to what’s good. I tried to show them that you don’t have to be a studio producer. Back then, everybody’s concept was like, a producer just stays in the studio and you just work by yourself and you’re not collaborative and you don’t play out. I showed them that you can perform your own productions out and can have fun with it.”

When Suzi left Uganda, she maintained ties with many of the artists she had met there, establishing a firm foundation for when she returned in 2019 for a residency that would eventually lead to 

(roughly translated as “It bangs/it slaps” in Luganda). This compilation was created in collaboration with ANTI-MASS, a collective made up of the artists Authentically Plastic, Turkana and Nsasi that stage multidisciplinary, queer, feminist happenings in Uganda. With ANTI-MASS, Suzi hopes to create a lasting connection between Black artists in the West and on the African continent.

“Uganda has one of the largest youth populations in the world so there’s just a freshness and a pulse there,” she says. “I went back and lived in Kampala for a month and met other producers and DJs. From those people, Authentically Plastic and I really kept in touch over the last few years. During the pandemic they came to me and asked about collaborating with artists in Never Normal Soundsystem. I thought that was a wonderful idea because now we’re really creating a bridge between the continent and the diaspora.”

The music that Never Normal and ANTI-MASS have made together is a dynamic mixture of electronic sounds that are teeming with the power of the global Black musical experience. The first two singles from 

 are “Make It Shake,” a collaboration between Turkana, Suzi, and Oakland rapper Queens D. Light, and “Desserts,” which brings together US producer Safiyahh and Ugandan musician Nsasi. Both tracks combine house, footwork and East African rhythms into a holistic sound that is rooted in our shared experiences and socio-political conditions. When asked about 

, Suzi gets to the heart of the project’s purpose. The sound and the technology behind it are key, but it is ANTI-MASS and Never Normal’s approach to collaboration that opens up a new space for Black liberation:

"We’d meet in the midst of the night with the music thumping and smoke in the air. That’s where we would meet to free ourselves.”

“It was important for us to share sounds from our environment and cultures. It really is the story of the African diaspora. Y’all are over there struggling and we’re over here struggling too. We had riots and protests about our presidency and they had them too. Where would we meet now? We’d meet in the midst of the night with the music thumping and smoke in the air. That’s where we would meet to free ourselves.” ♦

Press Play: Never Normal Records

After years of Myspace-era punk touring and self-booked four-band bills, Scottie McNiece was feeling burnt out. Tired of pop punk monoculture, when he stumbled into Chicago’s jazz-adjacent improvised music scenes, he was engrossed by the level of craft he heard. “It was the punkest thing I'd ever seen,” he recalls. “These people are doing this incredibly difficult music, and they're so dedicated to it that they don't give a fuck what you think. I was very drawn to that.” The shows were life-affirming, but when he looked around, it was often just him and a few middle-aged men in attendance. “My instinct was, I need to get more people here,” he says. “There’s this whole world of people out there who want to hear new things, and are looking for new things. But people need entry points that are appealing.”

That has since become a mission statement of sorts for the label he co-operates, International Anthem, one of most compelling hubs for jazz and improvised music in recent years. The label itself prefers a more open-ended definition, calling itself a “recording company that produces and promotes progressive media.” Since 2014, it has released celebrated work by free jazz drummer and beat experimenter Makaya McCraven, the avant-garde and confrontational trumpeter jaimie branch, spiritual jazz clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid, and improvising protest collective Irreversible Entanglements, to name a few. The label specifically aims to expand audiences for its constellation of artists, helping bring new, uncompromising sounds to uninitiated listeners.

International Anthem is an intriguing case study in the value of an independent record label in the year 2021—in the role that labels can still play in connecting dots between scenes, framing new music in ways that draw listeners into the work, and rooting new music in a sense of place at a time when music discovery feels increasingly placeless. It’s a testament to the way the label grew out of physical show spaces. Years before its first release, McNiece was bartending, and he began running a series at the restaurant where he worked. The owner was willing to give him $300/week as a guarantee to the musicians. He didn’t have any trouble booking out the calendar. At the time, in the Chicago improvised music scene, that was a good gig. (“Unfortunately,” he clarifies.)