Here's a split zine between Paradise Noise (France) and The Way of the Warrior (Italy). Both zines focus on the underground scene with a lot of coverage on bands that most people haven't heard of, which is always cool. Paradise Noise is a self-proclaimed "anti-human zine" that starts things off with 23 pages and includes some relatively brief interviews with all sorts of bands from brutal death metal to experimental noise and then some. Sadly one of the interviews that I was the most interested in reading (Mourmansk 150 - power electronics from France) is among the only two interviews that is actually written in French, so I'm shit out of luck there. Most of the interview questions are pretty short and typical, but the bands tend to do a good job of elaborating and keeping things going (especially Social Sterility). There are no reviews in this half of the zine, but there is a brief article that talks about the history of Killing Joke, and a few political oriented pieces as well. Not bad. The Way of the Warrior ("the ultimate hardcore/grind zine") gets the bulk of the space, taking 31 pages total (granted there are more ads in this half, so the content is probably almost equal). The interviews here are a bit longer and there are more of them, in addition to a slew of reviews. I'm not that big on the reviews though, because every review is incredibly short, usually topping no more than one to three lines of generally enthusiastic praise about any given release. A lot of the interviews got me interested in checking out new bands though, which I always appreciate. The label interview with The Spew Records is also a nice touch. There are a few problems here with pages being out of order, so you sort of have to dig around and find out where an interview begins and ends in a few cases, but other than that everything works out. The xeroxed layout with 27 pages (front and back) stacked and stapled together is totally D.I.Y. and absolutely works for these two zines. I wouldn't have it any other way. My main suggestions here would just be for both zines to beef up their interviews with more pointed questions, and for The Way of the Warrior to put much more effort into the reviews. Other than that these zines are both interesting, and despite their setbacks I enjoyed reading them because I'm really interested in finding out about new and obscure music from other countries. So for that, I commend them.
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The Way of the Warrior - [email protected]
