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Making a Scene: Musicians Breathe Life into Ithaca’s Underground

Published by Natasha August 15th, 2007 in Local, Music, Interview.

Check out our nice arts feature by Rebecca Lerner on the growing Ithaca underground and new music scene. She really covers all the bases — punk, experimental, indie and DIY scenes are all given a voice. Here’s the article as it appears in this week’s Ithaca Times:

Sweaty from the lack of air conditioning inside No Radio Records, the crowd spilled onto the Seneca Street sidewalk. It was a quick set break during a punk show, and dozens of black-clad, tattooed and pierced under-30-year-olds were eager for some fresh air. Wearing too-tight pants and Converse sneakers, they sipped on water bottles and traded stories about their favorite upstate New York bands.

If this were Binghamton, Syracuse, or most other college towns across the country, the Monday night scene would have been a pretty common sight. Not so in this city, home of hemp clothing, folk music and chilled-out singer-songwriters. Phillip Price is one of four Ithacans working to change that.

“Ithaca, as far as this music goes, is not where it should be,'’ said Price, a punk promoter best known around town for working at Volume Records on The Commons. “But I think punk is more than applicable for this area. It’s innovative, it’s fresh, it’s always creative, and 80 percent of the time it’s angry, fast and loud. Which is something young people really need. There’s a lot of kids who don’t feel like they fit in.”

The 19-year-old music philosophy major from Binghamton has thrown two other shows this year. But the Attica! Attica! headlined event, held last Monday, was the first time he put the phrase “punk show!” on the promo flyers. No less than 70 people showed up, packing the small record shop shoulder-to-shoulder and staying for hours despite the smelly, sticky conditions.

Bob Proehl, the 28-year-old owner of No Radio Records, sees a hungry audience primed to support an underground music community, one held together by a common desire for innovative, youth-driven alternatives to the mainstream. He’s lending out free space in his store to make it happen, even though he knows it’s a monetary risk: Shelves are likely to get smashed, merchandise could get stolen. He thinks it’s worth it.

“I’m interested in community-building,'’ said Proehl, who grew up in Buffalo, a place with a dearth of all-ages venues. “Record stores, for me, have always been community spaces.”

The shop is decorated with colorful paintings of apples, weird metallic sculptures, and deep red walls. In the front, there’s a lone futon surrounded by some cushy chairs. In the back, near the bathroom, there’s an empty space large enough to serve as a makeshift stage.

“For awhile I’ve been worried that there was not a sort of a next generation of Ithaca bands, and that would be really, really bad,'’ Proehl said. “That’s when a scene becomes complacent — when the scene itself is not open to an influx of novelty, to something new happening. And those folks have to start somewhere. If somebody local comes to me and says, ‘I want to do a show, I’ve never really played before, and I have like 20 minutes of stuff,’ I’m going to be open to that because there aren’t many places for those folks to go. Castaways is going to very rightfully turn folks away because they’re a (for-profit) venue. I’m not. I don’t touch any of the money that’s made at shows.”

The record-store-as-concert-hall offers yet another bonus: With no alcohol, there’s no legal incentive to resist opening the doors to young fans. That’s in contrast to many clubs and bars in the area, which have to worry about hefty fines if underage drinkers somehow get a hold of booze. And since those venues often use bands as a way to bring crowds to the lucrative liquor, they usually can’t afford to take risks on up-and-coming artists who don’t have an established fan base.

Those challenges are part of what sets an alternative music community apart from the mainstream, even in a place like Ithaca, where the mainstream is considered by many to be pretty counterculture. Cornell University graduate student Aaron Tate, for example, is heading up a collective music-as-conceptual-art effort called Ithaca Experimental that has little chance of — and little interest in — being commercially viable.

“We could charge $5 at the event, but for me it’s a conscious decision to make these events free because the goal is interaction, the goal is community, the goal is sharing ideas. No one makes any money, and to be honest, we probably lose a little money and time promoting the show. But the idea is that if you come out to listen, we will try to provide the highest quality sonic experience that we can. If you come out, we will create an event and it will be different every time,” Tate said.

Without financial incentives to drive things forward, the energy of grassroots promoters and community support are vital to sustaining efforts like his.

“You have to be actively participating in it. It sounds weird for people to think, ‘It’s my duty to go to this show,’ but in fact it is,'’ Proehl said. “If everybody shrugs and just doesn’t come out, a channel goes dead and the next show might not be there.'’

There was once an active channel in Ithaca. The now-defunct C-Spot Gallery and WowNet Cafe both hosted local bands in the early 2000s. And the Ithaca Show Syndicate — made up of Aaron Scott of Attica! Attica! and Marathon, Cornell alumn Dave Rand of Robot Goes Here, and former city resident Heidi Waye — brought innovative bands to the masses around the same time.

“All the bands that they were affiliated with stopped coming here because there was no one left to coordinate. When I moved here, my idea was to help regenerate that,'’ Price said.

Like Price, 27-year-old Jayme Lee Peck is trying to help rebuild the network. The GreenStar deli worker and IT whiz launched IthacaUnderground.com earlier this year after moving here from Plattsburgh and finding, to his surprise, that the city had a huge hole where he expected a scene to be.

“I had listened to bands such as I Farm who were from Ithaca, so automatically I thought Ithaca must have an awesome punk scene — you know, shows in basements or churches, touring bands coming through. But when I got here, I couldn’t even find a flyer,'’ Peck said.

His Web site is designed to help would-be band members find each other and give promoters a place to advertise shows, not unlike the popular social networking site MySpace. Peck’s project grew out of the do-it-yourself punk ethic he saw as a college student in Plattsburgh.

“My friends were putting on shows themselves, wherever they could: ice cream shops, churches, basements, wherever. They rented out a house one town over in Morrisonville and continued to set up shows with all different kinds of bands — punk, hardcore, grind, avant garde, hip-hop, metal, dance, local or on tour from out of town/country,'’ Peck said. “All the while my friends down in Long Island were doing the same exact thing, so I got to see it from two different angles. It was all surrounded around the idea of do-it-yourself, highly emotional and political underground music.”

Inspired to do the same thing here, Peck convinced his Ithaca landlord to let him clean up a languishing slaughterhouse on the property and turn it into a show space with a bike shop attached. He named it the Abattoir. It’s a small room, but Peck thinks that’s a good thing. “It gives a real sense of togetherness, which is one of the things I’ve always loved about DIY punk — and for me punk is more about the ethic than the aesthetic, so music based on that ethic is still punk, no matter what it sounds like,'’ he said. He’s organized two shows there so far, and he’s hoping the fall will bring more.

“Punk rock doesn’t have to be a four-piece of white dudes, drums, bass, guitars,'’ said vocalist Laura Fidler of The New Dress, one of the bands that performed at No Radio Records recently. “Punk has wide appeal. Ithaca hasn’t benefited from it yet.”

Indeed, the genre’s historic ties with protest politics and inclusive social views seem poised to slip into a natural niche here. The traditional punk emphasis on grassroots community building and collectivism, too, have analogues in such local ventures as the GreenStar food co-op, Recycle Ithaca’s Bicycles and the budding Free School.

“Punk is just a word,'’ Price said. “To me, it’s the most free form and liberating vehicle.”

But even if it could earn vibrant community support, and even if organizers do have lots of enthusiasm, a true Ithaca underground does face some hurdles to getting off the ground. One of those is a lack of non-commercial, all-ages show space for potential promoters to cultivate. That’s in contrast to many towns, where bands play in gritty basements and fenced-in backyards. Then there’s Ithaca, a city filled with apartments and old homes with dusty, low-ceiling cellars.

Price acknowledged the problem, but said he hopes to work around it. He’s thinking about asking area churches to lend space, something the Unitarian Universalist Church did in Philadelphia.

“We’re just going to continue to look for more nontraditional venues that are open to what we’re doing,'’ Price said. “We just want to come to a place where we can gather a lot of people, play loud music, and do our thing.”

Ithaca’s also somewhat of a remote location for touring bands to find, without a major highway nearby.

And it has what Proehl refers to as a “high attrition rate,” both among college students and musicians.

“I’ve been in shouting matches with friends of mine coming out of Cornell or coming out of Ithaca College, who are like, ‘We gotta move the band down to Brooklyn because there’s no scene here.’ The response is, the reason there’s no scene here is because every time we get a band going, they leave and go to Brooklyn,” Proehl said.

At the same time, Proehl has had some past success getting a do-it-yourself music scene going in Ithaca. When he first moved here 5 1/2 years ago, he was frustrated with the proliferation of bands in the jam genre.

“Some friends and I would sit at the bar complaining that none of the bands we wanted to see ever came. And when I realized that you can write to the bands and ask them to play, we started doing bookings under the name No Radio Productions,'’ Proehl said.

Now they do well-received dance parties at the Lost Dog Lounge, such as the recent The Smiths vs. The Cure party. The No Radio Records store, too, is looking to expand its cultural reach beyond music to encompass SOON Production poets and future art openings.

“A thriving underground can happen anywhere, and it will. If it happened in Plattsburgh and Morrisonville, NY, it certainly can happen in Ithaca,'’ Peck said. “Underground scenes tend to go in waves. Right now it seems Ithaca is in a rising valley.”

Ithaca Experimental’s next show is a joint event with SOON Productions planned for Saturday, Sept. 8, at No Radio Records, with poetry from 7 to 9pm and experimental music from 9pm to midnight.

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