A bit of an extravagance this. Yeti is a one of those 'zines (in this case from the US, though I was able to get it from Boomkat) that operate despite, as much as because of, the free market. This 194-page gets into all sorts of arcane areas of culture (comics, photography, avant garde filmmaking) that very few people have ever heard of. Can there really be sufficient graphic designers with creative facial hair in metropolitan cities to make publications such as Yeti viable.
I bought this issue just for the ten pages of interview with Alasdair Roberts. The interview is by Erik Davis, who's an interesting guy in his own right, and has an individual take on Alasdair's work.
As it turns out, the interview's has one or two insights, but nothing earth-shattering (and Hamish Henderson has somehow become William Henderson in the transcription from Skype). I haven't read much else of this issue, though, opening it at random yesterday, I came across some old interviews with Maryanne Amacher, who sounds fascinating. I'm sure she will have been featured in The Wire at some point, but I read that sparsely too. I skimmed the old interview with Bruce Conner, filmmaker, artist and occasional cohort of Neil Young and David Byrne, but it's frustratingly lacking in context. Oh, and by happenstance, there are some tour diary photos by Dean Wareham of Galaxie 500 and Luna. This is the second time in a week that a musician I like has cropped up in unexpected circumstances: I recently found out that the John Cage diary I have just here on my desk was designed by Naomi Yang. Sharing a certain rare sophistication in their tastes, it's almost as though Dean and Naomi should be in a band together…
I paid no attention to the CD until now. No reason for that: it could have been great, for all I knew. But it's not, it's just OK. If I'm honest, I didn't give it that much attention. It seemed to suffer from that "indie" attraction to all things lo-fi. Sounding a bit like an only slightly updated take on the Harry Smith Anthology. What put me off a little bit was the sneaking feeling that it might have been meant to sound like that.
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