Cassette
Our Digital Age, eg? It takes a fella from Pittsburgh to show us what's been hiding under our noses over here all along. Parsnips Under My Feet, mostly referred to in its acronym form of PUMF, was a long serving DIY imprint operated by Mark Standing from his Blackpool-based culture bunker. Standing - or Stan as appears to be his preferred moniker - seems to be one of those self-determining forces of nature the DIY underground generates every now and then, driven by what appears to be a near-religious zeal for outsider sounds and productions. PUMF was a name familiar to me only because of Ceramic Hobbs, but there's a catalogue that stretches wide across first tapes and then CD-rs, those truly reliable tools of DIY activity. This tape that Floating Mill have compiled covers their remarkable output from, astonishingly, 1986-1998, 14 tracks from six bands, curiously none of which are Ceramic Hobs. And so i know none of these acts, though i recognise the sounds - we're broadly talking something like Modern Art/Cleaners From Venus/The Homosexuals/Thomas Leer and the adjacent hidden worlds of Messthetics. In other words, superstars in their own bedrooms, superstars in everyone else's if only the world would let 'em. Because this spans a wide period of time it's not like the Buntingford of 4 stars compilations which capture a specific electric-blue moment. Rather, PUMF both defines a sensibility and holds inside it the notion of possibility. In an impossible world, it's a vital service. People like Mark Standing don't get a blue plaque, but you don't need that with a legacy like this. The unsung heroism of the trenches.
