Creaking. Groaning. Cracking. Grinding. Exploding. Clunk, clunk, clunk. As well as the music we’ve written about since 2008, these have been the sounds of The Quietus during our first 16 years of operation. They inspired the howls of despair uttered in our old offices, now articulated in text via GChat and email, to herald the site collapsing into a 503 error, or to inform us another great article has gone missing, or let us know our CMS is refusing to publish yet another photograph, or to make it known that the use of the wrong type of quotation marks has put us offline for another afternoon. You’re reading this new column, Listen Here, on a Quietus reborn. We’ve spent the past six months working with an amazing team of tech and design wizards to regenerate the site, summoning the entity you see before you, which is more stable, possessed of smooth functionality, and allows better access to our archive.
Apple recently unveiled an advertisement for their new iPad Pro in which a huge hydraulic press slowly crushes pianos, a record player, a metronome, guitars, books, paint – many of all the wondrous devices through which for centuries humans have disseminated the joy of music, art and literature. While the jaunty soundtrack of Sonny & Cher’s ‘All I Ever Need Is You’ plays, you can hear the painful splintering of the instruments, the sticky flood of paint, the breaking of strings and human craftsmanship before silence as the slim oblong of an iPad appears. This is the grotesque and disturbing sound of hubris, dreamed up by tech bro and marketing arrogance. We hope that our new Quietus website is as far from Apple’s dystopian vision of human creativity as you can possibly get. Yes, we are a digital operation, we (as yet) have no tangible, paper incarnation, but what our new website will allow us to do is to keep celebrating the culture that has inspired us over 16 years and more than 30,000 articles thus far. That we have endured for so long despite the noisily ramshackle old site is, to allow ourselves a brief blow of the trumpet, testament to how all of us at tQ believe in sharing the joy we find in sound. I’ve often felt that in the past music publications (now largely no longer with us, or greatly reduced from former glories) became drunk on their own sense of power and being able to influence the culture around them. This might be the most hippy-coded thing I will ever write, but I truly believe that what we do here is all about sharing a deep, overwhelming love for what art is able to achieve.
We hope you enjoy playing around with the new Quietus. Listen Here will be a fortnightly column from The Quietus’ editors meditating on sound, music and the auditory experience of being alive. We also have a new feature called The Portal, an ever-evolving guide into our archive, sometimes themed, sometimes focussed around an artist – this week, we’ve gone for the theme of Survival and Renewal. You can find The Portal here.
The Quietus’ beloved subscribers will also notice that their perks – essays, podcasts, playlists, downloads and newsletters – are now far more easily accessible on the Subscriber page here. With this comes a request – if you’re enjoying the new site, we’d be grateful if you would consider taking out a subscription. We rely on subscribers to survive, new websites don’t come cheap, and we really need to boost our numbers in order to be able to continue improving our editorial and what we can give to you, our readers. You can subscribe here, for the price of a pint or two or half a vinyl a month.
John and myself want to thank the team at 11:11 Studio for ushering this new site into being, all our subscribers for keeping the show on the road, and everyone who has supported us over the years. That sound you can hear isn’t champagne corks popping, these are difficult times for publishing after all, but after years of intense stress from having a barely functional website, we feel we might at least allow ourselves a sigh of relief.
Thanks for reading, Listen Here will be back in a fortnight, and we hope you enjoy the new site.
