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.

At least not from 1995 to 2003, when the noisy shoegaze trio was active in and around the college town of Fredericksburg.

Made up of Oliver Ackermann, Paul Baker and John Fedowitz — friends from Stafford Senior High School — Skywave sounded like The Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine. At the time, Baker says, that’s not what locals wanted to hear.

Skywave (via Facebook)

“These days, the hipsters would maybe like us, but in the late ’90s and early 2000s, I felt like we seemed we were from another planet,” emails Baker, 38, who still lives in Fredericksburg.

But 12 years after Skywave went quiet, a fan in São Paolo, Brazil, is giving the band a belated tip of the hat. On June 20, Renato Malizia plans to release a free digital compilation called Got That Feeling: A Tribute to Skywave via his label and website, The Blog That Celebrates Itself.

“I’ve always been a big fan of Skywave from the start,” Malizia writes in an email. He says a friend who understood his taste — he counts the Valentines and Jesus and Mary Chain among his favorite bands — hipped him to Skywave’s 1999 record, Echodrone, after a trip to the U.S. It was “love at first hearing,” Malizia writes.

“We were playing songs with actual melodies and we looked like some skinny wimps, but we were louder and weren’t following some awful, flavor-of-the-month sound.” —Paul Baker, formerly of Skywave

When ex-Skywave members moved on to other bands — Ackermann relocated to Brooklyn and formed A Place to Bury Strangers and Fedowitz and Baker played in Ceremony until Baker left in 2012, starting Static Daydream — Malizia stayed hot on their trail.

In March, Malizia and Baker began chatting on Facebook about a Skywave tribute. The blogger contacted bands from all over the world with personal or stylistic ties to Skywave and commissioned 19 covers for the compilation. Oregon’s The Prids, Brazil’s Lautmusik, England’s Nothing.Existed and Virginia’s Screen Vinyl Image — in addition to A Place To Bury Strangers and Static Daydream — are among the bands chipping in.

In 2003, after years of playing to unappreciative audiences, that level of Skywave fandom seemed unimaginable, Baker writes.

“Sometimes … we’d play at some hipster place and they’d seem to hate us as much as the country or Top 40 sort of venues, because what we were doing wasn’t considered cool at the time,” Baker writes. “We’d play with hardcore, screamo bands, and I think we just blew them away and they didn’t know how to respond. I mean, we were playing songs with actual melodies and we looked like some skinny wimps, but we were louder and weren’t following some awful, flavor-of-the-month sound.”

Malizia says that’s exactly what he loved about Skywave.

“Skywave rescues on their albums that magic, that energy, that dream of making real music without using the marketing or the media,” the blogger writes. He admires that the group seemed to “say ‘f**k you’ to everyone.”

Or maybe it’s that Skywave — with its sound cribbed from the 1980s and early ’90s — was both behind and ahead of its time.

“Back then it seemed like we were playing shows for about five of our friends, which was cool, but it certainly didn’t feel like 10 or 15 years later anybody would remember or care enough to do some kind of tribute. So that’s a pretty amazing feeling,” Baker writes. “I mean, we were trying to do something great back then, but it never really felt like it was happening.”

The Blog That Celebrates Itself plans to release Got That Feeling: A Tribute To Skywave on June 20.

Below, a playlist of highlights from Skywave’s Echodrone and Synthstatic LPs: