Once upon a time, in a galaxy that seemed to be a long, long way away but was actually only a few miles down the road, there was no Internet. Exposure to music was different then. You could read in the pages of the NME about what kids were getting up to in the UK, but you couldn't hear much if any of it. If you were lucky enough to have access to, say, Three Triple R in Melbourne or (what was then) Sydney's 2JJ, you could hear what was bubbling up from underground, but even so, to get played there a band had to have recorded an album in an actual studio, with an actual producer, using other people's actual money.
Aside from personally knowing a young band and/or being able to get out to pub gigs, your ability to hear music made on the absolute ground floor was very limited. (And, correspondingly, the ability of neophytes to get heard was very limited.) But there was one way out: a combination of cassette tape and the postal service. We came in around the mid-1980s, but presumably this sort of thing had been going on before then. Enterprising people like Wayne Davidson in Melbourne and Calvin Johnson in Olympia, WA were somehow able to put together compilation cassettes of what we would now call "unsigned artists" and if you sent them a dollar or two, or a tape of your own, or a fanzine, or a badge, or pretty much just begged them, they would sent you their latest compilation tape. Many of these were of fleeting interest, but others have lasted to this day. I'm thinking of the "Let's Together", "Let's Sea" etc series of K Records tapes, and especially of Toytown's epoch-defining (at least for a small group of youngsters in a small town in South Gippsland) "Display Ideas For Supermarkets".
Some of the bands on these tapes didn't really exist. Others disappeared without trace. But you also had your first exposure to future household names like The Melvins, The Magnetic Fields, The Cannanes, Beat Happening and Mecca Normal. And there was a special feeling you got when what you received was a cassette tape that had been put into a case into which a hand-photocopied and hand-folded cover (and sometimes even hand-drawn, such as one I received from XPressway in Dunedin) had been inserted by a real live person just like you, and it fell out of an envelope that had been hand-addressed by somebody just like you. What you got was a sense of belonging to a community.
Now, of course, you can wander around the Internet and download hundreds of new songs by people you have never heard of, without even looking too hard. But I can tell you from dismal personal experience that you will then delete after one listen at least nine of every ten of them. These are, then, the best of times, but also the worst of times. Who is there to help you? Underwater Peoples, that's who. You can wander across to their site (or the site of someone they know) and download the Underwater Peoples Winter Review. What you get is the C21 equivalent of one of those tapes. You don't get quite the same sense of personal involvement, but if you close your eyes and listen you can almost imagine it.
Obviously on a venture such as this nobody is going to like everything they hear, but there is much to enjoy, and come back to, on what they have put together. The loss leaders on this particular venture are tracks by Real Estate and Ducktails, both of whom aren't exactly household names but have at least poked their heads up above the grass roots. But everyone involved does a great job of evoking the sheer joy of making music for its own sake, in that special but narrow period between when an individual voice is discovered and when commercial considerations, however subtle or benign, necessarily intervene. Sound quality is rudimentary at best, but since when has that been relevant? (If you dubbed it onto a C-60 using a shitty tape recorder you would barely notice the difference, and you would also end up listening to it in the medium it was really designed for.)
You want influences? I hear variously Galaxie 500, T Rex, Jonathan Richman, Sebadoh, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and what might be described as the Pacific North-West branch of the C86 Diaspora.
And if you do download it, and like what you hear, do the right thing and send a handwritten note (or virtual equivalent) to its compilers. It's what the old timers would have done.
