New zine - Mouthguard #1 out now
Issue One of Mouthguard is finally finished, and contains a lot of fun crazy writing on experimental music.
You can order a cheapish copy in the mail from here or find it at various locations in Perth. I will slowly be uploading writing from the zine to this blog over the coming weeks.
If you would like a PDF, email hellomouthguard@gmail.com
EDITORIAL:
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 rather banal yet there is a rich creative underground of artists, musicians and writers. Here almost everyone I know is doing something, spending their spare hours on strange and ambitious projects, all of which deserve to be seen, considered and documented.
While the physical street presses disappeared about 10 years ago, shortly followed by the demise of underground blogs, there are now several decent publications in Perth that are of good quality and independently run. Dispatch Review writes about local 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 the several literary magazines I never can afford. Even Perth's "theme park culture" is covered by my old colleague PerthThemeParkLife. So, how come if Perth has such a vibrant and varied music scene, then we have almost no substantial writing about it? (I’m not talking about history books). Is it because there is nothing about music worth saying? Is writing about music really dancing about architecture?
[Here I have removed my spiel about lousy perfunctory music criticism which makes me sound too unwell].
In this first issue, writers have responded to various performances at the weekend 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, yet not in the bum-baring, bird-flipping, dicktation graffing way. This is where I somewhat disagree with Paul’s employment of Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque. For me, attending a Tone List event feels more like a school excursion to the art gallery than a raucous painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. For the rustic layman, performances at AE tend to alternate between serene and stressful, almost always confusing... But I will 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 a Kirbyesque guffaw.
While this zine is open to reviewing music of all kinds, from a whistler on the bus to a Hare Krishna parade to a big arena spectacle, this issue focuses on a single hazy room of silent unmovers, their attention pooled together to fix upon something weird.
Witnessing experimental music, one learns to sit with ambiguity, discomfort and over or under-stimulation. Mouthguard's writers are encouraged not to write within the boring gig review framework of judgement and appraisal or promotion. The critic of ephemera should neither be a lice-picking bird nor a bloodsucking leech but a limpet on a rock, not deriving any nutrients nor providing any service but simply making a trail in the algae - hopefully a good one.
Mouthguard hopes to document as much of Perth's music as possible, while avoiding empty promotion. Writing for writing's sake is much better in the long run than writing as a social service.
You probably have not attended this festival, nor have you heard of the artists, yet I can assure you that every bit of writing in this issue is hopefully Worth Reading. Izzy French and Maddie Doncan have written dreamlike stories combining the magic and mundane. Carlie Norma Germs’ writing is 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, recounting her Homeric odyssey to download a two gigabyte file at the public library. Sorry again Gummy.
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.