dumb/SULK trigg-er
Posted: August 24th, 2009, by Marceline SmithCast your mind back to the glory zine days of the late 1990s when pretty much everyone in the UK wrote a zine. You probably wrote one too, or at least stuck some pound coins in a SAE and posted it to some random stranger in the hope they’d send you back something awesome. Of course, diskant grew out of this zine scene – I first met all of the original diskanteers through zine-related shenanigans.
And it’s not just rose-tinted nostalgia speaking here – those zines were AWESOME. I still have 3 boxes of the things which I re-read on occasion and every so often I get a little sad about all the zines I never owned or knew about at the time. Sometimes people like Al Burian or Cometbus get a book compilation of their zines but, for the most part, these zines are only available to the handful of people who bought them at the time. This is a sad state of affairs.
Luckily, enterprising folks like Roger Simian still exist. Roger was in weirdo-mentalist band Dawn of the Replicants and also co-ran the much-missed Scottish magazine Sun Zoom Spark as well as writing his own zine dumb/SULK trigg-er. He now runs his own label Shark Batter while playing in new band The Stark Palace and has just put out a compilation of the best bits of his zines and writings. This is great news for me, as my sister was the one who bought all the original zines, so I haven’t read them in ten years.
It’s still all good stuff – long interviews with Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth, Lisa Carver and Traci Lords, fiction, a letters page featuring half the UK zine scene (and our own JGRAM) and one of my favourite articles ever, where Roger goes to a Prolapse gig in Glasgow and hassles every minor lo-fi scenester of the time with a dictaphone. Nostalgia ahoy. You also get a tiny minizine and a free mixtape CD featuring The Stark Palace and their favourite songs.
I have no idea how much Roger wants for this but I’m sure it’s a bargain. Hit him up on sharkbatter AT googlemail DOT com and tell him diskant sent you!
And if everyone else who ever wrote a zine could do a compilation of the best bits and send it to me, that would be great, thanks.
Marceline Smith
Marceline is the fierce, terrifying force behind diskant.net, laughing with disdain as she fires sharpened blades of sarcasm in all directions. Based in Scotland, her lexicon consists of words such as 'jings', 'aboot' and 'aye': our trained voice analysts are yet to decipher some of the relentless stream of genius uttered on a twenty-four hour basis. Marceline's hobbies include working too much and going out in bad weather.
http://www.marcelinesmith.com