Writing about music that didn't survive its own context. Bands without archives. Scenes without historians.https://www.thebsideofeverything.com/en-ushttps://www.thebsideofeverything.com/royal-you/https://www.thebsideofeverything.com/royal-you/Neil Pascoe wrote this for a webzine called Pulse // Static that went offline in 2009. I found it through the Wayback Machine while looking for something else entirely. Pascoe reviewed maybe forty shows for that site over two years, all of them competent, none of them memorable. Then he saw The Royal You and wrote something that didn't sound like anything else he'd published. I've never been able to confirm whether the band actually existed. No recordings. No Discogs entry. No trace beyond this review and two dead forum threads.Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:05:53 GMThttps://www.thebsideofeverything.com/firkin/https://www.thebsideofeverything.com/firkin/Nate Pruitt and I know each other a little. Not well. We were at the same house show in Columbus once and he spilled a beer on my jacket and we've been on nodding terms ever since. He sent me this essay before he posted it, which he says he does with things he's nervous about. I think it's the most honest piece of music criticism I've read in years, mostly because it's about the music criticism and not the music. The part about Jesse keeps me up sometimes.Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:05:53 GMThttps://www.thebsideofeverything.com/rue/https://www.thebsideofeverything.com/rue/This isn't an article. It's a comment section. Someone uploaded a live video of a band called Rue performing "Nest" at a place called The Bakery in Asheville, and then people argued about it for four years. I saved it because the argument is better than most essays I've read about what happens when a song leaves the room it was written in. Also because Iris might actually show up at the end, and if that's really her, it's the closest thing to a resolution the internet has ever produced.Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:05:53 GMThttps://www.thebsideofeverything.com/superegos/https://www.thebsideofeverything.com/superegos/This one's recent. Mara Kinsey, writing for The New Noise, spending four days with a band in an LA studio. The Dropdead Superegos still have a pulse. They have a label and everything. So why is it here? Because most profiles tell you what a band sounds like. This one catches the moment a band finds out what it sounds like, and not everyone in the room hears the same thing. Kinsey stayed long enough for the quiet parts. Most writers don't.Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:05:53 GMThttps://www.thebsideofeverything.com/candlemakers/https://www.thebsideofeverything.com/candlemakers/Liner notes from a 2025 reissue on Candlepin Records. I ordered the vinyl because the label name caught my attention and I liked the town. Lebanon, Pennsylvania. I've driven through it. There's a stretch of Route 422 that looks exactly the way this record sounds, if that makes any sense, which it probably doesn't unless you've been there. The notes are unsigned except for initials. The record is good. Not great. Good in the way that a photograph of someone's parents is good. It belongs to a specific time and the people in it didn't know they were disappearing.Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:05:53 GMThttps://www.thebsideofeverything.com/parallax/https://www.thebsideofeverything.com/parallax/A guy who runs a blog called SubFreqBlog translated this from a Japanese music site using eight months of self-taught language skills and what sounds like a phrasebook he found in a Portland bookstore. The original interview is probably better. I don't speak Japanese either, so I'll never know. What I do know is that somewhere in the middle of this, two musicians describe what happens when one of them leaves a gap and the other one walks into it, and it's the best thing in here about trust. The translator's endnotes about monkey proverbs and dumpling idioms are a bonus I didn't expect to love as much as I do.Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:05:53 GMThttps://www.thebsideofeverything.com/pfg/https://www.thebsideofeverything.com/pfg/I received this from a friend who teaches at Ohio State. She said, "You need to read chapter four." I said I don't read dissertations. She said, "You'll read this one." She was right. Amanda Harrisburg spent five years chasing a campus funk band that rehearsed in a janitor's closet and may or may not have been engaged in actual worship. The methodology section alone is worth the price of admission. I've read a lot of academic writing about music. Most of it makes music sound like it happened to someone else. This one sounds like it happened to Amanda, and she's not entirely comfortable with that, and the discomfort is the best part.Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:05:53 GMThttps://www.thebsideofeverything.com/wbtk/https://www.thebsideofeverything.com/wbtk/A friend in Virginia sent me this on a cassette with no label. She said, "Side B, about forty minutes in." I almost didn't get there. Side A was a segment about weekend concert listings and a car dealership ad I listened to twice because I forgot to fast-forward. When I found the segment, I played it straight through, rewound it, and played it again. Then I sat there for a while. Three people in a radio booth trying to agree on what happened to two people who aren't in the room. Nobody agrees. Nobody's wrong. The phone number on the tape is my favorite detail in the entire collection, and Shanice telling Curtis to call it is the second.Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:05:53 GMThttps://www.thebsideofeverything.com/beato/https://www.thebsideofeverything.com/beato/Lars Jansen wrote this for a Dutch site as a show preview, which means it was meant to be disposable. Read it before Thursday, go to the show, forget it. Except the show has happened and the preview is still the most complete account of Yoko Beato that exists in English. I don't know if Beato is a genius or a fraud or just a guy from Ballarat who figured out that mystery is a better marketing strategy than clarity. Jansen doesn't know either, and he's honest about it, which makes this more useful than a piece by someone who'd already made up their mind.Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:05:53 GMThttps://www.thebsideofeverything.com/ama/https://www.thebsideofeverything.com/ama/A Reddit AMA. I'm aware of how that sounds next to a dissertation chapter and a blindfold test and liner notes for a 1972 vinyl reissue. I don't care. Marcos Barrera runs a small ambient label out of Phoenix and came online to talk about it, and instead spent two hours telling strangers about the band he used to be in. He built a whole label out of what was left after the loud thing ended. I understand that instinct more than I'm going to get into here.Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:05:53 GMThttps://www.thebsideofeverything.com/blindfold/https://www.thebsideofeverything.com/blindfold/This ran in a student journal at Waukesha College. Issue 22. I found it because someone quoted the Dawn of Midi section on a forum and I tracked it back. The student, Kelly Platz, spent a year convincing a percussion professor to sit in a chair and listen to records she'd never heard. The result is the best writing about listening I've ever encountered, and most of it is Claudette Boone talking. I don't have a better explanation for why I collect this stuff.Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:05:53 GMThttps://www.thebsideofeverything.com/tactical-duck/https://www.thebsideofeverything.com/tactical-duck/Half a page from a French punk zine called Sortie, issue 14, summer of 1998. I got it in a trade at a record fair in Indianapolis. The reviewer, Émile, is mixed on the record and completely right about the bassist. I don't know anything else about Tactical Duck. The 7-inch is white vinyl with a photocopied duck in a helmet on the sleeve. I own a copy. It cost me two dollars and a Jawbreaker bootleg.Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:05:53 GMThttps://www.thebsideofeverything.com/booking-sheet/https://www.thebsideofeverything.com/booking-sheet/Nate Kovacs books the undercard at a regional festival and wrote this for an industry newsletter that maybe three hundred people read. It's about a band called The Categoristics, who he saw in a tent in 2018 and has been quietly losing his mind about ever since. The piece is really about what happens when you know something the spreadsheet doesn't, and whether that still counts for anything.Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:05:53 GMThttps://www.thebsideofeverything.com/dale-sievert/https://www.thebsideofeverything.com/dale-sievert/VHS tape, unlabeled, from a box lot at an estate sale outside Springfield. The first twenty minutes were someone's kid's soccer game. This was after. I don't know anything about Random Bread beyond what's on the tape. I don't know anything about Dale Sievert either, except that he was still doing the show in 1997 and that he'd been doing it since 1992, which means he outlasted most of the bands he put on.Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:05:53 GMThttps://www.thebsideofeverything.com/chavaddo/https://www.thebsideofeverything.com/chavaddo/An entry from a record guide that never made it past a photocopied first edition. The book was called Shore Leave: A Buyer's Guide to the Jersey Coast Underground, 1965–1979, written and self-published in 1987 by a guy named Phil Corrado out of Toms River. Sixty-four entries, spiral-bound, distributed through three or four record shops in Monmouth and Ocean counties. I found a copy in a milk crate at a flea market in Englishtown. The cover was gone.Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:05:53 GMT