Music scenes burble and blare in the margins all around us. It’s easy to forget because so much of our exposure to culture is now largely through pristine ultra-curated algorithmic feeds, but rest assured that little Petri dishes of humanity are exchanging ideas and spreading the joy of art (and community!) at a local venue near you. You just need to know where to look.
IYKYK, a photography exhibit hanging Saturday and Sunday at Bumbershoot, won’t give you detailed directions—as the title insists, if you know, you know—but it does provide a series of windows into four distinct music scenes outside of the average ticket-holder’s purview.
The idea for the exhibit, according to Bumbershoot’s creative director Greg Lundgren, started during a chat with Seattle music journalist Jonathan Zwickel. “We were having a conversation about Luciano Ratto,” Lundgren says. Originally from São Paulo, Brazil, Ratto moved to Seattle at the peak of the pandemic and spent the years afterward shooting a specific sect of the DIY punk community at several house shows across the city lines. His talent immediately revealed itself in stunning digital black-and-white shots, which bear more than a little similarity to those of legendary Sub Pop photographer Charles Peterson. “He’s a phenomenal photographer. What he was pointing his camera at was breathtaking, and a lot of [his photos] are of the people in attendance,” Lundgren says.
Though Ratto had built an audience on Instagram, it was his decision to compile his photos into a limited physical compilation, Taste the Floor, that brought him notoriety outside the internet. “Once you take it outside of Instagram, it feels a lot more important by nature,” says Ratto. “Print matters.”
Zwickel, who is the Board Chair of the Vera Project, discovered Ratto’s prints, fell in love with the work, and snagged one of only a hundred copies. Lundgren was likewise converted into an acolyte. “I thought, this is a really great portrait of a music scene,” he recalls. “It documents the three pillars: the music, where it’s taking place, and the audience. Once you remove one of them, it becomes less powerful.”
Of grave importance, of course, was protecting the venues Ratto captures on film. “Most of these places are people’s backyards or illegal,” says Lundgren. “Our goal is not to send five thousand people to someone’s backyard. The goal is to say, ‘Hey, there’s a lot of stuff happening underground.’ The most exciting things around are places that don’t have marketing budgets or don’t even want that visibility.”
Around the same time, a friend introduced Lundgren to another surreptitious musical community, this one outside of the city proper. At an undisclosed location, residents and non-residents alike have been playing music of all styles, from Dylan covers and third-wave folk to Cajun, for over 25 years. The night Lundgren caught the tail end of a show, the venue featured bluegrass and zydeco bands.
It also featured a bearded man named Peter Ray, who was in the crowd capturing gauzy shots of the performers. Like Ratto, Ray is a transplant to the area, having moved to Vashon Island from upstate New York in 1982 to manage a woodland nursery. During his two-and-a-half decades of managing the nursery he had only dabbled in photography. When he left the nursery, he took photography classes at the Seattle Film Institute and started pursuing a side of himself he’d yet to explore. That’s when, after first being invited to the venue’s shows, he became one of its dedicated documenters.
It’s easy to discern the difference between Ratto’s and Ray’s respective scenes. One is DIY punk music propped up by the Gen Z vanguard; the other is mostly acoustic music featuring the last of the Boomer fans. And yet the two scenes shared a purpose; providing an outlet for people in the vicinity to commune via music, and outside of the digital realm. “They’re connected by the same reasons for existing,” observes Lundgren. “It made me think: what are the other things I’m not paying attention to?”
Lundgren commissioned Ray as a contributor to the nascent exhibit and set about trawling for similarly subterranean scenes. That led him to the dub/reggae shows regularly held at Culture Yard. Dub and reggae have a small but devoted collective of disciples in Seattle, and according to scene photographer Leleita McKill, the shows they regularly host are both intimate and neighborly affairs.
McKill, unlike Ratto or Ray, wasn’t aware of Seattle’s dub/reggae scene until she was commissioned by Bumbershoot. But the pairing was kismet; McKill had spent much of her youth in reggae hotspots around Jamaica and Central America and was starving for a scene here. The three shows she documented for the exhibit—one at Culture Yard’s home base in Fremont, one at the High Dive, and one outdoors at Seward Park—blew her away. “I was like, ‘Was this happening the whole time?’” she recalls, remarking upon the hospitable aura of the events, the homemade food she was offered, and the permeating power of the sound system. “I can't say enough what a lovely vibe it is,” says McKill, who has since returned just to enjoy the shows without a camera in tow.
“One of the other scenes I wanted to explore was hip-hop,” Lundgred claims. (The words carry a bitter irony; how is today’s definitive soundtrack of America’s youth still a “hidden” scene in Seattle?) His search led him to Gary Campbell, a champion of local hiphop and electronic music for over a decade. Yet another transplant, the Toronto native moved to Seattle as an Amazon employee in the early 2010s and leveraged his tech wage into becoming a patron of sorts for the city’s hiphop acts. His small vinyl label, Crane City Music, released works of local legends like AJ Suede, Stas THEE Boss, Dave B, and Gifted Gab.
Campbell’s work is also featured in IYKYK in the form of NEWCOMER, a documentary comprised entirely of live show footage captured on Campbell’s iPhone, but Campbell’s other contribution to the exhibit was in pointing Lundgren to Damascus Purnell, a visual artist who had done some of Crane City’s record covers. Years before, Purnell had been in the scene himself, but now spends his time helping out his fellow artists with their promotional needs. “I try to uplift them because I felt like they had these great talents,” he says, “and they needed the skills I had to get that information out.”
Purnell spent many a night pre-pandemic at local hiphop venues, many of which—including Capitol Hill sports bar 95 Slide and mysterious Belltown hub 5312—no longer exist post-COVID. Some of the acts are similarly defunct (including Purnell’s own group Underworld Dust Funk), and that makes Purnell’s and Campbell’s entries to the exhibit an outlier: a requiem to a previous era, rather than an exploration of a current one.
That sentiment coincides with an accompanying essay by music journalist Martin Douglas, whose column Throwaway Style has been an integral part of KEXP’s written coverage since 2018. Douglas, like Purnell and Campbell, was a witness to the concussive blast of creativity that emerged from the area in the 2010s. His essay, fittingly, contextualizes the importance of that scene while also addressing the factors that caused it to dissipate: COVID, mostly, but also a continued sense of apathy from a town still anchored to its grunge past.
Then again, a memento mori isn’t the worst thing in a show about underground music scenes. As revelatory as the images from IYKYK might be for Bumbershoot’s festival-goers, it’s also a high-profile time capsule for the people featured in them.
“These scenes are so temporal,” concludes Lundgren. “When they go away, all you’ve got is the albums, and sometimes not even that; often all you have are images. It’s important to document these flares of creativity and community, whether they’re in the art world or film world. We have these moments where things spike, and these photographers… God bless ya.”
IYKYK will show at Bumbershoot Saturday, August 31 and Sunday, September 1 from 12:30-11 pm.
