Bowie. What more can I say? I certainly don't have anything to add to the conversation that hasn't been shared much more eloquently a thousand times already. (Including, I'm sure, a thousand or more versions of the preceding sentence.) A huge loss has occurred, but it's been inspiring to see the ou…
“We carry it now as a badge of honor,” says Miguel Ramirez, percussionist of Los Angeles group La Santa Cecilia, “to say that we are immigrants or children of immigrants.” After the band had stopped by KEXP a few months earlier to perform live I reached out over the phone so we could talk a bit mor…
The name Erik Lindgren was not familiar to me at first glance (nor, for that matter, was the name of the currently-more-famous celebrity poker player Erick Lindgren), but it turns out I have heard his work before - and even covered it on this blog. Lindgren has lived all over and been affiliated wi…
How appropriate that I should be blogging about this album on the very week KEXP (formerly KCMU)'s vinyl library is being disintegrated, the records removed from their dusty shelves and boxed up to be transported to the shiny, sexy new home. (I hope you guys are careful with those little paper labe…
It seems the thing people at KCMU most wanted to talk about regarding this 12" single by the Northern Irish band (with an American singer) That Petrol Emotion was the graphic statement on the back of the record regarding the strip searching of female prisoners at Armagh Prison in Northern Ireland. …
There are many paths that lead one to emigrate and there are many roads to becoming a musician. When you combine the two, you often find a unique beast that exists in between dimensions. The legendary Balkan band Kultur Shock is such a beast. Sometimes a musician or band creates a persona to sell t…
Despite their being named after my favorite brand of pants and the fact that I loved me some poppy punk rock music in my early teens, I don't believe I ever got into The Dickies. Maybe they were just a little too goofy for me, or maybe I was so busy with the output of Dischord and Lookout! Records …

In 2018, KEXP celebrated the 30th anniversary of local record label Sub Pop with a four-month retrospective, "counting up" every catalog number in their vast discography of over 1,200 releases. Dig into the archives of our catalog coverage, featuring in-depth coverage on the history of their releases.