Deep Listening in Ink: Celebrating Five Zines That Helped Shape the Pre-Internet Underground

Part catalogs, part manifestos, 1990s print magazines documented experimental music long before it had a digital home.

One of the great crimes of the digital era is how much writing has vanished, especially the kind we believed was immortal through coding, uploading, archiving. We were promised permanence and got neglect. Portals collapsed. Scenes dissolved. eMusic’s editorial disappeared without ceremony. Tiny Mix Tapes fell silent. MP3 blogs were wiped out by takedowns or left to rot. Forums splintered, their archives corrupted or lost. Dusted, once a cornerstone of independent criticism, still technically exists—but only barely. “The Dustedmagazine.com CMS is broken,” the editors admitted, “and needs replaced with something that wasn’t built from scratch by an amateur programmer in 2002.”

It goes without saying that before the internet, if you were deep into experimental music discovery beyond the radio and the record store clerks, you found your way to magazines. Every self-respecting record store had a magazine rack with titles like Rolling Stone, Spin, Option, Maximum Rocknroll, Flipside, the Big Takeover, Alternative Press, Raygun, Your Flesh, Chemical Imbalance, Forced Exposure, Motorbooty, and whatever local xeroxed zine someone had dropped off that week in a manila envelope.

In Los Angeles, Amok Books felt like a secret portal, its shelves packed with bootleg histories, noise catalogs, and manifestos that read like transmissions from another world. See Hear in New York was just as vital: a narrow room dense with zines, imported journals, and the kind of stapled ephemera that blew open your sense of what music could be. They felt like maps to secret worlds, imperfect, radiant, handmade, that pointed the way to London bedrooms, Osaka noise bars, and four-tracks in Olympia.

All of this is a way of saying that printed matter has a strange, stubborn durability. It doesn’t vanish when a domain lapses or get corrupted when the CMS fails. It lingers in basements and attics, in milk crates and flea markets, in scanned PDFs and whispered recommendations, and, of course, eBay. What follows is a look at five such portals, each dense with otherwise undocumented sound.

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Bananafish 

Less a magazine than a transmission from some brilliant weirdos’ heads, part zine, part prank, part audio hallucination, Bananafish was founded by “Seymour Glass” in San Francisco. It ran from the late ’80s through the early 2000s and made no concessions to clarity or casual readers. Layouts and collages looked like ransom notes for people who collected Nurse With Wound records. The zine also had some strange, grizzly obsession with the body, especially disturbing and/or gross stuff.

While best known for its deep dives into the outer edges of sound — Caroliner, Merzbow, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck — it also featured artists who would later anchor their own cult canons: Royal Trux, the Dead C, William Winant, the Thinking Fellars Union Local 282 among them. Fact and fiction bled freely into each other. A Karen Carpenter profile carried a byline from the Smiths’ guitarist Johnny Marr. An interview with Boyd Rice was purportedly conducted by Gary Numan. If you didn’t catch the joke, or the lie, that was on you.

For a brief, shining moment, Bananafish also served as one lens into the tangled narrative orbiting Lisa “Suckdog” Carver and her zine Rollerderby, the comic artist Dame Darcy (Meat Cake), and a pre-Drag City Bill Callahan, aka Smog. At some point, all of them lived in or passed through a house in Guerneville, California, which became a kind of unacknowledged micro-scene — a swirling mix of art damage, noise tapes, dysfunctional relationships, and raw ambition. Gregg Turkington, then a noise label guy and contributor, now better known as Neil Hamburger and co-star of On Cinema at the Cinema, also moved through its orbit.

Each issue came with either a 7-inch or a compilation CD — oblique, noisy, difficult, exquisite.

Chemical Imbalance 

The New York zine was raw, loose, and more expansive than peers. Edited by Mike McGonigal, who later founded Yeti and now helms the excellent Maggot Brain for Third Man, Chemical Imbalance began in the mid-’80s and read like a post-punk obsessive’s dream journal: record reviews, surreal comics, fiction, rants, and interviews with bands that hadn’t yet figured out they mattered.

Boston zine Forced Exposure, which was publishing around the same time, came armed with a competitive, snarky chip on its shoulder and regularly, bafflingly, took shots at McGonigal in print. Chemical Imbalance wasn’t interested in score-settling. Its enthusiasms were genuine, not strategic. Each issue carried a cryptic tagline like “Exploring the Spiritual in Rock since 1984” or “For They Who Isn’t,” as if broadcasting from a basement temple.

Its tastes were impeccable. Chemical Imbalance was celebrating Unwound singles long before the band became a reissue magnet. It tipped the first Sun City Girls release, covered early Drunks with Guns 7-inches, and dug into Merzbow’s cassette work while most zines were still catching up to punk. Pavement appeared on one of their 7-inch compilations. The CD samplers were just as thrilling: a wildly curated snapshot of the underground before it congealed into narrative.

The Spring 1988 issue alone featured Beat Happening, the Cannanes, Negativland, and a retrospective on ESP-Disk, alongside comics by the Hernandez Bros, Basil Wolverton, and a pre-Simpsons Matt Groening. It even found room for visual artists like Bill Viola and Mike Macioce.

Opprobrium

“Throughout 1993, due to boredom with life in general and my course of study… and excitement with all this wild/crazy music I was now listening to, I came up with the idea of putting out a fanzine.” That’s Nick Cain, founder of Opprobrium, recalling to Perfect Sound Forever the spark that led from a photocopied zine called de/create to one of the most essential deep-listening journals of the 1990s.

Edited from Christchurch, New Zealand, and later co-helmed by Jon Dale (who’s now a SHFL contributor), Opprobrium published just four issues between 1995 and 1998. But each one was dense with interviews, long-form reviews, and close listening spanning free improvisation, New Zealand noise, Japanese psych, and outsider experimental work from across the globe. The tone was serious but never pompous, quiet but never dull. 

If Bananafish was the id of underground music writing, Opprobrium was the superego, rigorous, contemplative, and borderline monkish in its focus. It interviewed AMM, Gate, Hijokaidan, Bardo Pond, Tony Conrad, Bernhard Günter, and many others, often at lengths that let artists actually think. Stark in design and deliberate in pace, Opprobrium stood apart because it didn’t chase trends. It mapped the underground by listening hard and refusing to flinch.

Much of its best writing was later collected in Archive Fever: New Zealand Underground Sound in Fanzine Interviews 1991–1999—a reminder of just how deeply the zine listened, and how little noise it needed to make to leave a mark.

Popwatch

Popwatch was a Boston zine with antennae tuned to the right static — obsessed with New Zealand records, American misfits, and the fertile weirdness connecting them. Edited by Leslie Gaffney in the early ’90s, the magazine covered dozens, if not hundreds, of releases each issue. Her tastes skewed toward Michael Hurley, Barbara Manning, Tall Dwarfs, Yo La Tengo, Codeine, and the low-fidelity twilight of the American independent underground. If a record came wrapped in hiss, hurt, or homemade philosophy, it probably showed up in Popwatch.

The magazine punched well above its print run. It featured early writing from Tom Scharpling, WFMU’s Brian Turner, Dinosaur Jr./Sebadoh founder Lou Barlow, Tall Dwarfs cofounder Chris Knox, Yo La Tengo’s James McNew — and me. (Leslie and I went to college together and worked at the same club). Gaffney’s editorial voice was clear, generous, and kind. There were no fake-outs, no forced snark. Just sharp writing, deep listening, and a sense that everything covered actually mattered.

Issue 6 included a razor-sharp overview of Japanese noise by Turner. Issue 8 ran a killer interview with Jim O’Rourke, years before his name was ubiquitous. And issue 10 sat down with Robert Wyatt to discuss his then-new album, Shleep, a conversation that felt both intimate and canonical.

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Popwatch: How was it working with Brian Eno in 1997?
Robert Wyatt: Just the same! He hasn’t changed at all. He’s just so fast in the studio. All the particular things that I’m illiterate about… which is like what the little buttons on the machine do and so on… he’s quick and fast and very imaginative.

Perhaps he’s even quicker and faster now. He gets so quickly to what he wants to do. He doesn’t spend hours thinking, “Maybe we can do this.” He sort of hears something and calculates an appropriate response, such as the kind of dripping water sound on track two; he got that in minutes really, from hearing the track, and it just goes so well with the cymbal. He just seems to be able to make the machine do it. Whereas other people can do these things but they take hours to find the place on the machine.

Popwatch: It’s an interesting combination, putting Brian Eno and Evan Parker together.
Well, they’re from completely different disciplines. Not just different dialects but different languages almost. But they’re both very interested in the idea of not relying on musical clichés—or at least making their own language.

Popwatch: Evan Parker being a huge, huge European sax giant.
He is indeed. I think he is one of the few non-American musicians from the jazz tradition who’s made a distinct contribution that you could say is not just participating in the American tradition.
There are a few, like Django Reinhardt, and I think he is one of those in my opinion.

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Gaffney’s editorial voice was clear, generous, and unsentimental. There were no fake-outs, no forced snark. Just sharp writing, deep listening, and a sense that everything covered actually mattered.

File 13

A scrappy zine out of Massachusetts edited by Mark Lo, File 13 hit something of a peak with its Fall 1991 issue — no. 11 — —which was devoted entirely to Japanese noise. At the time, that kind of coverage was almost nonexistent in the U.S. Outside of a few import bins and mailorder lists, artists like Merzbow, Hijokaidan, Masonna, and Solmania barely registered. But here was a zine laying it all out: interviews, reviews, translations, scene context.

It didn’t treat the music as shock value or spectacle. The tone was direct, informed, and refreshingly flat, like someone trying to get it right, not sell it. The layout was rough and the printing barely held together, but the signal cut through.

Alongside Bananafish, Ongaku Otaku, and Exile Osaka, File 13 no. 11 helped bring that scene into focus for a lot of U.S. listeners. No fanfare, no theorizing—just a smart, early document that did the work.