Category Archives: Books

Books, DIY, RIP

Goodbye Vital Weekly, Hello Again Korm Plastics !

Vital Weekly Book

Vital (Weekly) was the longest running review newsletter for any experimental / drone / post-punk / whatever outside of the categories releases. At first it was published as A4 leaflet which was copied and distributed freely by anyone in contact with him (or against postage) starting in 1987. I remember a few odd copies which reached me in the late ’80’s/ early 90’s when there was still a healthy diy/fanzine/tape culture arround which had grown over the years and postal ways. The last of these appeared in 1995 and all the issues have been documented as seen above in a book collection a few years ago. The internet had become a handy tool with it’s homepages, e-mail info services, discussion boards and suddenly an incredible wealth of information could be found and distributed at very low costs (depending on your connection and bandwidth). In Vital Weekly Frans and his allies reviewed nearly anything they got – with a few limitations only: it needed to be a physical product which was sold or kept after being reviewed and since several years the permission to use excerpts for the accompanying podcast.
Still up and running are the lates issues at the mixcloud channel or with tracklisting at Vital. The decision not to review any digital only releases excluded quite a lot interesting music but seemed to work fine as a pre-selection at least for the reviewers. Now after Marc Almond’s e-mail service closed recently (due being not more relevant as other ways of posting are more popular) Vital closed with #1500 too in September. The site and archive is still up and can be found at vitalweekly.net.

The reason for this is different – Frans decided to concentrate again on his label Korm Plastics once again but this time it’s mutation as music book publishing house. So after 40 years and various phases from fanzine, tape label, releasing CD’s and Vinyl, working 10 years+ for Staalplat (see his published resumee below) and also being – judging on the amount of releases – permanent active as Musician (Freiband, Kapotte Muziek f.e.) one can hope he enjoys what he does next equally. Thanks Vital for all your input and time!

Of course you can also listen to a lot of his works via bandcamp nowadays as of Korm Plastic Releases.

Books, Daily Life, RIP

Poems. Lydia Tomkiw. Collected.

Dan Shepelavy from ‘Universal Exports of North America’ is the the publisher & editor of a new, comprehensive re-issue of the hopelessly out-of-print poems of Lydia Tomkiw.
It features an introduction by poet and Tomkiw’s teacher Paul Hoover, a recollection by poet and close friend Sharon Mesmer, and an assessment of Algebra Suicide by music critic/Trouser Press editor Ira Robbins.

Besides each book also includes a download of Algebra Suicide’s 1986 debut album Big Skin – significantly the only time a book & record were released simultaneously, with the same poems, in the same order.

Today available only splattered on the re-issue LP Compilations by Dark Entries (Feminine Squared and on Still Life) but luckily also saved in it’s original form but from a 2nd gen source at archive.org.

This is most likely the only chance to get all of her out of print collections and more for a reasonable price and as someone who collected Algebra Suicide and Lydia Tomkiw works for years I know how expensive (if for sale at all) a copy of “Popgun Sonatas” can be.