Distort #9

istort mag started in 2003 to document kvlt hardcore and World War III. The contents of Distort have been dominated by impulse, excess, insomnia, stimulation. No editor, no proofread, no nerd.

Out of the 2000+ pages published over the past couple of decades I am skimming the C.R.E.A.M. into an archival book.

I'm raising funds to print this by making backissues available again via PDF.

You can also purchase a onetime subscription to all Distort here which this issue is part of.

Distort #9 (2005) Interview with Chris Colohan re: Left For Dead / Japanese hardcore rumourmill / writing on Disclose, Severed Head of State, Upstab, Urban Blight

Left For Dead Interview with Chris Colohan

#9 featured an interview with Left For Dead. Is this band familiar, this Left For Dead band? You hear them before? 90’s hardcore from a country north of the USA, contemporaries of h100’s, similar outlook, bleak sentiment. In 2005, the influence of Left For Dead on hardcore in Australia was very real and I wanted to pay tribute to this.

Japanese Hardcore By Spider Death

Spider is an old friend from Sydney. He wrote this about Japanese hardcore for Distort when he’d started playing music again after a long hiatus from punk. 

More recently, Mahmood Fazal and I interviewed Spider for a Mont Icons podcast, reflecting back on our childhood together in Sydney’s punk scene of the late 90’s.

Here’s an extract:

DX: how me and Spider first became mates was, I found a zine that he did at a shop in Sydney. And I got at home and I was just like, I didn't know what your inspirations or motivations were. But it was my first exposure to like, kind of the evil side of crust. You know, this kind of that scary side of like punk and I wrote you a letter.

S: Yeah.

DX: And we started corresponding like back and forth. So whenever I saw Spider it shows like we'd start talking and we were coming from like, different areas of punk.

S: Definitely.

DX: I was definitely from the more kind of the sober, disciplined hardcore mentality. And, but we went to the same shows because that's what punk was in Sydney, like you'd you'd always just go watch bands that you'd have like, like, street punk bands, playing with like, chaos punk bands, playing with straightedge bands, it was the way that it worked. And we were attracted to definitely mutually attracted to kind of mixing with as many different people as possible. And we were having like a kind of discussion that I couldn't have elsewhere, like with other punks. We, we, we've been mates ever since. Spider was also one of the first people that introduced me to GISM and it wasn't even directly it was just through his fascination. That kind of myth building that you were doing was really like effective. You know, you're you're one of the early champions of this band, and I heard I heard it so out of nowhere, and it terrified me.