Rebuilding the Flaming Fish Review Archives

Upon discovering the World Wide Web in the mid ’90s, I immediately began using it for the same purpose that any other red-blooded heterosexual male in his late teens would: looking up anything and everything I could find about Christian industrial music. I had discovered bands like Mortal, Under Midnight, Circle of Dust, and globalWAVEsystem only just a few years prior, and I was hungry for more.

My search eventually led me to the Flaming Fish email list and its related label. Overseen by Carson Pierce, the Flaming Fish community served as one of my chief gateways into the world of Christian industrial and goth music via wide-ranging discussions and a growing archive of user-submitted reviews. When Pierce announced that he would no longer host the reviews on his site, I offered to host them on Opus, and he graciously agreed.

Those reviews remained on Opus for several years until they eventually disappeared from the site (for reasons that I can’t quite remember). For the last decade plus, they’ve only existed on the Internet Archive, but as part of my ongoing efforts to centralize all things Opus-related, I’ve reclaimed them and placed them in their own special collection.

Reading through and prepping the 40+ reviews that comprised the archives was certainly a trip down memory lane, bringing back names with whom I frequently interacted and discussed music. (And all over email, mind you. At the time, social media as we now know it was still years away.) Many of the artists and releases reviewed remain obscure even now, and some have all but vanished into the ether, these reviews being the only proof of their existence. Others have landed on YouTube and Bandcamp, and a few artists, like Circle of Dust and The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus, are still active today.

Above all, these reviews serve as a reminder of a time, before Amazon, Spotify, and social media made finding music all-but-effortless, when you really had to hunt down the music that interested you — especially if you were interested in anything remotely on the fringe. But there was joy in the hunt, and community to be found along the way, and music felt less like a commodity than it so often does today.