New Books In Dance

Ask anyone outside of Austin what they know about the city and chances are the first thing they'll mention is the music. While the Armadillo Era has been well-chronicled, there is no book about Austin music in the 90s. In their new book, A Curious Mix of People: The Underground Scene of '90s Austin (University of Texas Press, 2023), veterans of the sccene Greg Beets and Richard Whymark have put together an oral history of the decade. Beets and Whymark are not trying to cover all of the music made in Austin during the 1990s; they're most interested in the underground/punk community in which they participated. While a few of those bands got big (e.g., Spoon), the music remained mostly local, DIY. It was driven by live shows, though local media (radio, TV, print), record stores, and a few labels were also important to the story. Beets and Whymark devote chapters to those elements, but almost half of the chapters are based around a particular club. Organizing the book around physical spaces is not only appropriat