Basement Signal

Turn the pages with the buttons, the arrow keys, or the numbered squares. Prefer to scroll? Switch to the plain reading mode above.

A fanzine is a small, self-published magazine made by fans, for fans. The word dates from around 1940, in science-fiction fandom.

Punk zines of the late 1970s, Sniffin’ Glue (1976) among them, showed that you needed little more than a typewriter, a pen and access to a photocopier.

Through the 1980s, fans in underground metal, punk and hardcore scenes traded cassette copies of demos by post. Dubbing a tape cost very little, and a letter slipped into the envelope often began a long correspondence.

Zines printed address lists, review columns and trade requests so these networks could find each other. A tape copied from a copy lost a little more of its high end each time.

TEAC introduced the Portastudio in 1979: a four-track recorder that used ordinary compact cassettes. A band could record guitars, bass and drums on separate tracks, then bounce several tracks onto one to free space for more.

Tape hiss, few tracks and no way to fix it later were limits, and the limits shaped the sound.

Distortion happens when a signal is pushed past what a circuit or speaker can reproduce cleanly. The tops of the waveform flatten, or clip, and new harmonics appear.

Guitarists got it by overdriving valve amplifiers, then with pedals. Recorded to cassette, loud signals also squash softly in the tape itself, which is called tape saturation.

Before layout software, zine pages were assembled by hand. Typed columns and photographs were cut out and stuck down with glue, and headlines sometimes came from dry-transfer lettering sheets such as Letraset.

Mistakes were covered with correction fluid. The page was then photocopied, which flattened the layers into one sheet.

A photocopier reads greys as patterns of black dots, called a halftone, and pushes everything toward black or white. Copy a copy and contrast climbs, fine detail fills in and specks multiply.

That loss between generations is where the rough look comes from. The samples below show one line of type after more copies. The effect is simulated here.

Libraries and archives now collect zines. The Library of Congress, for one, has a page on fanzine culture in its comic-art exhibition.

Print runs were tiny and paper is fragile, so many issues survive in only a few copies.

Basement Signal is an invented zine made for this page. Its words and drawings are original, nothing is quoted from a real publication, and no band or release is named.

The notes are general history written from memory of common sources. Verify before you repeat them. Below the reader you can build your own eight-panel mini-zine from a single sheet.