Kludge

» see kludgemagazine.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

A kludge is a fix that works without being correct, which is a reasonable name for a music magazine assembled out of people who were not being paid to do music journalism. Arturo Perez started it in Los Angeles in 2000 and edited it for six years. At its widest the masthead ran past twenty people, mixing working journalists with writers who had never published anywhere, and that mix is usually given as the reason the writing did not sound like anyone else's.

The format was album reviews and interviews at lengths that mainstream publications had already given up on, plus a media section with rare recordings and a forum that people actually used. It never came close to Pitchfork's readership. It got quoted instead, by the Oakland Tribune and Music Connection, and it was used as a source by Artistdirect and by labels including Epitaph.

Publishing stopped in May 2006. The site did not. kludgemagazine.com sat there serving its full archive for another three and a half years, unchanged, until it went offline in December 2009. The Wayback Machine's last healthy capture of the front page is 6 August 2009; by the following January the page had shrunk to a third of its size, which is what a hosting account looks like on the way out.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the room it wrote from ~

The early 2000s American webzine was a specific institution and Kludge was squarely inside it. You needed a domain and a group of people willing to write four thousand words about a record for no money, and in exchange you got a publication that could book interviews and get on label mailing lists. Dozens of these existed, and most are gone without an entry anywhere.

The ones that lasted lasted because the editor kept editing, which is a duller explanation than traffic and a more accurate one. Perez did it for six years, a long run in that world.

~ the slow part ~

Nothing was announced in May 2006. Publication simply thinned and then stopped, and the site went on being a site. This is the most common shape of death for anything built by volunteers, and it is the hardest to date, because the thing that stops is attention rather than service.

The three and a half years that followed were the useful part for anyone who came looking. A complete archive of underground music writing from 2000 to 2006, still at its original URLs, still linkable. Then the hosting lapsed and all of it became a Wayback problem. Today kludgemagazine.com answers with a parking lander.

~ what stayed up ~

I was downloading music in Turkish internet cafes in the years Kludge was publishing, and the discovery mechanism there was a shared folder and whatever somebody had burned onto a CD, not an English-language webzine out of Los Angeles. Reading about records in order to decide what to look for was a habit that needed both the language and a connection you could browse on, and in 2003 I had one of those. The writing was doing its work for an audience I was not part of.

What is worth noting is how little of that kind of writing survived its own hosting. Music criticism from the period that lived on a magazine's budget is still online. Music criticism from the period that lived on a founder's credit card is mostly in the Internet Archive or nowhere, and Kludge is on the better side of that line only because somebody crawled it enough times.

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