K Records and Kill Rock Stars: 22 albums from the town that made amateurism a principle

K's own band on its second album, out in January 1988 through K and Rough Trade, produced by Steve Fisk with Mark Lanegan and Gary Lee Conner of Screaming Trees turning up to help. Three people, no bass, drums often played standing up, Calvin Johnson singing lower than his voice really goes. Half the bands who heard "Indian Summer" have covered it, and not one of the covers gets near the flat kitchen-table calm of the original.

Jean Smith and David Lester were a Vancouver duo rather than an Olympia one, but K and Matador co-released their third album in 1991 and the town claimed them anyway. Guitar and voice with no rhythm section under it, and Smith writing about men and power years before the scene had a slogan for it. Kathleen Hanna has said she would not have been in a band at all if she had not heard Jean Smith first.

The first full-length, out on Kill Rock Stars in late 1993, and the loudest thing the label ever put its name to. "Rebel Girl" is the song that travels. "Alien She" is the one that shows what the band could do when it worked in tension instead of slogans. It still sounds like it was recorded in a hurry, which is the correct way for it to sound.

Allison Wolfe, Molly Neuman and Erin Smith made the funniest record of the first riot grrrl wave and got read as a policy document anyway. Two chords and a grudge, delivered with an enormous amount of eye-rolling. The playing is deliberately thin and it lands harder than anything with a guitar solo in it.

Lois Maffeo's second album, released by K in February 1993, produced by Calvin Johnson and engineered by Stuart Hallerman, with Molly Neuman of Bratmobile on drums and the bass split between Donna Dresch and Codeine's Stephen Immerwahr. That credit block is the scene's entire address book. Maffeo sings quietly and writes plainly, and the songs are considerably sadder than the twee shelf they get filed on.

Tae Won Yu and Rachel Carns met at art school in New York in 1989 and moved the band to Olympia in 1992, which was the standard migration route of the decade. K released this in October 1994: two people, guitar shoved to the front of the mix, Carns hitting the drums like she has a personal grievance against them. The most underplayed record in the K catalogue.

Corin Tucker and Tracy Sawyer's only album, and the place Tucker's vibrato turns up already finished. "Axemen" and "Complicated" are not chants, they are arguments, and the record is slower and bleaker than most of what sits beside it. Sleater-Kinney started the next year and this got quietly buried, which was a bad trade.

Recorded over four days at Avast! in Seattle at the end of 1993 with Steve Fisk producing, out on Kill Rock Stars in March 1994. Justin Trosper's guitar sits between a chime and a scrape, Vern Rumsey carries the tunes on bass, Sara Lund plays behind the beat on purpose. Most post-hardcore of that moment worked in loud and quiet halves; this is a band taking a room apart methodically.

Recorded in Calvin Johnson's basement across two visits, October 1993 and January 1994, while "Loser" was busy turning Beck into a novelty act somewhere else. Johnson produced, James Bertram and Scott Plouf of Built to Spill played, Chris Ballew and Sam Jayne filled in the rest. Anyone still convinced the folk-blues side was a costume can be sent straight here.

Carrie Brownstein and Becca Albee shouting across each other, occasionally in agreement. Kill Rock Stars put it out in April 1995, the band's second and last, a year before Call the Doctor made Brownstein's guitar playing something critics wrote paragraphs about. Rougher than everything that followed and better company for it.

Three high school friends from Tumwater, the town next door, under a name that stood for Kill All Redneck Pricks: Jared Warren on bass, Chris Smith on guitar, Scott Jernigan on drums. K released Suplex in October 1995, which meant the label known for twee pop was now selling something closer to the Melvins. The riffs read as a joke for about ninety seconds and then stop being one.

Calvin Johnson and Doug Martsch of Built to Spill singing at the same time in different keys and at slightly different speeds. Recorded at Dub Narcotic and released by K in 1996, with Steve Fisk and Wayne Flower filling out the band. Martsch keeps hauling the songs up toward daylight, Johnson keeps dragging them back down, and that tug is the record.

Janet Weiss's first album with the band, recorded by John Goodmanson in Seattle over the turn of 1997 and out on Kill Rock Stars that April. Two guitars, no bass, parts wound so tightly around each other that the missing low end reads as a decision rather than a shortage. Decades of best-of-the-nineties lists have not managed to overrate it.

Portland rather than Olympia, but Kill Rock Stars released it in February 1997 and it became the biggest record the label ever had. Doubled vocals, close-miked guitars, fret noise left in where a bigger studio would have scrubbed it. Good Will Hunting arrived the following year and rearranged his life; this is the last album he made while nobody was watching.

Calvin Johnson's other band, chasing soul and dub instead of pop, out on K in August 1998. Johnson on melodica and voice, Larry Butler on drums, Brian Weber on guitar and keys, Chris Sutton on bass, and Miranda July singing the title track years before anyone knew her as a filmmaker. The oddest thing in the K catalogue and the slowest to click.

Arrington de Dionyso howling and playing bass clarinet over a rhythm section that behaves like faulty machinery. K released it in April 1999, at the point when the label was supposedly all sweetness, and it sits far closer to Captain Beefheart and the Birthday Party than to anything with a jangle. Olympia's ugly streak never actually went anywhere.

The last one, recorded through 2000 at the studio the band built for itself in Olympia, released as a double in April 2001. Organ, tape hiss used as a material, songs that take four minutes to work out what they are. A trio that spent the nineties getting harder made a record that moves like weather, and then stopped.

Phil Elverum recorded most of it at Dub Narcotic, burying the drums under distortion and then digging them back out. K put it out in September 2001. If you want one argument for what a cheap studio and unreasonable patience can do, this is it, and it has outlasted nearly everything else released that year.

Three kids from Searcy, Arkansas followed their drummer to Olympia and made a debut that is over in twenty-four minutes. Kill Rock Stars released it in January 2001: Nathan Howdeshell's guitar, Kathy Mendonça's drums, Beth Ditto singing like the building is on fire, almost nothing else in the room. The disco singles came later. This is the one to keep.

By 2004 Kill Rock Stars had a sister label, 5 Rue Christine, and this is the harshest thing either of them released. Jamie Stewart sings about desire and violence in the same breath over gamelan, cheap electronics and long gaps of silence. Not an Olympia record in any geographic sense, but proof that the town's appetite for discomfort had turned into an institution.

Twenty songs from San Francisco's most contrary band, released in October 2005 by Kill Rock Stars with 5 Rue Christine and ATP, by which point the label had moved most of its operation to Portland. Satomi Matsuzaki sings nursery rhymes over guitar parts that change their minds mid-bar. The house style of melody plus refusal survived the move out of town.

A coda rather than a scene record. Elverum released it himself in March 2017, recorded in the room where his wife Geneviève Castrée had died, playing her instruments, singing plain sentences about a package that arrived in the post after her death. Every idea Olympia argued for, chiefly that nothing should stand between a person and the tape, arrives here at the point where it stops being charming.