Today marks tQ’s 13th birthday as a fully-independent digital magazine, and rather than slamming our bedroom door in a high dudgeon and blasting out IDLES at ear-piercing volume at the sheer unfairness of life/ parental enforced curfew/ legitimate environmental concerns, we’d actually like to take this opportunity to say THANK YOU to all our readers, and especially our subscribers who have hauled our bacon/ pig-free plant-based rasher substitute from the sizzling skillet!
Our partnership with Steady to provide a subscriber system means that we’re out of the woods for now, but that comes with a caveat: aside from the crumbs we earn from Google ads, advertising is still running at about 10% of what it was a few years ago. Subscribers are therefore now nearly our entire future, and we hope that some of you dear readers who aren’t already signed up with us might join us as we move into our fourteenth year, helping us to increase our writers’ pay and continue bringing you the best in new music and Black Sky Thinking. If you think you can help, please read on!
For those of you who aren’t aware of how it all works, we have three tiers for our Quietus subscribers, and we’re adding new perks to mark our birthday. Up until today, the top tier, called Sound & Vision, had an exclusive, tQ-commissioned music release sent to them four times a year. We’re now increasing this to an exclusive release every month – so that’s 12 records of substance per earth revolution around the sun! So far, this has included an exclusive EP by Sleaford Mods and an earth-shaking collaboration between GNOD and JK Flesh! But from September, we’ll be giving subscribers to this tier brand new releases every single month. Under the name Singularity, we’ll be commissioning our favourite artists to create a new track of epic length, with the freedom to go to town on the idea of transformation; to start in one location but to end somewhere completely unexpected. Already confirmed for forthcoming magical releases are tQ favourites including Alison Cotton, Sly And The Family Drone, Shit & Shine, Siavash Amini, 75 Dollar Bill, Perc, Matmos, AMOR, and France. The next Equinox release is a mind-blowing new project from Valentina Magaletti (Tomaga, Vanishing Twin), Matthew Sims (Wire) and Sarah Register (Talk Normal, Kim Gordon), with a beautiful Richard Skelton and Roger Robinson collaboration to follow at December’s Winter Solstice. These releases are supported by our friends at state51. Subscribe to Sound & Vision here.
S&V subscribers of course will continue to receive the same excellent, exclusive monthly essays, podcasts and new music playlists that make up the Low Culture tier. We’re going to be adding a new email newsletter to this called Organic Intelligence. An antidote to the clueless algorithm, this features tQ’s favourite people giving you an essential buyers guide to micro-genres, DJ gold dust and thrillingly obscure records. The first installment, coming this month, is Jennifer Lucy Allan on Swedish psychedelic prog. If that’s not enough to persuade you, go and have a look at the Low Culture archive to get an idea of the days’ worth of exciting music now contained in our subscriber playlists, plus Low Culture 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. Subscribe to Low Culture here
And let’s not forget that if you want to support tQ by chucking us the amount you used to spend on a monthly print music magazine, you can do so by becoming a Cover Price member here.
We would like to express our utmost gratitude once again for everyone’s support so far, whether as subscribers or readers. We know the past year has been very tough for many of you, so we genuinely appreciate everyone’s generosity in helping us to keep on going.
With love from Luke, John and all at tQ
