BLOG01 -- ''The Blog", HOLY BALM, 'Cracking Asbestos' by Nat Kassell, NARKAN, Soulseek Forever, Barely Human Updates

Quick recap of some things seen and heard over the last while to get some motion going on a more regular writing front. I was trying to do this via a Substack column a couple years back, but felt the strange sensation of being sucked into the voice of the platform that grossed me out then froze me up. I'd seen it argued that Substack was just a renewed form of 'the blog', but I don't know if I'd agree with that, particularly after it became a networked platform that was soon driven by discoverability via the algorithm (the now-inevitable shift where the good stuff goes to die). 'The blog' as we knew it 15+ years ago had a voice too of course, but it was sloppy, first draft, hammer it out and post voice...one that had variation between attempts, where (usually) the most interesting thoughts and ideas and styles gathered snow. That energy has been lost in the informal writing of recent years. I miss real 'the blog' is what I'm trying to say! And am feeling nostalgic about a time when 'the blog' was a form that was both mocked and derided on the one hand, and then taken with an embarrassing co-optive interest by academics/workplaces which treated 'the blog' as a new form of communication with revolutionary potential (there was a time when researchers were encouraged to keep a 'the blog' running to communicate their work, which seems almost weirder now than being forced by a workplace to maintain a LinkedIn or Twitter page does). But now that we're in a post-'the blog' paradigm, I start to think that maybe they were right in blowing smoke through the sphincter of the form, something that was not just immediate and open, but loose and unconstrained by the limits of the platform. A true open page. And at no point did a 'the blog' writer of (let's say) 2009 think about demanding a cover charge for the right to read it! I'm nostalgic for the early internet for a million reasons, but high among these was the widespread sense that throwing thoughts and ideas on the internet was in some way motivated by the free spread of information. Maybe because e-monetisation was so clunky then (RIP PayPal payment embeds) and felt kinda wild west, so e-commerce was all left to the burst dotcom bubble while we fucked around in a sandbox of geocities and blogger pages. A beautiful time. 

Since deleting social media (Instagram GONE, Substack GONE, Twitter LONG GONE) I've found my internet time is becoming increasingly curiosity driven. Most of this is due to some research interests (I'm writing a novel and thesis that's circling an Italian punk history, with side quests into subcultural theory, autonomism, anarchism and Italian literature, lots of which has fun rabbit holes to fall down online when it comes to lost cultural artifacts), but threads keep opening up on those travels that are interesting and thrilling in their own way. I had a similar experience when researching the podcast version of Barely Human, where the bands were niche enough to have not been written about formally...oftentimes whole episodes were necessarily based off blog entries, old archived interviews, forum discussions featuring scanned zine pages, etc. Doing that research scratched an itch...the whole time I felt like a conspiracy theorist. It felt the way that research should feel: as though you're finding something that has been lost, and that you're playing the role of unearthing it via discovery...bringing ideas and stories back to life. These experiences are still available to us, but we find ourselves too busy spying on our friends and enemies on our little platforms, fighting for space and recognition by trying post over the top of said friends and enemies, and forever chasing that feeling of connectivity that we were falsely promised by Web 2.0. I need(ed) to log off because I was going insane, and though I'm still pathetically addicted to finding some kind of quick-fix in the form of short-form video content on YouTube which can't ever be completely deleted like an app can, there have been small improvements in my mental state. I feel slightly more patient (many may disagree, but everything's relative), slightly less distracted, and I feel that when I am desperate to communicate I can turn to something like this instead of writing/deleting/re-writing captions and comments and still be satisfied. So in addition to the physical zine, to the novels, and bands and whatnot, I want to keep some kind of semi-regular conversation going through this website that I pay domain name fees for and do absolutely nothing with. I hope it'll scratch an itch for someone else here and there. It will mostly play host to some discoveries in the DIY music mines, some observations about cultural decline (and the resistant efforts to said decline), some kinda input on the state of literature as I write around it, and hopefully some interesting things to follow up on for whoever stumbles across this despite search engine indexes increasingly funneling readers away from anything other than the same five platforms that are doing the long-form version of Scanners brain explosion to society and culcha!

HOLY BALM LIVE IN 2026
The secret of the 2026 HOLY BALM reunion escaped the bag for me when I started recognising song names on the white board at the Boom Boom Room rehearsal space. Anticipation was high after seeing 'Fashion' scribbled on the whiteboard (one of the all time great Australian pop songs imo, DIY or no), as this band - best known for their regular performances throughout the 2010s - has been important to me for reasons I've never fully understood until seeing them live in recent months. I'm not sure when they stopped playing, maybe around 2018 or so, but their role in transcending the genre tags of electronic/dance music (before the pervasive monolith of normie EDM) I think informed a certain subset of Sydney DIY in that 2010s period that has fallen by the wayside since. DIY electronic and experimental communities have always been a hard nut to crack for me, in part because I've always gravitated towards punk, hardcore, garage...GUITARS if you will...and felt that unfriendly feeling of being a spectator when at those shows, or even on the occasions I tried writing about them (once got threatened with a punch in the head for writing a split review of the Superstar/Angel Eyes LPs in 2013 on the Mess+Noise forums because the split review was supposedly disrespectful to the individual artists - which is hilarious for several reasons). But HOLY BALM to me always had a come-on-in invitational feeling to them, and from the get-go (their first LP released on punk label RIP Society, illuminating history there) found themselves interacting across genres, often finishing off a mixed bill in Sydney in what is increasingly feeling like a golden period in Sydney DIY (2018 approx). 

HOLY BALM are, and have always been, three close friends, on stage, playing synths, drum machines, keyboards live, with playful live vocals, often hilarious-in-their-mundanity lyrics and a sense of play and humour that I would say has been slowly cleared out of adjacent styles in recent years. I don't mean that as a blanket statement without exceptions, but there does seem to have been consequences to the rise of software packages like Ableton (which sounds to me like it's having an homogenising effect on what comes out the back end, but I'd be interested in your thoughts on this if you think otherwise*). It's at the very least a contributor towards the acceptance of the 'put laptop on stage and run recording' gig, alongside a de-trending of the 'look at this weird synth I found' paradigm that seemed to dominate the scene ten or so years ago, and often created interesting results. I'm not the right person to speak to this as I've only tried playing anything like it once or twice and it ended up sounding like bad movie trailer music, but I do know that HOLY BALM's two recent performances are some of the best times I've had watching music all year, and I hope they find a way to influence a new wave of something inspired by what they have long been doing. Sydney music has in recent times seen a tendency towards the humourless and cold performance that reads somewhere between serious artifice and subtle self-indulgence and it's not always been that way in this wild-eyed fun lovin' city... in short: HOLY BALM forever!

*Thanks for those thoughts that have since come through! To clarify, I don't solely blame the Ableton software package for what I hear as an homogenising effect, but I do wonder whether the fact that swathes of users were drawn to that package in such a short period of time wasn't a factor. I also agree that it's no less Ableton's fault for homogenised EDM as it is the fault of the guitar for homogenised rock music, and I understand the argument that software like this can be more affordable than needlessly 'rare' and overpriced electronic hardware. My point is more that I think a sense of play-in-performance, humour and the variability that comes with a mistake (even if just a mis-pressed button) remains important in any form of music, and that, generally speaking, automated processes can often remove those elements. 

NARKAN - Milano hardcore V no wave
After spending a few weeks in Milano recently, and on a few visits over the past few years, I'm convinced that NARKAN is the best band in the world that most don't seem to be aware of. And it's not just because their logo is a spin on the CRASS 'anarchy-snapped machine gun' to the '80s Virus squat's 'anarchy-snapped syringe' to this 2020s equivalent: destruction of the goddamned smartphone. Thank you NARKAN, if not just for this contribution to this visual evolution of the waves of anarchopunk...

Death to Telephone (Thank you NARKAN)

The first time I saw NARKAN was in 2024 at the Cox18 social centre (that recently celebrated its 50th anniversary no less), during a gimmick set that felt like a pro-wrestling stimulation: performing a mock feud with a band of their same crew, storming on stage after each song to boot them off only to play a song of their own, rinse and repeat with alternating tracks until the sound guy shut off the PA with a 'that's enough!' Truly demented stuff. At the time, the members were all in their mid-teens or a bit over, playing a brand of hardcore that was indebted to their home town heroes WRETCHED (down to the cover art of their second EP that plays on WRETCHED's visual style, updated for the horrors of the 2020s surveillance). A few months ago I saw them play again at Circolo Anarchico Ponte della Ghisfola, a social centre that's been running since 1968. On that day (in the most fucked heat wave I've ever lived through, and maybe the sweatiest I've ever been), NARKAN were a whole new thing entirely. Still in their teens to early 20s at most (one member had to sit a final high school exam that week), the straight-up Italian hardcore format had been deconstructed to include a synth/keyboard, for a few songs a saxophone, and songs that often had more in common with CONTORTIONS than anything of the Milanese hardcore canon. And yet, no baby was thrown out with no bath water: the hardcore songs remained, but then switched into these sweat-addled no wave romps that were unlike almost anything I'd seen before. Speaking to friends in Milano about NARKAN and everyone had a fond anecdote: from one local DIY label offering to put out NARKAN's first demos, only to be rebutted with "no, we'll release it ourselves because that's the right way to do things" (a long ramble about Italian punk's 'autogestito' tradition one day soon I'm sure; imagine if we had that subcultural logic in Sydney????), to the band's claim that they don't want to restrict membership of the band, instead letting it grow and evolve and change from gig to gig. All this is really exciting stuff, and I feel like it'd be a crime if what NARKAN are doing fell on deaf ears...really looking forward to hearing and seeing what comes next from this crew!

'Cracking Asbestos' by Nat Kassel / Self-publishing
Thanks to the opening up of the PO Box subscriptions (PO Box 301, Summer Hill NSW 2130; send me letters!), I was lucky enough to receive (among a couple tapes and CD's that I haven't gotten to yet) a copy of Nat Kassel's Cracking Asbestos. This short release is a self-published zine/short story about Nat's experiences in what feels to me like 2016-18 or so. In it, he outlines the odd hustle for shitwork that felt very familiar to me of that time: bad bartending, freelance writing for Vice Magazine (a scene where he's breaking into an abandoned railway tunnel for a gonzo piece brought back a wave of memories of my own failed pitches that included 'what if I reviewed every music venue urinal', fuck me dead...), dragging your arse through a decaying sharehouse; all great stuff written in no-bullshit prose, self-published and distributed to shops around Australia. 

I felt relieved when receiving and reading this publication to be honest. I appreciated Nat's style, that free-flowing honest observation that obliterates the boundary between documentation and narrative; something that likely comes out of his past as a freelance journalist in the 2010s (I was thinking recently that my own fiction-writing has as much to do with my time in 2010s gonzo music journalism as anything I tried to hone in a literary sense). I've got a whole lot of respect for the initiative taken in just typesetting the thing, printing and distributing it too! It should be encouraged for writers to take their cracks like this, and this instinct is so rare in Australian writing communities that I've more or less blocked my ears and tried not to think about that sad state of affairs. There's no shortage of writers bemoaning the lack of publication opportunities, and when the idea of self-publishing or (better still) starting a new small press arises, it's treated either as a mysterious impossibility outside the realm of the imagination, or worse, a personal insult. Nat shows that you can just go out there and do it, and in having self-published some of my own stuff for Barely Human (and soon, some other people's works as well), I want to hammer home the fact that the cost can be affordably low if you want it to be: the BH books cost about $700 for a run of 150 books printed in Sydney that, in theory, you'll sell at a profit in order to fund successive runs; it's not rocket science, and completely familiar to those coming from punk-land. So, I'd say, for those who want their writing in print? Don't be fooled into thinking it costs any more than a sub-$1000 starting point to get that kinda thing going...it can be done (and email me if you'd like help getting that going).

Soulseek Forever (or, Let Me Tell You About My PONO)
When I switched from annoying smartphone to zero feature flip phone a couple years ago, I lost the capacity to listen to music outside of the home; which was a minor drag, but I didn't miss it, appreciated the chance to just listen to 24/h a day field recordings like dipshits beeping each other along Parramatta Road...but then I started thinking about what I'd been missing and went looking for mp3 players, which made me think about a certain MUSICIAN I was obsessed with and a certain MEDIA PLAYER that he'd brought to life. In the mid-2010s (we're back in that decade again) I had a brief obsession with Neil Young's PONO player because I thought it was the funniest fucken thing, even though every time I tried talking about it no one seemed to really understand what I found so comical about Uncle Neil's strange turn into feeling personally attacked by the rise of the mp3. At the time, he'd been giving interviews that claimed that low quality mp3 audio was besmirching his back catalogue. Ever the tech-optimist, Young set about finding some hack start-up audio engineers to build a digital media player that was "optimised" for lossless audio, a mission that led to the Toblerone-shaped PONO player selling for an absurd USD$1,400 on release through a crowdfunding platform I can't remember the name of.

This is what democracy looks like

The funniest part about the PONO wasn't that it was so expensive, that Neil Young was marketing it, nor that the concept of this FLAC-only audio player was so unpopular that they needed to include mp3-capability by the time it launched, hence failing its original mission entirely...it was that months after release, a team of unrelated researchers demonstrated in a rarely-discussed paper that the human ear was incapable of detecting the audio quality of lossless digital media above CD-quality specs. Meanwhile, all the talking heads (actually, I think just David Byrne) from Iggy Pop onwards filmed videos for Neil speaking of the 'magic' they heard pumping through the PONO, and though they were never really pulled up on it, were revealed as accidental snake oil salesman. PONO went bust three years after release.

The point of that story is I found a first model PONO on eBay for $150 and I haven't turned back. I bought the cheapest pair of deadshit headphones I could find for added source of comedy, and started filling it with bad mp3s, bad hardcore demos recorded on smart phones, and bad vinyl rips of rare Italian hardcore 7"s thanks to the world's best media platform: Soulseek. It had been a long time since I'd torrented music, and I was shocked that I'd ever given it up in favour of streaming platforms (even once moving to YouTube Music to access bad video uploads of bootlegs during the FIRST Spotify boycott call in 2018, when I should never have left Soulseek in the lurch.) It's been a real blast being back in the torrenting mines, finding recordings I didn't know existed, building folders upon folders of pseudo-archives, digging through user files to see their own special interests (from catalogues of old punk flyers and accompanying bootleg live recordings, unreleased albums, all the good stuff), and occasionally chatting to said users as I go. I'm embarrassed to have ever abandoned my friend Soulseek, and as I re-live this objectively better participatory listening experience through the most user unfriendly mp3 player made since the birth of portable audio players, I realise that we gained NOTHING from the streamers, while they managed to take everything from us as compensation. Soulseek forever! (No brand loyalty to PONO, but hey, maybe PONO forever too...)

A Note on the Barely Human Online Shop
I've just re-stocked everything that I can in the BH Online Shop cos I lost a bunch of work recently and am desperately scurrying around to try to claw back some of that lost wage labour via cheat code (dubbing recycled C90 cassette tapes with bootleg and mixtape recordings). Not worried about putting food on the table (ask me about my stale bread soup recipe), but more so fundraising to put out a new book (by a DIFFERENT writer to myself, a real exciting project TBA soon) while working on Issue 2 of the new zine series in the meantime. Many cool things coming, just need to juice the coffers by moving some of this stock that's sitting under my desk! I'm looking to move on from plugging back catalogue all the time too (and also, need to manufacture some scarcity here), so I'm selling the master tapes while I'm at it, meaning all cassettes now in the shop are the last copies I'll ever make. I've also put the BH shirts on sale, dropped prices on a few other things (including a one-off hand-painted cassette audiobook boxset from the Barely Human pod), and added some new items to the store for anyone who's interested. Head over to https://barelyhumanshop.square.site/ to browse what's available, and email me at max@barelyhuman.info if you want to talk package deals, international postage, etc etc etc... thanks for letting me shill at the end of my anti-shill newlsetter (jfc)...

All this and MORE

Barely Human Zine Vol. 2026-27
Thanks to those who've sent in letters or email feedback after the release of the first issue of the new BH zine series, sent out in late May/early June. It's been fun to get a lot of this stuff off my chest, get back on the typewriter for some loose screeds (lockdown flashbacks aplenty) and to start sending this stuff around the country to friends new and old. For anyone not already signed up, these are available for the meantime by subscription only within Australia, but I'll start selling individually after a few issues are out. This isn't a marketing strategy (it would be a losing one if it was), but a two-fold way of having a personal experience of shipping out regularly to readers, and thus having a HUMAN CONNECTION, while also reducing demand to a number of subscribers I can actually print to (it might not sound like much, but there are 70 subscribers which ends up making for a LOT of paper to run through the work printer after hours. I've had some really good feedback after Issue 1, and look forward to keeping these rolling. If you're interested in these, email max@barelyhuman.info to arrange within Australia (or just send $30 to PayID max@barelyhuman.info, or send cash to PO Box 301, Summer Hill NSW 2130), and I'll send issue 1 out now, with the remaining 5 issues to come over the next year or so. On a related note! I've uploaded the mixtape audio for Issue 1 to the BH bandcamp; so listen on in if that interests you...

Issue 1 Shipping Now!

New Novel, Now, Autonomy Out Now
Good news if you haven't heard it already, but I've got a new novel out now through small publisher Giramondo. Called Now, Autonomy, it's the third in a loose trilogy of books that charts a handful of characters and ~frienemies met along the way~ as they discover, encircle, leave and enter Sydney's underground music communities (among other things). It's been in shops for almost a month now and seems to be hitting the spot for the right people, so hopefully you'll enjoy it if you come across it somewhere too! Either ask after it at your local independent book shop, pop it in your cart at the BH online shop or order direct from the publisher here (they're offering a big discount on buying all three books at once that get you some nice pre-pandemic unit prices!). 
   

If you like to read, you can read it

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I think that covers most things! As always, email me if you're interested in any of this stuff, want to talk some more, or have anything in mind you think I should be listening to or reading. 

- m.e.e.