Editorial by The Yiz
Welcome to the first issue of Mouthguard, a zine we started to address the lack of music writing in our respective cities Perth and Man.
Perth is long, sparse and largely uninteresting, yet there lies beneath a rich underground of artists and musicians. Nearly everyone I know is working on something, their spare hours spent on weird and ambitious projects, all of which should have the opportunity to be seen, considered and documented.
While almost all the underground zines and music blogs disappeared a decade ago, there are has been a recent interest in DIY publishing, with several new physical and online publications starting up in the last few years. The Dispatch Review writes about art with a surgical knife and Artery with a feathery quill. Magazine6000 and Isolated Nation cover theatre and VHS Tracking covers movies. Pelican is getting ambitious again and there are also several literary magazines one can submit to. Even Perth's theme parks (to use the term very loosely) are covered by my old colleague PerthThemeParkLife. So, how come if Perth has such a vibrant and varied music scene, we have almost no substantial writing about any of it? Is it because there is nothing about music worth saying? Is writing about music really like dancing about architecture?
Well the trouble is, and I don't mean to put something down to put myself up but I will anyway... most music writing is not worth reading, live reviews especially.
The gig review is usually written as an afterthought. "Well, they did give me a free ticket so I guess I’ll say write something nice... what’s the word count again?" And unlike its more established cousin the album review, the gig review serves no purpose. The event has been and gone and there’s nothing to sell. Perhaps you can improve a band’s future gig-attendance by noting how they "entertained the punters and rocked the house off the floor" but if that happened it would be in the news.
Perhaps the dullness of the gig review is borne from the romantic ideal that critics and artists should have a symbiotic relationship; that is, the critic should be one of those lice-picking birds that pecks the vermin off the hippo's back while giving it a nice scratchy massage. Unless you are someone with the descriptive talents of Peter Schjeldahl, gushiness makes for boring, empty writing. Well whats the alternative to benevolence? Malevolence? You think the critic should be a vampire, a leech, a mosquito? A bloodsucking parasite that sucks the life from its subject to increase the size of its abdomen? Well, while I believe the negative critic actually achieves better social outcomes for "the scene" by providing gossip, intrigue, and the forming of new allegiances, the critic as bloodsucker is no good in the long run. Well then, what animal is the ideal critic?
Not an animal, but a mollusc. The critic as limpet.
The limpet fixes itself upon a rock and sucks and sucks away. The limpet provides no service and receives no nourishment. The limpet acknowledges that it can barely even see the rock but only the algae that covers it. The limpet is trapped in its shell, its eyes and mouth the same, unable to ever see the limpets around it. All it can know of them are the trails they have left in the algae. The limpet hopes to grow a beautiful shell. The limpet hopes to leave a beautiful trail.
In this first issue, writers have responded to various performances at the grassroots experimental music festival Audible Edge, organised by the lawful-good people at Tone List. In the essay at the end of this issue, writer Paul Boye sings the festival's praises so eloquently that I can only agree: AE is ambitious, joyful, caring and kind; in many ways counter-cultural as Paul says, but not in the bum-baring, bird-flipping, dicktation graffing way. This is where I somewhat disagree with Paul’s employment of Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque. For me, attending a Tone List event feels more like a school excursion to the art gallery than any raucous painting by Bruegel the Elder. Sure there may be some smirks and snickers at the Lucian Freud painting but hardly Rabelaisian toilet humour or Bacchanalian extasy. If anyone actually started skulling the kegs or throwing about pottery, they would get politely escorted outside. Yet I do concede that if AE is bombastic, then it is quietly bombastic and as Paul says, there is greater affect in a twist of the mouth than any Kirbyesque guffaw.
There is likely a chance that you have never attended this festival nor heard of the artists, yet I am confident that every piece of writing in this issue can stand on its own as something Worth Reading. Izzy French and Maddie Doncan have written dreamlike stories combining the magic and mundane. Carlie Norma Germs’ takes you on an inflatable boat trip down the river of drifting attention. There is also much jestivity. Matt Aitken has the record for the most jokes-per-sentence in his rollicking Totally Paulie-style journalism. Gummy Chauncey, my longtime pen pal from the Isle of Man, spends most of her review being rate proper cretchy in recounting her Homeric odyssey to download my two gigabyte video file. Sorry again Gummy. It was a pleasure to read and work with all the contributors, and we'd love to read more.
Adventurous music writing is the tagline we chose for Mouthguard, for reading and writing is all about going on an adventure. Advene is the verb form - I hope this zine advenes.
Images from Rocky and the Dodos - The Limpet Olympics