Mike Apichella was a teenager in Baltimore County in the ’90s. Early in the decade, he and his pals formed a loose music and art collective named Towson-Glen Arm after their hometowns. They rallied around a love of art, activism and the avant-garde, bridging the silly and the sincere; Towson-Glen Arm kids wrote poetry about social issues, but they also formed bands with names like Spastic Cracker and Lesbian Chicken Maggot Blasters.

In a way, Apichella and his crew followed in the footsteps of the greats of the home-recording movement, like Guided by Voices and Sebadoh. But they didn’t just do it with guitars, and they didn’t care about genre. Spoken word, funk, country, jazz, noise and ska — it was all on the table.

Apichella says the Towson-Glen Arm era was marked by its participants’ “avant-garde ambitions, revolutionary politics and straight-up teenage goofiness smashing into one another in this big spectacle.”

Later, some of those same suburban kids went on to play with well-known indie-rock acts like A Silver Mt. Zion, Cass McCombs, Lower Dens and Will Oldham. Apichella became better known for his band Human Host. It wasn’t until years after the Towson-Glen Arm heyday that Apichella decided to tell the story of his hometown scene.

Apichella took 44 songs his Towson-Glen Arm community had produced and put them on cassette tapes. He called the compilations Towson-Glen Arm Freakouts and started releasing them in 2013. All proceeds from their sale went toward two Maryland organizations: music education nonprofit music4more and Grassroots Crisis Intervention, which provides support to people contemplating suicide.

This spring, Apichella is sending those tapes to Europe for the first time, in an effort to “share the TGA craziness with people from far-off places.”

I recently chatted with Apichella via email about growing up in what he calls “the politically conflicted region of DelMarVa” and the lasting legacy of his crazy suburban scene.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Bandwidth: How have the tapes been received since you released them in 2013? What encouraged the upcoming European release?

Mike Apichella: For folks who never knew about Towson-Glen Arm until recently… discovering the Towson-Glen Arm stuff is a pleasant shock. Like they’re surprised to hear how contemporary the music sounds and how politically charged it was even though it was also sort of crazy and absurd.

I have to hype this record to as many audiences as I can because the music and art featured on the two TGAF comps just isn’t commercial. It’s a niche interest for people who like obscure creative work. Luckily, that niche interest is shared by record collectors and fans all over the world.

The two Towson-Glen Arm Freakouts compilations cover 1992 to 1999. How old was everybody during that time?

Roughly, the age range… was about 14 to 20. Most of the kids were high school students, or younger college-aged kids. A few older 20-somethings hung out, and even some 12-year-olds and 13-year-olds ended up in the mix occasionally.

Obviously there’s a lot of different technologies and environments captured here. How did you go about recording some of these songs?

Towson-Glen Arm records were recorded using low-budget, one-track portable tape recorders and cassette four-track recorders. A few bands recorded music on reel-to-reel tape recorders and a few recorded in studios. There’s even a tiny bit of video-tape documentation.

“Towson-Glen Arm was just a crew of smart, funny, really politically aware kids who were really psyched about subverting the destructive elements of society with art.”

What were some of your influences at the time?

A lot of the Towson-Glen Arm kids actually did have formal music training, or just had the natural ability to play classical and jazz with as much passion as they played weirder music or rock or folk or whatever. So sometimes the TGA diversity came from some of the scene’s more traditional musical/literary/visual art influences just sort of subconsciously.

I think the idea of mixing many different kinds of aesthetic concepts was one of the few really thought-out artistic goals of the scene. Many of us developed a consciousness of things like social-justice issues. This really influenced our attempt to try and make TGA a safe space for anyone and everyone who could oppose fascist/imperialist evil and all of the bad consequences associated with stuff like that.

How were these songs received then?

For the most part all this stuff was a local phenomenon. To me, Towson-Glen Arm was just a crew of smart, funny, really politically aware kids who were really psyched about subverting the destructive elements of society with art.

We had our own weird little world, but we treated it as if it were boundless, and I think that’s why it was really hard for “normal” kids and punks and stoners of the time to really find a lot of common ground with us.

It wasn’t even like we necessarily were acting against punks or preppies or whatever, it’s just that most of us didn’t even spend a lot of time thinking about what genre of music or art we were or weren’t gonna create.

How did you organize yourselves into bands?

Sometimes bands were formed at random. Some TGA bands were formed with a real preconceived concept in mind. Other bands emerged out of stuff like inside jokes.

Some of the TGA bands weren’t bands at all. Instead they were recording projects that only existed on tape and nowhere else.

Nothing really controlled what aesthetically defined a recording project and a live band. Some of the least commercial TGA stuff remained recording-only just because a lot of us knew no one would book the really extra far-out projects.

Which Towson-Glen Arm bands went on to earn fame and notoriety?

Walker [Teret] is very well-known in indie circles as a session musician, a producer and all-around musical genius. He’s played with Will Oldham, Arbouretum, and he also currently is in Celebration.

But Scott Gilmore might be the most accomplished of all the Towson-Glen Arm artists. He joined the Canadian band A Silver Mt. Zion during the early/mid aughts after he moved up north to go to college in Montreal. Scott now works advocating for and giving legal help to victims of state-sponsored torture who are from countries controlled by totalitarian regimes, so I’d say both politically and artistically Scott Gilmore’s achievements are the biggest things done by a TGA artist.

Is there any one song on these that you feel best captures what the Towson-Glen Arm scene was all about?

Absolutely! “Scott Chester, Boy Next Door” by The Preschoolers. That track is as much a document of the scene’s sense of humor and theater as it is a fine example of the kind of wild music and political influences that TGA became synonymous with. Plus, like almost half the musicians in the scene play on that track.

Drummer Scott Verrastro—who used to book the venue—is helping organize the event on Friday. “As Chris would have preferred, we’re going to have a big ol’ rock ‘n’ roll blowout to commemorate his life,” Verrastro writes in an email.

Verrastro and Grier played Velvet Lounge dozens of times starting in 2007, Verrastro writes. They teamed up in the ensembles Thee Ultimate Vag and Kohoutek. Grier also played for four years with the experimental collective To Live And Shave In L.A., often alongside Andrew W.K. and Thurston Moore.

W.K. wrote this heartfelt statement after Grier’s death:

When I first met Chris, it was on tour with To Live and Shave In LA. I was playing keyboard in the band and all I was told was that Chris was a newspaper writer from Washington D.C. who would also be performing with us. I guess I was kind of wary and shy of him at first. I somehow thought I wouldn’t get along with him. Turned out he was one of the most sincere, earnest, and devoted musicians I would ever have the privilege of playing with. He was a deeply great guitar player—an extremely advanced and attuned musician. He was great in that unassuming way that reveals itself from the inside out—from the sound of his playing, from the way it felt to hear his sound.

In the best way, all Chris really cared about was music. Probably one of only a handful of people who really lived their life for music and was brave enough to pursue it. And he pulled it off! He was playing constantly. He made big moves and sacrificed a lot to play music as much as he possibly could, often against the odds, and often due to his sheer tenacity and undeniable ability. When people ask what it means to be a successful musician, Chris really defines it for me—to play as much music as you can and with everything you have.

Kohoutek, Max Ochs, Rat Bastard, Insect Factory and Layne Garrett are scheduled to perform at the event Friday. Verrastro says donations can be made to the Chris Grier Memorial Music Fund, which will help pay for music supplies and instruments for students in the Charles County public schools system. (“Stooges records accepted as well,” he adds.)

“If you knew Chris or were inspired by his art, please attend and share stories, laughs and memories,” Verrastro writes. “There are many.”

The Chris Grier Memorial concert takes place 8 p.m. Friday, Aug. 29 at Velvet Lounge. Admission $8. Donations to the memorial fund can be sent to Chris Grier Memorial Music Fund, Charles County Public Schools, P.O. Box 2770, La Plata, MD, 20646. 

Top photo via the memorial’s Facebook event page; lower photo by Ally Schweitzer

Cuneiform’s eclectic rock output is impossible to categorize, but much of it stems from the late-1970s Rock in Opposition movement, embodied most famously by British group Henry Cow. So as Cuneiform gets ready to roll out its next batch of titles (including a new record from D.C. guitarist Anthony Pirog), let’s take a look at Cuneiform’s finest avant-rock releases to date.

Univers Zero, Ceux du Dehors (1981)
Why not start with one of the original Rock in Opposition bands? On this record, the still-active Belgian group Univers Zero had a strings-and-woodwind-heavy lineup that may have looked more chamber-music than rock, and drummer and composer Daniel Denis’ songwriting owed quite a bit to contemporary classical music. But his drumming continues to keep one foot solidly in rock territory. (For Univers Zero with more of a rock bent, check out guitarist Roger Trigaux’s related ensemble Present—and start with its 1980 debut Triskaidekaphobie, recently remastered and reissued by Cuneiform.)

U Totem, U Totem (1992)
U Totem represented a meeting-of-the-minds between two West Coast composers, James Grigsby and Dave Kerman, both of whom brought a distinct aesthetic—and this first collaboration is masterful. Highlights include Grigsby’s “One Nail Draws Another,” with its woodwind textures and lyrics sung simultaneously in three languages, and Kerman’s “The Judas Goat,” with its rockist rhythmic drumming and metallic guitar embedded into a thoroughly unconventional song structure. I also recommend Grigsby and Kerman’s other bands on Cuneiform: Check out Motor Totemist Guild, starting with 1999’s City of Mirrors—which also features West Coast jazz luminaries like Vinny Golia—and don’t miss 5uu’s, starting with 2002’s Abandonship.

Blast, A Sophisticated Face (1999)
On this album, Dutch nine-piece blast—like Univers Zero—looks more like a chamber ensemble than a rock band: It’s got guitar, trumpet, saxophones, clarinet, violin, cello, cimbalom (a kind of hammered dulcimer), bass and percussion. Less brooding and more convoluted than Univers Zero’s music, A Sophisticated Face almost sounds like a cross between Henry Cow and Frank Zappa’s big-band works. It’s possibly the least accessible album I’ve chosen for this list, but like so much on Cuneiform, it’s worth the effort.

Volapük, Polyglöt (2000)
Volapük is a project of drummer Guigou Chenevier, who was a member of Etron Fou Leloublan, another of the original RIO bands. Eastern European folk influences run through this album, and the orchestration consistently fascinates—with bass clarinet as the rhythm and melody expressed with cello, clarinet, violin or accordion. This may be the catchiest music on this list, full of playful melodies and accessible rhythms—though naturally those occur within unpredictable and complex compositions.

Thinking Plague, Decline and Fall (2012)
American band Thinking Plague is more deeply grounded in rock music than the other bands I’ve listed here. A concept album about humanity’s slow destruction of itself and its planet, Decline and Fall contains all of Thinking Plague’s trademarks: creative, unexpected melodies that require multiple listens to fully grasp; a propulsive rhythm section; intricate interplay between guitar, piano, and woodwinds and thoughtfully apocalyptic lyrics—all enmeshed within a deep and ironic beauty. Thinking Plague has other tremendous albums, but Decline and Fall is so far its ultimate statement.