9 Comments

Thanks for saying the quiet part out loud regarding the sustainability of this project for you. Leading with that honesty feels like a fair approach both for yourself and for readers.

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Those Phantom Bay folks are real gems. Stayed with me when they played New Brunswick before Fest, and were delightful.

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I still get excited every Friday for releases. I love how the internet have given us daily updates to our favorite music and the people who make it. I do miss the adventure of discovering bands at record stores, ordering music from printed distros, and reading the printed material on the sleeves or booklets to discover music.

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It is great that you are given a spotlight to an overlooked band but when I read that Phantom Bay are so close to Vienna it really struck me how strange times have come. If you are a student of history like me Vienna is known in intellectual circles as “the city of ideas that created the modern world” (I always found in funny that Sigmund Freud’s nephew , eddy Bernay, created the field of public relations). As always reading anti-matter is always time well spent and never disappoints.

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Hi, Norman! After reading this I just wanted to say thank you for making anti-matter accessible. I read all of your articles and learn just as much, if not more, from the articles I don't know anything about going into as the ones with names/bands I recognize. I love your stories and insight. Thank you again!

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That Phantom Bay track you put on AM Radio reminds me of End of a Year, sort of a natural extension of the Revolution Summer-era Dischord sound, which is to say, good stuff.

The way access has changed over time is so interesting - on the one hand, there was something magical about coming home to find a 12" mailer from Dischord or Alternative Tentacles or Lookout leaning against the front door, and the days of sending off a blank tape and postage money and getting back a band's demo. But on the other hand, streaming now (and the era of mp3 blogs before that) have made so much music that could have been lost so widely available. Limited access made things feel sort of exciting, but having all that history so easily transmissible now feels even more important somehow.

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Those interviews with more known entities in the hardcore world draw the excess eyes, some of which will inevitably soak up the lesser known content as well.

Spacing the bigger names out makes them that much more attractive when you do post them. If it's weekly, it's less special to some extent.

It's your space to run anyway you'd like, but I'm sure a lot of us appreciate the thoughtfulness.

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I used a very wotn out copy of a standardized test that had my birthdate on it to get into CBs. I cant remwmber if I had any form of picture ID. Maybe my highschool id pic. They weren't too hard on us 16 year olds about getting in. Perhaps an early form of white punk privilege that I was totally unconscious of. But it made me love the all ages stuff at the Pyramid and the Pipeline in Newark all the more.

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I used a temporary driver's license for the most part. No picture. Some days they cared. Some days they didn't. I was never able to find the pattern.

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