Other Voices Keeps the Underground in Sight.
When Mercedes Mendez mentioned The List, I lit up like a pinball machine. If you were a NorCal teenager in the dial-up days of the mid- ’90s, the List was the source for show information, and if some Gen X person from Daly City or San Rafel or wherever tells you how he saw AFI at a house show when he was 15, the List is probably how he got there. Mendez and I were sitting at the bar at the Boiled Owl Tavern in Fort Worth to talk about Other Voices, the calendar/live music collective she started in 2022.
– WORDS BY STEVE STEWARD • PHOTOS COURTESY OF OTHER VOICES
DJ Sam Ramirez, her partner and the co-founder (along with “Mayor of South Oak Cliff” Gabriel Mendoza) of long-running DJ duo Away from the Numbers, was setting up his turntables for his monthly Kool Thing night, one of many events Other Voices books, promotes, and supports across DFW. Mendez told me that Other Voices originated as a calendar for her and her friends. Four years later, Other Voices’ Instagram account shares their show flyers to over 7,000 followers.
The List began in 1990, when Bay Area punk fan Steve Koepke began compiling upcoming shows on a sheet of paper that he photocopied and handed out at events like band flyers. Like Koepke, Mendez wanted a calendar for herself and her friends that tracked all the stuff she wanted to go to for the month. “It was like 2020, right after COVID… Sam and Gabe’s nights just blew up… So we started with a Google calendar. and it was really only like two or three people were utilizing it,” Mendez said. “Sam used to run all these websites in the late ’90s and 2000s and then Dallashardcore.com after that. So he was like, why don’t you do something like that? I mean, basically, we took the idea from back in the ’90s, like the List.”
Mendez said she wanted it to be “something visible,” so that “everybody could see everything going on.” Other Voices posts plenty of videos, including short-form interviews with local musicians and DJs, conducted by Chris Northrup of Dallas-based industrial/noise/punk band Battery Licker. But show flyers are Other Voices’ primary content. Six years ago, Mendez and her friends were using a Google calendar to keep from overlapping with each other’s gigs. Now, Other Voices reps more shows than Mendez et al can probably get to in a night.
The List began in 1990, when Bay Area punk fan Steve Koepke began compiling upcoming shows on a sheet of paper that he photocopied and handed out at events like band flyers. Like Koepke, Mendez wanted a calendar for herself and her friends that tracked all the stuff she wanted to go to for the month. “It was like 2020, right after COVID… Sam and Gabe’s nights just blew up… So we started with a Google calendar. and it was really only like two or three people were utilizing it,” Mendez said. “Sam used to run all these websites in the late ’90s and 2000s and then Dallashardcore.com after that. So he was like, why don’t you do something like that? I mean, basically, we took the idea from back in the ’90s, like the List.”
Mendez said she wanted it to be “something visible,” so that “everybody could see everything going on.” Other Voices posts plenty of videos, including short-form interviews with local musicians and DJs, conducted by Chris Northrup of Dallas-based industrial/noise/punk band Battery Licker. But show flyers are Other Voices’ primary content. Six years ago, Mendez and her friends were using a Google calendar to keep from overlapping with each other’s gigs. Now, Other Voices reps more shows than Mendez et al can probably get to in a night.
It’s a good problem to have. Each of these posts — usually a stack of show flyers in carousel format — offer something for everyone. If you wanted to race around Dallas trying to catch multiple shows in a single night (sort of like a contemporary version of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, but with a soundtrack heavy on darkwave, goth, cumbia, and hardcore punk, and, presumably, a much lower likelihood of running into Michael Cera), Other Voices would be the resource for mapping your route.
Other Voices’ posts also offer local fans the rewarding experience of discovery; while they promote a lot of the same artists, there’s always new names in the middle of the regular DJ and band lineups. Mendez said she does vet and curate her events, but she is open to “pretty much whatever.” Still, running the account is a lot of work. Mendez, who turned 50 last December, recently retired after 27 years at UPS, but even with the influx of free time, keeping up with Other Voices posts requires a lot of time and availability. She told me that during her years at UPS, she would usually have to go to work at the sunrise shift after a show ended and the bars closed, but the amount of work — even after she retired — had become overwhelming. Burn-out was setting in, and she considered shutting the account down. Then she went to see some bands one night and met Spencer Echeverria.
Spencer Echeverria, 28, grew up in the Mid-Cities. They showed up at the Owl to chat about Other Voices after Kool Thing had been rolling for an hour or so. The Owl had filled up, and the music — a mix of post-punk, funk, and new wave — thumped loud enough so that we had to kind of yell at each other. Echeverria said her introduction to music started with early-2000s pop-punk. “One of my earliest memories is just, like, singing along to My Chemical Romance. It made me want to be in a punk band,” they said. “The first show I remember going to was at 1919 Hemphill to see a ska band called I Am Clark Kent. I don’t even like ska that much. I mean, I did back then. But I love hardcore. People be scared, though. They’re like, how do you like that? I’m like I don’t know. It just speaks to me. It’s exciting.”
They met Mendez in 2024 at a hardcore show. “Then Mercedes started seeing me everywhere.”
“I think it was after my second year [of running Other Voices], I got rid of the internet calendar, the physical calendar,” said Mendez. “I’d just switched to Instagram. And then the third year I was like, okay, that’s it. I don’t want to do this anymore… I was booking more shows. So I just did not have time to run the Instagram account. There were days where I wasn’t updating, you know? And I was like, I gotta find somebody… And when I met Spencer, I was like, I would have been friends with this girl in high school, you know what I mean? I knew they were a photographer, and I kind of wanted to start incorporating photography. I did that in the beginning, like just taking pictures with people. I kind of stole that from… I don’t know if you remember, but there was a website called About Last Night. And it was just like pictures. I always thought that was pretty cool.”
Echeverria was stoked to help out, but the work was a lot right off the bat. “I was like, I don’t know what I’m going to be doing.” So they started by booking a show, going to a happy hour at the Boiled Owl and asking the bartender if their friends, R&B singer DonoSpectacular and an ambient duo called No Tears for Broken Me could play there. “That was my very first one. I was just like, I don’t know what I’m doing, but you know what? Fuck it… I don’t really know, like, what the whole standard is for booking, but I was just like, it shouldn’t be hard… it’s just contacting people, right? There was definitely a learning curve, but I guess I just figured it out quickly.”
That was in 2024, and now, Echeverria wears a few different Other Voices hats. Besides booking, they make flyers as well as shooting, editing, and posting event pics. They’ve been doing photography since the ninth grade, but Mendez’ encouragement made them take their own work more seriously. “I can, like, get in my head too much about [my photography]. But Mercedes really brought me out of my shell, and I’m very thankful for that.”
Echeverria is affable, upbeat, and has an electric enthusiasm about her friends’ bands and DJ sets, and that vibe carries over in Other Voices content. “I feel like I just inspire people to come out, honestly. Like, not to sound like a narcissist or whatever, but people do enjoy the photography I do,” they said. “People are stoked about being captured in a picture on Other Voices,” they said. They also helped broaden Other Voices’ reach. “I know in the beginning Mercedes only promoted, like, goth and, like, dark wave, but she also wanted to do the cumbia stuff, too. So I was like, why not? Why not also do hardcore, burlesque, and drag shows, too? Because I don’t really see people promoting those things that much.”
Kool Thing’s DJs switched out, and Mendez went to hang out with Ramirez. A dude moved to where she had been to order a beer, his head nodding to the pulse of the speakers.
“I really love music,” Echeverria said. “I am passionate about it. And people always, like, shit on Texas. They’re like, what does Texas have? Like, what are they doing? We’re producing music! Especially up here! We have literally the best music there is out there.” They started to list a few locals — Llora (who moved to NYC in August), Luna, Ozone — that are among her current favorites, but they also admitted it’s difficult to pick their top acts. “It’s hard! There’s just so much good music here!”
For Mendez, who, in another lifetime (the ’90s and 2000s) booked hardcore shows at the houses she lived in (“We had this show in our laundry room one time. These bands were on top of washers and dryers. Their amps were flying off, and people would jump off the machines into everyone else,” she told me), Echeverria is a little bit like a protegé. “Something I do want to tell you about Spencer,” said Mendez, “They are an amazing human being, and they have amazing music taste. Like, there’s no doubt they are going to do great things. They always call me their mentor or whatever, but… but they pretty much run Other Voices now. Spencer does all the photos. I don’t do anything anymore except book shows. But all of it’s a lot of work. We don’t make any money. But running Other Voices is fun… I’ve had people tell me that I should monetize it, and I just feel like that it would… Like, that’s not why we’re doing this. We’re doing this because we love music. We’re doing this because we love this crowd.”
“I want people to hear what the music is like around here,” Echeverria said. “I hang out with a bunch of musicians, DJs, and artists, and I just want to share what they share with me because, like, I don’t know everything, but I like listening to what they have to share with me. It means a lot to me. That’s a love language, and Other Voices is here to share events with you.”
In the post-COVID landscape of the DFW music scene, Other Voices has been directly responsible for bringing people back to clubs to see live music, and in doing so, they’ve fostered a community that is welcoming and open to anything.
“I love all of it,” Mendez said. “I want to hear more music. I want to hear that weird shit. where nobody’s booking you because they think that you’re too out-there. We want that. I want everybody to hear it. Away from the Numbers, their DJ night is kind of a mixtape… I always say it’s like a love letter to our teen years… they play everything from post punk to punk rock to, you know, some days it’s a little heavy on one side, a little heavy on like hip-hop one time or shoegaze another time, you know, and I love that it’s that mixtape that I would have been putting in my ’76 Ford Granada on the way to school. So anything that is weird, I think, kind of fits. I try to curate it to where it sounds great. but I can get away with not having the same genre of music sometimes.”
To that end, Other Voices has some big aspirations. “We are all talking about maybe doing something for…” She paused and thought for a moment, like she was debating whether she was about to reveal a state secret. “We’ve been talking about doing a fest, almost. We have the name, we’ve been thinking about it for almost two years now, and we basically wanted to do, like, Texas bands. We’ve met so many people that have been asking to play Double-Wide, wanting to do shows with Away from the Numbers. We’ve made so many great friends. [With a fest], I could get them all in one spot,” said Mendez. Whenever or wherever such a fest happens, Other Voices will be where you find out.
I caught on to the List in 1994 when I was a junior in high school, when I was tipped off to it by a senior named either Brad, Chad or Todd, who claimed that “just about every weekend” he went to “The Gilman, in Berkeley.” He pretty much only wore Lookout! Records apparel, and pretty much only listened to Lookout! bands, and when he told me about the List, I felt like he was introducing me to a secret society. “Even though you listen to Pennywise,” he said.
Gatekeeper-y and condescending? From a guy who might still be a Ben Weasel apologist? Certainly. But when that trope — receiving a clue or a map to the subterranean realms from an ostensibly wiser, slightly older person, possibly with an Operation Ivy tattoo — happens to you, it’s transformative. Mercedez Mendez told me about how when she was in high school (about the same time I was), she and her friends would go to punk shows at a Jack in the Box in a rough part of west Fort Worth. When I was 16 and got a hold of the List, it sent me to a rented social hall in a rough part of Stockton, California. It wasn’t to see AFI, but I did watch Face to Face, after something like six other bands. When I peruse Other Voices’ virtual stacks of digital flyers, I’m reminded of that rite of passage, of going somewhere small, sketchy, or that smells like dryer sheets, and getting your ears scorched, your face elbowed, and all the other rad shit that can happen when you fall in love with underground culture and loud music.
Through Other Voices, Mercedes Mendez, Spencer Echeverria, Away from the Numbers, and all the DJs and bands and people ( weird and otherwise) who enjoy living life amid the bass, sweat, and shadows of in-person, underground musical experiences are all creating and sharing a map, not just to the coolest music happening in North Texas, but to the continuity between the old heads who used to stage dive off washing machines and the new ones who are looking for the opportunity.
