I’m archiving my life and found this old undated poem. I’m guessing it comes from around 2008, judging by the primitive Joey Terrifying scribbles on the sheets of paper that surround it. The name AMY HEMPEL is written too, making me think I read an essay of hers, or one of her short stories before writing this. Whatever the weather (it’s changeable in the shires), younger asshole me still resonates there, somewhere in the dysphoric chaos that is post-postmodernism, beyond the looking glass.
Are we secure in our insecurities?
Are we happiest in misery; detached and alone?
People like me don’t get along with people like me,
disarmed by laughter, you break my heart and burn my tongue.
The threat of death makes it all worthwhile, life worth living.
I face the fear by becoming what I’m afraid of.
Kennedy and Huxley died on the same day; a schism, a break, the start of decay.
I believe in Bodhisattvas.
When we are shown too much reality, we shut down, we give up.
This is narcotisation.
When the message is so blunt, the people stop hearing
there are only so many times you can be attached before numbness takes hold.
Housework equals death, domesticity equates to depreciation.
I know ye can feel my eyes burning through your person,
are we going to continue this silent neglect forever?
This fact destroys me; I’m still addressing ghosts.
My voice has been kidnapped, my muse ethereal.
Cauterize the wound, stop this bleeding.
Break the fourth wall; set fire, burn down and progress.
Ego as bludgeon, tongue becomes blade. Same sword slays serpents. Always serve the servants, oh lord.
ibid.
Meditations on meaninglessness, zen is nothing. Absence makes the heart hate fondu. Suckling secretions situate shitey neoliberal pop-psychiatry as standard.
The full 142 release MTAT discography download music collection is available with 50% off the usual price, now downloadable in one package for £44.99. That’s like 30p per release!
We’ve got new music, including the preorder of The Overbites’ “Time To Go” EP, from Fractal.420, Wreaking Joy, Vægtløs, David Delinquent and The I.O.U’s, Truth Ruiner, Knives Chau Fan Club, catslash, The Last Mile, ALLDEEPENDS & more, plus classics from Kaddish, Stonethrower, Broken Stories, Franz Nicolay, UNIFORMS, Seas, Starry, Get It Together, Goodbye Blue Monday & literally hundreds more.
The full MAKE YER ANE COMP collection is included, dating back to the inaugural Book Yer Ane Fest hosted in Perth in November 2008. The first compilation was a run of 100 CDRs we sold for donations on the day. If anyone still has a physical copy, we’d love to see it!
MAKE YER ANE COMP IX will be released this Friday and, we hope, follows in the #makeyeranecomp tradition of celebrating underground punk rock culture whilst introducing new artists, bands & ideas. I (Derrick) curated this mixtape in good faith with love. I did the art on this occasion also.
Hope folx enjoy it. It’ll be released in solidarity with Fans Supporting Foodbanks Dundee, with monies from pay-what-you-want downloads being split straight down the middle.
We ken times are tough for awbdy and it’s a big ask for a diypunk label to be asking the most supportive community on earth for more support, but we can only stoke these flames of discontent together!
BIG WEEKEND OF SHOWS
Tribalism is an illusion that benefits only the oppressor.
Call it math-rock, post-sludge, metallic hardcore, moshcore or whatever descriptor ye like, stripped to it bare bones, this is simply lead heavy brutal METAL at its most gnarly.
The church of punk, metal and hardcore is a big tent; sectarianism truly Scotland’s shame and the cause of much suffering, when we allow ourselves to believe we don’t worship at the same alter of noise. There are folx in this city who’ve being doing great work, for years, to unify the communities.
This Thursday, your friendly neighbourhood cowpunks extend a hand of friendship to all those who enjoy extreme metal & hardcore, in all its various grotesque shapes and forms, to join us for the the first of a Thursday / Saturday from MTAT & JCHC Zine.
Thursday; Pound (northwestern usa) UK Tour w/ Kakihara throughout Scotland, joined by Codespeaker and Knives Chau Fan Club. 7pm doors, first act on sharp. £8 advanced, tenner on doors.
Friday; Cirque Du Corset return for their monthly alt-drag cabaret residence with your esteemed host SLAY GUEVARA. 7pm doors from 8pm showtime. Hit up their page and / or insta for full ticket information.
Saturday; Jute City Hardcore presents Newcastle & Dundee HXC Unity with Wise Up (Nuclear Family Records) and AGGRIEVED having an away day with Truth Ruiner & Wreaking Joy. 7pm doors, £8/10. Tickets from JCHC.
All shows in Conroy’s Basement at Rad Apples Dundee. Usual house rules apply. Gigs strictly 18+, sorry. Please bring ID (this is the law, not our choice), familiarise yourself with the MTAT House Rules and be aware that we work with Good Night Out Campaign.
Vegan kitchen serving until 8pm all days. Bar open until 11pm Thursday, midnight weekends. Please be sound to the staff at Rad Apples and all the crew. Ken ye will be!
Due to some kind of system failure, all overseas shipping is currently suspended. This is a worldwide issue over which we have no control, sorry. We’ll start shipping internationally again once the Post Office up the road say it’s sound.
Seems none I’ve taken since new year have gone and there’s a bunch stuck at customs in amerikkka. Deepest joy. More information will be shared as soon as it becomes available. Apologies for the fuckery.
That said, I’m positive developments, all ALLDEEPENDS bundles have finally been shipped. We’re working our way through the TRUTH RUINER and VÆTGLØS orders at the moment, keeping time with our stated goal of having everything signed, sealed and delivered by the end of January.
Your patience is deeply appreciated, thank you all for sticking with us!
COWPUNK TV
If ye didnae ken, MTAT has a YouTube channel. It’s been online for maybe 15 years (?) and contains 420+ live performance and music videos from across cowpunk history.
MTAT began before the dawn of Web 2.0 and the birth of social media as we know it, so this page has received scant use over the last five years or so, as “culture” migrated to corporate control. It’s not monetised or used for financial gain, just as a shop window. Real life is not here.
We’re trying to move away and centralise everything, as part of a strategy to move away from social media entirely. By the end of the year, all our pages will be echoes from party central. Tom MySpace won the war; taught a generation to code, sold his company and bailed. Still the best front page for bands too.
That preamble is all to say that I’ve uploaded a whole bunch of videos to Cowpunk TV, including the “Anxiety” music video from the forthcoming “Time To Go” EP from The Overbites, Book Yer Ane Fest videos from ALLDEEPENDS, Burning Flag and Truth Ruiner, Tejas emo kids Riley from SUMMERPUNKS and a couple videos from newyearsemo from Slowlight and Gossiper.
I’ll steadily be adding to the live archives over the days, weeks, months and likely years to come. The work is never done. It’s always more than music.
01/04/23; BUYATICKETFORTHISFEST with JOEY TERRIFYING (only Scottish gig), THE SEWER CATS (Manchester), THE CUNDEEZ, KIDS ON FIRE (Seattle, usa), FLINCH (Glasgow), THE DISORDERLIES (usa), Scottish DIY fayre w/ JCHC Zine, Mutual Scum, Struggletown, more bands & artists and more to come.
Joey Terrifying will only be playing TWO SHOWS. Learn the words, breathe deeply, express yourself clearly. Prepare for ruckus.
05/04/23; PETROL GIRLS (eng / eu) with GET IT TOGETHER (ten year anniversary show!) & ARSENIC ANNIE. 7.30pm, £10/14. Tickets went on sale last week and have been flying out. Grab one fast!
07-09/04/23; Manchester Punk Festival w/ JOEY TERRIFYING, OFF WITH THEIR HEADS, ALLDEEPENDS, GOODBYE BLUE MONDAY, DIRECT HIT!, FRANKIE STUBBS, DISCHARGE, FIT TO WORK, KADDISH, BRATAKUS, CHERYM, BANGERS & thousands more pals.
10/04/23; FRESH (eng) & CHEERBLEEDERZ (eng) with CROCODILE TEARS and possibly one more. Post-MPF Dundee full band show a long time in coming from two of English indie pop’s most beloved exports. Likely to be turbo rammed, Rad Apples open for the SHOW ONLY.
All of these gigs are likely to sell out so please grab tickets as soon as possible to avoid disappointment. Full spring schedule coming soon!
📍 Rad Apples Dundee / Conroy’s Basement
Right, that’s enough blathers. Thank you if you’ve made it this far through the cowpunk cult propaganda newsletter. Know ye are loved and we can’t do this without you.
Disclaimer: I wouldn’t usually publish the BOOK YER ANE ANE FEST announcements and a massive screed of MTAT news on this blog these days. Indeed, I don’t publish much beyond gig news, record announcements and various stripes of press releases at all. Regardless, the MTAT website is currently experiencing technical difficulties beyond my skill-set and parameters of time. All hail Craig, Fernando and all the MTAT crew for their engineering and scientific wizardry. I have an ideas, not a practical brain, hence this piece of shit ten-year old reconditioned laptop.
NEW MUSIC
What do you do when one of your best friends gets diagnosed with cancer? How do you handle losing someone close to you?
Vægtløs are trying to wade into questions like these on their upcoming album, which solely includes songs about people close to the band who died or suffered deadly diseases.
Vægtløs focuses on a vulnerability and openness that are lacking in the music scene, but also in society, in general. Life is fleeting and fragile, and Vægtløs is a bridge to gap between the monumental emotional dread underlying the fact that all beauty will eventually die and the cathartic strength found in music.
Vægtløs are scene veterans coming together for their love of everything emotionally heavy, passionate, honest and sincere. The band is not afraid to wear their heart on their sleeves and paint a scenery of the remote and primitive Nordic landscape that is both silent and loud.
In these immensely bleak times, the need for melancholic and desolate music has never been greater. Vægtløs pours every last bit of passion into their aggressive yet emotional music which can be described as intense and atmospheric post-metal with hints of black metal, post-rock, post-hardcore, and emo, eventhough it is not a distinct variation of neither of those, but a mutated multifaceted modificaton of the sum. Musically the band never took any notice of trends and genres, as the band draws inspiration equally from life as from art and music.
Recorded: Vægtløs Engineered: Rasmus Glassau Clausen and Vægtløs Mixed and mastered: Jacob Bredahl Backing vocals: Victor Kaas and Christian Bonnesen
MTATV026 is the incredible “KAKAFONI” 7” EP from danish black metal hardcore punx Vægtløs; two songs & sixteen beautifully punishing minutes of progressive reflective post-rock/shoegaze/bleakcore available on three gorgeous limited colours of 7” vinyl; gold, green & classic black.
Released via a plethora of global diypunk & independent record label crews worldwide, it’s an honour to be involved. We’ve a small number of records, preorders are shipping, Thirteen Records have one copy of each colour. Digital download too.
Much love and respect to Akaip, Angry Music (denmark), Bad Moon Rising (taipei), Dingleberry Records (germany), DIY Kolo (poland), Entes Anomicos (peru), Fresh Outbreak (italy), Geenger, Nasty Cut Records (greece), Nothing To Harvest (greece), Punk Bjarte norway), Rip Roaring Shit (doncaster), TNS Records (manchester), virklighedsfjern (denmark), Voice Of The Unheard (france) & 5FeetUnder (denmark) for being part of it. Please check them out and support diy punk worldwide.
Written and performed by the band, these two jams were recorded live in Conroy’s Basement at Rad Apples, Dundee by Nicholas Mayer in August 2022. The recordings were then also mixed and mastered by Nicholas at home and released as a digital download and super-limited edition two-track CD single,
Our homegrown basement-born banjo-driven internationalist hardcore anarchist cowpunk riot that is ALLDEEPENDS are out on on tour in europe with The Sewer Cats.
We’re still awaiting confirmation of dates on 14/15 in eastern Germany, but if anyone can help with Berlin on 15/11, do please get in touch. Likewise for anything either side of Geneva. DIY tour booking is hard, even with an ace team, in this current climate. Much respect to TNSrecords, Disconnect Disconnect Records and Nasty Cut Records for all their help and all the rad promoters who’ve stepped in to help.
Sewer Cats fly home from CPN as ADE & FU tour back to the UK before the family reunite at The Flying Duck at the Pre-BYAF Glasgow show with Mutual Scum and Struggletown. Tour then wraps at BOOK YER ANE FEST XV.
ALLDEEPENDS released the “Throwing A Pit To Nothing” LP this summer, one of the most vital punk rock records in years, to these hefty biased ears.
There’s a whole bunch going down on the hometeam front too.
Very much looking forward to hosting Leeds-based fizzy feminist indie punks NERVOUS TWITCH at their first ever Scottish show this coming Friday. They’ve been out on the road since the summer in support of their awesome “SOME PEOPLE NEVER CHANGE” LP and I very much look forward to getting my hands on the vinyl. They’re joined in the basement by our lofi Aberdeenshire power/punk/grunge-pop pals ARSENIC ANNIE and local queer emo pups CROCODILE TEARS. 8pm doors, six bones advanced, eight on doors.
TINS FOR TUNES in solidarity with DUNDEE FOODBANK goes down on Saturday as the FUTURE SOUND OF DUNDEE throw a DUB’N’GRUB Saturday night basement special for the first time. Unfortunately DJ D-LOVE is unable to join us on this occasion but newcomer djxdrkrx will be joining regular DJs TACKITY BEATZ & FU MAN Q for an evening of roots, reggae, dub, ska, hiphop & whatever from 7pm. Entry is free/pay-what-you-want.
We’ve been running TINS FOR TUNES for almost a decade now and it continues to be a disgusting abandonment of duty on behalf of the state, whether they be the criminals in charge in Westminster or Holyrood. Foodbanks form part of government policy. There are more food banks on this shitty island than there are McDs “restaurants”. Fuck McDs, obviously, but also fuck this, fuck capitalism and fuck anyone who thinks this is a reasonable way to organise humans. Personal opinion, clearly, but it all fucking reeks.
Please bring items of non-perishable vegan foodstuffs, toiletries, hygiene products, warm clothes (socks, scarves, gloves, hats, etc) to trade for music, whilst stocks last. All donations will then be shared with Dundee and Angus Foodbank on Monday & Tuesday.
This coming Sunday, we’re thrilled to finally nailed down Glasgow finest new fuzzy indie pop media sweethearts THE WIFE GUYS OF REDDIT to give them the traditional basement once over. Thankfully, there are more than enough quirky pop zingers and math-y arrangements to keep the post-hardcore heads happy, alongside a bucketful of pop melodies and radio friendly unit shifting songs that’d sound great on the radio. They’ll be joined at their first Dundee show by the returning majesty of HOLY SNAKES and homegrown indie rock’n’roll mastro NICK SHANE. Early doors at 6pm, £6/8 for a Sunday funday.
The following Friday brings an evening of three distinct flavours of metal on our last MTAT stop en route to Book Yer Ane Fest XV. Edinburgh’s blackened hardcore doom / sludge / noise punks CODESPEAKER have just released their incredible self-titled debut album and they’ll be celebrating it’s lead-heavy launch with an evening of lacerating loathing in the basement. Joining them will be homegrown psychedelic stoner crew KURNEL FIST and black metal-influenced satanic thrash metalheads TYRANNUS will be destroying all in earshot to open. 8pm doors, £6/8 mosh tax.
PRE-BYAF; RAD APPLES, DUNDEE
A once in a lifetime opportunity to catch insurrectionary anarchist basque country post-punk legends ALGARA in Dundee as part of their ongoing campaign for total liberation. One of the most important, explosive and influential of the radical basque anarcho punk bands, and by proxy one of the most radical and motivated punk rock bands in Europe, it is our absolute pleasure to be hosting them in Dundee for one night only. Huge thanks to Paco at LA VIDA ES UN MUS for helping makes this happen. Support from THE MARX and TRAGICAL HISTORY TOUR. 8pm doors, £6/8.
PRE-BYAF; THE FLYING DUCK, GLASGOW
For the first (and probably last) time ever, we’ll be hosting concurrent pre-BYAF shows across two Scottish cities. We’d like to extend our thanks and gratitude to the MUTUAL SCUM collective for supporting us in this endeavour and to Steven from Struggletown Records for going above and beyond the call of duty in support of the diy punk community. Thanks also for the sick artwork.
Having last ripped up the boards together in Copenhagen, the touring triumvirate of ALLDEEPENDS, The Sewer Cats and Forever Unclean reconvene on Plague Island to kick-off the weekend on the west coast. They’ll be joined for a unicorn shit-rare hometown show from pre-existence MTAT allies THE KIMBERLY STEAKS. Doors are at 7pm and the running order will be determined in the tradition of the very first incarnations of BYAF; by “lethal lottery” just before doors with no running order announced in advance. If it was good enough for Bad Religion, Ice T, NOFX and awbdy on those early, meaningful years of the Warped Tour, then it’s good enough for some ecossemopunx!
Benefit music festival to raise money & awareness in solidarity with Wrasac Dundee & Angus, Dundee Women’s Aid & Dundee Foodbank. Individual day tickets now on sale. Having a weekend or day ticket ensures your entry to the building ONLY. It is YOUR responsibility to ensure you arrive in time at the stage for the performances you want to see. A full programme of events will be published the week before the festival begins but we’d encourage everyone to get in as early as possible, as ye never know what ye might miss at fest.
Thanks to Daniel Hughes Art for the illustration. Card always subject to change, as the bail of The Human Project yesterday after I’d already re-commissioned this piece for the third time. Time is money and all that, I’m running out of both. This will also be the last time I’ll be booking my ane fest. Thankfully, we have a tremendous crew of humans to pass the ball to. It’s been emotional but I’m out. Thank you all for everything.
That’s pretty much a wrap. There are loads of resources on the internet about the history, origins and story of BOOK YER ANE FEST. It’s been sixteen years since Graham passed, fourteen years of doing this festival and over twenty-five years of playing in punk rock bands. I turned 40 a couple of weeks ago, have been doing this label since I was 23. It’s been over a decade since my dad died and my best friend died a slow, horrible death after four year plus battle with cancer this summer. My own full time band called it quits at BYAF last year, Rad Apples takes up an incredible amount of our time and there are simply other things that I want to do with my life.
No doubt Book Yer Ane Fest will continue in some way, shape or form, but it’s time for the young team to step up and run with the ball. I never want to be one of those bitter old shitcunts who despises and fears the youth, fears change and discomfort. Fuck that, the entire philosophical history of western (capitalist) kind is “fuck you, old man”. Quite right too, really.
Write Yer Ane Zine 