Musicworks ed. by Gayle Young and Lauren A. Pratt (review)

ity, and made do-it-yourselfcassette production viable: everyone with a PortaStudio (orworse) in their basement could be reviewed. OP’scoverage of ‘independent’music (Foster’s beautifully generic term) ranged from the most zonked-out post-punk surf-Nazimusicians in Dayton, Ohio, to more or less respectable college music professors in California. OPemphasized articles about music written by musicians.Regularauthors included Peter Garland (on world music), Eugene Chadbourne, myself (on American musics) and many other active composers and musicians. No one believed that Foster would really stop with the Z issue (by that time OP had snowballed into a relatively major enterprise and had a fanatic following ), but he did. OP ’sprogeny, Option and SoundChoice, have, in different ways, followed in Foster’s visionary footsteps. Today, literally thousands of fanzines crowd the alternative bookstores . Some exist only as electronic mail (like Fred Truck’s Performance Data Bank/Electric Bank ) or cassettes (like the Telluscassette magazine). Perhaps the mother of all fanzines is the awe-inspiring Factsheet Five (published by the indefatigible Mike Gunderloy),which exists as a kind of metapolemic of fringe-lore, a listing of everything. If you want to find out where to get a publication devoted solely to deconstructionist multimedia works about Leave It to Beaver on hologram-postcards, this is the place to look. News of Music (published at Bard College, by the innovative Music Program Zero), falls somewhere between a photocopied fanzine and theJournal ofMusic 7heoly. Issues have included editors such as SaraJohnson, whose poetry and comments on visual art made the early issues particularly odd and enjoyable, and contributors such as Matthew Crain,Jill Borner and Wayne Berman, and the coalition of Dan Sedia, Penelope Hyde and Tildy Bayar. News of Music has been influenced , but not dominated, by the ideas of Ben Boretz, represented in reprints and articles, since publication began. The editorial style is nonexistent : anything goes. Material ranges from personal letters to drawings, scores, poems and concert and music ‘reviews’that take quirky and refreshing forms. Some well-known and interesting composers and performers (like Guy Yarden and David Henderson ) have passed through the ranks and left their marks, and non-Bardite kindred spirits like Warren Burt, Elaine Barkin and Kenneth Gaburo graced the pages of early issues. In fact, some of Burt’s strangest and most revealing writings are in this publication. What I like about News ofMusicis its refusal to impose style or restrict the form or even the subject matter of an article. When I read SaraJohnson or Penelope Hyde in the early issues, I rejoice at their complete lack of inhibition. Their writing makes me reflect on (and mourn just a bit) what happens to many artists as they move on to more ‘serious’and ‘carefully’ produced endeavors. The most recent issues, No. 10and No. 11,were the first to be (ominously) perfectly bound rather than stapled. They are (more or less) typeset and easier to read than their predecessors. They include more ‘bignames’ than earlier issues (Gaburo, Barkin, Boretz,J. K. Randall, Carol Berge and others). When I read the table of contents for No. 11,I felt a little sad until, near the end, I came across old friends like Matthew Crain (three short stories called ‘The Disease/The I,esson/The Tiny Spaces”)and SaraJohnson (an illustrated story called “ABoy and His Dream”).I am glad that these two music heroes, and others like them, still live in these perfect-bound pages. Where News of Music explores an almost childlike liberation from conventional musical bonds, Electronic Cottageblasts full-throttle into today’s pluralistic, low-tech, hypermedia, telecommunicative electronic-music environment. Count the different typefaces (even on the covers), and you sense the music underground’s lack of interest in comprehensibility or accessibility.In fact Electronic Cottage is about inaccessibilityand the ascendency of democratic music technologies (from the Portastudio to cheap MIDI devices and the modem). Each issue celebrates a different ‘indiecassette ’ mogul like Dave Prescott, Chris Phinney or A l Margolis.Articles are about groups and artists that I guarantee you have never heard of, with technopolitical polemics like Miekal And’s “PolyIntermedia and a Strategy for Electro-magnetic Survival ” (in which ‘product’is...