So here we are, holding a brick. Not metaphorically. Literally. "Elaste. 1980–1986" is 560 pages of paper, ink, memory, attitude, and very sharp cheekbones. Calling it a “book + digital album” is technically correct and emotionally insufficient. This is closer to a cultural hard drive extracted from early-’80s Germany, before nostalgia became an industry and before irony learned to monetize itself.

ELASTE was never just a magazine. It behaved more like a radar dish pointed at the future while standing knee-deep in post-punk debris. Founded in 1980 by Thomas Elsner, Michael Reinboth, and Christian Wegner, it emerged in a West Germany still boxed in by concrete, ideology, and bad haircuts. Punk had detonated, new wave was mutating, pop was discovering synthesizers and queerness at roughly the same time, and ELASTE decided to document all of it without asking permission or pretending to be neutral. The result was glamorous, intrusive, opinionated, and weirdly precise.

This book does an admirable job of restoring that precision. The layout refuses museum stiffness. Pages feel restless, redesigned in spirit if not literally, echoing the magazine’s original refusal to settle into a house style. Photography is not illustrative but confrontational: Bowie doesn’t pose, Warhol doesn’t explain himself, Robert Smith looks like he’s already tired of being a symbol. You don’t browse this book, you drift through it, occasionally colliding with a sentence by Jon Savage or Diedrich Diederichsen that still bites harder than most contemporary cultural commentary.

What makes "Elaste. 1980–1986" compelling is not the celebrity density, though it’s frankly absurd. Warhol, Kraftwerk, Almodóvar, Jagger, Lydon, DAF, Boy George, Klaus Nomi, Keith Haring. It reads like a name-dropping contest where everyone actually showed up. The real substance lies in how ELASTE framed these figures. Not as untouchable icons, but as signals within a wider system of style, politics, technology, and desire. Glamour was present, but never obedient. Subversion was there, but it wore lipstick and knew how to work a camera.

Michael Reinboth’s afterword quietly anchors the whole thing. His reflections on MTV, drum machines, "Blade Runner", and the visibility of gay musicians underline what ELASTE grasped early on: pop culture is not decoration. It’s infrastructure. It shapes bodies, language, and power long before politicians notice. Reading this now, in an era where “alternative” has become a marketing category, ELASTE’s rebelliousness feels almost impolite in its sincerity.

The included digital compilation functions less as a hits package and more as an atmosphere sampler. From Fred und Luna’s stubborn minimalism to Indoor Life’s proto-electronic sprawl and Burnt Friedman’s early structural instincts, the tracks sketch the sonic environment ELASTE operated within. This isn’t a definitive soundtrack, but it doesn’t try to be. It’s a reminder that scenes are ecosystems, not playlists.
There is humor here too, mostly unintentional and therefore effective. The fear ELASTE apparently inspired in “neon cafés”. The confidence of being young enough to not know what was impossible. The sheer audacity of a German indie glossy casually reshaping the visual and editorial grammar of pop journalism. The book never mythologizes this too heavily, which is a relief. It documents, contextualizes, and occasionally steps aside.

"Elaste. 1980–1986" is not about longing for a better past. It’s about remembering a moment when culture moved faster than its explanations. When magazines could be laboratories. When style was political without issuing press releases. This volume doesn’t ask to be worshipped. It asks to be read, touched, argued with. And it quietly suggests that the future once felt open because people insisted on treating it that way.

If nothing else, it makes one thing painfully clear: rebellion ages better when it’s curious rather than loud. And ELASTE, annoyingly, still is.

"Unearthing the Music. Footnotes to Sonic Resistance in Non-democratic Europe (1950–2000)" is a heavy book in every sense, more than six hundred pages that read like an atlas of sound carved out of repression. It is the final piece of a long project that began in Portugal as an online archive of underground and protest music, and here the archive breathes in print, full of stories, interviews, photographs, and testimonies that show how sound slipped through cracks in the walls of censorship. What makes it compelling is not just its encyclopedic scope, though that is impressive, but the way it captures the contradictions of resistance: music as escape and defiance, but also as compromise, disappointment, and the awkward hangover of liberation.

The editors come with strong credentials and very different energies: Rui Pedro D'maso, curator and archivist with a passion for connecting cultural memory to present struggles; Alexander Pehlemann, a self-described East German provincial punk who turned his rebellious instincts into writing, curating, and label-running; Lucia Udvardyová, journalist, organizer, musician, and tireless chronicler of Central and Eastern European undergrounds. Together they have pulled in a remarkable cast of contributors, from critics like Chris Bohn to musicians like Chris Cutler, from scholars of jazz under socialism to activists who smuggled sounds through bone records and reel-to-reel tapes. The result is not sterile scholarship but a chorus of voices, each with its own crackle.

The subjects are sprawling: jazz flourishing under the suspicious gaze of the Polish People’s Republic and the East German state, conceptual post-punk bands in Yugoslavia who knew that irony could be deadlier than slogans, electronic studios run by the state that produced both official experiments and secret detours, underground samizdat networks where records were copied onto discarded X-ray plates, women carving space in punk scenes usually dominated by men, the avant-garde muttering in Romania, Iberian punk shouting against Franco and Salazar, Ukrainian undergrounds simmering on the edge. Each chapter adds a new resonance to the overall soundscape, and the black-and-white photos scattered throughout make it clear that this isn’t abstract history - it’s lived, improvised, sweaty, precarious.

The strength of the book is also its challenge: its breadth is vast, sometimes overwhelming. One page you are in Belgrade with New Wave kids discovering postmodern irony, the next in Bratislava with experimental studio veterans recounting their tricks, the next in Portugal where punk and cosmopolitanism struggled to make sense of post-dictatorship voids. Some sections feel like fragments of a much bigger story that could fill a whole volume on their own, and occasionally the tone veers toward the encyclopedic. But this seems fitting, because resistance was never neat, and underground culture was always patchwork, a series of interrupted signals rather than a perfect broadcast.

What emerges most strongly is the sense that sound is never just sound. Under authoritarian regimes it could be freedom, a way of imagining elsewhere; it could be dangerous, drawing surveillance and bans; it could be absurd, an inside joke within a tight circle; it could even be disappointing, once the regime fell and the utopia failed to materialize. There is no romanticizing here: the book insists that resistance was messy, full of contradictions, often more about survival and improvisation than about glorious heroic gestures. Yet within that mess lies the power of sonic imagination - an electric guitar strummed in a basement, a reel tape copied a hundred times, a woman shouting in a squat, a jazz saxophone echoing in a state hall.

Reading "Unearthing the Music" can feel like stepping into a labyrinth of underground rooms, each with its own resonance. It requires patience, sometimes stamina, but it rewards you with moments of revelation: that history isn’t just in speeches and monuments, it’s also in the hiss of a cassette passed hand to hand, in the way an audience sways under threat of police interruption, in the silence that follows when the amplifiers are cut off. For anyone interested in the entanglement of art and politics, it is essential reading; for others, it may be too dense, too specialized, but even then its photographs and anecdotes can jolt curiosity.

In the end the book feels like what it promises: a set of footnotes. But they are footnotes that sing, scream, and sometimes weep. They remind us that culture under pressure does not simply vanish; it mutates, it hides, it improvises new channels. And if history often forgets these sounds, "Unearthing the Music" digs them back up, dusty but alive, proof that even in silence someone was always making noise.

Nik Nowak’s "War of Decibels" isn’t an album in the conventional sense - it’s an auditory battleground, a historical manifesto, and a multimedia experience rolled into one. This ambitious project, a 43-minute audio essay paired with an 88-page book, challenges us to reconsider the power of sound, its role in conflict, and its capacity to divide and unite.

Nowak, an artist renowned for transforming sound systems into quasi-military vehicles like the Panzer and Mantis, has always been fascinated by the intersections of music, technology, and power. With "War of Decibels", he delves into one of his most compelling subjects yet: the “acoustic proxy wars” of the Cold War era. The piece draws on his 2020 installation "Schizo Sonics" and extends it into an auditory experience that feels simultaneously academic and visceral, cerebral and confrontational.

The record opens with the eerie hum of historical recordings from the so-called Loudspeaker War (1961–1965), a bizarre chapter in history when East and West Germany bombarded each other with propaganda and counterpropaganda, blaring across the Berlin Wall. Jessica Edwards narrates this strange story with a voice that is both measured and haunting, a reminder that even in ideological warfare, words are often as potent as weapons.

The sound design is quintessential Nowak: industrial yet organic, jarring yet hypnotic. Tracks bleed into one another, blending archival sounds with abstract sonic landscapes that evoke the psychological tension of those divided times. Infinite Livez’s oblique contributions add an unpredictable, almost surreal layer to the narrative, like a distorted broadcast breaking through static.

The yellow and black vinyl themselves - graphically etched and visually striking - serve as physical artifacts of this sonic journey, their weight, and texture underscoring the materiality of sound itself. As you drop the needle, you’re reminded that this isn’t just a story; it’s a confrontation, a challenge to engage with sound as a medium of control and resistance.

But it’s not all history. Nowak deftly connects past and present, suggesting that the Loudspeaker War was merely a prelude to our current battles over airwaves, algorithms, and narratives. The parallels to contemporary propaganda wars - whether on social media, in news cycles, or through AI-driven disinformation campaigns - are chillingly clear.

The accompanying book is as much a part of the project as the audio. Filled with 129 images from the "Schizo Sonics" installation, it contextualizes the auditory experience with visuals that are as provocative as the sounds themselves. The essays, written in both English and German, serve as a theoretical framework, bridging Nowak’s artistic practice with broader sociopolitical themes.

Ironically, for a work so focused on sound, "War of Decibels" often leaves you contemplating silence - its absence, its power, its impossibility in a world saturated with noise. The project doesn’t just document an acoustic war; it invites us to reflect on our own role in the soundscapes we inhabit and perpetuate.

In "War of Decibels", Nowak doesn’t just amplify history; he remixes it, distorts it, and projects it forward, creating a work that is as challenging as it is compelling. It’s not an easy listen/reading, nor is it meant to be. But for those willing to immerse themselves in its world, it’s a powerful reminder of the ways sound shapes our reality - whether as a tool of division or as a call to unity.

This is no mere album; it’s a sound installation you can hold in your hands, a manifesto you can hear and see. Nik Nowak has once again proven that in the right hands, sound can be more than music - it can be history, philosophy, and resistance.

Lydia Tomkiw (1959-2007) once fronted the Chicago based minimal Post Punk duo Algebra Suicide which was pretty unique in pairing Poetry & Music but turned out to be more popular with intellectuals and critics than healthy for their career and income. Still they managed a long and impressive run performing and recording material at their own terms.
During the last few years some of their work was reissued by Dark Entries on two Compilation LP's; "Feminine Squared" (with bonus DVD of an early live performance) and 2019's "Still Life". All remastered with rare and not so rare tracks, photos and collected press quotes (meanwhile both are also available digital). Dark Entries also supported this release hosting a free dl of the remastered tracks which made up 'Big Skin', so the proper format for this would be Book & Download actually.Lydia started out as an hopeful writer, studying arts with passion at the University of Illinois, Chicago and the Columbia College. In the early 80's she got involved with the alternative punk influenced scene and the DIY ethos. On her own she published various handmade collections in small editions which where impossible to find even years I ago (I know because I tried). Nearly all of her work was out of print hopelessly but with some luck I found a few collections where she appeared with one or two (mostly exclusive contributions) besides the poems she had set to music.
'Poems' now sets out to be a complete collection of all her known works, among others with the full support of her Brother John and Don Hedeker who had became her partner and half of Algebra Suicide back in 1981. This book includes facsimile like reprints of her original publications as first part, starting with 'Ballpoint Erections' (1978), 'Obsessions' (1979), 'Popgun Sonatas'(1980), 'Big Skin' (originally issued with the Cassette Only Album by Cause And Effect in 1986)' and 'The Dreadful Swimmers' from 1989.
But actually these where the smallest part of her texts as she constantly wrote for Algebra Suicide (1982 to 1994) and considered those published with the credit booklet or sheets included in equal important form. Not to mention the performances live and recorded where she recited them in her typical distanced dead pan voice, set fittingly to music by Don to be heard even by people generally not reading anything connected to poetry.
After the Duo's demise she found it hard to reconnect with the literal circles she originated from and published another collaborative Audio / Lyrics CD in 1995 under her own Name with various collaborators she knew through networking or her local scene, moved to New York and faded away from the public eye.

In the (Un)Collected part all of her texts can be found - published in anthologies, used for Algebra Suicide and completely unpublished ones. Nearly 200 pages of them. Herein lies the weakest part of this book in a way - instead of sorting them in an obvious order they appear just thrown in one after another. No chronology is given, no chapter (Albums f.e.), no first publication dates or sources, not even an attempt to sort them alphabetically. The added register and the basic discography don't offer any more clues of the origins sadly, as I'd really hoped for a chance to follow her development besides the well documented musical side of her activities.
Maybe most of the information is lost today but as it is this part appears diced up which is an unnecessary low point, considering all the research and love for details and design which went into this book and the excellent introductions by her early mentor Paul Hoover, the memories shared by her fellow student Sharon Mesmer, early Supporter Ira Robbins (Trouser Press) and editor's Dan Shepelavy write-up of her life which fully support an understanding about the situation and times these texts come from and an insight into Lydia's life and development as an artist.
While her use of words is often strange, abstract, witty and charming and/or hard-hitting poignant, filled with far-fetched conclusions and astonishing appropriate observations in a rare quality this is exactly the artistic 1st hand expression which makes them authentical and needed. One can dive into 'Poems' at any page and finds something worthwhile and enriching - sometimes a perfect expression, sometimes an appropriate mood picture, sometimes a question which grows in your thoughts. Of course her poems are also uncomfortable honest, challenging and wreck-less.

"...There's The Sound That I've Sent
It's There To Haunt You
Like A Cello
Like A Buzzsaw
I Hope You're Enjoying Yourself."

Thank you to Dan Shepelavy's tiny independent press who took all the efforts and managed to give Lydia Tomkiw's voice this chance to be re-read and heard.

A while ago I happened to talk about this book with another old fart like me and he came out with: "that's the hardcore era we experienced"...holy shit!! That's one of these sentences that makes you feel like you've become a dinosaur and your next option is extinction! So "What will remain?" to quote a good old Strife anthem...memories and retrospective analysis and that's what Brian Peterson has collected and sewed together in this book. Peterson has probably cut the majority of the interviews into small interventions through which he speaks about the main topics and all of the peculiarities of the hardcore scene of the nineties. The end result is a composed portrait painted thanks the voices of some of the protagonists of the U.S. scene of that period and I think many of you have already heard names like Kent Mcclard, Vic Dicara, Ray Cappo, Robert Fish, Aaron Turner, Mike Heartsfield, Freddy Cricien, etc. As you may already have guessed, the book intentionally covers the U.S. scene and some of the of the most significant bands (but not all them) of the decade and I'm sure you'll find some interesting profiles for bands such as like: 108, Coalesce, Unbroken, Inside Out, Downcast, Integrity, Strife, Heart Crisis, Guilt, Groundwork and many, many more. Being more or less a coeval of the author and having witnessed the period and having experienced many dynamics related to the hardcore scene of those days, I was looking forward to checking if it was some sort of revaluation of the past. Unfortunately aging you see how everybody has to face the "old days nostalgia" and the side effect of it is that most of us tend to re-depict their past erasing the bad things, but I can guarantee even if the global atmosphere gives the picture of a scene less divided if compared to the present time and where spirituality, politics or ethics still meant a lot, that's not the case. I can assure you Peterson never falls into pathetic overestimations of the past, the only possible remark to his "historical reconstruction" could be he mainly focused on a great variety of muscular bands you can easily label as hardcore (even if it includes uneasily categorizable bands like Deadguy, Guilt, Rorshach) and even if he didn't forget to include combos like Swing Kids, Spitboy or Chamberlain there's no trace of forerunners like Iceburn, Junction, Engine Kids or labels like Art Monk Construction, Doghouse and so on. Please don't get me wrong, this' not sterile criticism, since I believe "Burning Fight" is an intense and interesting reading and I'm sure if some of you have experienced that scene, here and there you'll feel a sort of homecoming. I also understand the book was already huge (almost 500 pages), I just think despite their musical style, some of these "weird" unconventional-hardcore bands with people with a punk/hardcore background proved/prove how, despite its roots, for a short period the nineties hardcore community has been enlightened by an incredible open mindedness that later has slowly disappeared. I don't mean that "these were the days!!" and now the scene sucks, come on!! Those who have experienced the punk-hardcore scene from the eighties could have said the same thing about the nineties. I just think it all has happened because every-once in a while, above all when things are still far from being both categorized and segmented and above all far from becoming more "economically organized" and more "business oriented", curiosity and a genuine interest for self expression may bring some people "beyond the border". For me that's the point, that crossing the Rubicon and that search for self expression are what sometimes become lowest common denominators that link different generations of punks; many define it as a genre of music (and I can't deny I myself sometimes adhere to this kind of classification) but in general I think it's "just" a matter of attitude. I'm sure many of you will easily identify with the words of this or that scenester, above all when you'll read during the teenage days the hardcore scene was a safe place where you finally had the chance to feel surrounded by people like you, "a club for misfits" who were not able to feel comfortable in the "normal" society. Hard to say what's left of these days beyond the musical influence or beside the living inheritance of people like Converge, Sunn O)))), Gentry Densely (Ascend/Eagle Twin), The Locust. It's hard to judge the present objectively and I'm not exactly the right person to do it, after all there's "no time like the present". Differently from "All ages: Reflections on Straight Edge" this book goes to the core of its subject avoids superficiality by expressing a true involvement. "What will remain?"...good question Watson!.