Muted (R)evolution

You have to knock. If you’re supposed to be there, someone will let you in. The exterior broadcasts little; only a small sign in the window marks the name of the magazine.

‘Hi,’ he says. ‘Come on in.’

Inside, the walls groan with the weight of history. Posters old and new jostle for the limited space available: Powderfinger bidding farewell to the world, the Smashing Pumpkins touring their new album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. To the left, a reception desk curves away from me around the corner of the room, overlooking the entire area. No-one sits behind it. To the right, stacks of papers line the wall by the front door without any discernible order to them: the reformed Saints here, the Residents there. There’s at least fifteen years of history lying at my feet, almost discarded on the floor.

The Time Off Media office remains in the same Berwick Street office from where stalwart Brisbane street press magazine Time Off was published for most of its thirty-year history. Sean Sennett was the owner and managing editor of the publication for two-thirds of that time. In 2008, though, the magazine’s new owners set up around the corner in the heart of Fortitude Valley, Brisbane’s music hub. Here at Berwick Street the magazine has gone, but the magazines remain.

‘Originally’, says Sennett, sitting back on the couch with a mug of tea, ‘this was a printing press. Time Off was printed on site and the presses were used for all sorts of other publications. It was a very open space. But in the stock market crash in the late eighties, the press was sold off and the building carved up into separate offices.’

Today the building is silent, though its silence is not absolute. Frantic activity remains in its DNA, a hangover from the weekly deadlines that infused its aesthetic: layout people tapping at computers or in the darkroom printing up hand-glued pages into bromides, accounts people chasing bad debts, journalists making calls and faxing, and reception as gatekeeper ushering record-company reps and the long queues of people hoping to collect a free pass to this week’s movie giveaway.

‘It’s always been a working space,’ says Sennett. ‘Bands only dropped in semi-regularly and we didn’t really like a lot of people hanging around. Time you spend entertaining someone is time you have to make up. That weekly deadline is like riding a bike: if you stop, you’ll fall off.’

That weekly deadline remains, but the magazine produced here today would have been science fiction to the writers and editors who first set up camp here in the eighties. TOM Magazine is an online-only publication. As recorded music further removes itself from the world of objects, so too do the magazines that cover it.

‘It all happens in the ether. Record companies prefer you to download albums or tracks for review rather than mess about with CDs. Sometimes it’s great. You get a single zip file with everything you need. Other times you have to download each individual track, one at a time. You give up after the first half-dozen.’

It’s hard to find a corner of the music industry unaffected by the influence of the digital. Technology has fundamentally transformed the industry—from the kids playing into a laptop in their garage, to the entertainment multinational negotiating with a computer company, to street press deciding what not to cover in the multitude of releases in any given week.

‘Back in the [old days], if a local band put out a single it was a massive deal. Think about it: you had to be in the band and write the songs, organise the studio time, which was expensive, then the mixing, the mastering, the vinyl mastering, the artwork, the pressing itself. That was a huge investment just for a single. Then how do you get it into shops? Local indie shops might have been fine, but how do you approach HMV? Now you can go to iTunes and upload it to the world. It used to be: “Let’s start a band, let’s play gigs, build a following for two years and make an album.” Now it’s often “Let’s make an album” as the first point.’

The democratisation of creative digital tools has opened a world of possibility for artists, writers and filmmakers, but with democratisation comes noise. Where does a band turn to promote their freshly minted iTunes tracks? Do the bands themselves become advertisers? And if they do, in a time when readers are so bombarded with messages, what is the value of even a full-page ad?

Sennett simply shrugs at the question. ‘When I get up in the morning,’ he says, ‘I check Twitter, Facebook and email. An hour and a half goes by and I’m left wondering if this is a good use of my time. All I’ve done is fill my brain. And did I read anything on Twitter that resonated anyway?’ So how does street press, neck deep as it is in the rising digital talent pool, determine the truly exciting artists from the dross?

‘It’s dictated by who’s doing a gig. That’s a story. If a band approaches the magazine with an album, the response is, “When you have some gigs, come back to us.” Street-press culture is tied to the gig thing and we’ve always had a history of championing local bands.’

Much can be made of the shift from analogue to digital, but the effects can be exaggerated. It’s tempting to present an argument of screen versus paper, that our infatuation with shiny things has robbed us of the attention span required to engage fully with sustained conversations and arguments. It’s tempting to pin street press itself up on the walls, preserved, somewhere between Hunters & Collectors and the Triffids. But, although the medium of delivery might change, the fundamentals of what makes street press tick remain the same: the passion, the commitment, the drive and the sheer love of music.

At one of the desks behind us, someone clacks at a keyboard and Led Zeppelin plays through a pair of tinny computer speakers. My initial impression of the office was of a museum—years of music history, painstakingly preserved in situ—something to gawp at as much as it was a place of business. But this is still a working office. The digital evolution has muted this space, but the music plays on as the words continue their inexorable shift from the footpath to the inbox.

Copyright Simon Groth 2011