Memories fade. Documentation disappears. Scenes vanish.
When you’re busy creating a world, you don’t always think about how to preserve it for history. So old fliers and magazines get brittle and crumble, photos get lost, publications go out of business and websites get deleted. It falls to archivists — sometimes from a scene itself, and sometimes an avid follower — to fight that slipperiness. Each of these worthy and memorable books is the product of such work. What’s most startling is that the worlds they rescue are of the surprisingly recent past. Which means that even in this age of hyperdocumentation and rapid technological advancement, evanescence is always a threat.
The early years of Agnostic Front, the scene-shaping New York hardcore band, were chaos incarnate: a Lower East Side life of ramshackle apartments, rumbles on the street and birthing an explosive, aggravated, pugnacious new sound.
There are oodles of fliers from bills shared with Reagan Youth, Murphy’s Law, Suicidal Tendencies, Youth of Today and more. Some were scrawled by hand and some pasted pastiche-style; some featured illustrated skinheads in suspenders, tight pants and stomper boots; and some memorably gory ones were mailed in from an Oxnard, Calif., illustrator named Chuy.
Miret’s collection also includes margarine-yellow T-shirts, test presses of the band’s earliest recordings and show announcements from the Village Voice listings pages.
At the pulsing heart of New York City’s rave community in the early 1990s sat Liquid Sky: a record store slinging rare imports, a clothing store selling handmade gear, a vividly designed art gallery and, ultimately, a place for the most colorful and plugged-in downtown tribes to gather.
This lush book aims to retrieve that history in full, with detail-packed interviews with the crew’s key players and intimates (conducted by Marc Santo), oodles of scene-kid portraits and dozens of party fliers — from NASA raves, Konkrete Jungle and more — inspired by an aesthetic of technologically enhanced futurism.
From the very beginning, inscrutability was one of Aphex Twin’s primary charms. Emerging at the dawn of the ’90s, the musician born Richard D. James took shards of rave music, hip-hop, industrial and techno and constructed a kind of parallel dance music that was frenetic and sometimes caustic but always potent.
The book is part anthology of period journalism from the pages of Jockey Slut, part Festschrift with essays on each album, part reminder that even this most elusive of artists allowed himself to be photographed from time to time (including in 1995, with Philip Glass).
Sometimes it helps to have a camera, and to know when to use it. In the early days of the radical Los Angeles rap crew Odd Future, Sagan Lockhart often functioned as a spare set of eyes, running alongside emerging stars who were living and creating so quickly, they might not have stopped long enough to take stock.
The photos are amateurish and accidental, well matched to the renegade casualness of the group’s growing fame.
It’s eerie how much of themselves some people give to the internet, and it’s even more eerie how truly impermanent that record is. From the early 2010s, when he was a young teen rapper in Chicago helping give the city’s emergent drill sound its shape, Chief Keef was flooding his Instagram with self-documentation, all of which is essentially gone now.
Keef is one of the most imitated and emulated rappers of the last decade and a half, but he still feels obscure and distant. In these photos, though, he was happily putting on and showing off his identity in tiny increments.
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