About Us

A woman with curly hair passionately plays an electric guitar, with her mouth open, in a black-and-white photograph.

There's an old piece of advice given to writers: "Kill your darlings."

It means to delete the clever phrase you love most. To cut the beautiful but unnecessary paragraph in service of the greater truth of the story. It's the ruthless act of editing. A sacrifice made for the sake of honesty. Our principle is the same. We are not here to preserve the mythology of a band, to polish a press release from a record label, or to sell you on the next big thing. We are here to find the essential, bleeding truth of a performance, even--and especially--if it's messy.

We believe the story of music isn't found in an official biography or in the liner notes or in the sponsored ad. It's found in the condensation on a basement wall in Southeast Portland. It's in the oppressive, joyous heat of forty bodies packed into a room built for ten. It's in the beautiful anarchy of the pit and the ringing in your ears that lasts for two days. It's found in the quiet conversation in a driveway with strangers who--for a few hours--might end up feeling like the only other people on earth. That is our beat. The sanctuary of the DIY space, the dive bar, the forgotten VFW hall.

These are the places we go to bear witness.

Our writing is a dispatch, not a decree. We are in the room, not floating above it. We are not just the observers; we are the participants. We deliver the unfiltered first-person account of what it felt like to be there. We believe the raw photograph and the honest story are two parts of the same whole: a record of a moment that, by its very nature, is fleeting. We deal in the visceral reality of the experience.

This zine is not an authority. It is an archive. It is an attempt to create an honest record of a culture that is too often ignored, misrepresented, or sterilized for mass consumption. We do this because we believe this music, these spaces, and these moments matter. They are the vital, beating heart of a city, a state, a nation, a world, and they deserve a witness—not a salesman. We're here to kill the darlings--the hype, the image, the easy narrative--to get to the heart of it.