Welcome to Freq.
Freq was founded on 1 April 2008, and the main focus of Freq for the last decade and more has been on the bastardized forms of music which are polluting Millennial culture so nicely – the forms which offer innovation, eccentricity and unashamed noise. Resistance to the pervading pop culture may not be original, easy or successful in the long term – after all, how long does it take before any ‘underground’ musical form is assimilated into the service of advertising cars, mobile phones and sundry assorted products and services? – but it just feels like the right thing to do in the circumstances.
As the .org part of Freq’s URL indicates, we’re not in it for the money, and no advertising will appear on this site. For as long as possible we intend to keep those sufficiently interested entertained and informed about the grey and even greying areas of music (let’s not forget the apparently dim and distant past – a Freq favourite re-release in the last decade of the twentieth century was The Holy Modal Rounders‘ first two albums [on one CD] which drew on American Folk music from the Nineteen Twenties and earlier), and let’s not forget that Modern music can be traced back at least as far as Stravinsky‘s Rite Of Spring. It’s not what label it’s on that counts, nor even if it’s on a major, a division of a multinational multimedia giant, or the home-produced work of one person and their CD burner (or even as has recently re-emerged as an object of retro-fetishism, cassette recorder). If it’s interesting, unusual, excellent or subversive, Freq aims to cover it – and sometimes if it’s very bad or just plain average we’ll try to provide a warning or a commentary. Maybe even the mediocre will be considered. Just weep when a favourite slab of noise crops up in a glisteningly slick ad for the latest in semi-disposable motoring or in the incidental music for otherwise bland TV. Don’t say you weren’t warned; or that it can’t happen, or that the wishes of an artist can’t be wholly ignored in the pursuit of commodity sales.
Reader feedback and contributions are always welcome using the form below.
Richard Fontenoy; Editor.
Introduction updated 1 June 2010