Welcome to Freq.
Freq was founded on 1 April 1998, and its main focus for the last couple of decades 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 felt 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. When Freq started, web advertising didn’t really exist. Now it’s everywhere, and hard to avoid (though various adbockers are available for most sensible browsers), and site generate advertising revenue by encouraging clicks and retention of visitors for as long as possible so as to demonstrate just how valuable their reading of a site is to potential advertisers. Freq doesn’t do this and no money is made by this site; we do it because we like music, art and other things which aren’t about cold hard cash.
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 the roots of modern music can be traced back at least as far as Stravinsky‘s Rite Of Spring more than a century ago.
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 occasionally re-emerged as an object of retro-fetishism, cassette recorder) or download site. 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; sometimes even the mediocre will be considered (though mostly not). 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.
Richard Fontenoy, editor
Introduction updated August 2013