Halana #4

I’d have to say that even if the late 1990s ended up being one of my least-favorite eras for music, I’m still rather struck by just how many well-designed, high-circulation fanzines were being made available at the time that covered the most absolute out music on the planet. People bought ‘em! I’m still not sure if the rock-adjacent improv & experimental underground was actually and truly peaking around this time, or if there were just more folks paying attention to it as a defiant reaction against the mainstream co-optation of the independent rock underground – you know, the whole “Royal Trux and V3 and Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments on major labels” thing. I had the opposite reaction and mostly ran for the hills, both from the mainstream and from the deep-deep underground for a few years. But I still bought their fanzines.

From Muckraker to Bananafish to Opprobrium to Deep Water to this one, Halana #4 – and obviously there were others – there was an entire circuit of editors and an audience who revolved around craft micro-labels like Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers, Swill Radio, Sedimental, Oblique and dozens of others, many of whom released not-even-music music. Halana #4 came out in 1999 and was edited by Chris Rice in Ardmore, PA. His magazine focused primarily on what is somewhat euphemistically called “new music”, which means avant-grade and certainly non-linear music not at all informed by the 4/4 beat, nor from, say, your traditional “rocknroll boogiewoogie”. 

The contributing editor was Ian Nagoski, who’d later become a hero of mine with his Canary Records and incredible unearthings of 78rpm records by American immigrants, which he then turned into an expansive series of analog and digital-only releases with all that and more. In a similar, fellow traveler sort of vein, the touchstone piece in Halana #4 is a long travelog by Richard Bishop (Sun City Girls), packed with advice and stories and an enumeration of his approach to jaunting across India, Indonesia, Malaysia etc. Ian Nagoski himself writes about saxophonist Joe Maneri and his son Mat, and like any good curator, he got me to check them out 25 years later, something I didn’t do in 1999 when I very first saw this piece and was sort of openly rejecting the world that Halana was marinating in. Check out Maneri’s Paniots Nine from 1998, totally beautiful klezmer/gypsy Greek jazz from another realm. It’s a long piece, but you come out really wanting to HEAR these guys. I sure did, and have more to learn. 

There’s a long section of reviews by Chris Rice that takes up the rear of the fanzine. Nothing “rocks” in the least except Mainliner and Major Stars toward the end, and that’s fine as far as it goes. But there is a big heaping helping of praise for Revenant Records, which also just happened to be MY favorite record label in 1999. The rest of the section is lasered-focused on improvisational abstractions, with even most free jazz being too “straight” for Halana. There is a compilation CD in my copy that’s been there since I bought it. I just know I’m gonna hate it and I really like the mag, so why ruin it, right?