Velvet Blue Music Enters the World of Zines with Small Sounds Press

Long before there was Opus, there was Honor Students on Acid, a zine that my friends and I created in high school. We felt quite subversive with our handful of issues, which contained poetry, short stories, commentary on school events, edgy artwork (as I recall, one issue’s cover riffed on Big Black’s Songs About Fucking), and music reviews. In fact, my very first music review ever, of U2’s Zooropa, was published in the pages of HSOA under the nom de plume “Digital Anime.”

(Sigh… I know. Everyone who wrote for HSOA used fake names like “Digital Anime,” “Utopia Ideal,” “Dream Surfer,” and “Lady Spirit” to make us seem even more subversive and underground. Which gave our teachers a good laugh in the faculty lounge, I’m sure.)

We were far from the only ones who chose to fight the power with a little self-published zine; back then, record stores and used bookstores had piles of them, all free for the taking. The web’s rise hasn’t exactly killed off zines, but it does make the prospect of designing, printing (or, in HSOA’s case, photocopying), and assembling issues a bit less alluring, especially when you can just launch a website and publish to your heart’s content.

Suffice to say, I was pretty stoked when Velvet Blue Music’s Jeff Cloud announced Small Sounds Press, an honest-to-goodness print zine that was “born out of a nostalgia for the time when the physical medium was king” and seeks to recapture “some of the mystery and discovery of things that you can hold in your hand.”

Two issues of Small Sounds Press have been published to date, and they include interviews with the likes of Rob Withem (Fine China) and Ronnie Martin as well as music reviews, photography, and art. Even better, they come with honest-to-goodness mix CDs that feature VBM stalwarts (Fine China, LN, Map) alongside unsigned acts like Blue Blue Youth, Osnova, and Red Strat. In keeping with the nostalgia, the Small Sounds Press CDs remind me of CMJ New Music Monthly’s mix CDs as well as Tooth & Nail’s Art Core compilations, which were major vehicles for music discovery in the early-to-mid ’90s before the internet became so ubiquitous.

As far as I know, Small Sounds Press #3 has yet to be announced, but hopefully it’s in the works. It really is a treat to hold an actual zine in your hands and flip through its pages like it’s 1993 all over again.