At the moment marks an historic day within the Louder Than Conflict calendar as we launch the Louder Than Conflict Zine! The primary difficulty WAR1 is now that can be purchased from our web site for simply £4.99 +P&P.
Ryan Lewis-Walker, the zine’s editor explains:
Louder Than Conflict, like its dad or mum web site – goals to encapsulate an insatiable, unstoppable really feel for documenting pop cultural components that each design and dictate how we develop as, in a method or one other – obsessive nerds. ‘Eclectic’ is an typically misused time period, and for now – ‘experimental’ is an overstatement. As we’re virtually sure what occurs to most concepts earlier than they launch and acquire eventual momentum (or disappear towards the ethers of dusty cabinets not touched for many years), through the preliminary brainstorming phases earlier than we went to print, loads was talked about relating to the entire vibe of the journal. A lot in order that it was initially conceived as a zine, impressed by one thing such because the Imprecise, Slash or Sniffin’ Glue. Eager to be infused with the works of the Worldwide Occasions or IT, the elemental bible of the countercultural underground that uprooted conservative society from its locational stalemate, the Situationist Occasions, and Digital Sound journal, the seed of the concept, as solely that: an thought, ran round feral, untrained, and amorphous for a number of months.
However finally it took form. Curiosity spiked and declined. Submissions got here and went. Regardless of being impactful and arty-farty – ‘WAR’, as a title, was in all probability not the perfect thought. Regardless of the underground, Louder Than Conflict Journal merely couldn’t afford to decompose in between your fingers as skinny items of hempen rag going through a drop of rain. Regardless of the counterculture, this factor needed to resonate. It needed to pop. It needed to belong. It needed to make sense of being messy. It needed to be sensible about being tutorial. It needed to possess the ballsy vitality of ensnaring consideration with out being determined or distressing. There’s an etiquette to controversy. Stability. Integrity. Silliness. Extra stability. It requires legs and a pair of lungs to try this. It requires extra submissions to return in straight after you’ve completed studying this to try this too.
Whether or not or not our journal has completely ended up as a convergence of the inspirations of favor and iterations of print talked about above is anyone’s guess. And to be sincere – it doesn’t even matter. What we’ve on our palms is our distinctive, ideological continuation of these blueprints. Its our little contribution to the world of print media, one thing we hardly pine for the return of however are conscious of the worth of when completed accurately.
What we’ve is a mixture of thought-pieces in regards to the scythe-wielding, artist-starving tyrants perched atop Mount Spotify, with a dovetailing of deliciously sardonic opinions about band life on the DIY circuit by post-rock musician Francis Atkinson, Los Angeles artwork rock missile Qween Kwong and ‘sasswave’ group Vogue Suggestions that sweeps up nearly everybody and anybody, from promoters to punters of their livid, vitriolic spurt.
Moreover, readers can hope to identify interviews with Gez Varley from LFO about bass music and jeep tradition, a thrillingly bizarre, completely wired story about doll collections, accounts of mental-health melting earlier than our eyes, and the hijacking actions or ‘fragments of testimony’ belonging to rogue youth traversing internationally seeking UK Decay by Discontented Youth creator Ian Trowell, and the occasional flash of a picture to visually manifest the tone pulsating from the guts and thru the physique of every web page.
Nevertheless – along with wanting the journal to reflect the positioning a bit extra, we additionally needed it to be fucking bizarre. This was a relentless thought (amongst a pile of many different problematic concepts – from paper varieties, print finishes and normal subjects of consideration) that saved ebbing and flowing all through the submissions being taken in.
The journal subsequently goals to supply a bodily house inside which a glimpse could be given, for audiences, musicians and inventive folks the place their pursuits and concepts can have a platform to be recognized. For maybe they’d by no means get an opportunity to be recognized when dominated by the shadows of their day job (work in faculties, life on the street, workplace hours, identify your value). These are the dear, sanity-sparing distractions and obsessional tales made public, the whites-of–the-eyes and creaking sounds within the cracks of somebody’s persona, unearthed burials, freaky tales, fringe encounters, experiences of area of interest weirdness and exceptional features of somebody’s historical past, primarily with a musical or inventive essence glowing / growling on the core.
That’s how (roughly) it was defined to folks throughout some final minute poaches for submissions.
Once more – it doesn’t matter.
What issues is that the exhausting half is over. An thought is an summary idea. {A magazine} isn’t any totally different. Till you’ve got it in your palms, it’s a load of colors and textual content smashed collectively on the web page. What issues is the notion of a entrance door being partially opened for others to return inside.
What issues is that the web site has one other automobile for broadcasting its messages. Unanimously focused on protecting all of the features of our shapeshifting panorama.
What does matter is the concept that we did it. And also you didn’t.
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