Chapel Hill Indie Rock

You're asking about a university town of 40,000 that briefly got sold as the next Seattle. It wasn't a sound — it was cheap rent, one good venue, one cheap studio and a label that didn't need the bands to get big.

The records split two ways: fast, hoarse and melodic, or detuned and knotted up until the time signature stops behaving.

Chapel Hill and neighbouring Carrboro, roughly 1989 to 1996. Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance started Merge in 1989 to put out 7"s by friends; Jay Faires ran Mammoth out of Carrboro on a bigger-budget model.

Cat's Cradle was the room. Jerry Kee's Duck-Kee Studios was where the tape rolled — Seam cut Headsparks there in August 1991.

After Nirvana broke, major labels and magazines came looking for the next scene and settled on Chapel Hill; most of the bands declined to cooperate. What survived the hype was the infrastructure.

Merge is still operating, and in 2020 it reissued Polvo's first two albums on vinyl with updated artwork and archive ephemera.

Who: McCaughan and Ballance at the centre, Polvo's Ash Bowie and Dave Brylawski — high-school classmates of McCaughan — Eric Bachmann's Archers of Loaf, and Sooyoung Park arriving from Bitch Magnet.

Cat's Cradle, Schoolkids Records, Duck-Kee. What: guitars tuned wrong on purpose, vocals pushed into the red or buried, rhythm sections that refuse the obvious count.

No solos, no gloss. How it works: a record got made because someone had $300 of studio time and a friend with a 7" label.

Scene membership was a matter of who played the Cradle on a Tuesday.