Cephalopods are a mysterious entity for anyone used to the internet’s usual penchant for instant gratification. The people constituting the lineup immediately pique interest — Hugh McElroy (Black Eyes), Fiona Griffin (Horses, Et At It) and Wells Bennett (Early Humans) — but their internet presence is minimal and we’re lucky if we can catch a show from them once every few months.
Perhaps that’s why the vast majority of our conversation with Hugh McElroy revolved less around this current project and more around the philosophy that has driven his work within the D.C. music scene. His imprint, Ruffian Records has been a cornerstone in D.C. punk’s history of feminism and activism in general. His sense of community involvement stems beyond the Imperial China record that he co-released with Sockets Records. His home studio, Swim-Two-Birds, has hosted many of the artists we’ve interviewed for previous Three Stars posts. He is reliably present at every single Fort Reno performance. All of this is equally important, if not more so, than the beautifully haunting minimalist compositions Cephalopods have written for guitar, upright bass and percussion.
Find them online: http://www.ruffianrecords.blogspot.com
See them next: Tonight at Everlasting Life Cafe (2928 Georgia Ave. N.W.) with Silo Halo, Zebra and If I Had a Hi-Fi at 9:00 p.m.
You started Ruffian in 1996, is that right?
Yeah. The sort of germs of the label were coming together in ’94 and ’95 cause I’d picked up a zine that was a guide to putting out records and for a couple of years, I’d been reading it over and over again for a couple of years and I was like, “I’m so cool, I should do this.” Then I guess it must have been ’95 that a couple friends of mine were in a band called the Best Pocket Psalm and they were doing a record on another friend’s label and we decided to do a 7” together. So, it got recorded in ’95 and released in ’96.
It sounded like at least part of the impetus was to put out some of your own stuff.
Yeah, it went that way. It wasn’t totally original. I was in bands when the label started but we weren’t really thinking of putting stuff out and the planned first two releases were not things I played on. The first release was the Best Pocket Psalm where we put out a 7” and the second band was a band called Bubblejug, which was a local/northern Virginia punk band. I hadn’t really thought about putting out my own bands’ music, although I started getting into bands that were getting ready to put things out. I was like, well, we already have this label. I mean, it’s not like there was no interest but it was the mid-‘90s and there was a little bit more energy for this stuff. Not that there isn’t now, but I think it was more pervasive and part of the spirit. I feel like DIY music was a little more DIY.
What has changed? Obviously the internet exploded, but what else in terms of running a label and putting out records?
What’s really interesting is that I think a lot of things happen similarly now, they just happen in a different medium. I think the internet has consolidated a lot of the communication media that people used to engage in. I remember back then when I was putting out records, if I wanted to communicate with people from other scenes in other towns, I wrote letters. I got a lot of records by mail, by writing away by mail and getting records posted to me and I remember a lot of trading through the postal service. The internet has facilitated a lot of that communication happening more rapidly, but I also think that the internet has changed the nature of, for lack of a better term, publicity. I think in the ‘90s there was overt record label publicity stuff going on but it was also not impossible to put out records on a sort of DIY basis where the publicity was, the band would push it and people would buy the records and people who liked the records would review them in zines. I don’t think that doesn’t go on anymore and I think it does go on a certain amount online and in print as well, but I think because the internet has given people access to so much more stuff, the nature of what “word of mouth” means has changed. And I think it still happens locally.
What I think is really interesting is that in some ways the internet may have made “local” relevant again after awhile of making it seem not relevant. Because after awhile, being exposed to so much stuff, it gets useful to have a meaningful filter and if your meaningful filter is your local community and the people you know socially, that can actually be a really handy way to tune out a lot of information overload and static. But, it’s interesting because for awhile it was just so much harder to get anyone’s attention with records or music because there was so much out there and you didn’t have to make as many choices as far as, “I’m going to write away for this ‘zine because people write about music that I like,” you’d just have to go to a computer and say, “Oh, I usually like the stuff that Pitchfork covers” or “I usually like the stuff that’s on Brooklyn Vegan” or “I usually like the stuff that’s on DJ/Rupture’s website” or “I usually like the stuff that’s discussed on The Wire’s forum.” There were so many avenues for discussion in a way that there weren’t before. There were a lot of avenues but you had to seek them out much more aggressively to find them. So, you were kind of filtering stuff by the choices you made and now it’s easier to get all of that information without filtering it. So, it’s changed the landscape a lot. I don’t know that it’s changed the cognitive need for filtering, but it may also be changing people’s cognitive processes about how the process music and art and things that they care about. I could be totally wrong about all of this. That’s how I’m experiencing it, at any rate, as a person in my early thirties who is comfortable with technology but realizing that I don’t like having to spend that much time with it if I don’t have to.
Speaking again of things that are local…Sean Peoples was an active member of Ruffian for awhile. How long was he active with Ruffian?
Sean sort of came on board to help me out at a time when he was sort of contemplating starting a label himself. I would be hard pressed for specific dates but it would be around 2003, 2004, 2005. Sockets probably started up around 2005. Sean was basically helping me do a lot of web design stuff while he was contemplating starting up his own label and then when Sockets started, he sort of focused more attention on that while still helping out but we’ve always been fairly collaborative between the two labels. So, we’ve put out a couple of records together and we sort of help each other out when we can. So, he’s not directly involved in Ruffian except inasmuch as the fact that we’ve worked together on a few records. I’ve recorded bands that he’s put out. I’ve recorded records that we’ve released jointly. I’ve recorded bands that he’s ended up putting out but not the stuff that I’ve recorded. There’s a lot of cross-pollination and a lot of mutual interests and mutual friends and the two labels do collaborate occasionally. We sort of genrally informally help each other out when we can.
You talk about recording various bands. Is Swim-Two-Birds your studio?
Yeah, Swim-Two-Birds is my studio in the basement of my house. It’s kind of a weird ever-evolving space. It started out as this hideous finished but very inhospitable basement and it’s kind of warming up into a nice, cool, comfortable space that’s amazing again.
Anything cool you could tell me about that space?
There’s a part of me that’s biased in both directions. I’m like, “It’s my f**king basement. It’s not that cool,” and then there’s the part of me that’s like, “It’s my basement! Where I make records! I love it!” It’s kind of cool. It’s a studio that has a very analog heart but some digital capacity and I’ve done a lot of stuff I’m really psyched about down there. Sean and I recorded our old band’s music down there and we’ve done a couple records with HUME down there, some recording with Buildings. It’s really nice that I’ve worked with a lot of bands that I’ve been excited about in D.C. over the last few years. Like HUME and a sort of earlier incarnation of HUME called Barkitecture have tracked down here. Also, we’ve started stuff at Inner Ear and mixed it here. There was some noon:30 stuff that Sean and I were going to release together but we came up with an idea of a bunch of split 7”s with local bands that for a lot of logistical and organizational reasons didn’t happen, but there were some cool sessions. So, noon:30’s recorded down there and Laughing Man and Buildings and HUME and Imperial China. Baby Killer Estelle did a record down there. It’s just a very nice space.
It’s nice that it’s at home. It gives a lot of sort of leisure to not feel like you’re on the clock when you’re recording. It’s also nice because there’s a lot of different people who have lived in this house who are artists or musicians or designers. We’ve had a lot of interesting people coming through. So, there’s one record that I made with a friend who was touring from Australia and a couple of our friends were nice enough to be her backing band and we recorded six songs in the basement. But in the meantime, one of the guys who was in the band who lived here with his then-partner — he was playing in the band and she was upstairs and she had people over for a barbecue so we went to record for a little while and then we went upstairs and people would grab a burger or a veggie burger or whatever and have a beer or a glass of wine and get back down to working. It was a very comfortable, very pleasant sort of mix of getting stuff done but also having this sort of homey environment to just hang out. I recorded a band called Girl Loves Distortion and it was the middle of July and we took a break and I grew a bunch of vegetables in my garden so there was a bunch of cherry tomatoes and basil and we just went inside and dipped tomatoes in salt and then wrapped them in basil. We were eating fresh fruit from the garden while talking about the record we were making. There was just a really pleasant mixing of life and art. It’s nice to have the ability to work and hang in the same place in a very productive and relaxed way. You can go downstairs and focus on the work and then come upstairs and hang out in the yard and eat the tomatoes. It’s a great place for creative and social productivity.
Would you say that’s the aesthetic of the label on the whole?
Yeah. It’s got to be because I haven’t put out a record in a couple of years. The thing I’ve come to realize is that, and this kind of comes back to some of the social filtering that I was talking about, what I’ve realized is that I’m so psyched about the community of musicians and artists that I know in D.C. and I really like the idea of collaborative and productive hang time. I don’t feel super pressed about, “Oh, we have to put out a record and keep our name out there or in the press” or whatever. There are just so many people that I know who are making awesome music and making awesome art and I’m just sort of happy to be hanging out with them and not worrying about whether there’s a product unless there’s a pressing need for something to become a product and just letting it be about relationships and community. The notion of community has become much more important to me than the notion of product. So, I think there is a definite degree to which that has probably become the aesthetic of the label.
Yeah, I had noticed that it had been quiet in terms of releases recently. I take it you’ve been up to other things?
Yeah. Partially, I’ve been teaching and teaching has been one of those things that requires a lot of creative energy. So, to some extent, teaching has been taking up a lot of my creative energy and for awhile when I was teaching full time, I was still recording a lot of other people’s bands that I’m doing a little bit less of. I’m still doing it on a more community basis and less of another job and more of a project I really want to get involved in. And I’m finding that it’s hard to keep all of those things in the air all at once and I’d rather spend some time being one until I feel like it’s in a good place and then I can pick up the other one again. So, the label isn’t going to shut down. We have some stuff that was in the works that may still be in the works and may go somewhere else. There’s so much stuff going on that I’m happy to give the label a little time to sort of mellow out. There’s still plenty of stuff to keep up with. There’s still a lot of e-mail and actual postable mail to do. But it’s becoming a thing that is less of a distinct entity in its own right and more a thing that’s this one part of my life that also includes teaching kids and playing in a band and recording bands that I’m psyched about and just generally being part of a very cool, ongoing, long-lasting community in D.C.
One thing that I kept running into on your website was the phrase “Ruffian Youth Conspiracy.” What, specifically, is that?
It’s this idea that I had back when I started the label. I was 17 or 18 at the time. It’s funny, I think it’s one of the things that actually led me into teaching. I felt like young peoples’ voices were not heard very much and I certainly felt that my own voice as a young person was not heard very much.
So, we sort of had this vision and I think we were sort of inspired in some ways by some of the tactics of Riot Grrl in this. We were pretending there was a big thing going on even though there were maybe five of us with some ideas about stuff with the hope that some other people would hear about it and think it was exciting and sort of get in on it. That was also probably a little more possible in the pre-internet days. Like, “Ooh, what’s this ‘youth conspiracy’ thing” because we were very empower-oriented. It’s something that I really held onto in the fact that I really think it’s super important that young people get their voices heard and that young people find ways of making their voices heard in situations where maybe the adults around them are not supportive of that. It’s sort of interesting because we were very interested when I started the label of finding ways of — we did ‘zines and put out tapes and stuff like that — we did stuff for people who felt underrepresented, especially in the pre-internet days: queer kids and young people of color.
D.C. at that time was such a different place in terms of an urban identity. We had this bad rap because of the crack epidemic and it was the murder capital and all this stuff but there were still plenty of us who grew up here who just loved it. We just really wanted to find ways of making public and giving voice to young people’s experience at thoughts. That’s what that idea came out of. It’s sort of funny because I haven’t thought about that idea in a long time. I remember thinking very consciously once I became aware of the fact that one of the strategies that most people who were in on the ground with Riot Grrl had done was essentially make up Riot Grrl chapters that didn’t exist and act like it was this huge news net to make people excited about getting on board and talking about feminism in a punk concept. So, I thought that this sort of idea was really exciting and thought, well, let’s try that and see if it happens and it sort of didn’t but it sort of did. Years later we ended up putting out a lot of young bands and I’m doing the D.C. Free Recording Project which is all young bands who we did free recording sessions for. We were doing something cool for kids who were making music. I have some enduring friendships with kids who are younger in the punk scene because of that.
I think there was a broader philosophical ethos about that probably outlived the situationist rhetorical device that it was originally conceived as. And it was the ‘90s and there was Huggy Bear and the Nation of Ulysses and this great deal of adopting situationist political rhetoric of rebellion and conspiracy but also playing with the idea in a meta way. I was trying to do that on one level and in retrospect, a lot of what I was trying to do was looking for other people my age who were into the same shit. It was a way of putting out what we were about in the hopes that people would write me letters and be like, “Yeah, I’m into that, too.”
Did that happen?
It actually did. A lot of it was through the ‘zines that we wrote and through the fact that the band I was with at the time, A.K.A. Harlot #1 played the Philadelphia Riotgrrl convention and I met a lot of queer and feminist punk kids who were roughly the same age. What I think was interesting was that back then we sort of hoped we’d find a lot of people like us and it turned out that we didn’t find as many as we thought we would, but we found enough to keep up a good correspondence. D.C. at the time was overrun by awesome political queer punk girls but not so many awesome political queer punk dudes. So, you’d find one other person who was into what you’re into in another town or one other person who had your experience. It wasn’t strictly aligned on gender and sexuality issues. There’s a lot of different stuff. But, you’d find someone in a different place who was on your page. Even if you found just one person in Vermont and one person in Philadelphia and one person in Tennessee, you’d feel like you were connected to people who you wouldn’t otherwise be and you feel like you were connected just by putting yourself out there on a record or a tape or in a ‘zine. It turned out to be smaller scale than what we were hoping, as all young activist people we were all sort of lamenting the revolution writ large, but we all just ended up making our own lives a lot better and hopefully the lives of a lot of our friends and hopefully a lot of people that we were in a community with that are better by being more connected. That may have turned out to have been the point even if we didn’t understand it at the time. I met a lot of interesting and great people through all of that. It’s funny because a lot of the people that I was active with doing stuff at the time have gone on and done stuff that’s totally still connected. In the band I was in that played the Philly Riotgrrl convention, Sara Marcus played drums in that band just published a book on the history of Riotgrrl. Ginger Takahashi played bass on that and ended up playing on a record with Mirah a few years back and playing in a band with J.D. from Le Tigre and there’s a lot of very cool continuity. Maybe some of the stuff we were doing was here and there and informal and kind of ad hoc in terms of the connections we made but lots of people are then taking that into other worlds. Or a broader audience in the case of them as musicians and authors. For me, a lot of these values are the things that inform my teaching as a high school teacher. It’s cool to see that stuff have a continuous life, even though we could have been disappointed by the smallness of the scale at the time.
Do you have any advice for people who are thinking of starting up a label?
It’s interesting because my work methods are probably different from what people who want to start an economically viable label now might have to do it. But, no matter what, you want to choose what you want to spend your money on very carefully. You want to find the best way to get the music that you care about out into the world as widely but inexpensively as possible. So the reason that tape labels were such a big deal and CD-R labels before putting out 7”s was a thing is that they were economical ways of testing the waters. At the end of the day, music doesn’t work unless people connect to it emotionally and it’s very hard to find a formula for what people will connect to emotionally, so, for most people there’s a lot of trial and error in terms of figuring out what kind of works as their thing. You don’t want to take out a second mortgage on the house when you’re putting the test balloon in there. But, I think another thing about it, even with the changing nature of internet stuff is that so much of what happens with music is about communities and about people connecting with each other.
So, I think one of the important things that people often sort of forget is that the way bands used to do it is you would play a lot of shows in your own town and see if the people that you already knew and who kind of knew who you were liked it. And you wouldn’t necessarily do anything with it until you’d sort of figured that out. I think that remains a fundamentally human phenomenon about art and community and music. You don’t necessarily want to expect to reach an audience beyond your town or your community immediately as much as there are tools to do that. People do still and I may suspect increasingly relate to things that are authentically interpersonal. I deeply, deeply remember a lot of the bands I saw as a high school student who were also high school students; the teenage bands I saw as a kid that I was able to make friends with. Now, I play in a band with someone that was in a band that I had mad respect for when I was a teenager. So much of the stuff is how people’s personal feelings and emotions have to do with how people relate to a broader group of people or a bigger community and that stuff is at least as important if not more important than reaching a giant audience of strangers.
