This week marks the fourteenth year since The Quietus became a fully independent publication. Happy birthday to us! Like the spaceship in Event Horizon, we pass further into the strange horror of deep teenagerdom and we’d just like to thank you all for your continuing patronage of our website. As many of you will know, we’re in a far better position now thanks to our Quietus subscribers – since we started working with the Steady platform two years ago, we’ve been able to weather the continuing decline in advertising revenue and increase what we pay to our team of writers. We’ve also loved commissioning all the exclusive essays, podcasts, newsletters and best of all music releases that the different tiers get every month – there are now thousands of words of this on the subscriber-only Low Culture page here. However, we’re by no means out of the woods and everything continues to be run on a shoestring. If you can help us to continue Black Sky Thinking towards our fifteenth year, we’d be made up if you would consider becoming a tQ subscriber by signing up to one of the tiers below. If you’re already a subscriber, please tell your friends, family, acquaintances, wear it on a sandwich board around the local shopping centre. It remains a pleasure and a privilege to keep bringing you the best long-form writing about music from the margins and the middle, to hear that our annual chart is one of the the finest ways of discovering new music there is, and to know that we are able to keep giving words to artists who struggle to get covered elsewhere. With your help, long may it continue.
Anyone who has been a top tier Sound & Vision subscriber over the past year will have had 12 exclusively-commissioned slabs of music come to their inboxes. We’re really proud of the work we’ve summoned from the ether here, and don’t mind blowing our own horn to say the two most recent releases, a cover of Patrick Cowley’s post-punk project Catholic’s ‘You Laugh At My Face’ by Hey Colossus and a beautiful piece of meandering cosmic pop based on an A.E. Housman poem from Vanishing Twin, are two of the records of the year so far. Anyone who signs up to this top tier in September will get both releases – a sort of two-for-the-price-of-one deal. Other releases have come from Ghold, Jo Bevan, 75 Dollar Bill, Teleplasmiste, Matmos, Alison Cotton, Shit & Shine, Better Corners, Nik Void, Alexander Tucker, Richard Skelton and Roger Robinson. You can subscribe to Sound & Vision here.
Sound & Vision subscribers also get the tonne of perks enjoyed by those who sign up to the middle Low Culture strand. This consists of, for starters, hours of new music we’ve been writing about in our monthly playlists on Spotify, Tidal and Apple Music – you can find this month’s here. Then there’s the Low Culture essay, A monthly long-form essay re-examining a cultural artefact by some of the best writers going at the moment. Recent essays have been on Disney’s A Goofy Movie, Dad’s Army, computer game Crusader Kings, and the BBC’s baggy Christ tell oddity, Manchester Passion. In the ever-expanding archive are essays and podcasts on such varied subjects as Julian Cope’s Modern Antiquarian, Knightmare, the Olivetti Typewriter, Georgian singer Hamlet Gonashvili, Billy Joel, Hi-NRG, Viz, Soft Cell, Robert Palmer, turntablism, Echo & The Bunnymen, Accrington Stanley FC and Iron Maiden’s mascot Eddie the Head, with such stellar contributors as Nicky Wire, Shirley Collins, Adelle Stripe, Jeanie Finlay, Max Porter, Nadine Shah, Megan Nolan, John Higgs, Darran Anderson, Tariq Godard and many more. Forthcoming are words on The Fatima Mansions’ Lost In The Former West, by Andrew Mueller, Manish Argawal on big trouser funk metal, Wendy Erskine on Rod Stewart’s Hot Legs and Stephanie Phillips on PJ Harvey’s Reeling With PJ Harvey tour film. In the monthly Low Culture podcast, tQ editors John Doran and Luke Turner discuss their cultural picks for the coming weeks. And finally, Organic Intelligence is our antidote to the algorithm in the form of an exclusive newsletter in which our writers, musicians and special guests introduce you to a niche genre or scene. Thus far we’ve had the likes of Bill Brewster on Scandinavian Balearic, French dystopian sci-fi prog, the Swiss 80s underground, French rap meets 2-step, post-Tito Yugoslavian pop and much more. head to Steady and subscribe to Low Culture here.
There is of course also the Cover Price tier, which doesn’t come with any perks but is our equivalent of buying a mag off the newsagents shelves every month. You can do that here.
We understand that times are tough at the moment and returning to a tQ subscription might not be possible, but want to thank all our readers, subscribers and otherwise, for continuing to support what we do.
All the best for the coming months,
Luke, John and all at tQ.
