A LOW HUM

A Low Hum Zine

A Low Hum started life as a zeroxed zine in 2003 after a few years of wanting to start a music magazine but never working out how I could afford to do it without selling silly amounts of advertising. I’d been photographing New Zealand bands for the previous decade and had grown totally jaded with the shortsightedness of the industry.

You can view my photographic work (pre-2003) at http://www.blink.net.nz

Close friend of mine Nik Brinkman (Over the Atlantic/Psychic Powers) was at the time designing a magazine as part of a design project for school and he was mocking up covers with photos of me on them for it. This got us talking lots about magazines and design and we ended up looking through a book on zine design together while xmas shopping in 2002.

I was totally inspired and went home and immediately set to work on making a zine. I was making a trip the week late down to Nelson to shoot “The Cusp” NYE party so made that the main feature of the zine along with a few other features and photos.

Nik designed the cover of issue one, though this was his one and only involvement. Thankfully history has proven that he was right to go and focus on music while I continued to work on the project. Me and a group of half a dozen friends one night pieced together the first issue at my girlfriend Sally’s mums workplace (conveniently a copy centre), it took us a few hours to assemble the 100 issues of issue one as I had designed it in a really stupid way. I split them into four lots and sent to three friends around NZ who I had met on the nzmusic.com forums who each dropped some into their local cafes/record stores. All the copies of the first issue dissapeared on the first day.  I had no idea of the hugely positive reaction it would get.

People who missed out on the first issue sent me stamped addressed envelopes for issue two and I received dozens of complementary emails about issue one. More people on nzmusic.com stuck their hands up to distribute and over the next six issues it slowly grew in size to 500 copies each month in twelve different towns around NZ.  Distributed in/at New Plymouth (Raw Records), Nelson (Everyman Records), Palmerston North (Mango Music), Wellington (Slowboat), Auckland (Real Groovy), Christchurch (Galaxy/Pennylane), Timaru (Radiant), Hamilton, Dunedin (Records Records/Arc Cafe), Wanganui, Napier (Music Machine), Rotorua.

It was costing me a fair bit to do this as the zines were pretty big, like 40-68 pages or so, and i had to as well pay for that postage around the country each month for distribution. In the whole history of A Low Hum magazine (including all the printed properly ones) the only ever ad I sold was in issue 4 of the zine, I think from memory for $40-80?

I was hemorrhaging money.

I was also getting frustrated at writing about all these bands that people couldn’t even hear as their recordings were barely even getting played on student radio and certainly people couldn’t see live as it was pratically impossible to tour NZ without losing a ton of money. I soon realised that not only would I need to release a CD to go with each issue, but would also have to start looking at touring some of the acts as well.

Around the time I was piecing together issue 5 of the zine, friends of mine Degrees K who (other then Die Die Die) were touring more than any other “indie” act in the country asked if I wanted to be involved in their September national tour. I’d already been on a short stint of a tour with them when  I first started managing Ejector, however, this was to be a nationwide comprehensive tour, and they were keen for Ejector (who had recently totally changed lineup with three new members) to support on the tour, they were also happy for A Low Hum to “present” the tour.

This was the big chance.  I had recently won a lawsuit against Universal music who had just taken a photo from my website (Of Jon Toogood) and used it on the cover of the “Give it a Whirl” compilation series without seeking my permission. I settled for $5k which I spent every cent on buying a Bravo CDR duplicator (one of the worst descions in my life) .

I had this elaborate plan (as so many of my plans are) yet, almost every element of this plan backfired on me. I came up with this idea of presenting A Low Hum in DVD cases. I would make the zine fit into the part where the booklet goes and pop the compilation into the DVD holder part. This ended up being a complete nightmare. I tracked down some reasonably priced DVD cases from Australia of which ended up costing me heaps more once they got held up in Customs in New Zealand and I had to pay to release them (lesson 1 learnt), Iorganised all the content for the magazine and CD and designed the magazine, without first ever making a mock up (lesson 2). I popped along to the copy centre about 3 days before the tour started and started trying to make it work.

The way I had designed the magazine was that It would be printed first and then I would simply have it chopped down to size after stapling. I can’t remember exactly what went wrong, but I remember vividly spending three whole days at the copy centre trying every which way to make it work, with several people trying to problem solve before it got past zero hour and we knew it wasn’t going to happen.

The CD had been mastered, the compilation ready, but I have no magazines and so didn’t bother burning off the discs.  This was one of the most depressing times for me. I had made several months of announcements in the zine that this was happening, I’d made a big fuss online about this new format of the magazine and how this tour was the release tour for it! Every night as I did the door, people would ask me what was going on, I felt like such a failure. I wanted to throw it all away. It had been an interesting year, but its very hard to bounce back from such a huge public failure as this.

What was amazing though was I had no idea how many people around the country actually cared. Many people were turning up to the shows who were keen on A Low Hum, and even though I felt like a dick telling people how I fucked it up, i was also quietly stoked at the amount of people who were gutted.

At the time I thought I had really helped out in the organisation of that tour, but on reflection I did absolutely nothing, the Degrees K guys made it happen.  That two weeks of that tour was perhaps the best two weeks of my life till that point. I had such an amazing time on that tour. I knew that even though I’d fucked it up totally and had 1000 DVD cases and a $5000 duplicator and screwed up zine at home that were unusable, I had to keep A Low Hum going, I had to tour again.

The issue of A Low Hum that never came out with tracks by Shocking Pinks, Sleepers Union, Phoenix Foundation, Phelps and Munro and Letterbox Lambs is pictured on the right.