Electronic Sound #2
Electronic Sound began in 2013 as an iPad-only magazine, but from the outset the team agreed that they’d produce the publication in whatever format its readers wanted at any given time. They were flexible—whether print, digital, iPad, zine, or stone carving, they’d go wherever the tide took them. ‘We always knew that if one day people didn’t like iPad anymore, we’d publish it where they did want it to be,’ explains editor Mark Roland.
So now in 2016, the place that Electronic Sound readers want to read Electronic Sound content is—unsurprisingly for followers of magCulture—in the pages of a print publication. ‘The response to our first print version has been overwhelming,” says Roland, noting the similarities between how music fans have returned to appreciating vinyl records as well as the physical beauty of a printed product with high production value. “Bagging them up and sending them off takes us back to our fanzine days, and gives us a sense of a connection the magazine and the readers that’s even deeper that we already had.’
What’s most interesting about the new version of Electronic Sound is the way that the team has approached the design of it. Interviews and features are similar to how they’ve always been; this issue features a history of UK Electronica and interviews with the likes of Beth Orton (above) and The Associates. Its design looks wholly different though—it’s geometric, systematic, and almost cartoonish in places, and it features bold highlighter yellow (below) and neat overlapping boxes.
It looks like the kind of design you’d expect a tin robot to dream up if it had spent a few days locked up in Berlin’s Do You Read Me?!, which is fitting for a magazine of Electronic Sound’s kind.
‘The majority of music magazines I see are very cluttered, ’ explains the magazine’s art director Mark Hall. ‘We wanted something cleaner and fresher. A lot of inspiration came from the music itself, for instance, because the music we write about features a lot of modular synthesisers, we use a modular grid for the layout (see below).’
