Dusted Magazine -- C/D

I'm not into most of the records they review (ie the free improv and punk rock stuff), but I still read it pretty much daily. Especially after they added audio in the reviews.

Yeah, the audio is a nice touch. They review a lot of reissue stuff -- e.g., Dust-to-Digital's catalogue -- which I love.

Hi, Daniel.

Uh . . . hi.

That you're magazine? If so, it's v. good.

No, I run a different one, but I think you might like us (paperthinwalls.com)

/end plug

That all being said, I like Dusted's guest lists a lot.

LOL. Yeah, I like PTW a lot. Last year, you did a fantastic track-for-track discussion of the After Dark comp from the Italians Do It Better label. One of the best pieces I read all last year.

(xp)

i like paperthinwalls! : )

Oh sweet, the Dusted xword puzzles are still online. I thought they were gone.

I like the lists also.

I read this online music magazine.

yeah this one is good-- combine this w/ popmatters and you kinda get the indie and pop cross section you had w/ stylus

BTW, WGW, the PTW feature I was thinking of is called "Listening Party," and I just signed up for the RSS feed. As I said, it's a great feature.

I never really read Stylus. Worst online mag is easily cokemachineglow.

xpost

oh wow... thanks D. Esq!

yeah cokemachineglow is insufferable-- but i get the feeling only 15 ppl read it and/or are supposed to understand any of it

don't read dusted every day anymore but they do some good stuff ... the "Destined" articles at the end of every year have put me up on a lotta good bands ... and Mosurock's singles column ...

^Yes the singles column.

I'm on board with Dusted.

I gave cokemachineglow a chance for a few weeks, but never again.
THE BOOKMARK HAS BEEN DELETED.

I don't always agree with their conclusions, but Dusted's reviews have been especially good lately: well-written, straightforward and interesting.

Just sayin'.

i like dusted, mostly for their features though

I'm impressed they're still around... also that the bottom of every page on their website still says "©2002-2005 Dusted Magazine. All Rights Reserved"

haha

Yeah, they're usually real good.

I'm impressed they're still around... also that the bottom of every page on their website still says "©2002-2005 Dusted Magazine. All Rights Reserved"

Also funny that the Magic Markers circa 2004 or so are still the people you see when you open up the homepage. Part of the reason I like it: they are not trying so hard to maximize page views, just quietly providing rock-solid reviews and occasionally great features etc. (occasional in that they aren't frequent, not in that they are duds).

How many Dusted writers have paying writing gigs elsewhere? It seems like it is largely a site for the love of it, so to speak (being lazy, of coures I could google writers etc., but as so many writers turn up here perhaps there is an insider answer to this?)

I am a Dusted stalwart.

dusted is great. informative, tasteful, no BS.

also, unlike so many other music magazines, it doesn't send my browser spiraling towards flash-ad doom.

"online music magazines," that is

Perhaps this is why it pops up so infrequently in other threads/heated discussions:

... tasteful, no BS.

Not much to throw into the gristmill when you are being generally honest and tasteful, though Mosurock, Earles, and a few others certainly don't pull any punches when they get worked up about something.

yeah, i mainly just meant that they don't have a "news" section like pfork and other sites -- with important stuff like TRACKLISTING REVEALED and so forth.

Marginally popular band adds tourdates to the tourdates we posted yesterday.

dusted is great . . . except for andrew beckerman. he comes off like the indie snob little brother of scharpling and wurster's "rock, rot, or rule" dude

they have an interesting approach to end-of-year lists, too (just individual writers' year-end reviews and best albums/songs, but without rank-ordering their selections (unless they want to, iirc))

that's really neat, actually

I don't usually rank my year-end list, I think it's pointless. I may choose a top ten and a next ten and so forth, but don't see a big point is nit-picking any further than that.

Markers, have you checked that site out? Lots of interesting stuff going on in their archives etc., and their approach may be refreshing to you, as they stay out of a lot of online nonsense and stick mostly to the task at hand, though of course none of us can do that all of the time in this day and age.

I too enjoy their approach to year-end lists. But I think it makes sense strictly because the writers at Dusted seem to have such different genre/sub-genre focuses. There are a fair number of jazz reviews, for example, and trying to rank apples and oranges is too confusing.

Pitchfork is trying to be the expert on indie rock and hip hop; so a year-end ranking makes more sense. Same with, say, Resident Advisor's list.

Great site. I've been looking in sort of irregularly for a few years now. I also really appreciate Dusted's calm. PF is just too busy for me to begin to look at (and for my very old laptop to handle!).

the absence of numeric ratings on dusted reviews really calls attention to how distracting they can be on pitchfork reviews, since both sites' reviews are otherwise kind of similar in style. somehow i find it's easier to be interested in what a dusted review can tell me about the record since there's no other way of finding out from the review.

They have a great jazz writer in Derek Taylor. There's no-one else currently writing about Peter Brötzmann and free improv with such enthusiasm and clarity.

What's up with it?

I don't know, was about to ask the same thing. One of my usual morning review stops.

https://twitter.com/spotieotis/status/252744341829853185

server crash innit

Busted

Just glad that it is only a server issue. Was excited to see Pelt surface on Friday in the "Listed" feature, and to see that they are going to have a new album coming out. My favorite music site by far.

Loved that Listed! Pelt were in my town maybe four years ago and it was so great. I bought the "A Stone For Angus Maclise" lp. Awesome meditation music.

Got excited by news of that Pelt article so I rushed over to the Dusted site to read it and ah...

What's up with it?

lol

Pelt guys are super-nice. If you get a chance to see Mike Gangloff play solo (or with Black Twig Pickers guys in any format) do so, it is great. I live in Virginia, where there is a lot of nonsense passing as old-timey and bluegrass music, but Mike plays a variety of it that is so good! He plays fiddle and banjo tunes in alternate tunings that somehow make the old songs and originals he writes sound so much fuller and more dynamic (helps that he has broad interests beyond old-time and bluegrass music of course). He also goes around rural Virginia and W. Virginia learning them from families/musicians who learned them from others, i.e., tries to go right to the source of the songs. Tells lots of great stories to go along with them too.

It's back online btw

it's back! that pelt thing is pretty great.

what's up with these guys?

yeah, after being one of the more reliably updated sites, they seem to be kinda drifting this year.

This bums me out, and has me a little worried that it is just going to go away. Would be incredibly sad for me. Seems like they had developed a new schedule somewhat, which was maybe more like 6 reviews a week, but not sure there is any pattern at all any more.

yeah would be a bummer...crazy that i've been checking them out pretty much daily for close to a decade now!

love dusted, would hate to see them go

Yeah, me too (in re a decade or so of excellent reviews/features). I would love to hear the "behind the scenes" story of how that site works, because the writing is almost universally good to great (though a real head scratcher has appeared a few times) but surely no one is getting paid (zero adds etc.) The labor of love aspect must run high there, but still, to have kept up the pace they have with (seemingly) no financial reward and such a high quality is truly something to marvel at. It is just so atypical of the internet generally that I can't believe it is real sometimes.

so any news? the updates seem to be getting further and further apart. going to be sad if this is falling apart after such a good run.

There was a week or two there where there were regular reviews again. Then nothing ....

Was just wondering this myself. It's been a good source of reviews for some time now, hope this is just a vacation.

Good riddance. I'll miss the Listed feature though.

?

Any reason?

Dusted is ace, hope it pulls through.

that site is like a ghost town now. bummer. it was one of the best

Is anyone from that site an ILMer? I think Mosurock was at some point but is long gone, just would love to hear something one way or the other. Big bummer for sure to me though. Can't understand any sentiments of "good riddance" being lobbed their way unless you were on the receiving end of a "Still Single" beat down or got turned down as a reviewer or something.

Yeah, I'd really like to hear. I mean, I'm assuming it's pretty much done at this point, but it'd be nice to hear an inside story.

Sad news if this is the end. They always covered a wide / diverse range of music pretty well IMO.

So they updated their chart today, but still no new reviews or anything else. Seems like someone is still investing some energy in it.

https://twitter.com/FloatingHatchet/status/349863165254832128

Good news!

Hah, I know how that "real life" thing goes. Great news on both fronts!

huzzah!

Dusted is taking an extended break. We will return in late July.

they're back!

Yes!

2 weeks since last new reviews

cmon guyz we miss u

what happened to these guys? updates gone sporadic in the past few months and the site won't load for me today. come back, dusted!

Weird, was just coming here to post that the site is completely down.

yeah I found that earlier, Had found they had a review of the Afflicted Man lp that's just been officially reissued so wanted to read it. Either that or the bootleg complete recordings from 2007 & I couldn't get it to load.

http://dustedmagazine.tumblr.com/

rip dusted, i guess.

Explanation from Otis himself, which seems to be good news generally:

http://dustedmagazine.tumblr.com/post/72098885772/what-happened-to-dusted#

backward compatibility is a bitch

Yep

ha i've always liked that dusted looked pretty much exactly the same for a decade.

http://dustedmagazine.tumblr.com/post/87812734554/the-dusted-in-exile-first-and-maybe-last-mid-year

hard to say things have been smooth sailing over there but i like the sound of this

We are more of a collective than we used to be, so these discussions can go on for some time and often take unexpected turns. An idea surfaced: What if we each nominate one or two records as favorites and then have someone else on staff review them? Sort of like a Secret Santa exchange, except not secret and not very Santa-ish (i.e. no presents). Surprisingly, the concept gained traction, and we all kicked in ideas. A week or so later, I printed all of the recommended albums out in large type, cut them into strips and randomly drew names from a bowl to assign them to writers. There were a few rules. No one could review his or her own suggestion. No one could be assigned a record he or she had already reviewed for Dusted in Exile. You were not allowed to refuse a record because it was outside your comfort zone, which was, after all, sort of the point. We loaded up promos into a Dropbox and started exchanging records.

We ran into the usual problems. Some people didn’t like their assignments. A few, it turned out, didn’t really understand the concept and weren’t as on board as we thought they were. But mostly, it was a pretty interesting experience. It spared us from writing at least once about our favorite records. (I almost always hate my No. 1 a little by year end, just because I’ve had to write about it so many times.) It got us out of our ruts. It fostered more communication between writers, who are, god knows, often pretty isolated from each other. And maybe most importantly, it turned us on to new music, which is, after all, why most of us got into music writing in the first place. It certainly wasn’t the money.

oh just go away already

http://dustedmagazine.tumblr.com/post/156939917240/want-to-write-for-dusted