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Welsh spacemen, chaotic design, band interviews, goofy robot/tech graphics, reviews, rambling articles...there's something for everyone in Robots and Electronic Brains No. 7. Let's have a look, one at a time.
The Welsh spacemen are, well, spacemen, and they're speaking Welsh. What are they saying? I do not know. Sadly, Altavista has not yet added Welsh to their translation engine. I have a feeling they're talking about donuts, though.
The chaotic design is, well...chaotic -- but good/entertaining/clever chaotic, not just bad design chaotic. It seems to work like this: take all of the ads, particularly the computer/tech ones, from the Sunday paper and lay them on the floor. Then print out all of the columns, reviews, ads, graphics, etc. for your zine. Then lay out the zine printouts on top of the newspaper ads, making sure that there's lots of space between your materials so that it's really difficult to tell what's from the newspaper and what's part of the zine. This is particularly effective at causing confusion between the ads in the newspaper and the ads from record companies and such in the zine. Finally, and for good measure, paste in lots of pictures of hand-drawn robots and old computers and spaceship decks. Crazy. A tip: something titled "A Sex Hat Dance #11" is not likely to be an ad for a computer company in the Sunday paper.
Most of the twenty pages in the zine are devoted to CD, record and zine reviews. The reviews are well-written and often quite funny, if slightly vulgar ("Main man Chris Trout would certainly shit down the neck-hole of a recently decapitated A&R man..."). They're pretty much all positive reviews, and I see on the Robots website that they don't review stuff that they don't like, so that explains that. Still, these aren't slobbering, ass-kiss reviews; they're honest and thoughtful and tend to relate the music to Mr. Robot's life, which seems to me to be the point of making a paper zine like this anyway.
Likewise, the interviews are smart and well done. The Butterflies of Love interview is set up as a how to guide, as in "How to know the Butterflies of Love". Very entertaining. Parlour Talk gets a more straightforward treatment. It's an interesting read for an American, as much of the discussion is about what it means to be a British hip hop artist. Like listening in on a phone conversation where you're being dissed in secret... Up next is an interview with Elisabeth Esselink, aka Solex. She's a bit prickly, but has some very interesting things to say about sampling/royalties/etc. The final interview is with Michael J. Hex, a musician from Christchurch, New Zealand. It's a neat look into the dynamics of life as an independent musician in a smallish, somewhat isolated underground music scene.
Finally there's the lone article, "Sorted". It's all about the author's attempt at arranging his massive CD/record/cassette collection into something manageable. A fun, easy read.
This a creative, witty zine, full of fine writing and clever design. It has a UK bent that's particularly interesting from this American's perspective, both because of the slightly foreign slang used and the focus on issues that you don't often see in US-based zines. Recommended.
-- Irving Bellemead
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