Hometown Tunes: Lost And Found in Seattle's DIY Music Scene
Hometown Tunes by Pure Nowhere is a collection of playlists, focused on small cities & local music scenes across the world, accompanied by personal stories & images. read & see more here >
WORDS + COLOURED PHOTOS by Laura Affolter
B&W PHOTOS by Alex Herzog
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In my freshman year of university, I began a list in my iPhone notes of all the bands I saw live while living in Seattle, Washington. Like many of the projects I have started, the list was shortly forgotten about and abandoned, and through neglecting to purchase more iCloud space for my account, it was eventually lost to the expansive digital graveyard of arbitrary and inconsequential personal data.
What was not lost, however, were the memories and life I constructed around the bands, concerts, big venues, DIY spaces, and network of communities that comprised the Seattle music scene - namely the DIY scene - from the years of 2015-2019.
Known for big names across multiple genres, such as Nirvana, Jimi Hendrix, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Death Cab for Cutie and Modest Mouse (please, no one come after me for this haphazardly picked assortment of bands), Seattle can undoubtedly be called a city for musicians for both the famous and the aspiring. And for many of those who have called or do call the city home, it’s the smaller, lesser known bands and their side projects - and their side project’s projects - that are the driving force behind the city’s music scene.
During my time in Seattle, I witnessed how local bands and the spaces which supported them helped ground communities while creating emotional ties to Seattle. The fluid music scene and the songs coming from it acted as a commentary on Seattle’s ever-changing geopolitical, cultural and social landscape. DIY spaces, intended as safe havens for alternative communities, helped anchor and house many who found themselves needing a place to crash and a sense of belonging. Small, grungy venues like the Black Lodge and Vera Project are important outposts with age-inclusive policies prohibiting the use of drugs and alcohol and often headline with local acts.
House venues are spaces of counter-culture filled with creative energy and are one act of resistance against the rapid gentrification of Seattle.
On a personal scale, the music coming from small bar and coffee shop shows, locally driven art spaces, several house’s living rooms, basements and backyards were the soundtrack to my life in Seattle. Though not a musician myself, I have experienced so much of what the Seattle DIY music scene provides. My ties to the DIY scene as a visual artist meant that many of my close friends, partners and friends’ partners were musicians, and through this web of connections I found myself at a show nearly every weekend.
Over the years, I spent countless hours listening to, waking up to, creating to, loving to, crying to, having an existential crisis and subsequent mental breakdown to local, live music.
From the basement and backyard shows at Rat House during my freshman and sophomore years where my friends Tara and Fi played, avidly seeking out invitations to shows put on by the ubiquitous and exclusive Friends of Friends of Friends project (the Sweaty Teens vs Moist Adolescents musical face off remains a favorite memory of mine), the yearly and appropriately named Susquatch festival (R.I.P. the Sasquatch! music festival, I am still heartbroken that I was never able to attend you), to breaking the moldy table that sat in the backyard at Candy Mountain between Strawberry Mountain’s and a touring band from the east coast’s sets, expensive Lyft rides to shows in the suburbs of Seattle, and spending the night at Cone after a rowdy show only to wake up to one of the six residents practicing the xylophone at 8am, my life and the diy scene were inseparable. I would not have wanted it any other way.
The sounds of the Seattle underground are innumerable; post-punk, rockabilly punk, glam punk, riot grrrl, industrial techno, acid techno, deep house, shoegaze, bedroom pop and surf rock are just a few of the genres one can hear while attending a Seattle show.
The playlist I have put together in collaboration with other Seattle musicians showcases the wide-ranging acoustics of the Seattle music scene, with many of featured bands holding a special place in my heart.
Listening to this playlist while thousands of miles away from Seattle makes me feel much closer to my friends and old stomping grounds.
Tiro Nyom by Tiny Room is one of the songs that gifted me tinnitus during the last music festival - Funeral Fest - held at Cone before the house got torn down to make way for generic, cube-like apartments for the techies. The shows at Cone were always my favorite, filled with energetic, sweaty dancing and strange colorful projections.
José Tries to Leave was written with a big nod to my ex, and as I hear the cadence of his poetry in the lyrics of the song I am reminded of the house venue Hot Yoga with its musty, dark and loud basement shows.
Time in the Sun by Francis Farmer plays on repeat when I think of my last summer in Seattle, with ferry rides to Vashon Island and misty mornings filming his music video near Volunteer Park.
The list goes on. And while Seattle is no longer my home, the memories that I have from the music scene are some of my fondest. Many of the stories I tell my new friends in Hamburg evolve around house shows, local bands and late nights spent listening to music.
One thing I have learned from moving to a foreign city is that the music scene in Seattle is incredibly unique, and very impermanent. None of the house venues previously mentioned exist any longer; many of the members of the bands on the playlist have migrated to new cities and formed new groups.
While the rapid gentrification of Seattle and loss of many incredible music spaces is not something to be romanticised, there lays beauty in the transience of the local music scene and the perpetual cycle of discovery, unification and disbandment.
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