Various Artists - RED XEROX - Chicago Youth Beat: 2020-2025 Various Artists

For some reason other, by chance or fate or something else, I’ve fallen head first into the sounds coming from Chicago over the last few years. Most probably first brought to my attention by Eli Schmitt, a longtime social media friend of mine who has designed many a gig poster for me even across the ocean, Chicago bands have been a mainstay in my playlists for a long while.

Hallogallo, if you’re not familiar, is the bustling and fertile scene right out of the Illinois city: grassroots gigs, zines, recordings, likeminded people with likeminded values. Kai Slater of noise-rock band Lifeguard and solo project Sharp Pins, hand-makes zines and flyers from Hallogallo HQ (aka his apartment). It’s a call to arms, a collective of media scans and handmade tapes and cartridge ink; a likeminded home of Chicago music and those all around the world who fuel it: NEU, Dolly Mixture, Fugazi, The Smashing Times, Ripped & Torn. You don’t have to be from Chicago to experience Hallogallo, it lives all around the world in bedrooms and underground venues and toilet cubicles pasted with home printed posters and stickers.

Eli (New Now, Unresolved Zine, Numero Group) has assembled Red Xerox, a compendium capturing the first years of the city’s youth-beat Hallogallo scene; a living, breathing movement — one that is still unfolding. Red Xerox features early cuts from Horsegirl and Lifeguard, who are now pillars of the scene signed to Matador Records, alongside soon-to-be classics and previously unreleased tracks from Friko, Post Office Winter, Dwaal Troupe, Sharp Pins, Free Range and more. These are sounds from basements and bedrooms and makeshift studios – there’s something happening under the surface of the city, much like our home here in Glasgow.

This collection of tracks transforms tape machine fantasies and typewriter communism into history. From pop perfectionism, to noise rock wonders, from Ecuadorian inspired folk songs to no-wave psychedelia, Eli presents the full breadth of Chicago’s musical diversity. You want guitar ballads? You got it. You want a 7 minute live track that sounds like a long lost Fugazi vault track? You got it. Whatever you want, and whoever you want to be, Chicago welcomes you with open arms.

“Somehow, against all odds and logic, we became a group of punk rockers in Illinois, making what felt like an atomic love bomb, and we knew it. This was self-actualization in real time: manifestos and stratagems, calls to arms. Zines planted at every Blue Line stop and coffee shop we could find. Frances B. playing trombone and trumpet at the same time. Niko K. shrieking like a newly born pterodactyl, and a whole generation of newly born pterodactyls alongside him, stomping and kicking. Not crying for their mothers, but for youth expression, liberated bodies, dance spaces, rave-ups, and hops.If any of this sounds silly, you are a silly person. But if it sounds like a future you want to be part of, welcome. This compilation is not a reminiscence of the good old days or a document of a time long gone, it is NOW! Please join us. The future is yours and mine.”

- Lauren / Monorail