An interview with Jen Matson, creator of Indie Ephemera
Discussing everything from making zines to crappy photos of Galaxie 500 with the person behind a digital (and physical) archive of alternative music history.
During my senior years of high school, I fell in love with the eighties music scene known as the Dunedin sound. Championed by Kiwi indie label Flying Nun Records, the lo-fi, homegrown nature of the music and its aesthetic really appealed to me. Having started high school with the jangly guitars of R.E.M. and The dB's, it almost felt like I was coming full circle.
Bands such as The Chills, The Clean, and The Bats quickly dominated my listening habits. I was doodling their names in the margins of my English notes. I made zines raving about their music. And although I was desperately trying to find avenues to enthuse about them with others, between some brief conversations with record store clerks and scouring a few Facebook pages, I was largely left to my own devices. It’s difficult enough being a fan of bands who were popular twenty years before you were born. It’s even harder when said bands are semi-obscure. I decided I needed to look elsewhere.
In its heyday, Tumblr was once a thriving hotbed of fandom and community. Now most of its users have moved on to greener pastures. But having started a vaguely music-oriented Tumblr when I was thirteen, I was one of the few that still clung onto whatever remnants of the site were left. I’ve always found that if you sift through its contents long enough, you will find something of note. And that’s how one day, whilst trawling through Tumblr posts tagged #the chills, I came across Indie Ephemera.
Indie Ephemera is a blog run by Jen Matson, a DJ based in Seattle. Although now on hiatus, the blog documents “the flotsam and jetsam” of her life during the late eighties and early nineties. In other words, a good time for alternative music. Indie Ephemera was also a writing challenge that Matson set for herself - a post a day, every day for a year.
Scrolling through her Tumblr, I saw countless photographs, documents, and mementos, each captioned with a fascinating story. It wasn’t just bands of the Flying Nun ilk - there were posts about other indie acts I liked too, from Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians to The Go-Betweens. I had stumbled upon a vast archive of music history, all of which was lovingly documented and immensely fun to read.
It was great fun chatting to Jen about the blog and the bands that feature on it. You can read our full interview below.
DEAD LETTER OFFICES: Where did the idea of Indie Ephemera come from?
JEN MATSON: It’s hard to remember because my first iteration of it was in 2015. It was probably because I’m a bit of a pack rat and I was trying to organise things in my office/record room. I have all of these letters from people, fanzines, things that weren’t records, that were [all] in a variety of boxes. I thought they were interesting and each one told a little story. I actually have a very bad memory, but I find that objects really trigger it, so it was fun to relive little bits of my past through the objects.
DLO: There are many different blogging platforms you could’ve used to document your work, but Tumblr is an unusual choice. Why did you pick it?
JM: I think it was partly [because it was] 2015. Right now, Tumblr is maybe a little less of the zeitgeist. Also, I didn’t want to have to set up a blog myself, even though I know how - my personal website uses Wordpress. My day job is in technology, so it’s something I could easily do. But I liked the idea of a simple concept. I didn’t want an overblown thing.
The fact there was the community aspect was also really appealing to me because I had some people I knew who also had Tumblr blogs. I thought that was cool. I didn’t know how many people would read [Indie Ephemera] or who would stumble across it. I thought if I just put it on my own personal website it’d be an almost private project. Hardly anyone’s gonna look at that. But if I put it on Tumblr and tag it, maybe other people will come across it. And you did!
DLO: There are so many different items featured on the blog - promotional goodies, ticket stubs, pins, typed catalogues, a pair of jeans - how have you managed to hold onto everything and in such good condition?
JM: I would say that a part of these things - including the jeans - were at my mother’s house, so they were just kept in a box in the basement. For myself, I have a house here in Seattle, so I have enough room for everything. But having my parents’ place basically as a way to store stuff was certainly helpful. I haven’t moved too often in my adult life. I’ve actually been here in this house for the past fifteen years, so I don’t ever want to have to move again!
DLO: I imagine all of it would be a bit of a hassle to carry around, especially the records.
JM: Yeah. My husband also likes music the way I do, but he also has a huge comic book collection! But I guess I’ve always had a curatorial eye towards my stuff and kept it pretty neatly stacked in little boxes so nothing got crumpled. Which is kind of amazing.
DLO: How did you get your hands on some of these things?
JM: When I was in high school, I started working at a used record store in Boston called In Your Ear Records, and promotional materials would come through. So a lot of the weird little promo items [on the blog] were things that record labels had sent in. In college I did an internship at Billboard music magazine. Then I got an internship at a record label, Rykodisc, so I was steeped in it.
I also started going to shows at rock clubs starting at age 15, so I saved everything from that - ticket stubs whenever there were some. I was interviewing bands. I had a lot of different activities, both personal and semi-professional, that led to me being able to acquire a lot of these things.
DLO: When writing about things for the blog, did you have any notes or diaries you would refer to? Or did the story come straight to you as you wrote?
JM: I do have diaries, but I didn’t really refer to them. It’s more like you said - I just kind of sat down and wrote the story. Like, I have some ephemera from seeing the Church for the first time on the Starfish tour and I went, “‘ooh that’s a really good story”. Or the related one where I went to see Marty Willson-Piper and I took the Greyhound bus down to NYC without telling my parents. That’s a classic story of mine - I just really wanted to go see this musician, and I couldn’t see him in Boston because I was underage! So of course I’m just going to take a bus after school to New York [laughs]. A five hour bus ride, or something like that. The story was [already] there in my head.
DLO: So you’re from the US. How did you get into bands from the other side of the world - my side of the world - like The Church, The Go-Betweens, and all the Flying Nun bands?
JM: I think I was into the Go-Betweens before the Flying Nun bands in part because they got played on MTV’s alternative music program, 120 Minutes, which was a big way for people over here to find out about small bands. It was broadcast from midnight to 2am on Sundays, so I would try and stay up late or I would tape it on my parents’ VCR. I think the first thing I saw on an episode on that show was the video for ‘Was There Anything I Could Do’. 16 Lovers Lane had just come out. I liked it, bought the record. You could actually find a couple of their records in stores. But it wasn’t long before I got into even more underground music on independent record labels.
I got into fanzines when I was around 16, and there was this fanzine called Factsheet Five which basically listed and had reviews of fanzines - it was a fanzine directory. So I went through that and I wrote away - you know, old fashioned paper and pen, sent off into the mail, sometimes with a requested dollar or two to cover postage or to order a copy of their zine. And one of those zines was called Writer’s Block. Mike Applestein was the one who put that together and we became friends because I wrote to him. I was like, “your zine is cool!” and I ended up writing for his zine. He reviewed the In Love With These Times compilation around the time that came out and I was like, “that sounds like that’s right up my alley”. He thought I would like it too, so I went to my local independent record store and I looked at it in the import bin. It was very expensive. I think it was around 20 dollars, and this was around 1990. 18 to 20 US dollars in 1990 was very, very expensive. But I was like, “well, it does have all these bonus tracks compared to the LP”. That was the common thing. It was like, “do I get the LP or the CD? Oh, the CD has eight more tracks. Okay, it’s worth my money. It’s about a dollar a song”.
So that was the start of it. And Boston interestingly was kind of a hotbed of New Zealand music.
DLO: Oh, really?
JM: Yeah, so the radio station WHRB - which I ended up DJing at later on, but I would listen to it in high school - there were folks there that wrote away to Flying Nun and got these big care packages in the early eighties.1 There was this awareness of what was going on contemporaneously, when the first whole big Dunedin sound was happening. You had this base of fans. So when these bands would come to the US, they would always play Boston. But they would always play New York too of course, it being close by.
So I got to see all these bands when they were touring on their major label albums - I got to see The Chills, The Verlaines, The Bats, Jean-Paul Sartre Experience, Straitjacket Fits. Almost all of the bands I loved from that time, I got the chance to see live.
DLO: I’ll pretend I’m not extremely jealous.
JM: [laughs] I never got to see Look Blue Go Purple though, or Able Tasmans. They never made it over. Able Tasmans is a lesser sung one.
DLO: You mentioned that you got into fanzines around the age of 16 and contributed to a few. Did you ever make any of your own?
JM: Yes I did! [holds up one of her fanzines] I did some in 1992.
DLO: [reading the cover] I see the Go-Betweens. And Hamish Kilgour.
JM: Yeah, ‘cause [Kilgour] had moved to the US around 1990 or something. And when I learned he was living in New York City and I was living in New York - I went to college there - I was like, “ooh, I have to interview him”.
So I did this zine and a bunch of interviews for issue two, and then I never ended up putting it out - I ended up putting it out 25 years later. These are all bands I interviewed in the early to mid nineties. I put [the zine] out in 2017, and I wrote all of the content as if it were 1994.
I actually published another zine last year. I’ve been getting into it more. There’s a little print shop right in my neighbourhood, so you can DIY it. They do little workshops. I basically picked it up after not doing it for so long, and since I go to a lot of shows, it’s a great way to meet people. Just to have a zine to give them - that’s how we did it in the early nineties. That issue one, I remember when I saw The Chills on their Soft Bomb tour, I gave [it] to Martin [Phillipps]. I just went up to him after the show and I was like, “I love your band!” and he was like, [mimes reading zine] “Oh, the Go-Betweens! Brilliant!”
DLO: Are there any possessions or documents that you have a soft spot for in particular? Anything rare or just plain sentimental?
JM: Ooh, that’s really hard. Some of my photographs I feel are really special, even if they’re really terrible photos. I think some of the very first things I posted on the blog were my pictures of Galaxie 500 the first time I saw them. And even though the photos aren’t good, it is a literal snapshot of a day where I kinda realised there are amazing bands in my town, and I [could] see them and get really close to them. Because up until then I had only ever gone to stadium concerts. I’d seen R.E.M. and before that I’d seen Duran Duran - I was very into them when I was younger. But [now] I was like, “Wow, Galaxie 500! I’m gonna write about this for my school newspaper!”. I was very excited, going up to them and interviewing them. They were so nice! Then they ended up being a pretty big band, but I was able to see them when they were awkward and were like, regular people. I was thinking, “Their music is really good. And now I should start paying more attention to other bands in my city, because I want to have that moment of discovery over and over again”. So those pictures are crappy photos, but they’re special to me for that reason.
DLO: It sounds great to be able to approach bands after a set and interview them. I feel like with a lot of ‘indie’ bands nowadays it’s not very easy to do that anymore.
JM: Yeah, and when I look back I can’t believe how bold I was in a way. Because another thing I did - and this was very old school - but before we had the internet to look up people and I wanted to interview a band, if I knew their name I would look [it up] in the phone book. And I didn’t live in Boston proper, so I would go to the library and get the phone book for Boston to look them up. And I would just call them. I would pick up the phone and say “hi, my name is Jen Matson and I really like your band and I would like to interview you for…” First it was my high school newspaper, but then when I started writing for fanzines, it was much cooler to say “I’m writing for a fanzine”.
DLO: That’s awesome. I can’t imagine calling up, like, Lindy Morrison and asking her to chat.
JM: Oh my god, I’m so happy Lindy Morrison follows me on Twitter.
DLO: [laughs] same. I can’t believe she follows me either. One of the greatest drummers of all time following a lowly writer like myself? It doesn’t seem real.
DLO: What are your future plans for Indie Ephemera? Any related projects?
JM: I still have a file of things I could post. I have this old fashioned wooden inbox/outbox where one layer is things I’ve already posted and another layer is the things I haven’t yet. I do eventually want to post a few more things at least every now and then, but I have other projects happening that are taking up my time and certainly I wouldn’t do a post a day. That’s a bit too much. But I have a weekly radio show which takes up a lot of time, and I’m also on the programming committee, so I also have other responsibilities. Onboarding new DJs is a part of that. And I have a weekly Seattle gig guide which I started doing because all my friends would ask me, “what shows are you going to?”. I thought, “oh well, I should just send out an email”, and if other people wanna see it that aren’t my friends, then that’s cool. And like I said, I’ve been doing zines.
I definitely like having a lot of different projects, but I can only juggle so many at once. With Indie Ephemera, the 365 posts was a good milestone. I think I’ll just let that one go back into hibernation. Because I started it in 2015, I did it for like four months, and then I didn’t do anything with it for at least five years, I think. Then I wanted to do this again five years later. I thought, “sure, why not?”
You can visit Indie Ephemera here and visit Jen’s website, Nonstop Pop. You can also follow her on Twitter @nstop.
For reference, Flying Nun Records was founded in 1981.