For most of the 1990s, Tsunami combined deft lyrics and charged music to create some of that decade’s most enduring work. Now, the group’s discography has been collected by Numero Group as the collection Loud Is As, and the band is heading back on the road with longtime friends Ida. I spoke with Tsunami co-founder Kristin Thomson about the group’s return, the process of assembling the new collection, and the questions of art and ethics that they navigated then and now.
What was the process like of getting everything back together for this collection?
Since we put out all the records ourselves, and even in the cases where we did a split seven-inch or did something with Sub Pop or whoever, it was quite easy to get the rights. We had assembled all the rights even back in the 90s because we did a compilation CD. So it was really easy to get the music at least available for us to remaster — which Numero did — which was fantastic because everything sounded so of the era. Together it makes much more sense when it was remastered.
On the booklet side and on the artwork side, we also have been really lucky that we kept a lot of stuff. Because we were running our own label, we have all the business records, we have most of the artwork, we have weird ephemera. Jenny Toomey is a lifelong journaler, and so she has suitcases full of contemporaneous journals of her writing about the same time period, snippets of lyrics she wrote down on the back of a receipt, things like that.
Plus, we lived with Pat Graham, the photographer. He was our housemate. So there was always somebody taking photos. We had a lot of things to draw on.
The flyers included in this collection feature some pretty esoteric bills, like a show that you played with Jawbox and Moss Icon and Velocity Girl — which is a tremendous bill, and also a pretty wide-ranging one. Have your feelings about your own music and where you fit in with the DC scene changed at all as you’ve regarded it from a more retrospective place?
In DC, we had a lot of friends, you know, like a pretty close-knit community. When I wasn’t doing Simple Machine stuff for a time, I was over at Discord Direct and Kim Coletta and I worked together. Lots of friends worked at Discord Direct. Velocity Girl was also close friends and we toured a bunch with them. And then we were neighbors with Unrest and all the TeenBeat people.
Even in just that three-label, you know, cohort, you get everything from The Jonny Cohen Love Machine to Jawbox and Shudder to Think. There was a lot of willingness to do a show together. You didn’t really need permission to do things that maybe if you were a professional promoter, you’d say, “I want to be sure that those three bands should go together.”
DC wasn’t the only place where we had bills that, in hindsight, look a little strange. I’m looking at our City Garden shows; we played one in 1993 with Jesus Lizard and Brickbat, and then we played one in 1994 with Jawbox and Trenchmouth. With Tsunami, we were able to tour equally with Ida and play shows once in a while with bands that were on Touch and Go.
Both Simple Machines and Discord were and are artist-run labels. Do you think that’s given you a unique perspective on how the environment has changed for indie labels and the artists they work with other the years?
I’m so impressed with bands like Superchunk that have lasted for 30 years and have successfully run Merge Records, putting out records that are iconic now and supporting bands for 30 years and still doing great stuff. Their new records are amazing. It’s not that they’re just playing stuff that they put out in 1992. It’s amazing to see some bands who were our peers back in the 90s still around and playing much bigger shows. Off the top of my head, I think of the Mountain Goats and even like the Hold Steady, which came out of Lifter Puller, but like is much bigger than what Lifter Puller was.
I think some of the things that I think those bands have in common are really interesting lyrics, really dedicated fans. They’re really honest about what they’re doing. And I think there’s some labels that still can operate that way because there’s like this sublayer of the music economy that is mostly run by independent entities but have the same kind of things to offer: distribution points and marketing and PR and manufacturing and things like that. I’m not saying it’s easy and I’m not saying it’s cheap. It’s quite risky to do it, but there are a handful of labels that have been able to pull it off. So that’s fantastic.
Among the writers who contributed to the box set are Gina Arnold, Ann Powers, and Jenn Pelly. That’s an impressive lineup of writers; did you also set out to have it be multigenerational as well?
I’m glad you picked up on that because when Tsunami was active, Evelyn McDonald and Gina and Ann Powers — some of the writers who had written about us at the time, you know, and over the years we’ve kept in touch with them, either because they’ve continued to do writing or they’ve done anthologies or they’re still music critics. And then there’s a couple of folks like Jen Pelly and Alex Cummings, where we got to know their work after we were finished, but they’ve been active for quite a while, too.
It was nice to mix women who had seen us play or who had written about the records in the past and then folks who were coming back to them or listening to them with fresh eyes and ears. So we got a broader perspective on the work.
How did you come to work with Numero Group on the collection? And how long did it take to get everything together once that had been locked in?
They reached out to us, but we were not we weren’t unfamiliar with them. We’d been friends with Ken and Rob Sevier for a number of years. And in fact, way back in the 90s, when Ken had a label called Tree Records, he put out an Ida single. So we’d crossed paths over many years. We knew that they had done some amazing box sets leading up, like sort of working their way through with the Hüsker Dü box set and Blonde Redhead and stuff like that. Once we got talking about it, was probably a year from when we decided to do it to when it came out.
But for us, the things that made it possible to move fairly quickly in this world was access to all the stuff. We own everything. And also, we’ve kept up with a lot of folks, so it wasn’t like we were reaching out to people after 20 years and asking them a question. It wasn’t like we had to rebuild relationships in order to get folks to agree to be part of it.
Has your own relationship to music changed at all since the band came to an end?
Tsunami basically was done by 1998 with actual touring. And then we did like a few shows in the early 2000s to play some Ladyfest shows. I’ve been in a band in Philly since like 1997, but it mostly just plays in Philly. My late husband was a concert promoter, and so he booked the rooms where all the great bands played. He started with the Khyber and then he moved up. And so every day I was thinking about bands on tour just because I was living and doing it. He was also Rocket From the Crypt’s tour manager for a while. So there was a constant thinking about music. And then in the early 2000s, Jenny and I were both part of Future of Music Coalition, with Jenny being the founding executive director and me being employee number one. So there was a lot of thinking about music and the changes in the economy.
On my own, I go to a lot of shows because I like not only seeing bands that we were familiar with or going to see bands that are still working, but also,I’m eager to hear new stuff. I’m excited to see new shows and see new bands.
Between Simple Machines and the Future of Music Coalition, you’ve been involved in a lot of issues involving music and technology that are still being hotly debated today. Are things that you learned from earlier in your career as a musician and in the arts that have come to feel more relevant now in unexpected ways?
There’s an answer that’s based on practicality, which is that doing Simple Machines stuff and Tsunami stuff in the 90s, we were really cost conscious. We were always doing things ourselves: screening our own shirts for many years or doing our own mail order, things like that. When we went on tour, it was like just us, never even a sound person. That’s kind of our default position. It’s a combination of cost awareness and also: can we learn this ourselves? Can we demystify the thing? Can we make sure we’re not paying too much for something?
Even though sometimes the technology has changed or the capacity for things to happen or the price or the feasibility of things have changed, you with a mindset of, is this possible? Can we do it? Can we do it in a clever way that doesn’t cost too much? And this is all just logistical stuff. But then there’s like the revisiting of the music itself, which is really fun and fascinating. To your question, when we started replaying the songs, we asked, “Which ones really still resonate? Which ones are fun to play?”
It’s exciting to reread all the lyrics and listen. These songs stand up. They still stand up, which is pretty amazing after 30 years. I can’t really encapsulate it because there’s everything from personal narratives to questioning the music economy to work. A Brilliant Mistake is mostly about work, you know? And so there’s lots of different perspectives in the music, but I’m pleasantly surprised that a lot of them still feel relevant. We can still sing about it and still feel like they’re interesting to listen to.
Anything you’ve been listening to or reading lately that you would recommend?
I finished Franz Nicolay’s book, Band People, recently. I haven’t done a lot of reading about session musicians and side people, but I know enough of the folks he interviewed for the book. It was just a great peer-based interview book, because he’s part of that world. I thought it was just really interesting, the stuff that you never even talk about or think about.
I’m working through Liz Pelly’s book on Spotify, but I’m only two chapters in. I think music-wise, if I looked back, I’m pretty sure the record I listened to most last year was the Lemon Twigs. And I do love the Lemon Twigs so much. I saw them three times last year. They do a very good job.
Photo: Pat Graham
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