Chapel Hill

College town, cheap rent, Cat's Cradle every weekend, and Merge Records right down the road. What more do you need? Superchunk is the power pop corner, Archers of Loaf is the scrappy rock corner, Polvo is the 'what tuning is that' corner, and Bitch Magnet passes through for a couple of years on their way from Oberlin to NYC, recording Umber and Ben Hur along the way. Polvo especially — those guys tuned their guitars to frequencies from another dimension and somehow made it catchy. Today's Active Lifestyles and Exploded Drawing on Touch and Go are the records that put Chapel Hill math rock on the map. Mac and Laura built Merge out of their apartment and it turned into one of the most important indie labels in the country. Fiercely independent, fiercely weird, fiercely great.