Editorial by Ben Yaxley
Welcome to the first issue of Mouthguard, a zine we started to address the lack of local music writing in our cities of Perth and the Isle of Man.
Perth is long and sparse and largely banal, yet beneath its patchy surface lies a rich underground of art and music. I have lived my life for a relatively long time, and perhaps it is just the echo chamber, but it seems that everyone I know is working on something, their spare hours spent on which ambitious projects, all of which deserve an opportunity to be seen and considered.
Most of Perth's street-press and music blogs disappeared 10 years ago. Blame social media, arts cuts, the bug zapper of Melbourne, etc... yet the last few years have seen a surge in DIY publishing, with several physical and online publications appearing: Dispatch Review writes about art with a surgical knife and Artery with a feathery quill. Magazine6000 and Isolated Nation cover theatre and VHS Tracking covers movies. Pelican is ambitious again and Pulch also serves as a stepping stone for emerging writers. Even Perth's theme parks (to use the term very loosely) are covered by my old colleague PerthThemeParkLife. So, how come if Perth has such a vibrant music scene, then there's no substantial writing about it? Is this because there's nothing about music worth saying? Is writing about music really like dancing about architecture?
Well the trouble is that most music writing is not worth reading - live music reviews especially.
A gig review is generally written as an afterthought. "Well, they gave me a ticket so I guess I’ll say something nice... what’s the word count?" and unlike its more established cousin, the album review, the gig review serves no practical function - the event has been and gone and there’s nothing to sell. Perhaps you can improve a band’s future gig-attendance by noting how they "entertained the punters and rocked the house off the floor" but I think peoples eyes turn into venetian glass when you say stuff like that.
Perhaps the gig review's dullness is born from the romantic ideal that critics and artists should have a symbiotic relationship; that is, the critic should be one of those lice-picking birds that pecks all the ticks off the hippos while simultaneously giving it a spindly massage... but unless you are someone with the descriptive talents of Peter Schjeldahl, gushy promotion makes for boring, empty, insincere writing. Well, whats the alternative to benevolence? Malevolence? You think the critic should be a vampire, a leech, a mosquito? That the critic should be a tick who sucks the lifeblood from the hippo's back? Well, while I believe that the negative critic actually achieves BETTER social outcomes for "the scene" by providing gossip, intrigue, and the forming of allegiances, in the longrun the critic as bloodsucker is obviously no good. They will swell until they burst or else be turned into a red smear by the great hand of collective disgruntlement.
Well then, what animal should be the ideal critic?
Not an animal, but a mollusc. The critic as limpet.
The limpet fixes itself upon a rock and sucks and sucks away, providing NO real service and recieving NO real nourishment. The limpet acknowledges that it can barely even see the rock as it is but only the algae that covers it. The limpet cannot see the other limpets for it is trapped in its shell, its eyes and mouth the same, its eyes feasting on slime. All it can know of the others are the trails they leave in the slime. The limpet hopes to grow a beautiful shell. The limpet hopes to leave a beautiful trail.
In this first issue, writers have responded to various performances at the grassroots experimental music festival Audible Edge, organised by the lawful-good people at Tone List. In the essay at the end of this issue, writer Paul Boye sings the festival's praises so eloquently that I can only agree: AE is ambitious, joyful, caring and kind; in many ways counter-cultural as Paul says, but not in the bum-baring, bird-flipping, dicktation graffing way. This is where I somewhat disagree with Paul’s employment of Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque. For me, attending a Tone List event feels more like a school excursion to the art gallery than any raucous painting by Bruegel the Elder. Sure there may be some subversive smirks and snickers at the Lucian Freud painting but hardly the Rabelaisian toilet humour and Bacchanalian extasy of a Woodstock 99. If anyone actually started skulling the kegs or throwing about the pottery, they would get politely escorted outside. Yet I do concede that if AE is bombastic, then it is quietly bombastic and as Paul says, there is greater affect in a twist of the mouth than any Kirbyesque guffaw.
There is likely a chance that you have never attended this festival nor heard of the artists, yet I am confident that every piece of writing in this issue can stand on its own as something Worth Reading. Izzy French and Maddie Doncan have written dreamlike stories combining the magic and mundane. Carlie Norma Germs’ takes you on an inflatable boat trip down the river of drifting attention. There is also much jestivity. Matt Aitken has the record for the most jokes-per-sentence in his rollicking Totally Paulie-style journalism. Gummy Chauncey, my longtime pen pal from the Isle of Man, spends most of her review being "rate proper cretchy" in recounting her Homeric odyssey to download my two gigabyte video file. Danyon Saxon has done all the graceful sketches, and Tim Gates a really really stupid one. It was a pleasure to read and work with all the contributors, and we'd love to read more.
Adventurous music writing is the tagline we chose for Mouthguard, for reading and writing is all about going on an adventure. Advene is the verb form - I hope this zine advenes.
Images from Rocky and the Dodos - The Limpet Olympics