The astonishing productivity of garage-rock hellraiser Ty Segall has by now become something of an in-joke, one that he himself acknowledges. Before moving to L.A. in 2014, Segall was associated with an enthralling cadre of Bay Area garage-rock musicians, among them The Fresh And Onlys, Thee Oh Sees, Kelley Stoltz, and Sic Alps (of whom Segall was a member at one point). Such groups once constituted a fertile, mutually beneficial scene, of which only vestigial traces now remain, largely owing to the exigencies of Silicon Valley’s expansion.

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New American Songbooks, Volume 1 brings together a somewhat unlikely trio, inaugurating a series in which Sound American editor Nate Wooley asks participants to “pick the tunes that they [think] should be included in a new American canon.” Greg Saunier, Ron Miles, and Mary Halvorson (each a notable figure within their own neighboring but disparate field) follow suit and present selections that are adamantly personal, toying with the assumption of an essential, universal, American canon.

More about: Greg Saunier, Mary Halvorson, Ron Miles

Although No Age is considered “noise rock,” their music is very much in the wheelhouse of classic indie rock: caustic, unruly dissonance anchored by either pleasant oscillations between two chords or inoffensive progressions involving three or four chords (with the occasional parenthetical passages). Their ancestry can be traced back to Sonic Youth via Yo La Tengo, Dinosaur Jr., and Pavement; their siblings are Deerhunter and Japandroids.

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In a 2015 interview TMT did with Galina Ozeran, she spoke of making music that was “a reflection of all the changes, what’s happened in my life for the last year, though not so much in the text, rather in the atmosphere of the music.” While writers and labels often highlight an artist’s personal life for you to understand and relate to the music, Chikiss uses the experience of losing her voice as “a deep subtext” to New Season

More about: Chikiss

If there’s no music, they can’t dance

All we ever want is love.

And then we fade away.

More about: Barrio Sur, Dedekind Cut, Lee Bannon