Qwerty Pop

By The Thomas Ferguson Band
www.mixcloud.com/ttfb
fulsomeprism.wordpress.com

Every now and then I get a zine and I have no idea where it came from. This one was made for a typewriter festival (in February) at the Sticky Institute (a rad zine shop in Melbourne Australia). Well, no, that's not exactly true. The creator of this zine was asked to make a mixtape/cd about and inspired by typewriters for this event. What on Earth do you have to do to get a reputation as someone who can make a mix based around typewriters?! (I guess the answer is just "be pretty good at making mixes", and this guy is. I listened to the typewriter one already, and am now listening to another right now. Hurray!)

You can listen to the mix in the link above, and it's actually pretty rad. This zine acts as a companion piece to the mix, and I'm a little disappointed that it's a halfsized zine. I make a fair number of mix CDs (do you want to trade? Let me know!), though none with as weird a theme as typewriters. Quite frequently I make little booklets to slip inside the CD case. This zine works in much the same way my booklets do: there's information about the bands, the individual tracks, and random anecdotes about how the music was discovered. It's all pretty fun.

This zine also had a weird and awesome story as an insert. The story is a first person narrative about someone, who is completely oblivious to society as they don't know what money is, serving Salvador Dali in a super market. It's presumably an attempt at creating a Dali-esque piece in text form. I'm not familiar enough with Dali to really know how successful the author was, but I enjoyed it.

Plus the mix features a Missy Elliot/typewriter mashup, I mean, what's not to love about that?

(This review was originally published on 365 Zines a Year.)