Pitchfork is excited to announce the upcoming launch of Altered Zones, a new sister site that will focus on leftfield pop, experimental, and home-recorded sounds. In the last several years, there's been an explosion of small-scale DIY music, and Altered Zones is dedicated to exploring these emerging musical worlds. Uniting an international team of bloggers whose individual sites have proven among the most consistently rewarding outposts for unique and leftfield music, this new site will highlight the most notable and adventurous new artists, serving as a focal point for the flood of creativity coming from deep within the music underground.
Under the direction of co-editors Emilie Friedlander (Visitation Rites) and Sahil Varma and Jack Shankly (Transparent), Altered Zones contributors will share their favorite tracks each week in a rotating schedule with daily posts, as well as highlighting the most compelling new albums. Altered Zones will also regularly post overlooked or undiscovered tracks chosen by its favorite artists.
Features will include topical artist interviews, artist-curated mixes, and profiles on up-and-coming labels, with additional content and images sourced from art Tumblrs and artist blogs. It will also feature a running RSS feed of all current posts from its contributors' core sites. Tying it all together, Altered Zones' visual design is anchored by a rotating series of surreal retrofuturistic backdrops inspired by the site's name.
The new site is set to launch Wednesday, July 7 with a feature on the year's most overlooked albums, mp3s, and cassette-only releases. In the meantime, you can check out the Altered Zones Twitter feed and Facebook page, and meet the new site's contributors after the jump:
The Altered Zones blog collective, in their own words:
20 Jazz Funk Greats is a collective that functions as one brain overrun with a passion for Arthur Machen dreamscapes, epic cosmic structures, terrible punctuation, avant pop experimentation, the gospel according to Yuzna, and themes and sounds from the semi-inverted pyramid of phantasmagorian synergies.
In the shadow of their Comfort Zone, McGregor and Chaakles of Chocolate Bobka burn sage bundles while sipping Stewart's Key Lime soda. The air is palpable. This aura is often carried over to other mediums, including wwws, .flvs, print publications, cassette duplications, and radio wave retransmissions.
Defining the music blog collective Delicious Scopitone is like explaining why one prefers red to blue. More than anticipating tomorrow's stars or trends, our mission is to find and share one artist a day that means something to us. We share our personal taste with our readers, with the aim of supporting artists who aren't famous enough-- or not famous at all.
Don't Die Wondering is a London-based music blog, monthly club night, and periodic compiler of compilations. Written and maintained by Noam Klar, it was started by various contributors in April 2009. Despite settling into a loose, associative, stream-of-conscious aesthetic over time, its main objective has remained constant: to provide a platform for new music that is emotive, exciting, and beautiful-- or that at least makes you scratch your head a bit.
Friendship Bracelet is a Western Massachusetts-based music blog maintained by freelance writer/artist Ian Paul Roger Nelson. When not daydreaming about hitting step-back fade-away jumpers, he posts new music (mp3s) and images (photographs, manual art), hosts a weekly radio program on WMUA 91.1FM in Amherst, curates digital and physical compilations, and presents music events.
Get Off The Coast is the mothership for Jheri Evans, a Wilmington, North Carolina-based music blogger and collage artist. Days spent in a daze, he enjoys telling people about new music that excites him, privileging feelings and images over technical terms.
Gorilla vs. Bear is a Texas-based music blog, founded in March of 2005. In addition to blogging, GvB also hosts a weekly show on Sirius XMU Radio and regularly presents shows in Dallas, Austin, and beyond. GvB enjoys dogs/cats, NBA basketball, antiquated photographic techniques, and '90s hip-hop. Its heroes are Larry David and Ron Artest.
Raven Sings the Blues is a Queens/Brooklyn-based blog that has been posting a heavy rotation of noise, psych, left-field electronic, garage, and lost classics since 2006. Written and maintained by Andy French, it has also produced a series of free download compilations featuring music by Moon Duo, Woven Bones, Sic Alps, Sun Araw, Blues Control, and more.
The Road Goes Ever On is Cameron Book, an astrophysics student based in Atlanta, Georgia. He occasionally writes from his hometown of Bear Gap, Pennsylvania, though the lack of internet access there can be debilitating. Heavily influenced by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, Cameron likes calling our attention to the most minute of details, both in Middle-Earth and in the music he writes about.
Rose Quartz is Richard MacFarlane, Shea Bermingham, Max Lavergne, and Gervin Puse, a group of writers, radio disc jockeys, and live music promoters based in England, New Zealand, and Australia, respectively. Collectively obsessed with wonky retrofuturist visions and half-remembered cultural nostalgias, they prefer the more cosmic, colour-drenched, and skewed sides of pop, noise, hip-hop, and electronica.
Founded by Jack Shankly and Sahil Varma in 2005 as a DIY printed fanzine, London-based Transparent has since morphed into a blog and limited vinyl record label dedicated to unearthing, championing, and releasing weird, brave, perfect, and heartbreaking pop music. In addition to spending hours trawling Flickr for cool photos, they put on regular shows with their favourite bands.
Based out of Brooklyn and LA, Visitation Rites is a music and video blog dedicated to tracking emerging forms of 21st century psychedelia and understanding them in light of their historical moment. Its founder, Emilie Friedlander, co-hosts Newtown Radio’s Underwater Visitations series, a freeform collaboration with Underwater Peoples concerned with the intersection of independent music, DIY culture, and digital technology.
Weekly Tape Deck are two tall, Texan blogsmiths (Nate S. and R. Ellis) aimlessly wandering the streets between Dallas and Denton in search of their next audiophile fix. When they're not out scouring for tunes they enjoy long walks on the beach, the Dallas Cowboys and a wide variety of tacos.
Yours Truly's mission is to discover and document, celebrate and interrogate, capture and catapult the singers, screamers, writers, and rhymers whose craft demands our affection.
