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.

The inaugural mix comes from (my friend) Mike Petillo, one half of D.C. production team Protect-U, and it reps D.C. with cuts from local producer Ben Jenkins and a handful of releases on District imprint Peoples Potential Unlimited.

Extended Family promises a fresh mix on the fourth of each month, with the larger goal of promoting D.C.’s diverse electronic music scene. From the project’s website:

Despite the cumbersome red tape that binds Washington D.C., the city has managed to cultivate a rich and long history of music that has grown organically, insistently. It has now become abundantly clear that a cluster of electronic musicians in the District of Columbia are responding to influences of house, techno, and experimental electronic works with open ears and a fresh delivery. Extended Family is a mix series that gathers these voices into a cohesive project: a chronicle of the vibe.

Let the chronicling begin. Stream Petillo’s moody mix, “Frog in the Coffee Pot,” below, and keep up with Extended Family at extendedfamilydc.com.

Photo via Flickr user kev-shine 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.

Saturday, Morgan DJs as part of the Vanguard Festival, a nightlong noise and electronic fest presented by DIY promoters Select DC. The fest’s schedule is a mixed bag, for sure, but Morgan—who goes on after midnight—will probably be the only guy playing forgotten synth funk. To get ourselves hyped up for the show, Bandwidth commissioned a special mix from Morgan, and he delivered this eclectic, low-fidelity, and occasionally bewildering (in a good way!) sampling of some upcoming releases on PPU. Time to get dusty.

Here’s the track list, with a few helpful notes from Morgan:

1. Unknown Artist, “Jam I”
2. Moon B, “Stank Tartare”
Morgan says: To be released April 19/Record Store Day on PPU.
3. Uku & Maryn, “Ao”
Morgan says: These are some commercial demos from mother-son writing team Uku Kuut and Maryn E Coote.
4. Family of Gold, “Stink”
5. Leroy Ace Miller, “Used To Call Me”
Morgan says: While working on Ace’s masters, we found this song on the flip of an unlabeled tape. I think he had forgotten about it.
6. George Smallwood, “Loser”
Morgan says: Smallwood is a local Hyattsville, Md., soul treasure; this is an unreleased home-dubbed demo.
7. The Trash Company featuring Rama, “Mind Game”
Morgan says: From Richmond, Va., this is from an upcoming PPU test pressing, a co-release with Zentao II Publishing.
8. Mix-O-Rap aka Billy D Littlejohn, “Spitting Game”
Morgan says: This is some Gaffney, S.C., laptop rap.