Sl@nted @nd Ench@nted

Taking the name from a Pavement (tres cool American band) album, Kod and Clodagh (2 Communications students) and maybe, I *think*, one more person started up s@e, a freesheet to be distributed around the Dublin music stores and gigs, usually of the underground and D.I.Y nature (stores such as Freebird Records and the newer Road Records), sometime around Spring 1996, I'd guess.

The freesheet started off reviewing books, punk bands, dance music and gigs, and was out at around once a month.

Around April '97, Clodagh left, and Kod recruited self-styled "Brickie" (apparantly the coiner of the phrase...) and womaniser Thayl as one of the S@E crew, and tried to get Bob to write some stuff for the freesheet too (didn't really work, the lazy git.)

S@E turned into a mush of Kod's drug-fuelled nights out, political and social commentary and Thayl's emerging liking in dance music and love for the Dublin Underground music scene.

Singer (me!) joined the crew sometime around November '97, impressing Kod and Thayl with the fact that he used to read S@E before he ever thought of going to DCU, and Kod and Thayl used this as an excuse to get closer to Bootie, Singer's girlie.

S@E started getting an amount of recognition around then, and a load of respect around Dublin, a lot of Freesheets and zines back then folded, while S@E expanded their talents to include a Webpage, and received decent reviews in The Irish Times, In Dublin, The Dublin Event Guide, and others. (I couldn't find any of them on the web, and a search on ireland.com doesn't give anything back for slanted : ( )

After Kod graduated from CS, his eyes became set on greater things, and it seemed S@E should fold. However, all summer, S@E got together a compilation CD, entitled S@ccharine, containing 14 tracks by lesser-known Dublin bands/artists, ranging from indie-pop (Palomine) to kickin' Dance music (Decal)...

A release gig was help on the 22nd of October in The Funnel (scene since of a few RB nights out...), and s@e sold out of all their 250 CD's (which, incidentally, were all hand printed up by Thayl using his CD burner at home; he even had his mother trained to burn them while he was out), which really wasn't suprising, because the entry was £4.50, which inculded the CD, 2 bands playing live, 3 dj's, and free into the club afterwards.

The last S@E (number 38!)was handed out that night...

Since then, kod released another Zine, called "Sugar Riot", which was largely an anti-work zine, and featured stories from Idaho, Clodagh, Kod, Singer and Wilma) while Thayl has maintained his status as Brickie, while delving into the odd-world of Dance music creation.

Right, defintely worth reading is the previously mentioned Sugar Riot. It features two short stories, some writing by Kod about drugs, and a load of articles about real life experiences of work. It's a very VERY good read. Trust me ;)

Also worth reading are the S@E backissues, but they're not well formatted very well. The old webpage is up too, alas, it's a very old backup of it, and it's missing a lot of later added content.

so, 2 Urls you must visit, being http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~singer/sugar for Sugar Riot and http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~singer/slanted for all the S@E pages.

--Singer

Originally from the Encyclopedia