The Longevity of Indie Art and Music

by Megan Zabriskie

This is a little diddly; a commentary, or rather a question, regarding independent literature and music and its permanency. My course on the social politics of indie has made me wonder just how much of the music, media, and art we receive is spoon fed to us by a universal and massive “corporate ogre,” as Calvin Johnson of Beat Happening so boldly labeled it during the grunge-rock movement of the early 1990s. I used to think that indie music, which really just means that the production and distribution of a record is self-made, was always the “purest” form of art. I thought self-produced art was the high road; the road that many have traveled but through which few have made a universal legacy.

Interview: Tim Lowman aka Low Volts

by Megan Zabriskie

In my quest for the most bad-ass interview subject who fit the preferred criteria of being an artist with roots in the San Diego scene, I immediately realized that the dark and steely Tim Lowman from the one-man gritty blues-rock band Low Volts was just whose brain I wanted to pick. One sentence into the history of his one-man band and my heart was thumping just as quickly and powerfully as that deep kick drum with a biography on how Lowman wouldn’t be here today if his great grandfather hadn’t escaped allegations of murder and his own personal date with the electric chair. It’s exactly that kind of electricity that makes the band so spookily and eclectically balanced: the heavy and metallic roots of a tasty slide guitar bringing you down to the deep south, and Lowman’s simple but passionately loaded lyrics. So, naturally, when he agreed to answer a few questions for me, I was praisin’ “Oh My Stars“!