Radio Silence / A Selected Visual History of American Hardcore Music

The most difficult part in assembling Radio Silence was communicating to everyone exactly what we were looking for. We had almost twenty years of visuals, sounds and stories to start with when we began the project, we wanted to uncover the history behind everything we knew as familiar. Somewhere out there were uncropped photos, layout mechanicals, hand written lyrics and miscellaneous shit that would blow minds, we just had to find them. The second tier to this was finding images we could get permission to use and would reproduce well.

Once we were able to communicate what we were looking for we reached out to every person we knew who might have this stuff or know where to find it. One of the first people to dig into their archives and nail what we needed was Philly’s Phinest, Justin Moulder. In addition to “playing” guitar in the legendary Prohibition, Justin was the editor of Suburban Fanzine. There was a new crop of zines in the early 1990s including Suburban, Indecision, Daydream, Industrial Cows and Tidbits that really captured a transitional time in hardcore. The early 1990s saw a wave of bands winding down, new ones cropping up and hardcore splintering off into all these sleeper cells. What struck me as unique about Suburban Fanzine aside from the fact that it actually showed up in my mailbox (ed.note - Where’s my ‘zine Gabe Good N Plenty!??) is that it embraced new sounds in hardcore but still remained critical and lighthearted. With several miles separating people and scenes, the tone of a ‘zine was your only little window into the editor and who they were….well unless you had a hacked phone dialer. Each one of these fanzines had a personality and identity that made them special.

Justin dug up this photo that he had gotten from another zinester, Mikey Fastbreak though the photo was actually taken by Micha…just Micha but Mikey scrawled his name on it in white-out. Everyone is familiar with the image Zack D screaming in that O’Neill longsleeve shirt on the cover of the Inside Out 7″ but who knew how big the actual shot was before they cropped it? There’s pretty amazing crowd here, Porcell resting his arm on the amp, Sloth Crew kids, Foundation Records owners…pretty sick . We passed this around to several Orange County dudes and they were able to identify almost every person pictured.

As the book progressed and things changed, this image got lost in the shuffle. We didn’t have a negative and couldn’t track Mikey or Micha down and the book was really going a different direction. This image was altered and changed here to a process blue, not quite Inside Out blue. Eventually the treatment for all the artwork in the book became much more hands off, we wanted the images to breathe and keep their integrity.

Redemption…I hope Justin believes in it because despite his effort and dedication a botched cut-and-paste job by myself resulted in his name being omitted in our thanks list, a major hardcore no-no. I was pretty sick when I got his text and refused to believe it but that’s how it went down. Radio Silence wouldn’t have been possible without our contributors and Justin really jump started the project with this image and we’re extremely grateful. Maybe the Phillies can win the World Series this year as a trade off…psyche!

Photo: Inside Out Spanky’s Cafe, Riverside, California c.1990; Photograph by Micha