In a cultural landscape increasingly flattened by algorithms, consolidation, and profit-first creative models, artist-led infrastructure is no longer optional — it is essential. Across the country, small collectives and independent labels are quietly building the systems that institutions failed to provide.
In Minneapolis, that work takes shape through small organizations like H.E.X. Collective and its creative alignment with Phage Tapes — two entities operating in different mediums but united by shared values: autonomy, inclusion, and community over commerce.
H.E.X. Collective was formed as a deliberate counter-space. Queer-led and femme-centered, the collective exists for artists whose work leans toward the dark, the experimental, the politically charged, and the ritualistic — creators whose identities and aesthetics have often been pushed to the margins of traditional galleries and funding models. Members work across painting, assemblage, sculpture, writing, installation, fashion, and sound. More than a roster, H.E.X. functions as an ecosystem built on mutual aid, shared labor, and the understanding that survival in the arts requires collaboration rather than competition.
This philosophy finds a powerful parallel in Phage Tapes.
Founded in Minneapolis in 2007, Phage Tapes is a fiercely DIY label committed to releasing noise, hardcore, industrial, grind, post-punk, and experimental music that resists polish and refuses commodification. Its guiding principle is simple but radical: labels should promote artists, not profit from them. All proceeds are reinvested into future releases — pressing tapes, producing physical media, distributing records, and amplifying artists who might otherwise remain unheard.
Phage Tapes operates exclusively through its Bandcamp platform, which serves as its sole point of sale and distribution hub. You can explore the full catalog at:
https://phagetapes.bandcamp.com
In scenes that can still replicate broader systems of exclusion, those choices are not neutral. They are political.
Phage Tapes has consistently functioned as an ally to queer, femme, Indigenous, and otherwise marginalized artists — not through branding language, but through production decisions. Allyship here means committing resources. It means putting marginalized artists on physical formats. It means absorbing financial risk. It means ensuring distribution and archival permanence. It means stepping back and centering the work of others.
Among its catalog are projects that explicitly represent queer and women-led perspectives:
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bottom surgery — a self-identified queer cybergrind project pushing abrasive intensity into radical terrain.
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Lana Del Rabies (Sam An) — blending industrial performance and noise into ritualized sonic architecture.
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Deep Fade (Amanda Votta) — a women-led experimental noise project exploring rupture and atmosphere.
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Pack Mentality — confronting politics head-on within hardcore spaces, including tracks such as “Queer Terror.”
This Friday —March 6, 2026– Phage Tapes deepens its commitment with a split release from Echthros and Hotvlkuce Harjo — two Native American artists whose experimental and power electronics work brings culturally rooted perspective into dialogue with the broader underground. Supporting Indigenous artists within noise and industrial spaces is not symbolic. It is infrastructural. It ensures their work is pressed, circulated, and preserved.
Phage Tapes’ output ranges from grind-inflected chaos to bleak post-industrial atmospherics. Limited cassette runs circulate internationally while remaining grounded in a hyper-local ethic. The label operates less as gatekeeper and more as facilitator — a platform designed to redistribute visibility rather than consolidate it.
Integral to this ecosystem is Sam Stoxen, founder of Phage Tapes and (newly) Assistant Event Operations Manager of H.E.X. Collective. As both artist and producer, Stoxen has been operating almost namelessly for the past two decades, keeping the spotlight on the artists. He understands infrastructure from the inside. His own project, Pain Apparatus —a duo effort with Gnawed’s Grant Richardson— inhabits the same abrasive and politically charged terrain the label supports. But just as importantly, his role within Phage Tapes reflects an active commitment to allyship: using access, labor, and resources to elevate artists whose identities and work challenge dominant narratives.
Allyship, in this context, is not a badge. It is practice. It is the quiet work of production, logistics, manufacturing, and reinvestment — ensuring marginalized artists are not peripheral to the scene but central within it.
That work is deeply intertwined with J. M. Liles, Co-President of H.E.X. Collective. A multidisciplinary artist and writer whose practice confronts systems of power, gender identity, trauma, and cultural myth-making, Liles anchors the visual and conceptual framework of the collective. As life partners, Stoxen and Liles extend that collaboration beyond administration into shared creative framework. Their partnership models what both H.E.X. and Phage Tapes advocate: art as relational labor. As shared risk. As long-term commitment to community.
Where H.E.X. builds physical and conceptual space for artists across mediums — through markets, exhibitions, and collective governance — Phage Tapes builds that sonically. The partnership dissolves disciplinary silos: sculpture beside distortion, goth aesthetics beside blast beats, ritual performance beside tape hiss.
Both resist extraction culture.
Both reject profit-first models.
Both center artists who challenge power rather than flatter it with community which supports. Art as a reciprocal resource.
Phage Tapes brings sound that resists.
For those drawn to the strange, the loud, the political, and the uncompromising — this is not simply a label or a collective.
It is a practice.
It is a network.
It is an invitation.
Welcome, Sam Stoxen a.k.a. Phage Tapes.
