Low Profile with Markly Morrison

Today, we’re examining a hidden gem from 1984 lovingly crafted by a nineteen year old keyboardist living in Denmark by the name of Anne-Tina, whose debut album was reissued in 2025 on Frederiksberg Records . To help us explore this record, I’m thrilled to introduce our guest host, Ashley Eriksson, who is taking the reins to guide us through this conversation. Ashley has been on the show as a guest...

After moving to D.C. in 1985, then 16-year-old Craig Wedren helped shape Shudder To Think into a standout act within the Dischord Records scene, evolving from a raw hardcore-adjacent sound into a complex style that eventually earned the respect of Ian MacKaye. The band pivoted to Epic Records in 1994 during the big alt-rock boom, releasing the sonic anomoly Pony Express Record before facing label...

Musician Kento Oiwa interviewed by Markly Morrison for the Olympia Music History Project. Formed in the mid-1990s by Japanese immigrants Kento Oiwa and Michiko Swiggs, IQU was a group unlike anything folks in Olympia–or anyplace else, for that matter–had ever witnessed..  I spoke to Kento in a hotel room on an assignment from the Olympia Music History Project, where this interview was first publis...

Swamp Dogg is coming to Olympia this weekend 7/13/2025! First, he'll be performing at Scherler Sundays, it's a free show that starts at 3pm. After that, Olympia Film Society will be hosting a free 8pm screening of the new documentary Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted at the Capitol Theater in Downtown Oly. No reservations required, all totally free! More info about the show can be found at freemusi...

Today, instead of your usual Low Profile programming, I’m sharing an interview I conducted with Pat Maley in 2023 for the Olympia Music History Project .  The whole transcript is available at olympiamusichistory.org . Pat and I are discussing the history of Yo Yo Recordings, a studio and record label that he ran from the 1980s to 2006, recording hundreds of touring and local artists.  Inspired by...

When I first developed an interest in rough-around-the-edges cumbia music, a friend (thanks Matt!) introduced me to the music of Dick El Demasiado, purveyor of “cumbias lunaticas.” Over the years I’ve managed to glean a bit more about him, then I recently saw a documentary about him called Dick Verdult: It Is True, But Not Here. I learned Dick El Demasiado the musician is a mere sliver of what Dic...

It’s been a minute since I’ve put out a new show, and so I thought maybe I’d let you in on what has been keeping me so busy. A couple years ago, I started working on an oral history project funded by the city- appropriately titled The Olympia Music History Project. We (myself, Mariella Luz and Kelsey Smith) have since broken off from the city into our own nonprofit organization, and I’m excited to...

It's an election day bonus episode! Today we’re gonna be digging way back in the archive to episode 4: Focusing on Margo Guryan. This was recorded in early 2019, when I was still figuring out this show’s format.  At that time, it consisted of panelists with a shared interest (Andrew Dorsett and Michael Sean Coleman) nerding out about a favorite artist, and sometimes we’d get the chance to talk to...

If there was such a thing as the American ambassador to 60s French Pop it would have to be Elinor Blake, better known as April March. Elinor began her professional career in the world of animation back in the early 80s before she took on the April March rock and roll alter-ego. You’ve probably heard her music over the last few decades classic cartoons like The Ren and Stimpy Show and I Am Weasel a...

Psychic Temple is the extended-family project of Chris Schlarb, the proprietor of the retro-chic Big Ego studio in Long Beach, California. Chris is an old friend of mine, going back to the turn of the century when I lived for a brief period time in Long Beach. This episode is being released shortly after the announcement of the dissolution of Psychic Temple, which is addressed during a quick follo...

Bob Log III is a one man band from Tuscon, Arizona. He tends to tour at least half the days of the year all over the planet, bringing a party, and doing it all by himself, ever since his old band Doo Rag broke up while on tour with Ween back in the 1990s. Nowadays, when Bob's’s not on the road, he lives in Australia. If you catch him on the tour in your area, there’s balloons, an oversized rubber...

Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah is the percussionist and vocalist behind A frican Head Charge , the experimental dub project he co-founded with legendary studio wizard Adrian Sherwood in the late 1970s. With dozens of albums to his credit, he’s been established as an influential and singular performer with a sound all his own. Today I’m speaking with Bonjo about how he found his musical and spiritual calling...

The band Danielson started when Daniel Smith worked with his siblings to satisfy a requirement for his senior thesis three decades ago. If you’re not familiar with their music, one thing you’ll notice throughout today’s show is that nobody else sounds anything like them. Daniel and I are talking today about the thirty-year evolution of the group, why he sings the way he does, how the group incorpo...

Mayo Thompson is the founding member of The Red Krayola , an experimental rock group that has existed in various formations since 1966. He’s collaborated with The Raincoats, Pere Ubu, and the Fall as a record producer, is an active visual artist, and has recently published his second novel, “ After Math, ” a sequel to 2020’s “Art, Mystery”  (both available via Drag City Publishing ). Mayo joins Lo...

Markly brings his weekly pub trivia game "Questionable Music" to the radio in this exciting segment from the new two-hour Patreon release featuring Markly Morrison and Jack Habegger being interviewed by KAOS station manager DJ Jonny H. Full show available at patreon.com/lowprofile Play Questionable Music in-person at Three Magnets Brewing Company in Olympia, WA, Monday nights at 6:30.

Friend of the show Sean O’Hagan returns to the Low Profile to discuss “Hey Panda,” the first release from The High Llamas in eight years. When we last spoke in 2021, he had dropped the High Llamas moniker and forged a new path under his given name, embracing more contemporary influences.  In the years since, he’s recruited Llamas new and old to reroute the course of the band he’s led since the ear...

Once upon a time in England, a teenager named Susan Murphy brought her saxophone to audition for a new punk band called X-Ray Spex - a group that was not looking for a sax player. Despite that fact, she made the cut, and like her fellow new band mates, she adopted a stage name: Lora Logic was born. When her tenure with the band was unexpectedly cut short, a friend with a studio encouraged her to f...

James Spooner is a writer, filmmaker and visual artist from Southern California. He grew up as one of two black punk rockers in the small town of Apple Valley, and he wrote a critically acclaimed graphic novel about his experience called “ The High Desert ,” released in 2022, twenty years after the release of his groundbreaking documentary “ Afro Punk .” When I read the book, I found it so moving...

About fifty years ago, three brothers started a garage band in Detroit. Their sound was forward-thinking and ferocious, and their band name – Death – played no small part in killing their music career. That didn’t stop them from doing what they loved, in private, where they amassed dozens of songs that have yet to see the light of day. Their debut album For the Whole World To See was recorded in 1...

Who smoked more: academics like John Cage, La Monte Young and Vladamir Ussachevsky- or the underground scenesters, like Glenn Branca, Arthur Russel and Laurie Anderson? Why is turntablist Christian Marclay on the cover of "Transfigured New York," but not in the book, even though she interviewed him multiple times? Could AI design be to blame? How did the old guard of "New Music" feel about the com...

When I started this show five years ago, I made a short list of artists I wanted to feature.  Near the top of that list was the British musician Vashti Bunyan. Vashti Bunyan released her beautiful album “Just Another Diamond Day” in 1970, and it was almost immediately buried in time.  She’d had her fair share of disappointment in the music business and walked away from it altogether, until some th...

On this year's final installment of highlights from the Scherler Sundays live series, headlining act Gun Outfit is a twangy , dreamy rock band that started in Olympia in the mid-aughties, and relocated to Los Angeles several years later.  Carrie and Dylan still have family around these parts, so they brought their kid up to visit with the kinfolk, along with the rest of their crew as they share so...

In this eighth installment of highlights from 2023’s Scherler Sundays live series, we have another all-Olympia showcase.  This time, we hear performances and stories from Morgan and the Organ Donors, XOHNO, and Chance of Ghosts. The MODs feature Sara Peté's soft dreamy vocals and rhythmic 60s garage riffs, with "Wildman" James Maeda weaving in subtle guitar complexities, all held together by COCO'...

Recorded at the beginning of the 2020 lockdown, this remains one of my favorite interviews in the last five years of working on this project. Tjinder Singh’s Cornershop has been a long-standing go-to band in my rotation since I came across them on MTV in the mid nineties, watching back-to-back videos for “Sleep on the Left Side” and their ubiquitous hit “Brimful of Asha.”  Since then, they have co...

 In the seventh installment of highlights from this year’s Scherler Sundays concert and interview series, we’re getting another healthy helping of Olympia, WA rock and roll music. First up is Riley Kendig and his newly christened Magenta Sextet in their first public appearance, performing fully-realized arrangements of tunes off his excellent debut bedroom pop cassette entitled “Yr Car.” Next up,...