Sonic Viewfinder #1

Mike Faloon’s been orbiting my subcultural radar for a couple dozen years now; first, it was for the outstanding baseball fanzine Zisk, which he’s co-edited with Mike Fournier since the Miguel Tejada era. That still thankfully comes out with some regularity, and there’s a summer 2025 issue out now. They put out a book with some of their best material called Fan Interference some time ago, and if you’re a baseball dork like me, you’re probably going to want to read it.

Over the years I’d read between the lines and had gathered in various parts of their zine that both Faloon and Fournier were also very much “music guys”, but Faloon threw me with a great left-turn of a book in 2018 called The Other Night at Quinn’s: New Adventures in The Sonic Underground. It’s about moving during that time to a new small-ish town in New York’s Hudson River Valley with his family and discovering a local club in Beacon, NY called Quinn’s, home to improv and free jazz and regulars like Joe McPhee – whom Faloon has also recently co-written an oral history memoir for/with. 

The Other Night at Quinn’s was sort of revelatory for me, as it came at a time when I was trying (and succeeding) to go three or four steps deeper into free jazz than I’d gone before. Faloon’s real-time reporting of his many nights at the club, picking apart his own discovery process, and musings about what he’s hearing all matched much of my own way of hearing this stuff. Plus, it gave me a laundry list of players to check out, which I did.

He takes that same careful, probing, asking-questions approach for this just-out first issue of a new underground rock fanzine called Sonic Viewfinder #1. For instance, he goes to see the double-bill of Famous Mammals and The Spatulas at Tubby’s near his home, only knowing anything of either band from fanzines he’s read. Whereas my approach to writing about such a show would be to pack 12-15 pithy sentences into two paragraphs, larded with praise and maybe a laugh line or two, Faloon instead stretches out his impressions, interspersing them with wandering-mind tangents, such as callbacks to other records or books or barely-related topics, before oh-yeah-right returning to the bands in a “review”. (For the record, he loves both, as do I – I saw the former play live myself just two weeks ago). 

That’s pretty much what you can expect in the digest-sized, 28-page Sonic Viewfinder #1. The other two explorations are of musicians Damon Locks and Wendy Eisenberg, both more in keeping with the sorts of intrepid adventurers he wrote about with gusto in that Quinn’s book. The Eisenberg piece has me wondering why I’ve never gotten the Lasik surgery she did; perhaps I too could turn the experience of having done so into a double album. Faloon’s technique is a rare one in our content-addled, attention span-wrecking age. It’s one of consideration, questioning and humility – all worthy approaches, particularly when applied with care to hard-to-find music that deserves patience, reckoning and deep listening. Get a copy here for $3 if you want to see it for yourself.