Unsound #4

What a strange, creative and insularly self-driven fanzine Unsound was. We talked about issue #1 of this one here earlier in the year; I’m now going to attempt to render several paragraphs about Unsound #4, published in San Francisco during the first half of 1984. Little thought was given to economizing the page count in this issue, so you get a really crazed (but readable) mess of font types and sizes, short pieces about nothing whatsoever, longer pieces about not much in particular; and then more-or-less standard record reviews and interviews, mostly centering around a nexus of industrial, experimental, avant-garde and just generally oppositional musicians, musical offshoots, writers and artists.

This is how Zoogz Rift and his “Amazing Shitheads” come to bring his “odd, abrasive” free-form dada music to the Unsound party, just by being as oppositional as the First Amendment and the outer limits of taste might allow, all the while complaining (tongue planted firmly in cheek, I’d imagine) that he’s “being boycotted by the music industry”. Sonic Youth, fresh off their first visit to Europe and the release of Confusion Is Sex also have an interview here, 100% Thurston Moore representing, and right in that window where those of us hearing the band for the first time thought of them as something vaguely (if mildly) dangerous and transgressive. Remember, this is a time where “this music” wasn’t really even on college radio and the records themselves were often poorly distributed. All details were transmitted via fanzines.

I’d see blurry B&W photos of wild people like Michael Gira, Sonic Youth with guitars locked and hair long, even the relatively more popular Einstürzende Neubauten etc. and it was all pretty nuts and a little too much for a suburban high schooler. However, much more daring high schoolers like Jo Smitty and Mark Arm were living it in their suburban Seattle band Mr. Epp, referred to here in a bizarre post-mortem piece (“A self explanation”) entirely written by the band themselves. Four years later I’d see boogie-rockers Sonic Youth and Arm’s Mudhoney sharing a stage at San Francisco’s Fillmore. I’m going to bet Unsound editor William Davenport stayed home.

Then again, who really knows? It’s sort of funny combing through the record reviews of this one, which mixes up stuff like The Haters and deep-underground, edition-of-5 noise tapes with whatever records awful hardcore labels like Mystic Records were sending Unsound. Davenport, Brad Laner and other writers treat it all quite magnanimously, to my surprise – even the Gay Cowboys in Bondage tape! 

I’ve also just come off reading Marc Masters’ outstanding overview of cassette tape history and lore, High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape (get it!). My favorite chapter is on the 80s tape underground that was helped to flourish – all things being relative, of course – by fanzines like Op and by college radio programs helmed by freaks who’d play whatever tapes showed up at the station, no matter how homespun. This is a world that Unsound also helped to steward and cultivate, and there’s also a great piece about “Art Radio” in which people call up particular shows on the left of the dial in order to share their “audio art” with the limited audience brave enough to tune in. I barely recorded my own doofus 1980s college radio shows, and it kills me that so much amazing and daring cultural weirdness on the airwaves was barely heard once, and will unquestionably never be heard again.

 Finally, there’s what looks to be a mail interview with a 26-year-old Adrian Sherwood of On-U Sound, and he’s hilariously defensive and dismissive of many things surrounding “reggae” and the mainstream. It’s a hoot. Unsound #4 itself is too, mostly for all the right reasons.