Mike Faloon – Fanzine Hemorrhage

You folks remember Mike Faloon, right? We fluffed the hell out of that guy when we reviewed his Sonic Viewfinder #1 fanzine last year, and here he is in 2026 with another fine team-up zine called Sunbeam Tiger #1. The “team-up” is with Todd Taylor, a fella from Razorcake, and each gentleman gets two at-bats to see if they can move the runners. I think they move them really well, two big bags at least.

Faloon gets the music coverage, with “coverage” being the operative word. As with Sonic Viewfinder, he takes a literary fiction approach to his subjects, blending multiple tangentially related stories and musings together into a greater whole. It’s an approach I actually like a lot if (and only if) the person behind it’s got the chops to do so. I certainly don’t. Faloon does. His piece on a heretofore unknown-to-me modern act called Black Ends weaves in and out of bits about the band; about his daughter forgetting the keys to her college storage unit; and about the career arc of The Moody Blues. It all works, and one comes to think that maybe said band’s Psychotic Spew is something one maybe ought to take a peep at.

Taylor – also an excellent writer with his own somewhat unorthodox in-and-out style – puts weak pampered elitist pricks like me to shame with his paean to “Repair” – i.e. fixing broken things yourself. For this guy, it’s not a lifestyle, it’s a life – so much so that he spends large parts of his week at a DIY bike repair collective in Los Angeles, helping to get angelenos off & riding in what might be the most bike-unfriendly city in America. I remember when we bought our home many years ago, my boss told me “You’re either going to get really good at fixing things, or really good at writing checks”. I got really good at writing checks. All Taylor’s article does – besides thoroughly entertain me – is send a big crashing guilt wave across my bow. I mean I’ve fixed the toilet a few times and I’m surprisingly good at gardening my tiny plot(s), but Taylor’s on another competence planet entirely. His closing short piece on the Sunbeam Tiger automobile is connected to the larger one, and provides this fanzine with its name.

Faloon’s other piece is on Patrick Shiroishi, who’s created some pretty crazed exploratory musics with a variety of collaborators over the past x number of years. I’m particularly fond of this one. Again, Faloon weaves in some baseball, Japanese WWII internment, and a fanzine-making project he does with the elementary school kids he teaches – which resulted in the kids actually making The Patrick Shiroishi Zine. Two thought occur naturally: one, why wasn’t Mike Faloon my elementary school teacher instead of Mrs. Sullivan, and two, can we get a copy of the Shiorishi fanzine for discussion here at Fanzine Hemorrhage?

Get your own copy of Sunbeam Tiger #1 for a hefty $2 here.

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.