Pallor Mortis started as a drunken rant. I got into an argument about where certain fashion choices in goth culture came from, and had to look up the medical term for the pallor achieved from exsanguination. It sounded really fucking cool. You know when a phrase just kinda….grabs you? I knew I had to do something with it. The words kept echoing in my head.
About a week later, I was talking with a friend over beers about the days of paper ‘zines. Walking into your favorite coffeehouse or record shop in the 90s and finding some xeroxed couple pages with staples crudely holding it together. we used to collect and trade them because you’d find anything from album reviews with an address you hoped was still valid to order from to someone’s ramblings or poetry, scene reports, penpal listings, offers to trade cassette mixes…..any weird shit folks could find to express themselves and their love of underground music. Yeah we had Robert Smith in videos if you got to catch 120 minutes, but news about Rozz Williams? good luck finding Propaganda magazine outside of a city. Forget about keeping up with Mephisto Walz or Fields of the Nephilim. I remember finding out Suspiria had broken up three years prior from friends in NYC and being pissed i would never catch them live (who knew how many reunion shows would be a decade from then….). I hate the Great Gatsby-esque hyperbole about how a given generation did it all bigger, better and with more fire in their bellies, but things were different when my walkman & I were leaving high school with copies of recordings by a lot of punk bands and some vague notion that other people wore black with skulls on them, read morbid literature and hung out in graveyards. I love the explosion of culture across the web: If bandcamp was around in 1995, it would have been getting all my spare money (just like it does today). People are being fucking sharp about how to promote culture and open up avennues for equal expression of all voices. I’ll gladly trade the elitism I used to face for inclusive and strongly leftist morals that appreciate all expressions of a morbid nature.
Besides, xerox really fucking sucked for pictures and the cheaper copies smudged over time.
So this is it, the merging of ‘zine aesthetic with modern online publishing. I’m still ecstatic to find new bands, and I hope that joy never leaves me. I still love reading other people’s reviews, seeing their voices and modes of expression in typecast. It’s 5AM, I have a code deploy for my day job in 30 minutes, and all I can think about is the list of bands I want to review for this site. Keep coming back, and I’ll keep trying to pump out quality content, fueled by black coffee and red wine. Live fast, die whenever, and leave a fashionable corpse.
– Mange