On March 15, Josh Oswald is set to take the stage, Roland-style drum machine and his trusty black-and-white Fender Jazzmaster guitar in tow, to make some noise at Dormont’s Veterans of Foreign Wars lodge.
The live set will celebrate the area musician’s latest adventure under the nom de guerre Spacebastard, which Oswald released on his own very.offline.records label.
But, it also represents another step in a musical journey that started some 30 years ago with a modest, five-piece drum kit and, later, a guitar in Pittsburgh’s South Hills.
“It was always about teaching myself how to record and teaching myself how to play,” said Oswald, 44, a Bethel Park native who moved to New York City in 2004. He then boomeranged back to the Pittsburgh area more than a decade ago and now lives in Dormont.
“I don’t think in terms of notes — I will pick up a guitar and start playing and whatever feels right, that’s what I’ll base something on,” he said. “The music has always been for my entertainment. I just wanted sounds that I wanted to hear. But I feel like, if I enjoy this thing, somebody else might like it, too.”
Oswald’s debut full-length under the new project is chiseled with a deep sense of rhythm and time but also eschews metronome-driven monotony. It’s an appropriate timbre for a drummer who later branched out into electric guitars and more synthetic sounds.
The technology of the day also drives Oswald’s work.
Today, he maintains a recording studio inside a converted, single-car garage next to his home. There, he records and mixes music with Reaper software on a Dell laptop. He’s armed with both organic instruments — a guitar and a bass — and plenty of technological assistance from drum machines and an Alesis-branded electronic drum kit to a Moog-style modular synth and multiple guitar pedals.
In the mid-1990s, by contrast, Oswald recorded to old-school magnetic tape at what became Mr. Smalls Recording and Mastering Studio in Millvale. That studio time resulted in a self-produced CD, whose first run of 500 copies hit Pittsburgh streets around 1997 or 1998.
Like Oswald, Keith McCarthy grew up on alt-rock in Pittsburgh’s South Hills. He cut his teeth on the alternative bands of the era: Nirvana, Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth.
Oswald and McCarthy met while in high school. An Oswald side-project — the band’s name was Head Q-Tip and the Cotton Swabs — even opened for one of McCarthy’s bands at Peterswood Park in Washington County.
But the pair’s musical conversation deepened when Oswald returned to Pennsylvania. In 2020, he gave McCarthy a cassette copy of the demo “Kill Devil Hills.” (Oswald’s son Martin, then 7 or 8, drew the demo’s cover, which Oswald felt referenced the goofy-faced hitchhiker of Dinosaur Jr.’s “Where You Been” LP.)
McCarthy watched the new material gestate over the past few years.
“He’d tell me, ‘I’m gonna build a shed, I’m gonna build a studio and he … did it,” said McCarthy, 45, of Castle Shannon.
“It was just insane, the amount of ideas this dude has — he is just an idea machine,” McCarthy said. “He can have an amazing day at work, be an amazing dad, then go in his shed and crank out three hours of incredible music.”
Oswald estimates he’s recorded at least 50 finished and unfinished songs in his makeshift studio. He also has recorded hundreds of voice memos on his Samsung Galaxy cellphone, some of them as spontaneous as him tapping a new beat on his steering wheel.
Oswald also has been productive in the public eye.
He recently reissued the project’s first two “official” recordings — an unrelated pair of short EPs, recorded between 2021 and 2023 — via Bandcamp. One is free to download. For the second, listeners can name their own price.
But Oswald insists on keeping his new record entirely analog — listeners will find none of its songs online.
Pittsburgh boasts several indie labels, from the nascent punk rock of A-F Records to the more eclectic Wild Kindness Records or Get Hip Recordings!
There also is diversity in mediums. Driving While Black Records promotes its hip-hop acts with a bold online presence. One other local label, though, shares Oswald’s passion for physical media: Crafted Sounds.
That label, which indie impresario Connor Murray launched in Pittsburgh’s South Oakland in 2016, favors sharing media that listeners can touch — often cassettes — to spread the gospel on myriad acts such as Merce Lemon, The Zells and Gaadge.
Pittsburgh’s indie-record-label community also isn’t operating inside a vacuum. There were nearly 1,300 independent label music production businesses in the U.S. last year, according to the trade publication IBIS World. They’re expected to fuel a more than $450 million market in 2025.
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Those labels produce a lot of records.
Vinyl sales, many of them from smaller indie outlets, started outpacing CD sales about five years ago. In 2023, the Recording Industry Association of America said 71% of all physical media sales were records — 43 million units sold to be exact, at a total value of $1.4 billion.
Streaming, though, remains king. In 2023, by comparison, revenue from paid streaming subscriptions — $11.3 billion — was about 10 times larger than revenue from vinyl, the RIAA said.
“The record is here to stay,” said McCarthy, who embraces the format. “I like having that tactile experience, to hold something when I listen. And it encourages patience. You get a lot more out of listening to music when you listen to a record start to finish.”
Though Oswald’s latest project does flirt (at least a little) with the World Wide Web, he said he has little love for it when it comes to sharing music.
“Remember: the internet is where music goes to die,” very.offline.records proudly proclaims online.
“I felt like I was putting (my work) online and seeing it rot there,” Oswald said. “I just don’t have the promotional energy needed to be successful on the internet.”
Being able to produce a physical product, complete with lavish cover art and liner notes, “gives more personality to my work than pushing a button,” Oswald said.
“I felt that (listening to) vinyl was a special experience, being a little more intentional with your day, not making everything an AI-generated playlist,” he said.
TJ Snead — who provided the quirky cover art for the new LP — said he’s happy to champion Oswald’s cause.
Though he drew in high school, the South Hills-bred artist started dedicating more time to his work when he boomeranged from Maryland back to his native Pittsburgh around 2007. Snead has held numerous shows of his artwork, previously in coffeehouse-staples like The Beehive and Crazy Mocha.
In 2022, Snead first offered art for a the release — an astronaut exploding out of a prune-faced giant’s forehead, the whole background consumed in a nauseous yellow.
“I would always rather do something not digital,” Snead said. “I love the idea Josh came up with for very.offline. It’s physical media and more than a thumbnail. Online, it’s something quick. With this, we can really busy stuff up there.”
Oswald hopes the show at Dormont’s VFW on March 15 will help spur a communal spirit, like the relationships he’s nurtured with McCarthy and Snead, among those in his orbit.
“With vinyl, sometimes it’s ‘Hey I put on this Miles Davis record. Did I like every song? Maybe, maybe not,’” Oswald said. “But I stayed with it. I sat with it. And I was with myself and with the music.”
“very.offline will always be an outlet for me,” he added. “But I’d love to work with other people and produce them in my home studio — if they’ll do it.”
Doors for the March 15 show at McCormick Dorman VFW Post 694 on Dormont’s West Liberty Avenue open at 7 p.m.