released December 2, 2012

Well, nations suck and Austria sucks as well of course. This is our personal political opinion, we think history showed us that the drawing of boarders mostly brought us harm. It brought us problems like nationalism, racism, chauvinism, eurocentrism, xenophobia and more crap like that…..I will not go into further detail because this is a complex problem and this text has another intention than analyzing the problem areas of borders and nations from its roots. From our childhood on our thinking is organized in spacial categories. In Europe, concerning geography, our thinking is mostly influence by the separation of national states. But this kind of pigeonholding (Schubladendenken) sucks, it results in intolerance and in most cases intolerance sucks too.. ..So why the hell do we release a music sampler that consists of bands which mostly would call Austrian as their citizenship? Well that´s a difficult but of course legitimate question! We got the inspiration of doing a sampler through the UK Summer Mix from Nicolas who performs in sweet Hammers. We loved the idea of this sampler concerning the simple and self-made layout, as well as the collection of bands the sampler constitutes of. So we started to do one for the second issue of our zine, we started to contact local (Austrian) bands. During this process we suddenly realized “what the fuck are we doing here?” We put bands on that sampler which are from the western part of Austria which is about 600 kilometers apart from our writing desks but we do not consider bands from Slovenia which we could meet after 2 and a half hour car drive.
Well we were disillusioned… We re-thought everything and started with a new approach.
Basically our intention to do a sampler is to support bands. It is all about effort we put in contacting them and ask them to participate and of course not about giving bands the “honor” of being part of something exclusive.
At first we wanted to a do a sampler with bands we hosted or did shows for. Then we realized it would just be unfair to reduce it on that! We thought of asking all bands that in any way cooperated with us (did a column an interview or whatever) if they want to be part of this project. Then we thought it would just be unfair to spare out bands we had a nice talk with and impressed us musically so we wanted support them as well. So as you can imagine, after 2 years actively participating in something like a DIY Scene that would have been a huge list of bad ass bands. I wouldn´t call the list infinite but well it would have been a long one. So in the end we got back to the sampler of bands that would mostly call Austrian as their citizenship. But this is in no way an appeal to support your scene in order to support your Austrian scene. We should appreciate everybody who is putting a lot of effort in making music we like, with a massage or attitude we can agree with, without caring about his or her nationality. Of course there is a certain truth in the approach that you should know the band next door that you should know what is going on around you instead of being ignorant and following someone else´s lead. But as we mentioned before, we should not prefer this or that band because of its nationality.
So please give the bands we chose for this sampler a listen without caring too much about their passports. They earn your attention because they made the decision to perform passionate music without focusing on commerce. We tried to pattern this sampler quite diversified. We know that there are more bands in Austria but these are the ones we had contact with and made good experiences with.
Declaring War on Nostalgia
PS: Alea non iacta est! This won’t be our last zine and this probably won’t be our last sampler so we will have a new approach to choose bands for our sampler and it will be a cleverer one. Still not giving a shit about Austria and patriotism.
LOVE