Ponderous-but-still-pretty-groovy zine about sound. Quite a nice item with glossy pages and one of those arty/textual dtp layout thingies. Articles on easy listening, noise pollution, sine waves, music on the WWW and such like. Reviews. Big on improvised music (which generally makes plebs like me reach for my Madonna records). There's a sort of yearning for respectabilty here which seems to come from an overlong stay in the world of academia. For example, there's an account of a brilliant experiment involving vast amounts of industrial piping (blagged from the Gas board) and 5 loudspeakers which sounds mind-boggling, but there's very little emotion or enthusiasm in the text: Just a detached observation. This is in stark contrast to the rip-roaring live reviews section at the back where another contributor gets pissed and wanders between events in Sheffield and Leeds. You'll probably know already if this is your sort of thing.
20 Wake Road, Nether Edge, Sheffield S7 1HG, England U.K.
£2.50 inc. (chqs to "Noisegate"). 4 issue sub is £10 for individuals or £20 for institutions (see what I mean?) and this also gets you updates and other gubbins.
Rougher than the inside of a raver's mouth at 6AM and all the better for it. We've given this a hard time before for being a bit macho, but I will forgive them that forever if they retain their bile-saturated attitude. I mean, how can you go wrong with a zine that starts off an article on something as tedious as music software like THIS:
"OK, You're the sonically creative type. In your mind's ear, you keep hearing that fucking Ferrero Rocher advert, "Monsieur, with these Rocher, you are spoiling us", backed by a BooYacka-Jump-up jungle beat, until it becomes a cult dancefloor classic (or maybe not!) Or maybe you hear your boss' relentless snort of a laugh looped backward through distortion and reverb so it sounds like a Trent Reznoresque dentist's drill. The ideas keep coming, all you need are the tools."
Fallout is really keen on guttersnipes making searing techno tracks with zero money. Picture a legion of psychopaths dragging their Casiotones out of the attic and distorting them to hell, and you're getting close. And fucking right they are too. I'm getting pretty sick of dance records that are all perfectly clean and predictable and sound like they've been recorded by surgeons in a goddamn Operating Theatre. More dirt! More funk! More emotion, please!
This issue also has lots on the gabba/hardcore scene in Japan and quite a bit on technology - internet extremity, Bruce Sterling interview, information theory, nuclear war and so on. Hardcore.
DJ Scud, 64 Hollingbourne Road, London SE24 9ND, England U.K.
50p and an A5 SAE in the UK.