Meet the Label That Put Punk’s Most Overlooked Chapters on Vinyl
Lük Haas’ DIY label Tian An Men 89 gave global punk scenes a voice — from Romania to Pakistan — and reshaped underground music history.
If you were to list the most important, powerful, and revolutionary punk records, the 1993 split by Romania’s Revoluție? Underground Romania probably wouldn’t make the cut.
It’s neither rare nor widely known, but within Romania’s punk scene, it’s a landmark. At a time when physical releases were scarce, this record captured the raw urgency of a movement often overlooked internationally. In that context, it is important, powerful, and revolutionary. That same spirit — amplifying local punk voices from far-flung, sometimes war-torn regions to a global audience — is at the core of Tian An Man 89, and Revoluție? Underground Romania was just the start.
A French-born punk and intrepid globetrotter, Haas started the label “for the purpose of releasing punk music from parts of the world where, due to financial reasons, civil wars, or lack of record factories, there is no possibility for the bands to release their music on vinyl.” It was named after the Tiananmen Square massacre, the 1989 crackdown by the Chinese government on its own citizens.
Over the span of two decades, Haas released 37 records from all corners of the globe — Belarus, and beyond. Most of the bands were as obscure as those on that first 7-inch — meaning, not well-known at all, but each release marked a milestone: likely the very first punk or DIY record from their local scene to be pressed to vinyl and shared with the world. The impact of all this is practically immeasurable.
Never Mind The Taqwacores, Here Is The Real Deal 7-inch compilation from 2013, credits Haas with changing his life trajectory and his country’s scene. “Lük Haas is a major figure in the history of Pakistani punk. Simply from his idea of putting out the vinyl, a couple bands were formed and existing bands also were encouraged to make more songs.”
“Through his network I made friends and s from punk scenes all over the world, including some friendships that last to this day,” Amin continued. “It all started with that 7-inch. Without him it’s difficult to imagine that I’d be in doing my thing with [my latest band] Zanjeer.”
Amin’s comments highlight an important aspect of what Haas was doing with the label: while he could have focused the attention on himself as this dauntless (sub)cultural explorer from Europe, instead he used whatever privilege he had to build a platform for bands from around the world to stand on. “It was all fueled by curiosity and love,” Haas said.
Haas’ story begins in rural , in a small German-speaking community near the borders of and Luxembourg. Born in 1963, he came of age alongside the first wave of punk, though he its that early icons like the Sex Pistols didn’t quite click for him. Everything changed in 1983, during a trip to Poland, where he encountered the country’s underground punk scene. Around the same time, he discovered Maximum Rocknroll and realized just how many parts of the world were still blank spots on the punk map. He started contributing scene reports to the zine, a precursor to the global-minded ethos that would define his label.
This highlights another crucial part of Haas’s influence: journalism. Although punk music magazines have thrived in the United States and Europe since the subculture emerged in the late 1970s, they rarely covered scenes outside those regions in their early years. Writers often expressed iration for so-called international punk, but that usually referred to bands from Scandinavia, parts of South America and Eastern Europe, and occasionally Japan. By reporting on punk and DIY communities in places like Morocco, Hong Kong, and Thailand between the late 1980s and mid-1990s, Haas helped expand the global understanding of what punk could be.
There’s an inherent and deep curiosity with Haas that has charged so much of what he’s done in life. As he put it, before the label, “I had already been traveling a bit and loved to meet people and explore.” Adding punk into the mix meant seeking out new scenes. Some of his first trips were to Czechoslovakia in 1986 and East the following year, going to concerts, befriending musicians, buying records and tapes, and filing articles with MRR. He had the idea to bring that music to friends who had labels to try and get it released to a greater audience but it was “not always easy,” he said.
When he couldn’t find someone to put out the music, he did it himself. He started a cassette label called Ukrutnost Tapes in 1987 and then Tian An Men 89 six years later. According to him, “DIY is the best. Fun to do, important for those scenes, [and] no need to ask around if anyone had an interest in this music as I could just do it myself the way I wanted.”
The first TAM 89 release was the aforementioned split between Pansament and Tectonic. Haas explained that it came about following a trip to Romania in 1991, just a short time after the fall of the authoritarian communist regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu. Meeting with local punks and other community was the gas he needed to start a label to “focus on scenes that had never been documented on vinyl before.”
Then came EPs from Chaos In Morocco in 2013 with bands from Casablanca and Rabat. The music on all these albums is punk in sound and attitude, which feels especially real when it comes from places where subcultures and radical politics are, in some ways, criminalized.
A quick but related side note: in 1998, Haas released $229 in June of 2023.)
The process of putting these albums together first started with Haas getting cassette tape recordings, later DATs, CDRs, and finally just digital files, of songs and then sending them to the pressing plant he used outside of Prague for much of the label’s output. There were 500 copies pressed of each record with 100 always going to the artists.
“Most of the music was unreleased with a few exceptions and bands gave me what they already had recorded at home, live, or in a studio,” said Haas. “Considering when and where much of this was coming from, the recording quality is at times inconsistent, though what’s more important to Haas is how “these are rare documents giving a snapshot of a scene at the time.”
Haas isn’t just a seasoned traveler who’s been to over a hundred countries — he also spent 25 years working for an international NGO that sent him into conflict zones around the world, including Afghanistan, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Egypt, and North Korea. While he felt it was important to keep his punk life separate from his job — “things are pretty sensitive in conflict areas,” he said — there was still a clear crossover, even beyond the times he was stationed somewhere with a local music scene.
“The job helped me put into practice ideals I held long before I discovered punk,” Haas says. “It shaped my understanding of politics. Achieving real change requires pragmatism, principles, and balance. You can’t save lives with an all-out, radical, denouncing approach.”
He retired from that career in 2021.
The internet has, of course, made global communication exponentially easier, including the kind of DIY networking that fueled TAM89 and defined much of Haas’ life. The scenes his label once championed were deeply isolated at the time, especially in its early years. Now, many of those same communities are far more connected and regularly collaborate across borders. In many ways, that’s the future Haas had hoped for — the world he was trying to build. But it also makes his role feel less vital today, which is a bittersweet shift. Still, he hasn’t slowed down. He continues to travel, meet bands, and is even considering putting out records again for the first time in over a decade. Lately, he’s especially drawn to emerging punk scenes in Timor-Leste, Vietnam, Cambodia, and the Maldives.
“My relationship with punk is probably more measured now, less naive,” he said. “Life teaches you to put things in perspective. People change. The world changes. Nothing is forever.”
But Haas and TAM89 have had a lasting effect on global punk and DIY. Many of the countries featured on this label are now recognized for their underground scenes. On top of that, “international” actually means international when it comes to the punk press and how this music is identified and classified. Most importantly, there’s the immeasurable number of people whose lives were changed because of his work either as a journalist, with the label, or both.
Ой Дуораан, from Yakutsk, Siberia, one of the most remote punk scenes on the planet. According to Muchanic, “Without TAM89 I would never have done this.”
Muchanic describes growing up as a punk-obsessed kid in rural Pennsylvania as an isolating experience. “It was mind-blowing to stumble upon the Underground 7”s from Kazakhstan, Georgia, and Last Call For The Lost Scenes EPs,” he said. While he didn’t know about these scenes before discovering the label, he said that as a kid, he was always curious if punk existed as a worldwide movement. TAM89 answered that question. As he puts it: “There is punk everywhere. You just need to find it.”
The inspiration runs deeper. For Muchanic, releasing physical music is what gives a label meaning. He doesn’t see streaming as inherently bad, but says it often strips music of its context, especially when it comes from other parts of the world. It’s not just about liner notes, but about the act itself — the deliberate choice to play a record, tape, or CD. That kind of engagement matters.
Muchanic also learned not to get too caught up in genre or aesthetics. “Being exposed to those releases so early on, I never had a fixed idea of what punk is,” he said. “I read an interview with Lük where he talked about taking an anthropological approach: ‘If I’m in another country and someone says what they’re doing is punk, I just accept that as the truth.’ There’s no one way to be punk, so just do what you like.”
“I’m [just] happy to see both young and old still fighting for justice and humanity through music,” adds Haas. “That, I believe, will never stop.”
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