If it’s music and art that’s far from the beaten path you’re after, well, good luck. The stuff might as well be an illicit substance. The acquisition of a dealer of sorts, an acquaintance who somehow doles out surprisingly appealing sights and sounds you’ve never heard of, is required.

Back in high school, I had that friend. I’d hop into his car, and those stuffy confines were nearly always filled with strangely wonderful music. One day it was Camper Van Beethoven’s Vampire Can Mating Oven. Californian-Balkan surfer/slacker rock? Whatever you call it, I had a new band to add to my favorites list. Then it was the Meat Puppets’ “Split Myself in Two,” a pulsing, buzzing slab of cowpunk fury like nothing I’d ever heard (years before they finally got their just deserts via Kurt Cobain’s bringing them onto MTV to play their tunes with him). It’s still a favorite.

The pinnacle of all that surprising weirdness, perhaps, was hearing Sonic Youth’s Bad Moon Rising (definitely not, it bears noting, a Creedence Clearwater Revival cover). With a name closer to Up With People than, say Meat Puppets, they probably would have remained safely off my radar for years. Instead, that uniquely mind-blowing music became the soundtrack for late-night drives. Those drives, no matter who was in the car, usually turned to silent listening parties. Listening to music—especially stuff as epic in scale and crushingly dissonant as early Sonic Youth—was an end in itself.

It was hard to discover such non-mainstream music in the pre-Internet world because it required hooking into the right networks—of college radio DJs, of DIY zines, of little-advertised shows by out-of-town bands—in a dedicated way. The music itself could only be had at the right kind of record store, which might be many miles away, or via mail order, which demanded shot-in-the-dark prospecting orders that could easily turn up a pile of duds before yielding the elusive gem.

Of course, with the term “alternative” in the description, the Advocate aims to be a helpful friend to the adventurous listener. Witness, for instance, Matthew Dube’s Behind the Beat column in these pages, which taps into the endless well of new Valley bands 52 times a year. Many of those 52 per year might well knock on the door of underground status or offer sounds steeped in originality. We love it when we hear such stuff, of course, and we aim to be a conduit for distinctive voices. Still, this area’s musical riches aren’t limited to only the rarefied or transcendently original. There’s far too much going on to employ only that kind of filter, and homegrown variety is a virtue worth praising, too.

Beyond the Advocate‘s penchant for the locally original, there are national sources that search for material from that more rarefied, aesthetic rather than geographic, territory. One such source that rewards repeat visits for me recently arrived. It’s called Invisible, and it’s the work of the editorial staff of Alarm magazine (in fact, though it’s a book, it’s also been published as Alarm 38).

This Chicago-based publication has devoted itself to unearthing the unusual, with stout emphasis on artists and musicians who’ve found an authentic and distinctive voice. Alarm claims to seek “inspirational artists who are fueled by an honest and contagious obsession with their art.” They tout as their ultimate advantage the lack of corporate influence over their pages. With a large network of contributors, Alarm truly does provide all sorts of intriguing sights and sounds from everywhere, and often in high style, with writing that snaps along briskly and interviewing that gets beyond standard-fare questions.

Invisible is perhaps most impressive for its singleminded dedication to embracing authenticity and innovation. The pages offer all sorts of experimental weirdness—Matmos’ employing of an actual wired-up cactus that produced sounds when its needles were plucked, for instance—but also cover the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a North Carolina-based old-timey band specializing in the (disappearing) African-American tradition of Piedmont string music. There’s material enough to fill hours of listening. The fun part ought to be seeing which of the ever-renewing crop of Valley bands percolate from our pages to theirs.