Synesthesia

A5, 20 colour pages

£3.62 (+ £3.62 p&p)

Synaesthesia (the condition) is sensory confusion. Your house tastes like cake. Your lover’s voice smells like fresh cut grass. Your favourite song feels crunchy. The number seven is green, for some reason.

Synesthesia (the zine) dives headfirst into delirium. Stacey Matchett evokes a sense of desperate, inescapable confusion in her pastel colour palettes, bold rainbow scribbles and delicate black linework - it’s a beautiful assault on the senses. 

Usually when poetry and artwork appear together in print, the images end up playing second fiddle; they usually serve as garnish, pretty pictures to illustrate the words. Matchett turns this convention on its head. The bright images dominate the pages of this zine, holding hostage the reader’s psyche and rendering the accompanying poetry somewhat redundant. It’s not that the poetry is particularly poor, more that within the psychedelic pages of Synesthesia its role is secondary to the artwork.

When I first encountered Matchett’s work in volume one of Break the Chain, I described it as “grunge expressionism”. Reading through Synesthesia, it seems clear to me now that her work is too nebulous to fit within that category; her art style shifts throughout the pages, and yet each drawing bears her stylistic signature.

Matchett does a great job of creating a collection of artwork centred upon a theme without falling into predictability – each page explores a different facet of a disorganised mind and does so with a touching vulnerability.

You can buy your copy of Synesthesia here.


Review by J.L. Corbett

Reviews of American Films for White Power

Reviews of American Films for White Power
20 pages, digest, thick stock cover
$ ?

This showed promise. There were several creative things I liked before even starting to read. The mailing envelope was made from a piece of scrap paper. The cover art and design were cool enough. There appeared to be a mishap with the print run which was fixed by gluing a page to the inside front cover, and another to the back inside.

There was a mysterious and intriguing introduction to wet one's appetite, but it didn't deliver. Not to me anyway. The only credit I'll give them is they put a fair amount of effort into it.

It starts off simply enough. A group of friends stumble upon a web site that writes historical reviews of films written from the point of view of someone living centuries in the future. The reviews are of films that haven't been made yet in our time, but will be made in the future. Sounds awesome, right?

Not so much. It's written in a shoot from the hip style, presumably to invoke a sense of urgency, but it just ends up muddled. References to the mysterious web site being there, happenings in the supposed authors lives, , references to race, and the eerie recurrence to the number 22 are all mucked together. This could almost be overlooked if the actual film reviews really delivered, but they are written in much the same style. This discredits the idea that the supposed group stumbled upon the supposed web site.

It's entirely possible that this volume is exactly what it clams to be. Which would mean there is a whole litany of writers who need to be spanked. Unless it was written by high school kids, in which case it's brilliant.


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review by Jack Cheiky
This zine is being donated to the Cleveland Zine Library after review.