“When [President Ronald] Reagan entered office,” says punk elder statesman Mark Andersen, “it provided a focal point, like a physical embodiment of the things that we opposed.”

Andersen makes that observation to WAMU reporter Patrick Madden in a story that aired Tuesday. The co-founder of D.C. activist group Positive Force says that in some ways, the Reagan era energized punk in D.C. And some say the same could happen under President Trump.

Visit the WAMU homepage to hear Madden’s story, “Could D.C. Punk Thrive Under President Trump?” The sound-rich feature includes interviews with Andersen, Ian MacKaye of Fugazi and Minor Threat, filmmaker Robin Bell and Jason Mogavero of rabble-rousing D.C. band Jack On Fire.

Except for a few rarities, it’s not hard to find music from Dischord Records. The seminal D.C. punk-rock label co-founded by Ian MacKaye keeps its titles in print and its online store well-stocked — and the imprint jumped on the digital bandwagon long ago.

Nevertheless, news that the 36-year-old label is uploading its catalog to Bandcamp will probably prompt shrieks of joy from Dischord devotees.

The label has already posted Fugazi’s entire discography on the digital music service, plus a huge chunk of everything it’s ever released, dating back to 1980. Yep, Flex Your Head is there. So is Lungfish. Minor Threat. Rites of Spring. Q and Not U. Black Eyes. Nation of Ulysses. Name your favorite Dischord album, and there’s a good chance it’s now on Bandcamp, streamable for free and downloadable for a very reasonable price.

I haven’t been able to confirm when or why Dischord began posting its catalog to Bandcamp — I’ll update when I find out — but label spokesperson Aaron Leitko (disclosure: we’re friends) writes in an email, “we should [have] the whole deal switched on by next week.”

Now, here’s some Slant 6 just because.

Hardcore, and D.C. hardcore in particular, has a rep for being stuck in the past. But it stays fresh by continually creating new pasts to draw from. A few years back, bands like Coke Bust brought the early ’80s thrashy style of hardcore back into vogue. But there are others reviving the mid-’80s melody of Dag Nasty, the late ’80s aggression of Swiz and the late-’90s chug of Damnation A.D. Soon there will be late ’00s tribute bands to Coke Bust, too. The logical endpoint is to be, to paraphrase The Onion, nostalgic for bands that don’t exist yet.

This Was My Night & This Was a Lot of Other Nights is another chapter in the scene’s love affair with itself, though an entertaining and necessary one. Editors Tim Follos and Hussain Mohammed compile show reviews and interviews from Follos’ blog Day After Day DC, covering the past decade — the most recent era of harDCore. It reads like a blog, in good ways and bad: The energy of the house shows reviewed (though “lovingly described” is more accurate; Follos has hardly an unkind word for anyone) is palpable, and he draws from a depth of knowledge and eye for detail only a true fan could.

At the same time, the long personal asides, shout-outs and inside jokes (most involving Sick Fix‘s Pat Vogel) remind you this was written by and for a small group of friends who all hang out and play in bands together.

This Was My Night isn’t so much about a particular city or era, but rather a particular crowd of 20-something, group-house-dwelling, radical politics-having, dog-walking, (ex-)vegan straight edge punx dedicated to putting on shows in makeshift spaces on shoestring budgets.

So the 12-page review of the 2013 Damaged City Fest that opens the book is kind of overkill. And for a book aiming to document an era that produced hundreds of local bands, a lot of the same ones show up again and again — Ilsa and The Max Levine Ensemble, both terrific bands, but reflective of the authors’ personal preferences.

There are a lot of others from that period that don’t appear, either for taking a different punk-derived trajectory, or just being in different social circles. They include Deathfix, Mass Movement of the Moth, The Apes, The Shirks, The Cassettes, Medications, Imperial China and the whole Sockets Records roster. Today, as always, there isn’t one D.C. punk scene, there are many scenes, and they don’t always communicate well with each other.

‘This Was My Night & This Was A Lot of Other Nights,’ back cover

This Was My Night isn’t so much about a particular city or era, but rather a particular crowd of 20-something, group-house-dwelling, radical politics-having, dog-walking, (ex-)vegan straight edge punx dedicated to putting on shows in makeshift spaces on shoestring budgets. And in that sense, it’s really about one band, Coke Bust, whose members and fellow super-promoters Chris Moore and Nick Candela (aka Nick Tape, who’s since moved to Brazil) held this scene together mostly by themselves through sheer force of will.

Thus one of the best pieces in the book is by Nick Tape, in which he describes the benefits of booking shows at the Corpse Fortress, the famously filthy, hot, dilapidated Silver Spring house that put on memorable shows until the neighbors finally got sick of the ruckus and got them all evicted.

“As a promoter, access to a venue with no rules and no set fee is enormously helpful,” Tape writes. “The lack of a fee allows promoters of shows with mediocre turnout to still pay bands somewhat respectable amounts at the end of the night.”

The second half of the book is made up of interviews with familiar punk figures, some of which are more lucid than others (Bad Brains’ H.R. is, predictably, in another world). There’s a bittersweet chat with the now-deceased Dave Brockie of Gwar. There’s a theological discussion with Positive Force co-founder (and fellow scene historian) Mark Andersen. There’s the requisite Ian MacKaye interview — a surprisingly unique one given the man must give dozens of interviews a month — in which he takes a deep dive into the history of Georgetown.

Follos is a skilled interviewer, able to draw out rich personal stories without being too much of the fanboy that he is (and most of us who read the book are). He can also be mischievous, asking Brian Baker, “Why is it necessary for Bad Religion to have three guitarists?” and getting Ian Svenonius to accidentally agree with conservative columnist George Will.

It’s fair to wonder whether a book like this needs to exist, especially for a genre saturated in self-documentation — and especially today, when many of the bands documented still exist, and a lot of the material is already accessible online. But I’d say it does. Given the book’s ultra-insider perspective, the target readership seems to be the 50 or so people who already appear in the book.

But only an insider could tell the story of the Bobby Fisher Memorial Building, another DIY space that the Borf graffiti collective jury rigged and briefly put on art installations and punk shows before it inevitably got shut down: “Towards the end, they cut our power, because we were stealing power from a neighbor who was also stealing power,” writes Chris Moore. “We ran over 15 shows on generators. Cops never shut down the shows… Seeing 20 people installing soundproofing and insulation… that’s awesome.”

The authors of This Was My Night & This Was a Lot of Other Nights host a book-release party Monday, April 25 at Black Cat with Scanners and Mirror Motives.

In a little more than a year, the website — with its insider jokes about scene clichés, browbeating frontmen, mosh pit faux pas, austere lifestyles and so on — has become a hit, racking up pageviews and earning guffaws from people who instantly find humor in headlines like “Ted Nugent Begrudgingly Inducted Into Straight Edge Hall of Fame” or “Henry Rollins Driving App Tells You How Hard It Would Have Been to Get There in the ’80s.”

Gags like those, of course, would be impossible without the nearly four-decade legacy of D.C.’s hardcore scene. A dive into The Hard Times’ archives reveals that the site, based in California’s Bay Area, owes a debt to ideas and trends that can be traced to the Washington region.

Matt Saincome displays his postcards from Ian MacKaye. (Matt Saincome)

Founder and editor-in-chief Matt Saincome freely acknowledges that debt. One of his first pieces for the site was “Ian MacKaye Prepares For Another Long Day of Documentary Interviews,” which skewers the Dischord Records co-founder’s status as a punk figurehead and an accomplished conversationalist. It was an early sign that the Fugazi and Minor Threat frontman — and progenitor of straight-edge culture — was hardly off-limits.

“The truth is, I’m a really, really big Ian MacKaye fan, and the reason why I wrote that story is because I was seeking out and watching so many punk documentaries… and Ian MacKaye was popping up in all of them,” Saincome says. “I love Ian MacKaye interviews. My Ian MacKaye interview was a highlight of my life. He sent me postcards afterward — I still have them on my wall. But I do think it’s funny how often he pops up [in documentaries].”

Saincome interviewed MacKaye in 2010 for his zine Punks! Punks! Punks!, and he says it was a “life-changing conversation.” (Another, more recent fanboy moment for him: when Brian Baker — of Minor Threat and Bad Religion — started following The Hard Times on Twitter.)

Saincome, 25, says he’s been straight edge since high school — no alcohol and no drugs, in particular. “For me it doesn’t have anything to do with sex or the type of food you eat, or anything like that. [It’s] an addiction-free type of lifestyle” for him, he says. Two other people on The Hard Times team are also straight edge, he says.

Inside out

Saincome doesn’t consider himself particularly preachy about his lifestyle, but straight-edge adherents generally are known as some of the most sanctimonious characters in punkdom. For that kind of thing, nothing is better than self-deprecation, Saincome says.

“We found that … the most pointed and funny articles come from people from that particular subgenre. So if you’re writing a straight-edge article, it’s always best to come from a straight-edger,” he says. “‘Cause if you are something, you kind of know what’s silly about it.”

That instinct gives The Hard Times an undertone of love instead of self-loathing. For Saincome, it colored his exploits prior to starting the website. As frontman for the hardcore band Zero Progress, he assumed the persona of The Champ, a blowhard egotist whose costume included thick chains. The point was to mock hardcore’s macho tendencies from the inside, even if it made punks uncomfortable. The behavior of punk singers, naturally, is a big target — especially their reputation for haranguing crowds. (See: “Hardcore Frontman Running Out of Generally Well-Accepted Beliefs to Share.”)

“It’s different for everyone, but I do think that when people get up on stage, they like to present themselves in a certain light and in a certain manner, and in a lot of times in punk, it’s in a moral crusader role, and they’re preaching to the choir a bit,” he says, equating the tone of the site’s anti-frontman jokes to the ball-busting that happens in the van when bands tour together. The public face of punk doesn’t always show that jokey side, though.

“I think a lot of people appreciate what we’re doing because punks do like to joke around and have a good time,” he says. “It just doesn’t always get the spotlight.”

And that self-awareness, Saincome says, is a vital part of what separates The Hard Times from its most obvious comedy antecedent, The Onion.

“I think a lot of their tone has to do with hating life — it’s funny as f**k, I love the Onion — but we don’t hate hardcore and we’re writing about hardcore. So a lot of our stuff definitely has a lighter touch to it than theirs,” he says.

At one point he did a deep dive into The Onion’s archives, and it helped him make an important distinction for his own content.

“Crust punks… maybe get an unfair helping of satire from us. Straight-edgers, too.” —Matt Saincome, founder and editor-in-chief of The Hard Times

“It wasn’t gonna be punk satire, it was gonna be ‘alternative lifestyle’ satire,” Saincome says. “The way music people live their lives, not just at the concerts, but the way we live our entire lives as an alternative underground culture.”

The satire establishment has taken notice: The Hard Times is now part of The Onion’s advertising network, meaning that “they package together a bunch of websites and pitch that whole network to advertisers,” Saincome says. The Hard Times’ contribution? Saincome says that his site has as many as 1.4 million unique visitors a month. There’s also a project in the works with Vice’s music site, Noisey, he says.

His D.C.

Although The Hard Times draws on D.C. hardcore’s influence and history for inspiration, Saincome says he sees the area’s current scene through a different lens: friendships, particularly with the band Coke Bust and all its related projects. Saincome says he’s never been to Damaged City, the ever-growing annual festival founded by Coke Bust members, but he views it as a beacon for a lot of other scenes. (The 2016 version of the fest kicks off April 7.)

The Coke Bust guys “did a good job of not eating their young, of supporting younger people in the scene, and playing in bands with them … and I feel like that doesn’t always happen in the Bay Area. We’re a little bit more fractured. [Coke Bust] seem to keep it pretty tight, which I think works to their benefit.”

One trip through D.C. with Zero Progress gave Saincome an anecdote that summarizes another pillar of The Hard Times’ comedy: edgy or extreme characters operating in totally normal situations.

“When we went on tour, we stayed at a friend’s house, and it was in a fancy D.C. suburb, and all the hardcore kids were hanging out, like, in the decked-out basement of his mom’s place. Which I thought was awesome, you know? Dude, I don’t mind,” Saincome says, noting that he grew up in the suburbs, too. “But I remember his mom was like — in the morning when we woke up, because we’d played a show — like, ‘OK, I made you guys some sandwiches, oh, here’s some cereal with vegan milk.'”

Saincome likes to cite examples of that dynamic, including “Family Prepares for Another Horrible Thanksgiving With Vegan Punk Son” and “Black Metal Guitarist Spotted Celebrating Gammy’s 87th Birthday at Old Country Buffet.” Another target for fish-out-of-water jokes: the vehemently DIY, dumpster-diving “crust punk” lifestyle.

“We try to spread it out, but the more extreme of a personality type that your particular subgenre of punk has, the easier it is to pick it apart a little bit,” Saincome says. “So crust punks definitely maybe get an unfair helping of satire from us. Straight-edgers, too.”

Keeping things fresh hasn’t been too difficult, he says, because the site has dozens of contributors and the editorial team rigorously vets story ideas. Being able to chart the audience’s reactions via analytics and social-media activity helps, too, Saincome says. He half-jokes that The Hard Times is now entering its “Fugazi phase,” and branching out a bit more. (Recent headline: “Audiophile Neighbor Pounds Ceiling to Demand You Adjust Midrange.”) Consider it a nod to another important facet of D.C.’s punk culture: intelligence.

“We have a really intense drive in us to not be ‘basic’ or ‘simple.’ A lot of the basic and simple ideas work the best, but we try to do things a little bit differently,” Saincome says. “In our editorial meetings, it’s one of the main things we think about. And I think it’s been part of our success, because I think anyone can make jokes — but to make a couple of smart jokes once in a while, I think that’s part of the reason why a lot of people like us.”

A 264-page hardcover slab with photos and tales from the venue’s history, 9:30: The Book will include stories from original clubowner Dody DiSanto, Public Enemy’s Chuck D, The Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl, Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi, songwriters Natalie Merchant and Sarah McLachlan and the club’s current owners, Seth Hurwitz and Rich Heinecke. Expected out in January, it’s available for preorder.

The book coincides with a three-day anniversary party at the V Street club, the 9:30 World’s Fair, taking place Jan. 5 through 7. 9:30 Club is calling the event a “funhouse of interactive, jaw-dropping imagery chronicling 35 years of memories and memorabilia.” A limited number of free tickets are up for grabs now.

The 9:30 Club opened in 1980 at 930 F St. NW and quickly became the city’s most consistent alt-rock venue, hosting early performances from bands across new wave, no wave, punk rock and D.C. hardcore. Go-go band Trouble Funk played the F Street spot’s final show in 1996 before 9:30 relocated to the former WUST Radio Music Hall at 815 V St. NW. The Smashing Pumpkins played the first gig there. (If you’re thirsty for more history, check out the Washington Post‘s 2010 oral history of the club.)

Today, the 9:30 Club is generally considered D.C.’s best music venue and one of the top clubs in the country.

Top photo: Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney performs at the 9:30 Club in February 2015.

Back in the toddler years of D.C.’s hardcore scene, Georgetown venue the Bayou was both loved and loathed.

On one hand, the Bayou was one of precious few D.C. clubs that would host punk bands like The Damned and Bad Brains, who played a now-legendary show at the venue in 1979. But punk kids in particular complained about the Bayou’s security staff, who had a reputation for being less than hospitable.

One of the groups coming up in that era was Youth Brigade, who both formed and broke up in 1981. As young punk kids who felt unwelcome at the Bayou — which closed in 1998 — they had opinions about the club’s bouncers. (As did Ian MacKaye, who called them “a**holes” in 2013 documentary The Bayou: D.C.’s Killer Joint.) So Youth Brigade decided to put those opinions on tape.

Called “Bouncer,” Youth Brigade’s 72-second Bayou diss track was recorded at Inner Ear Studios in Arlington. The song appears on Youth Brigade’s first demo, which MacKaye’s Dischord Records will release for the first time on Nov. 23.

Here’s what Youth Brigade’s Danny Ingram tells Brooklyn Vegan about “Bouncer”:

It’s about our experiences at the Bayou, a D.C. club that often employed locally stationed marines as bouncers/doormen, many of whom had a less than cordial relationship with the punks who attended the shows. The song was written right after the Bad Brains played there. I managed to get into the show, but Nathan’s fake ID was easily spotted and he was given the bum’s rush. Once I was in, I found the staff was their usual belligerent selves — hassling kids who were dancing and jumping about, all the while castigating those who didn’t drink. In those days, righteous indignation often wound up as a song at the very next rehearsal. Such is youth and such was the case with this song.

Listen to “Bouncer” below. Want to bark along? Here are the lyrics:

Bunch of ugly thugs
Await you at the door
Trying to take your drugs
Trying to make a score

You wanna see your favorite act
But you made a mistake
and you can’t come back
If they don’t like your looks,
you don’t get to see the show
Bayou bouncers, f*****g clowns,
really got to go

Got your friend
By his shirt
Trying to make him stand still

Take away
All your gear
And give you s**t
For not buying beer

Don’t be fooled: if you get inside
If you’re a punk, you better hide

The petition started today has a simple mission: Persuade Dischord Records to sign Foo Fighters so Foo Fighters breaks up.

Started by music writer Grayson Currin, the petition on change.org stems from Dave Grohl’s recent suggestion that a deal with the influential D.C. label is on his super-successful band’s bucket list.

“If the Foos could do a Dischord single, then we could break up. Done deal,” Grohl said in a video interview with NME.

“People should support this petition because Dave Grohl says that, should Dischord release a Foo Fighters single, Foo Fighters will break up,” the petition reads. “This is very important, as Grohl and his band might be the most insufferable band of bros on the planet.”

In an email to Bandwidth, Currin calls his petition “entirely a joke” and says he doesn’t wish the Foos any harm. Yet, he adds, “I find Grohl’s opinions about music to be prescriptive and limiting and kind of myopic, and I feel like he often treats his values like official positions that should be adopted by heads of state or something.”

Grohl directed Sonic Highways, an HBO series about national music scenes and studios that also captured the making of his band’s latest album.

As of this writing, Currin’s petition has 55 signatures with a goal of 100.

Grohl recently publicized a letter he wrote to Dischord co-owner Ian MacKaye when he was 14, asking MacKaye to help out his teenage band Mission Impossible. He told NME the ex-Minor Threat vocalist found the letter in his attic.

I’ve reached out to MacKaye for comment on this petition business. No word back yet.

A new documentary film called Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in Washington, DC looks back at that scene. NPR Music will host a screening in, appropriately enough, the nation’s capital, and you’re invited. Salad Days captures an exciting time in this city by pulling together retrospective interviews with rare film footage from the days when harDCore punk was exploding. The film was made by Scott Crawford, a youngster back in those days who had a fanzine that covered those magical times.

Scott Crawford will be on hand after the screening to answer questions along with other panelists including Salad Days director of photography Jim Saah (who documented the scene as a photographer), musician Brian Baker (of Minor Threat, Bad Religion and Dag Nasty) and moderator Ally Schweitzer of WAMU.

The screening will take place on Tuesday, May 5 at 7:00 p.m. If you’d like to join us, go to this page to reserve your free ticket.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

That quote has context — MacKaye was talking about his old band Minor Threat’s if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em solution to shirt bootlegging — but in general, D.C.’s best-known record label really doesn’t do band swag. You won’t find any accessories, posters or clothing in the official Dischord store, not even from non-Dischord bands it distributes. If you want to buy a Dischord tee, you’ve got to go elsewhere, like Pedestrian Press, a company owned by the imprint’s other founder, Jeff Nelson.

But most touring D.C. musicians probably don’t share MacKaye’s position, and if they once did, they are probably rethinking that in the age of tepid physical sales.

So what D.C. bands and labels make the best merch-table fodder, besides records? Tough question. Bandwidth contributors put their heads together and came up with this list of creative standouts from local artists and record labels.

If you’d rather get your music from Soundcloud or Bandcamp, fair enough — you can support local music by buying this swag instead.

Note: We can’t guarantee that all of these items are still available.

Via Bandcamp

Coup Sauvage And The Snips’ “Your Condo Will Not Protect You” T-shirt

The D.C. dance-pop ensemble calls its music “a soundtrack for the children to watch the first world burn” — and this T-shirt won’t assure wealthy urbanites that they’re safe from the flames.

Via Tumblr

Ras Nebyu’s “Washington Slizzards” gear

The uptown MC christened his crew the Washington Slizzards, a name that even he acknowledges doesn’t mean much. Nebyu says he came up with the Wizards pun when he was joking around with his friend, and they thought it was funny, so they rolled with it. Then it blew up on Twitter. So Nebyu recorded a song by the same name and cranked out some T-shirts. That did it: the Washington Slizzards are totally real now.

Via Bigcartel

Moshers Delight sweatpants

The D.C. hardcore label makes its own sweatpants, probably for cozy roundhouse kicking in the pit.

Marijuana paraphernalia from Weed Is Weed and Dying Fetus

Both heavy Maryland bands have sold ganja supplies in the past: Dying Fetus slapped its name on an “herbal grinder,” and Weed Is Weed had its very own glass pipe. These guys understand their fans.

A Sound of Thunder “Blood Vomit” T-shirt

This shirt makes no attempt at subtlety. Then again, neither does the over-the-top metal band that commissioned it.

Via Bandcamp

Jack On Fire matchbook

From the band that wrote “Burn Down the Brixton” comes D.C.’s most black-humored merch: an official Jack On Fire matchbook — complete with a disclaimer, in case you get any funny ideas.

Via Bigcartel

Shy Glizzy’s “FXCK RAP” beanie

D.C.’s biggest street-rap up-and-comer takes a utilitarian approach to music: He said in a Fader interview with Bandwidth’s Briana Younger that he raps to make a living, calling hip-hop a “last resort.” His song “Fxck Rap” makes that much clear. “I know how to hustle, so f**k rap,” he says on the track. It’s all a little meta — a rapper rapping about the uselessness of his own rapping — and this rap beanie (yours for $10!) doubles the effect.

Via Causticcasanova.com

Caustic Casanova’s Bullets-style T-shirt

Dig stoner rock and D.C. sports history? Caustic Casanova has got the shirt for you.

A mildly NSFW shirt from Coke Bust

D.C. hardcore stalwarts Coke Bust sell an elaborate hand-drawn T-shirt designed by Brazilian punk rocker Xavero. Mind the nudity.

Via Silver Sprocket

Lemuria comic book

I wouldn’t doubt that the Syracuse/D.C. indie-pop band has loads of fun on tour, but this 40-page Lemuria comic book has them “travers[ing] the vast landscape of Russia, dodging roves of violent Nazis, crooked cops, mobster shakedowns, gunshots, a tropical storm, rabid dogs and a substandard German pizza.”

Windian Records 45 spinner

You can’t play most releases on the D.C. garage-rock label without one of these little guys.

Via Sean Gray

Accidental Guest’s “Morrissey Still Sucks” button

Record label owner (and Bandwidth contributor) Sean Gray seems to take glee in bashing musicians he dislikes, and these (free!) buttons make that contempt wearable.

Ex Hex tote bag

D.C.’s best rock band doesn’t sell any swag online, but catch the three-piece on tour and you’ll probably spot one of these simple tote bags at the merch table.

Via PPU

Peoples Potential Unlimited leggings

Andrew Morgan’s boutique funk record label makes excellent merch for vinyl obsessives, including slipmats and record bags that come in two sizes — for 12-inches and 7-inches — but I can’t think of another D.C. label that makes its own glamorous leggings like these ones designed by Lisa Stannard.

Via Facebook

Gloom sunglasses

If one day our world is destroyed by an exploding sun, our oblivion will probably sound like blackened death-metal band Gloom — and we’ll want to be wearing these shades to go out in style.

What merch did we miss? Drop us a comment or an email.

Photo by Flickr user Barb Crawford modified and used under a Creative Commons license.

Through much of the ’00s, Wyatt was part of an extended local crew of ex-punks and video-store heads who were building dance-oriented record labels such as Peoples Potential Unlimited, Future Times and Awesome Tapes From Africa. He initially made his name with work he called “video mulch” — skewed, collaged VHS-vault footage combined with sometimes nutty winks and nods to decaying cultural memory — that graced, among other things, the PPU label’s two Video Party DVDs of obscure regional funk.

But music was in Wyatt’s future: After ditching the District for Brooklyn at the turn of this decade, his own compositions — instrumental, sometimes experimental, often groove-oriented and usually grounded in synths and/or guitars — took off via tastemaker New York label L.I.E.S., run by Ron Morelli, an ally of the D.C. crew.

From “Because Of M.A.S.K.”

Most of that work has been under the name Torn Hawk, including two LPs released this year: the well-received Through Force of Will and Let’s Cry and Do Pushups at the Same Time. (The latest video from that album, “Because of M.A.S.K.,” is as good an entry point into Wyatt’s brain as anything.)

Wyatt, who now lives in Berlin, is a thoughtful interview subject, and prior conversations often turn to how his art balances machismo and vulnerability. Other facts: He’s in a relationship with Sheela Rahman, who makes music as Xosar. (She’s all over the “Because of M.A.S.K.” video.) His stepmother ran an indie movie theater in Charlottesville, where he was born. He grew up in New Jersey, where he learned guitar from Charles Bissell of The Wrens. He’s comfortable doing an exegesis of Dire Straits, likes to read and occasionally will drop a Michael Nyman reference.

I asked Wyatt about D.C., love, energy, exercise and his own sense of how people view and hear his work. The interview — conducted entirely via email, at an almost surreal pace over the course of a few weeks — has been footnoted and edited (but not mulched).

Bandwidth: You’ve been gone from D.C. for awhile now. When you look back, what did the city give you? What sticks with you — musically, creatively, intellectually, whatever — from your time here?

Luke Wyatt: One human, one persistent clever elegant generous and kind force of nature: Andrew Morgan. PEOPLES POTENTIAL UNLIMITED.

Yeah, there are a bunch of other guys, people in his wake that led to me being in the position where people regard my expression seriously, but Morgan* made it happen. Morgan led to Morelli — these are two guys I force the Angel Gabriel to play pool with. (I Force Angels is the name of the next Torn Hawk record.)

From “PPU Video Party, Volume One”

I mean, everybody pretends to know about how Morgan puts out good records or whatever, but have you experienced his snack display, or the way he wipes down a counter while flipping the side of a record and adjusting the lighting in one minimal gesture?

He and his wife Danni saved my life in D.C. and directed my nascent weirdness towards love and sharpened expression … by employing me as a fixer at his claymation camp (where I shepherded the brainstorms of gore-obsessed 12-year-old boys towards a union of purpose with always fastidious and classy 12-year-old girls) and as a fake carpenter and MealBuster pizza-eater around his house.

There is no D.C. without Andrew for me. I love all those man-children that crawled out of their postpunk cocoon and started making dance music but ANDREW WAS DOING HIS THING ALL ALONG.

I think D.C. is a s**t town unless you are in politics, in which case your life is like an episode of True Blood and you have to keep regular waxing appointments.

Andrew has a way of making D.C. tolerable — he loves to go down to the waterfront and order a grilled cheese and start to get casually drunk.¹ Then we’ll get back in his Acura, and pretend that people we see on the street are walking in time to the bad songs we are listening to on the radio.

Elsewhere in the landscape, you have suave gentlemen eloquent hipsters like Svenonius² who somehow exists with the other Ian³ — and this coexistence shines a light on the frailty of both those guys’ poses. Though I love Svenonius — I am just annoyed that he enables D.C. by his existence. (Move to Krakow please!)

Less Flexible No Sense of Humor Ian Fugazi: Please realize you are simply a sharp businessman, great rhythm guitarist and gutturally emotive singer that creates articulate tantrum music for workouts. “Repeater” is so good like that! “Repeater”= reps.

Those comments about D.C. — if you don’t mind me aggressively summarizing them — are all about “love” and/or “energy.” Even some of your weirdest creations, musical or otherwise, seem to have undercurrents of love, or at least affection. Am I right about that?

From “Melodrama Camp Three”

Yeah I would say a lot of my creations have dealt with me caring about people or things or whatever. It’s nice to push an undercurrent of positivity out there if only as a contrast to the harsh other elements I have put in play. I was also a little preoccupied with “love” for awhile, like many humans before me. As much of a worked-to-death theme as love is, I think you can still break some original material off that old tree.

Let’s talk about “energy,” too: I hear that you like to work out a lot. You’ve even got a song on the new album called “Return to the Pec Deck.” For you, what’s the connection between music and fitness? One is about sharing energy with people, the other tends to be about expending energy. (Obviously, people like to listen to music when they work out; I suppose I’m asking about how you frame “music” and “exercise” in your own worldview.)

From “Bad Deadlift”

To go back to your question for a moment about the “undercurrent of love” in the things that I make: I have a mood disorder where I manufacture my own MDMA. This happens if I don’t sleep enough for a day or two or if I drink enough, past the point of drowsiness, to a plateau of clarity and emotional generosity. In this state I will say things to people that are true but sometimes unnecessarily gooey.

Other people have this chemical issue, it has different names.

I just try to manage it and not make a fool of myself.

But I also try to never be embarrassed by saying something loving, as over-the-top as whatever I said may sound to me later, when I come down. Embarrassment is the most useless emotion. If you can’t be embarrassed you are kind of invincible.

As for exercise: it is a way I try to manage my runaway moods so I don’t just exist in these extremes of gooey-ness or withdrawn ice throne. When I discovered exercise I started getting a lot more done and stopped getting arrested.⁴

“Embarrassment is the most useless emotion. If you can’t be embarrassed you are kind of invincible.”

Music is a drug that helps sculpt moods; it dovetails with the exercise to put me in a place where I write positive movies about my future and come home from the gym ready to take the snail steps to make the movies real.

Alternatively, I could take Zoloft or something to be a functional person, but I have found that is not a sustainable routine. There are a number of studies about the efficacy of regular exercise versus these drugs, and exercise “works better.”

This is not to say I don’t struggle with a sort of seesaw existence. I hate/love alcohol, wish we’d never met. Looking for other nondestructive ways to blow off steam: Somebody give me a call if you have a good idea. (If your idea is parasailing, don’t bother, I have heard that one.)

With all of that in mind, what does the new album represent, to you? Is there anything about it that people are misperceiving?

This is a good question.

Through Force of Will is the (hopefully) obvious aesthetic antecedent to Let’s Cry….

With TFOW I went all in with the smeared, distressed tattered sound that had occupied me since the first L.I.E.S. releases. This was the first time I was able to present an album’s worth of tracks of this sort.

From “Born To Win (Life After Ghostbusters)”

But the truth is that all the tracks with this sound, on L.I.E.S. releases or otherwise, and including Through Force of Will, came from the same four-month period of recording; a controlled spill of formed song and sound ideas that felt quite predetermined as they came out; probably because I had obsessed over the process for so long — the (for me unique at the time) abusive handling of the tracks to achieve this cohesive sound. It was a concept I had to get out of my system.

The music I had made for a long time before that was all about delineation and crispness — very computer-sounding guitar and synth music. I got sick of the hard edges and always undoable decisions of computer workflow, so I went into the smudge zone for this four-month freakout.

Coming out of that, most of the tracks on Let’s Cry… were forward-looking experiments where I tried to lead myself out of the tape-dominated, smeared production system that had cleansed my palette for those four months, back towards the sushi music I had made (pretty much) privately for years before that. I began to add more overt layers of cleanliness, putting fresh frosting on …

Spray-painting dead leaves

Drawing on old denim with crisp metallic markers

Now I am impatient when people limit their idea of what Torn Hawk might sound like to this “tapey/VHS” sound. I get it — a lot of my video work uses VHS. But it is VHS in a hi-fi terrarium, or contrasted with heavy-handed digital brush strokes. At least that is how I see it. And my video work operates on a different track from my music (holding two conversations at the same time, with intermittent eye contact).

Of course it is foolish for me to expect that everybody will have paid attention to a few other things that I have done, especially since they are under other names, but the future I imagine for Torn Hawk embraces the whole available spectrum of fidelity and instrumentation, and being aware of these releases (here, here, here) will give a rounder reading of what I am about.

Let’s Cry and Do Pushups At The Same Time is simply my summation of a fruitful detour into forgiving smudge, my final report from the frontiers of duct tape and moth-gnawed sweaters. It is important for this and for holding production bridges to the future (past) with its hints of clarity.

Of course I hope it is observed that the through-line in all my music, regardless of surface aesthetics, is strong melody, and that anything I feel fit to release attacks people at that level. That is all I really care about.

* I asked Morgan for some insight on Wyatt. This is what Morgan wrote back: “We all knew Luke was gonna break into the biz, just didn’t know where. Late night New York networking led him into the music video-mulching world, he was making better music than any of the artists he was making videos for and titled his songs like no one has done before. Comical to a casual listener, accurate for those that know him well: “Life After Ghostbusters”! I heard Luke’s next move is stand-up comedy.”

¹ Unconfirmed.

² Ian Svenonius.

³ Ian MacKaye.

⁴ Unconfirmed.