MUSIC

Band . “Early on, the Beatles knocked us on our asses, and we were hooked,” says Jorge. “My brother and I would stare at the cover for hours. That shit blew us up. We wanted to hear more music like that. And we were really young, maybe five or six.

“My brother and I made little tape loops where we would sample stu o TV and movies and then create a collage,” Jorge continues. “We figured out how to do it with a microphone so we could make these little cassettes of all these weird TV shows that we would cut up, and we would laugh and laugh. Then we’d play it backwards and laugh some more.”

This would lead them to create imaginary bands and later join real bands. In high school, Jorge played drums in an avant-garde trio called Jazz Discharge. In 1999, Angel drummed for established punk group the Vindictives. For much of the 90s, Jorge played in spacerock band Defender, and both brothers were involved with that group when they started Allá in 2001.

The brothers were working on music for Allá when they first met Lupe Martinez at an open mike at Subterranean in 2004. (At the time, and for a few years afterward, she was in the band Almost Rosario.) Her golden voice seemed like a match for their compositions, and soon she made Allá a trio of young Mexican Americans.

Allá’s debut album, Es Tiempo , came out on Belgian label Crammed Discs in 2008, and they spent more than just seven years of their lives on it—it eventually cost a total of around $40,000 to produce. It features nearly two dozen guest musicians, and its intelligently crafted songs combine electronica, jazz, Kraut rock, pop, funk, and other sounds. To help pay for the album, Jorge got a promotion to manager at Whole Foods, gave up his apartment, and moved in with his parents in Wheeling.

Allá didn’t have the time or the money to make another Es Tiempo , but they released the covers collection Digs in 2009 (also via Crammed) and a homemade electronic album called Feed the Dragon Volume One in 2013. That period was a prolific one for Allá, but most of the material they recorded (including the other two volumes of Feed the Dragon ) never came out. Their attempts to break into the music business petered out after they lost their publicist in 2016. No Sé Discos has issued some of the band’s work from that time, and the label has plans for further such releases. But You Are Essential remains the clearest expression of its mission statement.

“It’s something we are proud of,” Jorge says. “Being working-class people—Nayfo is a teacher in the UK, Chebaka and I worked retail—we dedicated the project to essential workers. There’s a whole manifesto in it too, written with all of us. We handmade the covers at home. We worked with as many people as we could who we felt were on our side.”

No Sé Discos hasn’t sought out artists. Either artists approached the label or they met organically. “The artists we enjoy working with, they have to be working-class people,” Jorge says. “Meaning they have to earn everything they do. They have to really want to actively learn how to do every part of it, you know, not just make the music.”

The label values artists who like collaborating and enjoy every part of writing, recording, and releasing music. “Those are the people we want to work with,” Jorge says. “We need less talking and more making.”

No Sé Discos’ current roster consists of Allá, Chebaka, and Nayfo, of course, as well as four acts that aren’t on You Are Essential Bilingual producer and rapper Sorcerer, who recently moved to Chicago from Venezuela, leads Kaczynski Composite Sketch, and he’ll release the album Deviled Ham on Rye via No Sé Discos on May 21. Electronic artist 2 Butch, who came to Chicago from East Los Angeles, dropped a collection of ten tiny tracks called Wrestling With Pigs (made with a micro keyboard and an old laptop) in March 2023. Santrio is a Latine artist from Little Village who began releasing R&B-flavored dream pop as Mán Cub in 2018, and he’ll make his album debut with No Sé Discos later in 2023. Firstwave Chicago postpunk group Stations, now based in Tennessee, issued a long-lost single last year that they’d recorded in 1982 with the legendary Martin Hannett, and they have plans for a bigger release called Ghostland . The label will announce at least one more signing later this year.

Allá had previously worked with Nayfo, and they met Santrio playing shows. Jorge got to know David Stowell of Stations when Stowell tended bar at Whole Foods. Kaczynski Composite Sketch and 2 Butch—the other two artists celebrating releases at the Empty Bottle showcase—heard about No Sé Discos online. They’re both making their live debuts.

Allá and No Sé Discos have created a tiny but self-sufficient subculture, a rich cultura alternativa. “Our biggest influence is Asco, young Chicano artists in the early 70s from Los Angeles,” says Jorge. “They felt they would never be accepted by the art world, and they created their own public art shows and art spaces.”

Being Chicano, of course, involves constantly negotiating between Mexican and U.S. identities. “Chicano means looking at things, letting go of some traditions, bringing in new ones, and holding on to the ones that make sense for you,” Jorge says. “We are Chicano futurists. Chicano, for me, means creating your own culture with the two worlds you’re living in.”