Living in close proximity to Wicker Park, I’ve come to recognize the progression that stably employed couples in their early 30s follow upon settling down. They replace their couch from the Salvation Army with one from CB2. They take up jogging. They get a dog. They talk about having a baby. But so far as I know, Scott and Cara Flaster are the only such pair to start a record label specializing in high quality, lovingly packaged, and brutally punishing underground metal.
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The two met in 2001. Scott had moved to Chicago from Lansing, Michigan, a few months before, after splitting with his band, Small Brown Bike, which had gained a respectable fan base for its melodic flavor of hardcore. (He and I met in the late 90s after our bands formed a mutual appreciation society and played a bunch of shows together.) Cara, who’d moved here from Columbus three years prior, was a regular at the Fireside Bowl, where Scott had started working after performing there repeatedly over the years. They were married in 2004, and both ended up in “real” jobs—he’s an IT manager, she’s the interim executive director for Archeworks, a school that trains students to do design projects for nonprofits.
“The way I remember it,” Cara continues, “we both felt helpless about not being able to help so many bands that we knew that were amazing.”
Intimacy, the latest blast from Tampa-based Light Yourself on Fire, lays the shrieking anarchy of vocalist Matt Coplon’s former band Reversal of Man—Flaster’s onetime labelmates on Florida hardcore label No Idea—atop a chugging, intimidating riff-heavy foundation, alternately recalling heavyweights like Slayer, the Dillinger Escape Plan, and Eyehategod. Sonically it’s all knives out, but open the CD booklet and you’ll find lyrics full of dense lingual knots like “I feel the pain of loss / but I still absorb myself into the root phrase of ‘to be’ / love in death” accompanied by notes that reference Camus, Sartre, and Hurricane Katrina.
While the label is still small-time compared to its models, it’s found a fan base far broader than the couple expected when they started it over drinks.
