By Selina Yang (@y_aniles)
To walk around Chicago in the early days of the Hallogallo zine, is to face the chance of coming across one of the neon risograph booklets shoved in a tree. The zine itself, with its mixed media collage scans and rippled washes, feel like an 80s punk time capsule. It’s indifferent to popularity. It’s magnetically attracted to local music. You can be Chicago-based, but you don’t have to be. You can be the type of person to collect handmade tapes through classified ads, but you don’t have to be. Manila mailers emblazoned with Hallogallo’s sheep mascot, who represents “the growing network of Radical Youth Sheeple People Rock-n-Roll Punkrockers,” are sailing around the world.
Kai Slater (guitar, vocals), of noise-rock band Lifeguard and solo project Sharp Pins, hand-makes the zine from Hallogallo HQ, aka his apartment. Interviews are written by typewriter — a Sisyphean feat on a machine with no back button, but Slater accomplishes it anyways. Hallogallo zine is a collective effort.where in addition to Slater’s organizing, Lifeguard members Asher Case (bass, vocals) and Issac Lowenstein (drums) conduct interviews together. Local friends and international community members keep an eye out for exciting new acts to include. Although Slater is largely the curator and creator, and has probably pulled the most all nighters for it, the zine’s mission statement underlines again and again that “it is not a zine owned by anybody”. To find your own writing, poetry, or artwork in the zine is just a click of an email away. Hallogallo began by documenting the talent of their artistically-inclined friends, but as Slater’s musical obligations pulled him on tour around the world, Hallogallo’s community goes global as well.
Hallogallo is a cipher to Chicago’s teen-beat youth revolution. This is the same home where the likes of Horsegirl, Lifeguard, Friko, and Post Office Winter flourish, offering a space for youth musicians to find solidarity despite the largely 21+ venues. Sometimes, this means performing in gift shops, or hosting their own all-ages “rave-ups”. Within Hallogallo’s pages, legends of the likes of Michael Rother (of NEU!) and Laetitia Sadier (of Stereolab) mingle with mutual aid placements and essays on leftist history. The zine is electric with serendipity, where Slater’s artistic personal tastes and friendships merge with open submissions from those who stumble into Hallo-world.
Yes, the name “Hallogallo” honors the NEU! song. On getting to interview Rother in Issue 8, the zine comments, “The guy the zine is named after is now talking to us! Who could even top this?”
Outside of the creators’ own musical obligations, Hallogallo zine offers a respite from the studio, into a library that pools together the community’s collective knowledge. In this interview, Selina from Post-Trash sat down with the members of Lifeguard during their U.S. tour. Kai Slater, Issac Lowenstein, and Asher Case offer their insights into the creation of Hallogallo zine.
[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]
Selina Yang: How did Hallogallo Zine start? What was the community like at the time the zine first got together?
Kai Slater: There was a group that were making music in a similar DIY headspace. We all had a very tight friendship and musical connection, but it wasn't as a community type thing. Post-covid, we wanted to create a clearer sense of community so that more young people making music could feel like they have a home, especially in Chicago, or hopefully globally. Our first [zine] issue was like, “this is us”. The main goal was creating this clear thing that people could latch on to, where it’s a material thing that shows what we’re trying to do.
I think zines are so powerful, especially right now, because there’s less non-digital forms of connection. Holding a magazine is the same as going to a show, seeing something in front of you. It feels like getting a letter from your friend. Someone made this zine and typed it all out on a typewriter. There’s definitely more effort into it than making an Instagram post. This naturally has more of an effect once everything is so digital.
Selina: Since zines are historically countercultural, what do you see your zine countering? What are Hallogallo’s values?
Slater: It’s definitely counter to the average thing you’re taught to do as a young person. Zines are an important form of alternate communication, because it’s more under the radar. Unless you actually buy it, you’re not going to find it online. It feels more free to express radical ideas from being in a young band, doing it yourself. It rejects the notion of a capitalistic lifestyle, and even in interviews, people can say whatever the fuck they want to say.
Asher Case: Zines are also a great place for youth essays to exist. A lot of people aren’t reading essays written by people under the college education level. Reading the essays that kids write in zines is way better than reading older people's essays. Also, you can get your essay into a zine a lot easier than you can get it into like any other type of publication. I think,and especially in Hallogallo, there are some great essays by my friends that I'm very moved by. One I’m really thinking of is one that [my friend] Desi wrote in an earlier issue.
Slater: There’s also a practical purpose. There was this psycho in Chicago who booked a bunch of hardcore shows, and had a whole bunch of….henchmen? Bodyguards. He booked this show with a kid who everyone knew was a Nazi, wearing a Swastika shirt and shit. People started getting angry that he was playing this punk show, so he had his bodyguards beat these kids up. It was crazy. We had an article writing their firsthand experience of that. I don't know, it might be taken down in another context from another website. I think that’s really important to exist.
Selina: Music journalism is sometimes criticized for intertwining with marketing. How do you separate Hallogallo from that?
Slater: Music journalism can tend to serve a purpose of marketing, as you were saying. I think a zine is very different from most music journalism. It's usually just written by fans who aren't professionals, or theorists, they’re just kids that are passionate about something because it directly affects them. It’s talking about music, talking about concerts, people, issues, or fucked up shit in the scene. The vehicle of a zine feels more immediate to express things like that.
Selina: Can you tell me more about the visual language of Hallogallo?
Slater: I am definitely a design oriented person. I'm not much of a visual artist, except I like layouts and album covers. That's the stuff I've been most inspired by. With zines, there’s something [timeless] that comes across because I’m doing what you would have done in any era to make a zine, where you’re typewriting and collaging.That process of cutting things out is very similar to how we make music. We are very DIY recorded, on our own, printing on our own. I’m very into the art of printmaking and the weird textures you get from it.
Selina: Who’s behind the production of the physical zine itself? You hand make everything in your own apartment, right?
Slater: I’ve done it a few different ways, and I'm doing it differently the next few. The first one I went into UPS and made a bunch of copies. I told them I’d make 20, and made 50 instead. I did that for the second one but they caught me and I had to pay the full price. Then I was doing Mixam for a while, which is a good print shop. Now I’m doing all the risograph on a soy based, old printing process that was made for churches somewhere in Asia. It’s like a mini screen print, so it's very efficient. I really love the process, and we just did some album art with it. It’s a cool looking way to get monochrome stuff. I’ve always liked monochrome, just printing and copying onto colored paper and stuff. So yeah. A lot of long nights of stapling.
Selina: I just got a copy of Tango zine, who interviewed you in their first issue. When I opened it to see the paper stapled and glued, I was so moved to see it all done by hand.
Slater: Absolutely. It’s the same as getting a DIY cassette tape, hand stamped, and hand colored. The next tape I’m doing is going to be hand crayoned, so there’s some sense of each one being unique.
Selina: Is there a particular decade you’re inspired by, design wise?
Slater: Zines were probably biggest in the 90s punk rock scene, but they’ve existed for a while. Even in the 20s, Latin American posters for revolts and farmer protests were made with a lithographic printing process. I really like 80s zines a lot. There’s this book that I had that’s all about the mod revival zines, Ripped & Torn, Sniffing Glue, all those first wave punk zines that led into the 80s. It just looks awesome. All the toner was super fucked looking. My friend Henry Ownings, who did one of our records, does a zine called Chunklet. He showed me all of his old zines, and I was so inspired by them because it was an old toner printer that could do Duotone, so it could be blue. He would just overlay that on. So cool! I didn’t really think about it. My favorite type of designs are done really quickly because people weren't thinking about it. The process of printing looks so textured.
Selina: In music, in painting, whatever, your favorite part of the piece can be something the artist spent one second thinking about.
Slater: It’s the same for recording. In some of my favorite records, the recording was very hastily done — or, really specifically. There’s so many ways to record, and so many ways to make a zine. As a creator, you fall in love with certain processes.
Selina: Where do you find people to interview? Is there a thematic element to each issue?
Slater: Usually it just happens to find somatic pathways. They’re all over the place in my head. The next ones are all mod bands, like Smashing Times and Dolly Mixture. It also has Ultramarine, which Issac interviewed, which is an old electronica electro acoustic folktronica band. We did this big interview with this band from Atlanta called Limbo District.
Case: We interviewed Limbo District as a band. Me, Kai, and Issac talked to Kelly Crow from Limbo District, and it was one of the most informative interviews I’ve done. I like reading
interviews about bands and learning the history, but with Limbo District, there's no source of them anywhere online. The connection was through Henry Owings, who is an Atlanta guy, and Limbo District is from Atlanta. We basically just learned the entire history of that band. It is some of the most inspiring music history that I've ever heard, because it’s about very weird people with very weird interests, making music and movie that I really like. Actually talking to one of the people that was in it, and having connections to someone in that video, is very cool.
Selina: Do you relate to any parts of their story?
Case: I actually see their story as something so different from my life, which is why I’m so drawn to it. A good part of their band was these exchange students who they knew only during their exchange in the US at the university. It’s very specific things about these people that I don’t have a parallel for in my own life, which is why it’s so easy to attach to.
Slater: They’re different from us, but also, they were a band almost entirely made up of queer people. This was before anyone knew about AIDS. A good half of the band died of AIDS. It's really interesting to think about what the queer community was like in terms of the music scene, and how you would operate as a queer band back then versus how you would today.
Case: Of Atlanta, that whole scene with R.E.M. and B-52s, [Limbo District] is a band that was in the same scene at the exact same time, right before all the major record deals were made.
Slater: Michael Stipes’ first love was in Limbo District.
Case: They also made a movie called Carnival, where they’re filming in a field. It’s very homosexual, and elaborate, and expressive, and weird. The entire time we conducted the interview, we had the video playing on loop. We could see these people making the art, and we were also talking about their relationship with each other and the scene as a whole.
Selina: Talking to your musical idols you really look up to, especially when you’re reminded of their work right there, is really intense!
Slater: There’s some people, like Cleaners from Venus, that I’m too scared to interview because I don’t even know what I could ask you. I look up to you sir. How do I ask you questions? I don’t know how to interview you, because everything you do I love.
Selina: Can you elaborate on the feeling of ‘too scared to interview’?
Slater: I think it’s just how you feel as a fan. You can easily get into idolizing someone to the point where they're not normal, which is not necessarily a good thing. It’s really humbling, and you feel more down to earth when you interview someone from Mac Demarco or the guy from NEU! and they’re just a normal dude. That’s the great part of zine interviews, where it’s not Rolling Stone, where there’s some impetus for professionality. A zine is always more conversational and you feel more free to speak your mind, so you can get more comfortable with anyone, even if they are a big artist.
Selina: Out of my own personal interest, how did you come across the Gong Gong Gong interview?
Slater: Was there a Horsegirl connection? I did it with Penelope from Horsegirl. We were super excited because we’re both huge fans. I just emailed them. Now we’re just friends, internet friends. I went to Beijing recently and was gonna hang out with them. But a lot of [finding bands] is just emailing from their Bandcamp.
Issac Lowenstein: Weirdly everyone responds. At least, being in a band. We definitely check it and see it. People get less emails than you think. If you want to find someone, that’s usually the way to do it. Even over Instagram. Everyone gets the notification on their phone with email and everyone reads it because you feel like it's business, unless it’s a really big band where their label is doing that shit instead.
Case: You don’t have an email request, because that’s where so many things get lost on Instagram [through the request inbox]. I have a blind spot to it, like I can’t even see the button.
Slater: Basically, the interviews have been from emailing on Bandcamp or meeting in a really chance way.
Selina: What was your biggest obstacle starting the zine in the beginning, versus the biggest obstacle now?
Slater: The biggest obstacle now is definitely time. You don’t want to wait too long so the interviews still feel relevant. I’m sitting on two full zines right now that I haven’t fully made, and I really want to put them out, but I’ve just been so busy with music. Once I turn 25 or something I’m going to give [the zine] to someone else to take over the zine. Or it becomes something different. It’s also expensive and I’m finding cheaper ways to do it. Starting out, the biggest obstacle was reaching a bigger audience and having people read it. I started out by putting the zine in random places.
Selina: Like flyers in the front of a record shop?
Slater: Well, more just trees.
Selina: Transcribing takes the life out of me.
Slater: The one we did with Limbo District was almost two hours. When I did the Kleenex Girl Wonder interview, I paid [my friend] Desi a bunch of money to transcribe it. It’s so tiring, especially on a typewriter. Oh my god.
Selina: How does it feel for this band, and the zine, to be tied to your youth?
Slater: That’s the crisis that we expect will happen. When we turn 20 something, I don’t know, I’m not 20. Obviously a big part of our identity is that we’re young, because the biggest difficulty of being young is to be taken seriously. But it also is part of why I think it’s exciting for people. Obviously there are people with some weird kink for young kids playing music. I think [our artistry] will naturally progress, we’re always still going to make things. I think everything we’ve done is super important, all I can hope is that it will influence other generations of young people.
