That could be the motto of DZ Tapes, the D.C.-based record label Isaacoff started in 2011. At the time, he had decided that simply running a music blog — the now-defunct DAYVAN ZOMBEAR — wasn’t enough. He wanted to take it to the next level. And this Saturday the digital-and-tape imprint celebrates its fifth anniversary with a marathon show at local DIY venue Hole In The Sky.

Brett Isaacoff of DZ Tapes (photo: Julia Leiby)

How did DZ Tapes get here? Back in Isaacoff’s blogging days, he says, he kept receiving great submissions from indie artists — “so much so that I really want[ed] to find a way to share the work that was coming around my e-desk,” the D.C. resident says. “So I figured I might as well put out a mixtape.” He launched a successful Kickstarter campaign to put out a compilation. The label followed in its wake.

Now DZ Tapes has several cassettes under its belt, featuring both artists from here and elsewhere. It focuses on bands bringing new energy to D.C. and Baltimore’s underground rock scenes — label alumni include shoegazers Wildhoney and Big Hush, punks Hemlines and the fuzzy Nice Breeze, among others.

Sustaining any project for half a decade is no easy feat — perhaps doubly so considering the volatility of the music industry. But Isaacoff has figured out the formula: keep your expectations low and your planning short-term.

“It’s as hard as you want to make it, really,” Isaacoff says. “I’m just trying to have fun and enjoy myself and help people out.” By booking shows and working with interesting bands, he aims to give back to the scene that gave him — an avid showgoer himself — so much.

Hemlines “All Your Homes,” released on DZ Tapes

Keeping his day job as a business analyst at a solar startup has helped grease the gears at DZ Tapes. “If I could make money off of [the label] I would, but it’s not something that I want to really force,” Isaacoff says. “I feel like blending the lines between quote-unquote business and pleasure might get a little messy.”

A steady path is as good a marker of success as any, though there have been certain high points — like when Rolling Stone published a piece about Speedy Ortiz right before they were to play D.C. house venue The Dougout, a show he booked. “Filled to capacity” isn’t quite the correct phrase for it — the 70-capacity venue was overflowing. “It was an extreme fire hazard, looking back on it,” Isaacoff says.

DZ Tapes’ future remains both certain and up in the air. There’s this weekend’s anniversary show — “It’s gonna be a banger,” promises Isaacoff — and a few more releases slated for the rest of 2016. But for the future-future? Isaacoff isn’t interested in pressuring himself. DZ Tapes is going “wherever it wants to go, really,” Isaacoff says.

DZ Tapes celebrates its fifth anniversary July 9 at Hole in the Sky. 

Inspired by Sylvia Plath, Big Hush is both an oxymoronic and perfect moniker for the D.C. rock band. Fans of shoegaze titans My Bloody Valentine, Big Hush combines reverb and slushy guitars with droney, manipulated vocals, bringing together the quiet and loud.

That dichotomy is still in place on the band’s new EP, Who’s Smoking Your Spirit? (stream the EP below), but now the group is broadening its range.

“Who’s Smoking Your Spirit? is darker than our earlier stuff. Also a lot faster,” writes guitarist Owen Wuerker in an email. “Our songs have almost always had some melancholy in them, but these new ones are meaner, more anxious.”

The EP’s five tracks, which merge together like ingredients in a murky stew, sound like an updated version of the Dublin band that pioneered the dreamy rock sound of the ‘90s.

“In general we’re into combining nuanced vocal harmonies with big, messy guitars,” Wuerker writes. “I love My Bloody Valentine, especially the stuff they did before [1991 album] Loveless. I like to think we sound like that sometimes.”

But despite its European influences, Big Hush has put down roots in D.C.: Seventy-five percent of the group works on the same stretch of Connecticut Avenue NW. Wuerker works at Comet Ping Pong; guitarist Gen Ludwig and drummer Emma Baker work at Buck’s Fishing & Camping next door.

Big Hush began to form when Ludwig and Wuerker, acquaintances from high school, began writing songs together in 2013. When Ludwig began dating Chris Taylor, she played him some of the songs she’d written with Wuerker, and Taylor quickly volunteered to join on bass. After a couple of personnel changes, Baker eventually took over drums.

The group shares songwriting like they share vocals. No individual wrote more than two songs on the new EP, Wuerker writes. “Sometimes one of us has a clear idea of exactly how a song should sound and that’s that. Sometimes we have no clue. Usually we all get together and work through it.”

The band recorded everything on reel-to-reel with local musician Andy Aylward. “After that I transferred the tracks to my computer and spent months mixing them — at home, in cafés and bars, in the parking lot outside work, while driving sometimes,” writes Wuerker. “The longer I spent on them the more excited I got about using weirder production tricks and pushing the songs outside realm of capturing the way we sound live.”

That’s why the songs will sound different in performance, and that’s OK with Wuerker. Some of the EP’s songs “got so deconstructed that there’s no way we could reproduce the recordings at a show, unless we decided to use laptops on stage or something,” he writes.

Big Hush fêtes Who’s Smoking Your Spirit? tonight at Black Cat — and while the band’s live show won’t reproduce the EP, the audience should expect a performance with its own experimental flair.

“I’m gonna play guitar through two amps,” Wuerker writes. “On a good night, I hear things in our songs that no one is actually playing.”

Big Hush plays an EP release show tonight at Black Cat. Who’s Smoking Your Spirit? is out Dec. 1 on DZ Tapes.

Katie Park wanted to make feminist punk rock in particular. Dana Liebelson shared the same dream. They recruited a drummer — Julie Yoder, a founder of the Girls Rock! DC camp — through Craigslist. Their pal Ian Villeda, the sole guy, joined on guitar. Hemlines came screaming into existence.

The band represented a new direction for both Park and Liebelson. Both abandoned their primary instruments: Park swapped out her usual bass for a guitar, and Liebelson traded her violin for a bass.

“I had been in a pretty laid-back indie-rock project and I really wanted to start something that was explicitly feminist, and it seemed like I needed a louder instrument in order to do that,” Liebelson says, laughing.

Hemlines hit their target on All Your Homes, the band’s searing debut EP, released last week on DZ Tapes. The cassette opens with “Agenda,” a track that confronts the negative connotation that word has picked up over the years.

“Agenda” was inspired by a frustrating and all-too-common situation Liebelson came across, in which a college administrator told a sexual-assault victim that she was supporting a type of “rape culture agenda.”

“The phrase ‘rape culture agenda’ got in my head,” Liebelson says. She bristled at the idea that a sexual-assault victim’s pain and outrage could be dismissed as an agenda. “I was thinking, ‘OK, in that case, yeah, I want to reclaim this and say, ‘I do have an agenda. This is an excellent agenda that I want to be behind.'”

Writing a song on the subject proved cathartic.

“I remember hearing about the scenario and being upset about it and not quite sure what to do about it,” says Liebelson. “I channeled that straight into writing. Now I feel better every single time we perform it.”

Also cathartic for Hemlines are songs that deal with more personal matters, like mental health. Women’s mental health in particular, Park says, has historically been given short shrift, chalked up to hysteria rather than legitimate health issues.

“It makes a huge difference to put that into words and then be very loud about it,” says Park. Listeners can find something relatable in the subject matter, too.

The band recorded the EP this summer at Columbia Heights studio Swim-Two-Birds, tracking live and finding synergy with engineers Ryan Little (an occasional Bandwidth contributor) and Brendan Polmer.

“The [D.C.] community is very supportive. I don’t think any of us have ever felt like we’re imposters or we don’t deserve to be up on stage playing an instrument that’s new to us.” — Julie Yoder of Hemlines

“It was a seamless experience compared to other recording sessions I’ve been involved in,” says Yoder. “I felt like the engineers were really intuitive with when to suggest and when to back away. I had a really good time. It didn’t feel like work at all.”

The band always wanted to play punk, but it’s also worked out to be the ideal genre for other reasons, Yoder says.

“I just feel like punk is one of the most accessible genres, especially when you are starting out on a new instrument,” the drummer says. “The community is very supportive. I don’t think any of us have ever felt like we’re imposters or we don’t deserve to be up on stage playing an instrument that’s new to us.”

Yet while D.C.’s punk scene has lain out a welcome mat, the music industry overall can still be a challenging environment for female-identified musicians. Thus the importance of labeling Hemlines a feminist band.

“I would say we’re still at the point where when you get on a stage, that’s a feminist act alone,” Liebelson says, “but I just want to remind people of it. I don’t want to be like, ‘This is kind of feminist,’ I want to be reminding people that it’s feminist.”

Eventually, the band hopes, there will be nothing remarkable about women playing music.

“The act of women getting up on stage and performing should be normal,” says Park. “Yeah, it should be,” Liebelson agrees, “but it’s not yet.”

Hemlines plays an EP release show Wednesday, Sept. 30 at Black Cat.