Jon-Carlo Manzo grew up in Shorewood, an exurb just west of Joliet, but his tastes are thoroughly informed by Chicago. Since graduating from New York University in 2021, he’s entrenched himself in the Windy City’s indie-rock scene. In fall 2020, he began interning for indie label Fire Talk Records, which works with many Chicago acts—some of which are represented by Pitch Perfect PR, one of the premier agencies in independent music. Pitch Perfect hired Manzo in June 2021 as an administrative assistant, and he’s now a tour publicist for the Chicago-based agency. In his free time, he continues to work for Fire Talk, helping out with digital marketing campaigns and dabbling in A&R. Last fall, Manzo launched a Fire Talk imprint called Angel Tapes that focuses on Chicago acts, using the slogan “Music in good faith.” Angel Tapes has since released two EPs, one by postpunk four-piece Cruel and the other a reissue of folk duo Sleeper’s Bell. Next month, Angel Tapes will drop the debut EP by Feller, the noisy rock duo of Ethan Toenjes (Old Coke, Sleepwalk) and Pete Willson (Pete Willson & the Rooks, Cafe Racer).
As told to Leor Galil
At NYU, I was booking shows with the school’s program board. I didn’t really know much about the music industry before I went to college, but I got involved with [the program board] because it seemed like those were the kids that liked all the same music I was into. Booking shows was just an added plus.
What encouraged me was that the people on the program board were very nice and took to me. They created an environment that was pretty welcoming for someone who didn’t know much about it. But it was definitely a learning curve, and I definitely made a bunch of big mistakes along the way. One time that stands out was getting yelled at by an agent over the phone. But the kids were nice enough. They were all so much more involved and smarter than me, because those kids had been doing things when they were in high school, going to NYU’s music-business-program summer camp and things like that. I didn’t study music business. I was an English major who had a minor in political science. But my taste sort of spoke for itself and went a long way for me.
My sister, honestly, did a lot of the legwork for me. She’s four years older, and she was into Death Cab [for Cutie], the Postal Service, and indie music of that vein in the early 2010s, late aughts. So she covered my bases with that. And then being a gay guy, I was also super into pop music too. So those have synthesized over the years into my little vein of—“indie music with a knack for memorable hooks” is how I think of it.
At the program-board meetings, we would have icebreakers, and we would all be talking about the shows we wanted to book. So there’s like 20, 30 different band names being thrown around at every meeting. As I got more into a leadership position in my junior and senior years of college, I was pretty meticulous with writing down who people were interested in and the bands that seemed to be grabbing everyone’s attention that I had no idea about, and from there finding the record labels that were putting out these bands and their records. Going to shows too, and showing up early and seeing who else was on the bill for people I was excited about—you know, your normal music-discovery mode when you’re in college.
I have one memory of being at a party in college. I was a freshman at the time, talking to the senior who was in charge of booking all the new music shows. I asked him, “Where do you find music?” He gave me the rundown: “I check Brooklyn Vegan’s new songs roundup every day. I’ll check Pitchfork track reviews.” Talking to people and going out to events was really, really helpful to just dive in.
A highlight from the NYU days was definitely booking 100 Gecs’ first New York show ever. They did it at NYU, and we also had Pop Smoke on the bill. It was a crazy, chaotic show. The kids were going so hard that the ceiling tiles of the floor below us started falling down in the middle of a lecture hall. Pop Smoke ended up running out of the room where we had the show, and people in the crowd were chasing him—truly, you couldn’t make that shit up. We booked a Pride concert that had Slayyyter and Alice Longyu Gao that was really fun. It was right when hyperpop was becoming a thing and popping off, but wasn’t overkill at that point, so it all felt really exciting, fun, and new.
The pandemic’s kind of a blessing in disguise for me, because I got an extended amount of time to be back in the suburbs with my family. Then I went back to New York in the summer of 2020. At the top of 2021, my mom got diagnosed with cancer, so I came back and did my last year of college from the suburbs, just to be closer to her as she went through chemo. When I was graduating, my main concern was, “I need a job. I would love a job that’s in Chicago and has to do with music, just so I can be close with her.” That ended up having me interviewing with places like the Empty Bottle and Pitch Perfect, where I ultimately landed.
“It’s nice to offer people something that isn’t, like, ‘Upload your song to DistroKid and pray for the best.’”
They worked on a lot of records that Fire Talk was putting out—and going through their roster of clients, a bunch of records that I was passionate about outside of Fire Talk too. Going in and interviewing with everyone and talking to them, it seemed like everyone was nice and normal, which I was also looking for in a music job, because they can famously be not so nice and not so normal. So the people really drew me in—and the shared taste across the board.
I started there in June of 2021. It was my birthday that I got the call. I probably had a week or two of having no school, and then I started the job pretty immediately after. I started as just an admin assistant. I was just updating press reports and writing press releases for people. Now I’m veering into publicist territory with doing tour press and working on a bunch of artists that I’ve been a fan of for so long.
I also helped with bringing in new clients to the company, because I have a pretty wide network. It’s been nice to see some homies link up with the Pitch Perfect crew—getting Slow Pulp over to Pitch Perfect was definitely a highlight, and other bands like Friko and Villagerrr have been really cool too.
The summer of 2020, everything seemed terrible and pandemic drenched. I was sending a bunch of cold emails to people in the music industry that I respected, just putting it out there that I was looking for some internship opportunities. Even at that point I hadn’t done a whole lot. I was booking shows, and I had done an internship at [the talent agency] Paradigm. I was not feeling the whole booking landscape as something that I wanted to spend time with, so I was focusing on management and record-label stuff.
Fire Talk was at the top of my list, because I was so into Water by Dehd and Deeper’s self-titled record—and the Chicago thing. I was like, “They seem like real heads that I would love to work with.” That fall I was interning, and by the end of that year I’d been brought on in a part-time capacity to flesh out marketing.
I like to think of myself as being on the cutting edge of indie labels doing memes. We were kind of early on that, and I helped them do a lot more—but also creative marketing ideas for campaigns on a larger scale. A highlight’s always gonna be Mia Joy, when she did Spirit Tamer. We set up a horoscope generator on the Fire Talk website where people could put in their birthdays and it would churn out a Mia Joy lyric that corresponded with their sign. We just launched a Bnny “loveline” that I’m super proud of—people can call in and dish on their little relationship secrets. Stuff like that has been fun. It’s so hard to make music last longer than, like, 24 hours—that stuff can help add some longevity.
My former coworker Ruby [Hoffman]—she did our A&R for a while and is now over at Fat Possum—during her tenure at Fire Talk, she started a singles imprint called Open Tab that had done stuff with Chanel Beads, the Dare, and Maria BC. I started squeezing some Chicago bands in there. At the top of 2023, we did one with this band Hydrodate, and then that March we did a single with Friko—we put out “Crimson to Chrome” to give them one final push as they were shopping the record [the February 2024 release Where We’ve Been, Where We Go From Here] around to labels.
I wanted to do more, but I didn’t want to keep intruding on Ruby’s pet project. I talked to Trevor [Peterson], who owns Fire Talk, about how I was super into working with bands around Chicago. I like helping them out and giving them the backbone to release music properly and in good faith. So we landed on the idea of a little tape label, and the rest is history or whatever.
Jon-Carlo Manzo released Cruel through Angel Tapes last fall, and Feller will follow in May.
I don’t have the hugest ambitions for it. I’m not trying to take over the world by any means. I’m inspired a lot by Julia’s War, Bud Tapes, Citrus City—labels that have a strong community around them. I can go to any of those people, look at what they’re putting out, and know that on some level I’m gonna enjoy it. I just want to continue to put out good music that people enjoy, not sully my good name as a tastemaker, and help out bands in Chicago that I like.
There’s truly so many bands out here, and putting out music is hard, because everyone’s doing it. It’s nice to offer people something that isn’t, like, “Upload your song to DistroKid and pray for the best.” We have infrastructure that can actually help bands in their first releases and set them up for later down the line when they are ready to put out the debut record. You can say, “I got on these playlists; I’ve gotten this press; I did it with this label who’s respectable.” It’s meant to be building blocks for developing artists.
The reward is knowing I’m helping these bands and seeing how excited they get. It may not be the most exciting thing to Beyoncé to get on Apple Music’s “New in Indie” playlist, but for a local band who is just starting out it is really exciting. It’s nice to be able to be a part of that.
The fact that there is so much music is exciting. Yes, it’s overwhelming, and it’s hard to sift through, but it’s also cool to know that [artists’] spirits aren’t being bogged down by how bleak it may look, on first glance, to release music in 2024. No one’s shrinking away from making music—there’s actually an excess of it.
Like I said, I got into Fire Talk because of Chicago bands, so it’s nice to see the new era, the new sound that Chicago bands are moving in. Friko is a great example of that sort of chamber-pop sound that I think is so exciting. It’s been nice to see some bands adopt it. But also, Cruel, who’s putting out really charged-up postpunk, is fun and exists in a long history of that in Chicago. It’s revamped for the college kids. Listening to the music of the bands around here really gets me amped up.
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