Grey matter/literature/area: Bucketfull of Brains, fanzine form and cultural formation

Having ceased publication in 2015, Bucketfull of Brains (aka BoB), founded in 1979 by Nigel Cross, is prime candidate for the United Kingdom’s longest-running music fanzine. When Cross relinquished control of the zine in 1985 its identity changed, but it retained the ‘voice’ of a zine despite increasingly assuming the ‘look’ of a magazine. This liminal identity also extended to its transatlantic focus and its straddling of punk and psychedelic music scenes. This article demonstrates how BoB also ‘bridged the gap’, especially in terms of taste communities, between the countercultural/underground publications of the 1970s and the punk and post-punk fanzines which came later. In doing so BoB was ideally situated to document the long-running garage rock revival of the 1980s and indeed was regarded as ‘the Bible’ of this scene by its readers. Drawing on interviews with BoB editors Nigel Cross and Jon Storey, the article is primarily concerned with the motivations and work of fanzine editors/writers in documenting the histories and development of interlinked popular musical sub-genres and micro-genres. In providing various layers of context to elucidate the place of both BoB and the publications that had a significant influence upon it (e.g. ZigZag) in the history of rock fanzine scholarship and the reasons for the persistent neglect of such scholarship, the article is also influenced by concepts of literary form and genre.

From Socialist Realism to the Prague Spring

Chapter 2 explores aesthetic models, forms, and materials of creative practices in Czechoslovakia from the 1940s to the 1960s. It centers on how people made available aesthetic resources: the practice of furnishing an ecology. I examine the historical conditions of artistic production of post–World War II Stalinism’s “socialist realism” to the Czechoslovak Prague Spring and its political direction of “socialism with a human face” beginning with Egon Bondy’s work. I focus particularly on his biography as a producer and early poetry works after the 1948 coup, emphasizing two styles he developed with Ivo Vodseďálek from 1950 and 1951: Total Realism (Totalní Realismus) and Poetry of Embarrassment (Trapná Poezie). These poetic styles and content served as a response to the perceived absurdity of post-1948 Stalinist culture felt by Bondy and Vodseďálek. By examining this body of work, I investigate what Total Realism and Poetry of Embarrassment afforded, solved, and transmitted. On the heels of Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956, I continue onto the boom and popularity of rock ’n’ roll during the 1960s and the initial, inchoate formation of the Underground following the Prague Spring of 1968. I analyze people’s engagement with circulating cultural media during this period that contributed to a cosmopolitan music scene in Prague, detailing the proto-underground rock bands of the 1960s and the emergence of psychedelic music in Prague.

Pushing the Boundaries

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Melbourne psytrance scene, this chapter addresses the musical and social aesthetics of the dark psytrance (darkpsy) electronic dance music subgenre and its furious dance floors. The interviewees of my research often regard psytrance tracks as the musical transpositions of psychedelic drug – particularly LSD – experiences. Dark psytrance can be considered the hard core of psytrance, sending its LSD-infused musical structures into overdrive. Regarded as the flagship in the evolution of psytrance by fans and considered to be uncomfortably or even menacingly intensive by others, darkpsy follows the basic imperative of becoming increasingly faster and adopting more abstract forms of expression, destabilising rigid boundaries and catapulting the listener into a zone of the unknown. Such dissolution of meaning is celebrated on dance floors of high intensity, where psychedelic music and drug become integral parts of a media ecology that is aimed at the presentation of the unpresentable.