Music From The Empty Quarter #4 (U.K.)

Say what you will about Tower Records (and I've said plenty through the years), the fact is that the opening of the Tower store on West End Avenue in June of 1988 opened the door on a world of possibilities for we naive Nashvillians. The store's presence quickly transformed the city from a podunk, backwoods cultural outpost into a sophisticated backwoods cultural outpost. Aside from the biggest and most diverse selection of music that we'd ever seen in town, Tower's zine rack would become the stuff of legend, offering a glimpse through the looking glass into culture and music from across the US and Europe.

Case in point: Music From The Empty Quarter zine. This British music zine was a digest-sized stick-o-dynamite with slick black covers and bright white pages. Ostensibly an industrial music zine, our meek familiarity with the genre (we had heard of Throbbing Gristle, yes, and artists on Chicago's Wax Trax! Records labels were well-represented on Tower's shelves -- besides, Nashville had Dessau, now didn't we?) couldn't have prepared us for the wealth of information provided by Music From The Empty Quarter #4 when it hit Tower's zine rack.

Although the articles and interviews in this issue -- which included pieces on Debbie Jaffe of Master/Slave Relationship, Chris Connelly of Pigface, Pankow, avant-garde musician Karl Blake and a great overview of Krautrock legends Can -- were certainly of interest, it was the album reviews that grabbed the imagination of my friends and myself. Music From The Empty Quarter would review damn near anything, briefly and concisely, from industrial artists like Clock DVA, Foetus, Non and KMFDM to Current 93's "freak folk," art-punk Lydia Lunch, Scratch Acid's "noise-punk," prankster John Trubee and the garage rock of the Gibson Brothers.

There were reviews of all of the usual suspects from Wax Trax! like the Revolting Cocks, along with a fine article on the label, and reviews of other sonic-terrorists like Swans, Nurse With Wound and Nitzer Ebb, records released by proto-industrial labels like Mute, Nettwerk, Play It Again Sam and United Dairies. It was all very esoteric to us at the time, very foreign, and it provided great sport for us all during a brief "industrial music" phase (1988-93) that included dancing (or, more accurately, watching the women dance) at Nashville's 176 Underground club.

My personal interest in "industrial music" waned as my tastes drifted back to various forms of good ol' rock & roll. In '92 grunge was still on the rise, Rage Against The Machine provided all the industrial-strength anger that we needed, and rap was set to commercially explode. I still pull out the old Dessau, Psychic TV, Throbbing Gristle and Ministry discs now and then, and reading through this lone issue of Music From The Empty Quarter that I found at Tower brings up fond memories of a noisier time....

(Click on cover thumbnail to see larger picture)

VITAL STATISTICS:
• Issue #4
• February 1992
• B&W, 80-pages (plus covers)
• Style: industrial music

ARTICLES/INTERVIEWS
Debbie Jaffe of Master/Slave Relationship
Pigface
Can
Numb
Pankow
Wax Trax! Records
--> also album & zine reviews