The Aislers Set

Slumberland Records, the locally formed label that has released some of the best, noisiest indie pop ever pressed to seven-inch, turned 20 this year, and it's celebrating all weekend. Tonight's show at the Black Cat features current Slumberland bands Crystal Stilts, Brown Recluse, Frankie and the Outs and Pants Yell!, as well as three reunited bands from the area, the Ropers, Lorelei, and Nord Express.

We asked some of the people involved with Slumberland over the years to share their favorite memories of the label. We ran some yesterday, and here are the rest:

On professional jealousy: "The one record that I wish I had been a part of but wasn’t was Black Tambourine. I am forever jealous of everyone in that band because those songs are absolutely perfect. When I first heard "Throw Aggi Off the Bridge," I was filled with anger that it was something I hadn’t done. It represented what we were all about. It was noisy, it had the Wall of Sound, and it hinted at '60s girl groups. It had that element of what anyone could do and no one had."—Kelly Young (Velocity Girl)

On bonding over chipped beef: "My first encounter with Slumberland was in 1990. I went to see Whorl open for the Wedding Present at the old 9:30 Club. I distinctly recall Brian Nelson screaming until the shade of his face matched the red lights they were performing under. The stage was like the bridge of a submarine that is rapidly sinking. It was insanely loud and pummeling. I tracked down Mike Schulman after the show and demanded an interview. I met Mike and Dan Searing at the Tastee Diner in Silver Spring and interviewed them for the GW Hatchet. They told me about music like John Cage, Glenn Branca, and Skullflower. My article apparently failed to capture and convey what I had witnessed as Whorl's fan base did not explode in the way that I had imagined. But, I made friends for life over coffee and chipped beef."—Matthew Dingee (Lorelei)

On hazing: "Dan Searing and I went to meet John Cage at a book signing in Adams Morgan [around 1991], and then to a concert of his work downtown. I don't remember what we saw but I do remember mixing pills and drink. We did our best to focus but, like the composer himself, we nodded off a few times during the performance. We ended up where we usually did, back at Mike [Schulman]'s garden apartment listening to records at full crank. Pam [Berry] was over practicing some Bright Colored Lights songs with Mike. I eventually passed out on the floor. Much to my surprise, when I got home the next day I noticed that Pam had drawn eyes on my eyelids. I'll be looking to propagate this hazing ritual onto any member of the new crop of Slumberland bands that happens to pass out this weekend."—Matthew Dingee

On soul-induced nudity: "We had sort of a Slumberland supergroup with members of the Lilys, and the Ropers and Lorelei, and it was I think the 10th anniversary of the old 9:30 Club, maybe the 15th, and we were doing a cover of Archie Bell and the Drells’ ‘Tighten Up,’ which is a great soul classic, and Lorelei’s guitarist at the time [Dave Cerf], who was in the original lineup and who was back in town, who knows how or why, but he took off all his clothes and became a naked male dancer for this song, at a sold-out 9:30 club."—Stephen Gardner (Lorelei)

On surviving a blizzard: "I think it was October 1994, and Boyracer and the Ropers were on an American tour. Papa Slumber (Mike Schulman) and a German fellow named Ulrich were shepherding a caravan of sleepy musicians through a northern snowy mountain pass in two vans. Blizzard conditions...and I think we were supposed to be in Seattle the next day. Our vehicles were built for East Coast winters and wet city slop. They never should have seen West Coast mountains like these, not to mention this kind of snow. The heat was on full blast but still not enough to keep out that cold. Mike was driving one van, and Ulrich was driving the other. I could feel ours fishtailing back and forth at every turn. I was drifting in and out of consciousness from sleep deprivation but to actually fall asleep felt like certain death, so no one really slept. I can't imagine how we got through...Really, I was so frazzled, I can't even remember. It was something else...like Washington crossing the Delaware. Like this label...how did Mike do it? How did this label come out the other side of that mountain range with everything in tact? He kept it together. 20 years...amazing."—Greg Pavlovcak (the Ropers)

On touring Japan with the Aislers Set in 1999: "Amy [Linton] was being chased down the street for her autograph, like the Beatles or something.  We did a big show in Tokyo at the end of the tour, and the album wasn’t out in Japan yet but every single kid knew every word to every song. The whole crowd just went nuts from the first guitar chord. It was kind of shocking. Even I signed an autograph."—Mike Schulman, label head

On channeling influences: "One time Peggy [Wang-East] and I were out at an indie-pop dance night in New York called Mondo. All of a sudden, the opening chords of 'I Love You Like the Way that I Used to Do' by Rocketship came on, or so I thought. I said, 'Peggy, they're playing Rocketship, this rules—let's dance.' And she responded by pointing out that the song was actually 'This Love Is Fucking Right'—by us."—Kip Berman (the Pains of Being Pure at Heart)

Way back in 1989, when DC was still more of an all-hardcore-all-the-time kind of place, Slumberland Records took a chance and pressed its first 7", What Kind of Heaven Do You Want, a compilation featuring DC-based indie-pop bands Velocity Girl, Black Tambourine, and Powder Burns. Since then the label has become one of the most beloved purveyors of twee and fuzzy music, releasing a slate of well-loved records by Stereolab, Rocketship, and, more recently, Crystal Stilts, and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart.

The anniversary concert will feature performances by label artists both new (Crystal Stilts) and old (The Ropers, Nord Express). Lineup details after the jump.

Slumberland 20th Anniversary Concert

Friday, Nov .13
The Black Cat

Crystal Stilts
Brown Recluse
Pants Yell!
Frankie Rose and The Outs
The Ropers
Nord Express
Lorelei

Might as well post the details for the Brooklyn show, too:

Saturday, Nov. 14
Brooklyn, NY
The Bell House

Crystal Stilts
Brown Recluse
Pants Yell!
Frankie Rose and The Outs
The Ropers
Nord Express
Lorelei
Special Surprise Guest

It's probably not fair to call The Pains of Being Pure at Heart a lo-fi band. Certainly, the New York group's self-titled album sounds appropriately hissy and fuzzy. But "lo-fi" also connotes an attitude, a puritanical devotion to songwriting whether it comes at the expense of sound quality or not.

But when the four-piece, which plays tonight at the Black Cat, released the song "Higher Than the Stars" earlier this month, I was taken slightly aback at the single's wintry synths and programmed gurgles. And I wasn't the only one. But maturity doesn't have to be a bad thing, nor do higher production values. And you only need to look at some of the band's forebears to see why:

Case No. 1: The Field Mice

Conversion: Perhaps realizing it could never match the rough jangle of its 1988 debut single "Emma's House," the great U.K. twee band already was toying with beats in its 1989 album Snowball. Sequenced sounds meant a few near-unlistenable experiments ("Triangle"), but they also laid the groundwork for the band's elegant, measured swan song, 1991's For Keeps—which remains the most essential long player that lead mouse Robert Wratten ever made.

Case No. 2: The Mountain Goats

Conversion: The 2003 album Tallahassee, on which songwriter John Darnielle gave up his boombox-recording fundamentalism and began creating  concepts about more than geography. Darnielle probably could've spent the rest of his days releasing swappable cassettes or eccentric LPs like Protein Source Of The Future...Now! and left his fans happy. Instead, he became our best concocter of lush neuroticism.

Case No. 3: Guided by Voices

Conversion: No one's going to seriously argue that the 1996 album Under the Bushes Under the Stars, for which the standard-bearers of lo-fi entered an actual studio, is better than Bee Thousand or Alien Lanes. But as leader Bob Pollard became a tighter writer of anthemic pop, the studio offered a wider palette. Take the synthy album version of "Teenage FBI" (from 1999's Do The Collapse), which is miles better than the stripped-down take found on Guided by Voices' best-of collection. More controversial: I like the polished "Game of Pricks" from the Tigerbomb EP far more than the fan-favorite version on Alien Lanes.

The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart perform tonight at the Black Cat with The Depreciation Guild and Cymbals Eat Guitars. Doors open at 8 p.m.; tickets are $13. Photo courtesy of The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart's MySpace page.

Post-punk got a second chance, so did garage rock. Even disco has had a bit of come back lately. But when the indie-pop music of the early '90s–naive but noisy sounding bands that populated labels like Slumberland, K, and Sarah–finally died out, it seemed like somebody pinned a "do not resuscitate" order on it. It was dead. Deader than IDM, even.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart have made a pretty good argument for twee resurrection, though. The Brooklyn band's chiming chords, swooning melodies, and blasts of guitar feedback place a defibrillator on indie-pop's chest. Singer/guitarist Kip Berman spoke with Washington City Paper about the band, getting signed to Slumberland, and why it isn't as hard as you might think to play kinda wimpy music in New York City.

The band performs tonight at Black Cat with The Depreciation Guild and The Sugarplums.

Washington City Paper: Did you ever find a new job? (Kip was laid off from his job at Drill Team shortly after this Stereogum interview ran)

Berman: It’s embarrassing, I did that interview and then I lost my job right after that. I don't have an actual job right now. With all these dates coming up I wanted to wait before …you know, it’s hard to tell your new boss that you have to go away on tour the first week you start a job.

WCP: How long have you guys been doing this band, you knew each other before, right?

Berman: It's been about two years now; it’s been really exciting. We were friends before then, though. It’s not like we met through looking at classified ads. We formed up to play at Peggy’s, the keyboard player’s, birthday party. We had book some bands and we thought that if we formed a band, we could play too. It's been really fun every since.

I mean, I worked with Alex; we worked the same place, our desks right next to each other at. We liked so much of the same stuff– Exploding Hearts, Rocket Ship, and all sorts of stuff. Peggy was just somebody I had known in New York. She was a friend of a friend at an indie-pop dance party. She seemed too cool, I was scared to ask her to play in the band, but she said yes. She’s super fun. And Kurt [drummer], we actually started off with a drum machine. We had all of our drums on an iPod and we would play along. He [Kurt] came to our early shows and really enjoyed the music, he's my roommate now. We play a lot of Nintendo.

WCP: New Nintendo, or old-school Nintendo?

Berman: Original. He likes original systems a lot.

WCP: When you were starting out, was it hard to play such, well, twee music in New York City?

WCP: Yeah, you would think that it would be, but people in New York City are really open minded and supportive. There was this very fantastic DIY pop scene: Crystal Stilts Night School, Vivian Girls, Cause Co-Motion. All of these really good DIY pop-bands. We were all supportive of one another, and not hyper-competitive.

It's like how DC has a strong tradition of that. You know, with the Slumberland Records stuff. We actually went down there to mix our album with Archie Moore [Velocity Girl, Black Tambourine]. He was telling us a story about recording Chisel, Ted Leo’s old band, that they were this totally out of place mod pop band. They would play all these hardcore shows and be totally different than everyone else, but people were still supportive.

WCP: Speaking of Slumberland, how did you connect up with that label?

Berman: I don’t know the whole story, one of his [label founder Michael Schulman] other bands was playing a show, I don't know if he was a little wasted, but he was really enthusiastic about our set. We were completely flattered. Slumberland was a huge influence on us.

We took our time and tried to make a good record– we didn't want to let him down. He's been so supportive, he’s a huge vinyl enthusiast. He said we could do colored vinyl if we want to do colored vinyl. He’s like a weekend dad, you go visit him and he just says yes to everything.

WCP: Do you ever feel like you’re maybe a little too much like older Slumberland bands? Do you feel like your bring your own voice to that music?

Berman: I do, because it's my voice on the record. It’s us playing it in 2009. We're not too hero worshipful. We’re respectful of all the tradition, but the lyrics are really personal and really distinct and about our lives and our experiences in our world right now. We’re never in danger of slipping into time capsule mode. We feel very alive at the moment, we don't necessarily want to live in a different time or place at all.