As greedy and rapaciously profit driven as major record labels are, it's hard to believe that even Capitol Records would have a problem with
Semisonic only moving a million and a half units of their 1998 breakout album,
Feeling Strangely Fine. From the same source that disclosed this curiosity, I was also enlightened with the fact that would-be emo sensations
Texas is The Reason threw in the towel just as they were about to ink a deal with Capitol as well. And on a relatively unrelated note, imagine my amazement when I learned of a young teenage boy in Texas, circa the Reagan-era, who held
Yoko Ono and Ravi Shankar on a far steeper pedestal than Michael Jackson and Def Leppard.
So where did all this seemingly random musical minutia emanate from? A slender but often engrossing zine that just made it's debut last month (yes that's the cover to your left). Curated by an alumni of the more established
Big Takeover magazine the digest-sized
The Recoup is entirely reader funded and as such, is ad-free. Not one to be hemmed to album cycles, genres or even current artists,
The Recoup is the creation of an intense music aficionado, who's not afraid to assemble a compendium of articles/interviews with such disparate names as the
Naked Eyes, Apple Records footnotes
Lon and Derrek Van Eaton, the aforementioned
Texas is the Reason, and
Jacob Slichter of
Semisonic. As is par for the course of music periodicals, a bevy of album reviews are also featured, with an emphasis on reissues like
The Breeders deluxe redux of
Last Splash, and titles by the
Durutti Column, Codeine, Everything But the Girl, and a dozen or so more. To close the magazine out, the tables are turned with the editor himself being interviewed by the author (Lisa Carver) of a Yoko Ono book,
Reaching Out With No Hands, regarding his self-proclaimed martyrdom for the fifth Beatle, which took hold while he was still in grade school.
I've assembled a small MP3 mix of music pertaining to some of the artists discussed within, including rare studio and live material. A hard copy of
The Recoup is available on
Etsy, and a website has been set up
here where you can view some sample pages.
http://netkups.com/?d=805886534b0a2