Various artists
Red Xerox: Chicago Youth Beat 2020-2025
DESERT ISLAND
For decades now, Chicago’s music scene has consistently churned out wayward perspectives on contemporary sounds, from founding house music to transforming alt-rock into arena fare (thank you, Smashing Pumpkins) and beyond. Today, the staggering creatives of the city’s youth are still amassing pioneer sounds and like-minded communities vital to the health of DIY rock music. In 2020, Eli Schmitt helped to forge a community of art rockers who wielded manifestos of self-expression and a bashful rejection of the mainstream. Affectionately named Hallogallo, the scene made its mark across the city by way of zines posted at transit stations and live streams of underground shows, and it thrived through a generation Kai Slater of Lifeguard called “newly born pterodactyls” shrieking for “youth expression, liberated bodies, dance spaces, rave-ups, and hops.”
After years of organization, Schmitt is rolling out a document of the scene titled Red Xerox via the imprint of Brooklyn’s iconic comic and zine shop Desert Island—which, to no one’s surprise, fosters an erudite audience aligned with Chicago’s own zine space Quimby’s, or with Hallogallo’s own subscribers. Named a compilation album, Red Xerox is more of a symposium for genre-defying trailblazers, a no-skips playlists capturing the budding youth-beat movement as it enters its prime. Featured tracks from two of the scene’s pillars, Lifeguard and Horsegirl, bear witness to their contemporaries’ early periods rich in Electrelane and SST conformity, years before both bands’ contracts with Matador Records and their inevitable appearances on year-end lists.
The tracklist is a tapestry hung with Chicago’s colorful underground musical diversity. Tracks like Friko’s “Get Numb to It!” and Lifeguard’s unreleased “Crate” boast guitar hedonism, while “You Turned Off the Light” by Sharp Pins (Kai Slater’s solo project) swerves down a glorious ’60s psych-pop avenue. Sprinkled around such animated rock-out tracks are soft tones such as Amaya Peña’s “Song for Avi” and Post Office Winter’s “Mother, Sister, Nurse,” which stand out as bold, folk-forward counterparts. Together, these songs provide the perfect combination of experimental harbingers and the polished legacies of a gritty up-and-coming scene.
There’s no better way to vicariously live through a subversive DIY show hosted in a college student’s apartment than by listening to Red Xerox. The collection’s excellence lies in its authenticity as much as in its grandiosity; it’s as if you can hear the single-hung windows shudder from the battering percussion, much as you can hear future rock-defining giants being born. The scene is captured as though suspended in time, caught behind glass in a gallery exhibition on the archived history of sound. The 24-page zine included with the compilation only uncovers a glimpse into this cultural milestone.
