Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

Wednesday • 2010 April 07

The replacement of LPs with CDs as the standard for recorded music resulted in both losses and gains. CDs held more content and were manufactured for a lower cost. Almost anybody with a computer can make a CD at home.

The gain in quantity of content has to be weighed against the loss of quality of form. I've seen many beautiful LPs. I can't think of a single CD that, as an object, impressed me at all.

Consider this Gerry Mulligan album, Butterfly with Hiccups. It might be on CD by now. The music is quite good, and essential for anybody interested in Jim Hall. But while the music, the content, can be adequately transferred to CD, the form will be left behind. Will we ever see anything like this again?

The same thing happened with fanzines. They're websites now. Much cheaper and easier to make. (There are still some fanzines, of course, just as there are still people making LPs. Paper and vinyl products are no longer the standard, though, and they used to be.)

As with CDs, websites seem to be doomed to dullness. The most that you can ask of them is that they function and are as convenient as possible. You can put a lot more content in a website but when it comes to form, what can you do? The most beautiful website in the world is still just a website.

But the most beautiful fanzine in the world…. Well, I don't know what it is. But one of them must have been Edith Abeyta's Quench #1, though—the Quench zine that was about beverages, not the Quench zine that "deals with issues of sexuality, race, gender, class, religion, politics". That Quench is a website now.

The cover is eye-catching. It's a handmade patchwork of squares cut from aluminum soda cans, held together with taped aluminum strips. That's a brassiere ad featuring soda drinking in the center. Check out what's glued to the corner.

A bottle cap filled with glitter, a tiny toy jet plane and a little square of paper with "Quench" on it.

Each one of these had to be hand made. The zine itself unfolds like an envelope.

Inside is a plastic pouch containing three Quench stickers.

The table of contents:

All the best fanzines were monomaniacal. Soda recipes? Yes!

Check out this beautiful spread:

Another element that would, I believe, have to be done by hand for each issue. So would this:

What's inside this mysterious pouch located on the inside back cover? Let's open it and see.

Tiny rubber lungs. I really don't see how any fanzine in the history of the world could be cooler than this. And how could a website possibly compete?

Each issue is numbered.

I wonder if this #134 or #34 of issue #1. Did Edith Abeyta really make more than a hundred of these?

How much did it cost? $5.00. Five dollars. For a hell of a lot of work and a thing of beauty.