Whenever one goes out to the mailbox and is granted with music its a great day, zines and books are no exception, especially collaged zines which throw my brain back into being 15 and thumbing through pages and pages and pages of crudely xeroxed interviews with friends, bands i looked up to and bands i had yet to discover, Shrouded Recordings Zine is pretty much this: centered around the label with the same name. Issue 1 has an interview with Sam from the Rita, which is funny, informative and to the point, which is surrounded by high contrast images of cassette tapes, industrial style textures and abstracted artworks, and ads and upcoming releases for the label. Volume 1 is more fanzine style, however, Vol 2 and 3 give considerably more to the reader in terms of length, quality, artwork, and information. Shrouded Zine boasts cut up style interviews, NOISE, NOISE, NOISE and more noise are jam packed within this modest zine. All of the content blends together in an interesting and almost dadaesque way. Interviews blend with reviews, ads, non sensical, albeit beautifully crude collaged images, and blank space – the MOST important space in noise and art, imho.
#3 is perhaps my favorite so far, as each page of content is intelligently paired with a blank page to act as a journal, sketch pad, notepad, blank space for contemplation. What at first seems maybe like a printing error later reveals itself to be an intelligent and generous offering from the writer to the reader – in fact mine is INDEED scrawled with random notes and drawings that i made on the bus ride into the city whilst thumbing through volume three. Fun and informative interview with Kevin Yuen from Sutekh Hexan, lots of reviews covering harsh noise, death industrial, power electronics, noise, electronic, ambient and even some hardcore/metal stuff! PLUSS adds and upcoming releases from noise, industrial, electronics, and harsh noise labels, distros, and other zines/webzines with some minimal artwork scrawled across the pages as backdrops. I’ll be looking forward to stumbling across more from this zine/label in the future!
D E C A Y C A S T Magazine 