How Do You Preserve a Vanishing Music Scene?

New York Times

05-03-2025

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.
Roger Miret with Todd Huber, 'Agnostic Front — With Time: The Roger Miret Archives'
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. Somehow, amid all this, the frontman Roger Miret — who was picked to join the band thanks to his ferocious behavior in the pit — managed to hold on to everything. 'Agnostic Front — With Time: The Roger Miret Archives' is part photo essay, and part documentation of ephemera primarily from the band's tumultuous breakout period from 1982-86.
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. And brief personal excerpts from Miret and his bandmates capture the mayhem of the time: getting shows shut down by the police, then slapping stickers on their cars; and assembling copies of the debut Agnostic Front EP by hand, cutting covers from a large roll one by one and gluing them to order after shows.
'Liquid Sky'
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. It was also, at times, the actual home of Rey Zorro and DJ Soul Slinger, the institution's co-founders, who had moved from Brazil and helped nurture the city's growing club scene by giving it a de facto daytime clubhouse.
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. The parties, the music, the clothes — they all went hand in hand, and attracted a who's who of future stars. Chloë Sevigny was one of the first shop girls before she starred in Larry Clark and Harmony Korine's 'Kids'; a handful of employees were plucked to appear in the film. Moby was a regular. Björk is pictured wearing a shirt with the Astrogirl logo that anchored the Liquid Sky visual identity. For a handful of years, this scene helped remake the sound and silhouette of downtown New York, but this book also ends up telling a story about how a subculture can fracture again and again, until the original has evaporated into history.
'Aphex Twin: A Disco Pogo Tribute'
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. 'Aphex Twin: A Disco Pogo Tribute' was assembled by the founders of the cheeky British music magazine Jockey Slut, which ran from 1993 to 2004, a window in which James progressed from outsider to still-secretive standard-bearer and role model.
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). There's an affectionate and detailed oral history of Aphex Twin's early years, beginning with James's time spent warping the dance scene in sleepy Cornwall, England; a long disquisition into the design of his logo; analysis of the eccentric artwork and videos that accompany (and amplify) his music; and sections on his record label, his remixes, his many aliases, and his collaborators and devotees. At the intersection of history and fandom, the book demonstrates how the ephemeral, pre-peak-internet journalism of the recent past might be carried over to a new generation. And in its completist approach to a slippery subject, it offers unexpected visibility into the practice of an artist who's long thrilled at the chance to confuse.
Sagan Lockhart, 'I Don't Play'
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. Lockhart was shouted out in the occasional song, but more important, was brought along on the group's many adventures.
'I Don't Play' is a collection of his photos from the early Odd Future era — 2010 through 2017 — and opens with a shot of the stretch of North Fairfax Avenue that used to be anchored by the Supreme store, a crucial social district for the crew and part of its lore. Then Lockhart follows the group from Fairfax out to the world. There's Tyler, the Creator play fighting with his best friend, Taco Bennett; Earl Sweatshirt not long after he returned from a Samoan boarding school; appearances from crew members Hodgy Beats, Left Brain, Syd and Mike G as well as crucial plus-ones Lionel Boyce, Jasper Dolphin and Lucas Vercetti; and maybe the most unvarnished images of Frank Ocean seen since Odd Future's Tumblr era.
The photos are amateurish and accidental, well matched to the renegade casualness of the group's growing fame. Throughout the book, though, the milieus become more ornate — festivals and television shows, hanging out with Jason Dill, Toro y Moi, Action Bronson, Leonardo DiCaprio. The crew goes from wearing shirts with the Supreme logo to wearing shirts with their own. Their ruckus was becoming institutional, and by the end of this book, the rest of the world was taking pictures, too.
Eduard Taberner Pérez, 'Sosa Archive'
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. Enter Eduard Taberner Pérez, an amateur archivist and professional graphic designer, who compiled 'Sosa Archive,' a limited-run art book that gathers several thousand photos pulled from Keef's Instagram, presenting then in visually simpatico grids of 12.
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. There are hundreds of photos of him posing in fresh outfits against nondescript walls — they are elegant in their repetition and commitment to form, and full of small tweaks that explode the seeming homogeneity.
One spread shows photos Keef shot of various objects resting in his lap: a microphone, an iPhone, a bottle of Promethazine, a huge wad of cash. Certain things recur — bulbous sports cars, crisp sneakers, guns, posing with fans, posing with heroes, posing with his daughter. These are all building blocks of Keef's story, and this anthology functions as an inventory of a life, a moving restoration of a lost archive, an argument for the limitations of copyright infringement, a ground-floor guide of how to create yourself as a superhero.