The Pixies — Fort Apache Studios, Boston

The Pixies formed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1986, but their early recordings and the sessions that established their reputation were made at Fort Apache Studios in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with producer Gary Smith. The Come On Pilgrim mini-album (1987) and Surfer Rosa (1988, produced by Steve Albini) came from this Boston-area scene. The band's quiet-loud dynamics, Black Francis's shredded screaming, and Kim Deal's bass countermelodies created a template that Kurt Cobain would explicitly acknowledge as the blueprint for Nirvana's approach. Kurt Cobain said the Pixies were the band he was trying to sound like when he wrote 'Smells Like Teen Spirit.'

The Pixies' core tension — between the suburban normality of Charles Thompson (Black Francis) and the chaos of his writing — was very much a product of the Boston indie scene of the late 1980s. Their deal with British label 4AD, brokered through Throwing Muses' Tanya Donelly, placed them in an art-rock European context that amplified their American strangeness. They broke up acrimoniously in 1993 via fax and reformed in 2004 without Kim Deal.

Fort Apache Studios moved through several Cambridge and Roxbury locations over the years and is no longer operating in its original form. The broader Boston/Cambridge indie scene that produced the Pixies — centred on clubs like the Rat in Kenmore Square — has largely been displaced by gentrification, but the city's universities continue to generate significant music.