fanzines from my past.

I was looking at BoingBoing today, and I happened across this post about a vast collection of fanzines being donated to the University of Iowa.

It kinda made me jump, because Mike Horvat is the guy whose print shop I worked at in high school, and he showed me the upper floor of his house, which was packed from floor to ceiling with zines, models, radios, fan stuff, SF books, and such a vast and astonishing collection of ephemera and collectibles and just _things_ that it forever changed my life. (People who have seen my house will nod knowingly at this. Understand, though, that this fellow had more STUFF than I could ever even aspire to accumulate were I to have started ten years ago.)

He's had a bit of financial hardship in the past few years, and I suspect that he probably would rather have kept them. One thing I read said that the building they were stored in had been sold and was to be burned down for fire-fighting practice. That's unfortunate, and I think I know what building that was. I'm sure if he still had a large-enough house it would still be packed with stuff...

(UI press release here.)

Ulrich Schnauss

A link on a particular news network pointed me to this, Ulrich Schnauss, "On My Own."

The posting described it as something like "the good things about My Bloody Valentine extracted and piped back through Boards of Canada by way of Kraftwerk."

So I downloaded it. It's worth listening to-- it's 5 minutes of textured rhythm and etherial vocals. It's very very pretty. And it's _almost_ an amazing song. As it is, it's very good, but it doesn't quite reach the pinnacles of MBV or Kraftwerk or even Boards of Canada at their highest point. My Bloody Valentine's strength is the incredible control over the ebb and flow of the songs. There's almost nothing else to Loveless-- by reducing the song to walls of roaring guitar static (reducing by enlarging, for the ironicists among us), Loveless becomes almost nothing BUT structure. Here, the song is not so distilled, and the dross that otherwise would boil away to vapor remains and is accentuated by its very presence.

There are certainly high points to the track-- the chorus and its rising vocals and chords, the way the drums suddenly emerge from behind a curtain of low-pass filter, the held drones, the pounding bass and the rock'n'roll drums during the outro groove. The way the song itself fades into an extended atmospheric segment is pure MBV, though. Think "Touched" from Loveless or the extended guitar noise at the end of "To Here Knows When." It can work, although I think it's more appropriate for an album track than for a single, where the atmosphere can provide a sweet but transitory sherbet to clear the palate between the richness of the main courses.

For all this, and all that he does so well, it's still like he's reaching for the ceiling and just barely brushing the tips of the textured plaster with his fingertips. It's closer than almost anyone else has gotten. M83 have touched that ceiling, giving us a few brief moments of beauty, Boards of Canada have left a couple of handprints but never quite gotten enough of a hold to pull themselves up through the joists into the crawlspace between ceiling and roof, and Eno has set up housekeeping somewhere up in the rafters, where he lives surrounded by lizards and trees and ships and gleaming shards of crystal that hold suspended single perfect moments, time and emotion forever refracted into eternity.

I liked it enough to order the album. I guess I'll find out if this one song was a fluke, good or bad.