When UndercurrentMPLS got its start in 2011, Matthew Graves was just a guy with a cell phone who went to a lot of shows. Now it's 2024 and Graves is… well, he’s still just a guy with a cell phone who goes to a lot of shows.
But over the last 13 years, UndercurrentMPLS has amassed a collection of more than 8,000 live performance videos filmed at local punk and DIY shows. It’s a remarkable archive of recent Twin Cities music history, compiled for free by a small crew of tireless music lovers.
Graves (known to most as Gravey) says the decision to start recording and posting was more or less spontaneous. A friend had gotten an early generation iPhone that recorded pretty decent video—a mind-blowing thing at the time—and his thoughts immediately turned to live music.
“The first show I ever recorded was this band called Fetch the Warden, who let me know they were breaking up and they hadn’t recorded an album,” Graves says. Newly acquired smartphone in hand, he decided to capture as much of the set as he could.
Then came the obvious question: What to do with the recording?
Sure, he could send it to the band, or slap a post up on Facebook, but he had a feeling that it should be preserved in some slightly more accessible way. So he uploaded the video clips to the (now very active) UndercurrentMPLS YouTube page, where you can still find them. Graves says the name he chose was sort of a reference to 89.3 the Current, which he occasionally regrets, if only because folks sometimes wonder if the project is related to the Current (it’s not) or if the name is a dig at the Current (also no).
“I remember thinking at that time that the Current was one of the only avenues bands had to get exposed to people they don’t already know,” he explains. “They’re the alternative radio station, but I thought there should almost be an alternative to that, that goes a little deeper and was a little more raw in its coverage.”
In the early years, UndercurrentMPLS was just Graves, capturing as much video as he could from as many shows as possible, and the operation is still pretty barebones. Just a handful of other regular contributors—Graves namedrops Xochi de la Luna, Timothy Piotrowski, Jake Anderson, and Nathan Johnston—submit videos, though the occasional recording comes in from another source.
UndercurrentMPLS has evolved some over the years, though Graves laughs that he’s been “making it up as I go… and balancing that with, what can I do?” (His “day job”—he has one, if you can believe it—is in audiovisual production for corporate events.) Eventually, he started posting to Instagram as well as YouTube, and in addition to live videos, added the running daily show post, one of the most complete show calendars in town.
Ultimately, the ethos is the same as it was in 2011: documenting live music that might otherwise be lost to history. To this day, just about every video is shot on a cell phone; the idea is that this work can be done with a piece of equipment most people watching a set have on them anyway. If you’re at a show, you can record the show.
“The unpolishedness of it—it’s humanizing,” Graves says.
And the operation is still entirely volunteer-run. Graves and his loosely affiliated group of videographers do it because they like to do it. Other people might wake their brain up by doing the New York Times puzzles; the UndercurrentMPLS creator wakes up each morning by updating the show list. He’s never tried to monetize the project.
“I kind of think that would poison it a little bit, in a way,” he says. “That might be paranoia, but I just feel like I love doing it, people seem to like it, that’s enough.”
This weekend, UndercurrentMPLS will take over Palmer’s Bar on Minneapolis’s West Bank for a two-day show they’ve called the 13 Year Fartaversary, which is also a benefit for longtime UndercurrentMPLS contributor Carly Olds, who was recently diagnosed with ALS. Olds and Graves were partners for seven years, and she was foundational to the project’s success. Graves says the fest has given them both something to look forward to during a really difficult time.
“And the bands that are playing are so good,” he says. “We have bands that are coming back that haven’t been playing as often: Crimes and Hollow Boys and Liquid Lunch, Royal Brat is coming back… just so many bands I love.”
UndercurrentMPLS has created an indispensable document of this era of Twin Cities live music, but it also provides a real-time look at an evolving scene. Graves still finds out about new bands all the time, because new bands are forming all the time—and here at Racket, we first learn about a lot of them via UndercurrentMPLS’s Instagram. It recalls a pre-algorithmic time when zines, record store clerks, and good old-fashioned word of mouth were how you heard about new music. The account is like having a cool older sibling who tells you about all the up-and-coming bands.
“The amount of time that it’s been going, it’s cool to see that it’s almost an entirely different generation of people,” Graves says. “And then seeing the way that connects—a band that just formed this week, putting that into context with a band from 2011, or whatever—is cool to me. To have it feel like it’s a cohesive one thing, even though they’re totally separate.”
It’s an incredible body of work, but Graves emphasizes that he’s just the messenger. The only reason UndercurrentMPLS works so well is because there are so many great local bands.
“I really don’t see a reason why I would stop,” he says. “If anything, I get more interested in it the longer it goes.”
UnderCurrentMPLS 13 Year Fartaversary: Benefit for Carly
With: Mommy Log Balls, Sparrowhawk, Citric Dummies, Strange, Shrimp Olympics, and many more
Where: Palmer’s Bar, 500 Cedar Ave. S., Minneapolis
When: 5 p.m. Friday, noon Saturday
Tickets: $15 Fri.; $20 Sat.; $30 both days; more info here
