"Put a song on a mix tape!", suggest Sarge in the credits to The Glass Intact, condensing into a single imperative almost every important principle of indie pop, or at least most of the ones I've figured out so far. A major-label release would never tolerate this cheerful suggestion. It weakens the claim to copyright, some lawyer would doubtlessly point out, and the accountants would arrive with ornate pie-charts that could only come from bringing thousands of dollars of state-of-the-art software to bear on the timid conjecture that an epidemic of mix-tape makers would undermine the vast bureaucratic apparatus designed to convince impressionable teenagers to buy, and then throw away as soon as possible, mediocre name-brand audio entertainment products. (This idea is simultaneously paranoid, since mix-tape trading occurs on much too small a scale to perturb the music industry, and pitiful, since I feel certain that mix tapes help record sales, even of bad records, much more than they hurt them.) When your record's print run is only a thousand or two, though, and you expect to live with boxes of them in a hall closet indefinitely, neither copyright security nor profit maximization are particularly pressing issues. All these bands you've never heard of, releasing split singles on Parasol and Darla and Papercut and Magic Marker, some of them may harbor secret dreams of stardom, but none of them expect that this single, the one they're sitting at a friend's kitchen table putting into sleeves and numbering by hand because it's their first one and the fun of doing that hasn't worn off yet, is going to turn them into rock stars. They have the usual spectrum of motivations, I expect, for writing songs to begin with, but the journey towards wherever they hope to go always starts with somehow, against daunting odds, getting a few people to hear what they've done. Mix tapes are endorsements, in a genre that rarely gets them any other way; and immortality, because even with limited editions that probably won't quite have sold out by the heat-death of the universe, records can be forgotten far faster than they can be sold; and a massively distributed secondary distribution network, which emphasizes, not coincidentally, the peer relationship between players and listeners, rather than the vendor/customer dynamic of the serious music business. As the 45s have piled up around me, I've started feeling self-conscious that I don't have one to offer in return. It seems like I should, like the community tolerates unidirectional participation only reluctantly. For such a miniscule group, the indie underground has a remarkable appetite for new material. Pop should be ephemeral, Sarah Records claimed, and although I disagree vehemently on one level (the collectors' level, which results in my paying twenty dollars each for Gentle Despite singles, and yes, I know that people like me are to blame for that phenomenon in both directions), as a listener I agree whole-heartedly. You're supposed to buy lots of singles, that's why they're cheap, and of course many of them will make no impression, but a few will. One six-minute single isn't going to sustain you very long, no matter how great it is, but the accumulation of three-minute song epiphanies, and ten-minute EP epiphanies, and half-hour album epiphanies, just might. Making a life out of these scattered sparkles is an epic labor, like decorating a planet with pebbles, but then we're living on a planet decorated with pebbles, aren't we?

Any lingering suspicions that Pollard isn't in control of whether his songs sound like they were produced at the bottom of a mineshaft during an underground electromagnetic storm or not should be efficiently dispelled by juxtaposing Tonics and Twisted Chasers with Pollard's third nominal solo album, Kid Marine, whose personnel, once again, just happens to coincide with that of GbV at the time of its recording. Not in My Airforce and Waved Out, the first two to bear Pollard's name, not the band's, weren't high on my list of his finest accomplishments, as they both had a few songs I thought were decent, and a lot of filler that seemed beneath even GbV's malleable standards. Kid Marine adds a few more of each type. The acoustic "Flings of the Waistcoat Crowd" is slight, musically, but the harmonies are earnest, and I can put up with a lot from a song with the word "insectrocutioner" in it. "The Big Make-Over" is solid, unhurried, mid-tempo rock. The droning "Strictly Comedy" staggers into one great surging rock chorus in the middle, and then out the other side again. "Far-Out Crops" remembers the lessons in rock intensity from Cobra Verde's tenure as the rest of GbV. "Living Upside Down" is an extended intro that never manages to evolve into anything. The lamentably-titled "Snatch Candy" sounds to me like Pollard's not-especially-convincing impression of Radiohead, or maybe Jeff Buckley, or perhaps only Journey. "White Gloves Come Off" is lurching and unattractive, to me, and "Enjoy Jerusalem!" seems to groan under its own weight, but on "You Can't Hold Your Women", which is no more supple or quick, Pollard's quieter vocal delivery lends the music a different hue, and the song ends up sounding to me like a distant cousin of one of Marillion's abstract dirges.

And if you pine for GbV's pop days but insist on moving forward at all times, there are also now three solo albums and some other assorted oddities from ex-co-songwriter and occasional GbV vocalist Tobin Sprout. Moonflower Plastic, the second album, came out back in 1997, and I vividly remember listening to it a couple times and surmising that all the songwriting acumen in GbV was Pollard's. Listening to it again now, however, I haven't the slightest idea what I was thinking. Sprout's chronically unsteady voice has a sort of blurry sheen to it that I've only recently overcome an aversion to, thanks mostly to the Field Mice and the Orchids, but that can't explain why I thought these eminently accessible pop songs lacked melodies. I'm going to pretend my old CD player was the problem, which is also nonsensical, but less embarrassing. At most, a few of these songs are noisy and textural, like the buzzy "Get Out of My Throat", the decelerated Social Distortion clomp of "Paper Cut", the strained four-track hiss of "A Little Odd", and the growling "Curious Things". But the title track is gorgeous piano pop on the order of "Let It Be" crossed with Randy Newman, the beatbox-driven "Beast of Soul" is a throwback to when GbV sounded like REM without access to Mitch Easter's gear, and the starlight choruses of "Angels Hang Their Socks on the Moon" sound like avatars of the same eternal impulse that has animated half the pop songs in recorded history, from Poco to the Dream Academy to the Goo Goo Dolls. The swirly "Exit Planes" proves that with a little reverb you can build a song around Casio's Rock 2 setting, sputtering flams and all. "Little Bit of Dread" narrowly avoids getting derailed by the questionable decision to run the rhythm-guitar part through an Auto-Wah patch never intended for anything but an effects-box demo. "Water on the Boater's Back" wouldn't have been out of place in Grace of My Heart. And my favorite track, "All Used Up", which I'm dumbfounded I ever heard without melting, is effortless Beatles-lineage jangle, and belongs in the public-school music curriculum, if only as a demonstration of proper splash-cymbal technique, which is surely as important for children to learn as the difference between a compass and a protractor. (A compass tells you which direction you would have to walk to get to the Pragmatic North Pole; a protractor is a machine for wasting time.) I have to believe that with a few more songs like this, and a few less like "Frère Jacques" and "Michael Row Your Boat Ashore", and we wouldn't produce so many adults who think accounting and corporate litigation are acceptable ways to expend their life-forces.

Tobin hooks up different toys for the six-song, fifteen-minute 1998 EP Wax Nails, but the spirit is little altered. The square-wave bleat of "Get Your Calcium" yields to the rolling, elegiac sway of "Cereal Killer", organ chirp and warmly overdriven guitar filling in over Jim Eno's square drumming. The short "Seed" could probably pass for Richard Shindell if Tobin's voice was an octave lower, and "In Good Hands" sounds like an attempt to perform "Bridge Over Troubled Water" using They Might Be Giants' equipment. The frazzled demo of "How's Your House" sounds like it came out a little more Wall-of-Voodoo-ish than would be ideal. The prize of this set, for me, is "The Crawling Backward Man", another pop/rock song in the unmistakable old GbV pop idiom, inexorable drumming, fuzzy, pealing guitar, a plaintive melody and a cryptic chorus, with the added asset of lasting nearly three minutes, which GbV songs often didn't, albeit with an abrupt mid-beat ending that makes me glance over at the stereo to be sure this isn't one of those 45s whose music-bearing grooves extended farther into the disk than my auto-return turntable arm is willing to venture.

As Robert Pollard slides further into rock blare, Tobin Sprout seems to be following a mirror trajectory into an endearingly anachronistic "Cruel to Be Kind" conception of pop. Let's Welcome the Circus People, solo album number three, seems reluctant to let a downbeat go unremarked upon, and I spend much of this album mentally adding the doot-doot-doot backing-vocalist peeps these songs seem to plead for. "And So On" and "Maid to Order" are elegant low-fi Byrds homages, though, "Making a Garden" is a sort of psychedelic robot waltz, and "Liquor Bag" sounds like Bob Dylan backed up by some mixture of the English Beat and Yo La Tengo. "Who's Adolescence" is marred, for me, by the spelling error in the title, although, to be fair, the omission of apostrophes in pronoun possessives is one of English's particularly obtuse practices. The pastoral "100% Delay" reminds me of Winter Hours. "Vertical Insect (The Lights Are On)" sounds like the closest thing to an heir to "Angels Hang Their Socks on the Moon", but if you had to find an old-GbV-style single hiding in these dozen songs, I think the best bet would be the chiming "Lucifer's Flaming Hour", with its "Motor Away"-ish chorus, as the a-side, and the gauzy, methodical "And Then the Crowd Showed Up" as the reverse. It seems to me, however, like Tobin is deliberately, if slowly, stripping the most obtrusive elements of Guided by Voices out of his sound, in search of what's left when you eliminate everything but his own urges.

I haven't developed a taste for former GbV bassist/guitarist Mitch Mitchell's new band, Terrifying Experience, whose corpus now includes an EP and a full album, so my et al survey concludes with this recent reissue of the one self-titled 1986 album by Fig. 4, Tobin Sprout's pre-GbV band, accompanied by a handful of bonus tracks from later in Tobin's career (notably the wonderful "Sadder Than You", from the Popstram EP). The musical logic for Pollard and Sprout joining forces is pretty plainly evident in their early records. If Guided by Voices sounded like REM, then Fig. 4 sound even more like peripheral Southern-axis players Winter Hours and the Primitons. In 1986 GbV made the debut EP that Pollard refuses to reissue, Fig. 4 did this, REM made Life's Rich Pageant, Winter Hours were working on "Hyacinth Girl" and "Wail Till the Morning", and the Primitons were in between their EP and their album. For a few months, it seemed like the Byrds were more important than the Beatles, Peter Buck's dulcimer-ish guitar line on REM's "Seven Chinese Brothers" was all you really needed to know to start a band (although in polite society it was considered uncouth to illustrate this idea with the Cult's decidedly un-Athenian "She Sells Sanctuary"), and three chords were plenty as long as one of them was a suspended fourth. If subsequent research has uncovered flaws in these theories, I missed the journal articles. Fig. 4's breathy harmonies (Pollard, in fact, on several of these songs) and ebullient guitars sound just as unassailable to me now as they did the first time I heard the Plimsouls' "A Million Miles Away", and why everybody doesn't still play like this, I'm hard pressed to imagine. There's nothing slick about Sprout's straightforward eight-track production, but GbV's intentional low-fi distortions are still comfortably in the future. I was nineteen, when all this was happening, and maybe anything that happens when you're nineteen acquires some of your glow. But putting on these songs I'd never heard before, and instantly knowing when they were made, is one of those experiences that keep horoscope-writers in business. They never get mine right, though, and it's simple enough that there's no excuse: You will buy lots of records. Periodically, one of them will convince you that humans are good animals.