Print Profile: Douglas Lance Gibson - Mountain Fold Music Journal
Posted by Chris Barton on 21st March 2010
Douglas Lance Gibson comes from flat farming land, is beckoned by the Australian high plains of Hotham and now lives in Sydney where he produces Mountain Fold Music Journal. Despite the abundance of music media very few titles have the ability to connect in the way that Mountain Fold does. Maybe it’s because other publications appear to view music in isolation from the rest of the world, confine artists to the recording studio, or measures them by their final output. While this kind of critique is important, it can tend to ignore the role of music in our everyday lives. By talking about something we can forget what is around it—Mountain Fold doesn’t.
The publication also has high visual impact, each issue consists of four indepth interviews with accompanying photography by the likes of Rene Vaile, Jeff Burch, Max Doyle, Thomas Jeppe and Thobias Fäldt and cover artists have included Stefan Marx, Tom Polo and Rhys Lee. The musicians interviewed are given a further two pages to curate and this is space is often used to showcase their own visual work or that of their close associates. In Mountain Fold, even the ads are entertaining, a rare feat indeed.
From Eddy Current to Beaches, Roland S Howard to UV Race, the featured artists in Mountain Fold show high yet varied degrees of eccentricity and experimentation. Because of this the publication will continue to be referred to as "niche" yet the themes contained within each issue are far broader than you think.
Chris Barton: The name Mountain Fold is some kind of print terminology, right?
Douglas Lance Gibson: It's actually a reference to origami. It is one of the two principle folds, alongside the valley fold. I saw the magazine as being a series of mountain folds.
CB: Are you speaking metaphorically or technically here?
DLG: I mean it in a physical sense. The construction of a magazine is a series of pieces of paper folded in half and bound. It's a little tongue-in-cheek for a magazine to be named after how it is constructed, which I liked. As a side note, I really am an alpine beast and love the mountains, so that also came into play when I was thinking of the name.
CB: Do you think that your mountain man tendencies stem from the fact that you grew up in an extremely flat farming area or is it more about psychology than geography?
DLG: Yeah, I grew up on a farm outside of Trangie and it's extremely flat. The "You can see the horizon through the trees" kind of flat. Though every year our family would go skiing down at Mt Hotham, and I developed a really strong bond with that country. It's where I see myself ending up. I love the landscape down there, I love the cold. And while I also love the flatness and the dry conditions of my home country, the snow always seemed that little bit more foreign and fleeting. I'd say it's just as much geographical as it is psychological.
CB: I guess the reason I ask (and now I'll confess to be drawing metaphors) is that landscapes are extremely important to how we live. When we enter a new landscape we look at it on a superficial level but it is not until we start actually living in it that we begin to understand what it provides and what it is missing. I'm interested in how you entered the music "landscape" and why you thought it was important to add Mountain Fold to that environment?
DLG: Yes, I agree with you. I've been living in the city now for 6 years and it's only recently that I've become keenly aware of its limitations. Growing up in the country, I used to listen to a lot of country music like Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson and Tim McGraw. There weren't really a lot of other options.
When I went to boarding school, things slowly changed for me and by the time I was 16, through recommendations from friends and my own researching, I became aware of Pavement and Sonic Youth, and that's where things really started for me.
From there I became more interested in the local music scene, slowly making friends with similar interests along the way. At some point I realised that there was a lack of documentation surrounding the scene, and felt that I could possibly rectify this situation. I didn't want to limit myself to just Sydney though, as while I felt it was important to capture what was going on here and share it elsewhere, I felt the need to also highlight acts from the rest of the country and internationally was just as relevant.
We're just about to release our 4th issue, so it's been a year that we've been in production. I can slowly see the magazine becoming part of the landscape, which is a very satisfying feeling.
CB: Not only is the magazine becoming part of the landscape through its consistent quality but it is also evolving in its own right. Now that the basics are down-pat, is it fair to say that each issue is becoming a little more free, or experimental? For instance, this issue you are factoring in Sunday Ganim's patterned scarves into the design of the magazine...
DLG: We are slowly becoming more confident with our own identity, and feel that we are able to play with the limits a little more. When we started I had a very firm idea of how the magazine should look. I felt that there needed to be a consistency throughout the magazine. The problem with consistency though is that it can become repetitive, so we are very conscious of making each feature stand out as unique while also cohering to the framework we've enforced. I think it's important to look at seemingly unrelated practices for inspiration, which was the case with Sunday Ganim's role in this issue.
I had been aware of Sunday's work for a little while, and was introduced to her through a mutual friend. I felt that her scarves could add an abstract visual element that wouldn't detract from the content. We had a couple of discussions about how I thought we could incorporate them into the layout and I sent through a few reference images, then she just went off and wove them and when she sent through the finished scarves, I was totally blown away.
CB: I can't wait to see the finished product. In fact, I would pay to see it (haha) And things brings us to a point of contention: Why on earth is Mountain Fold free?!
DLG: A lot of people try to convince me to charge money for it, and there have been times where I have considered it, but one of the original intentions of the magazine was to make it free. I see Mountain Fold as a gateway. It documents a scene that is rarely covered in other media, besides specialized blogs, and it is often hard to get that initial foothold when you are exploring something new. I know that was the case for me. For someone to pick up a copy of the magazine there doesn't need to be any more commitment than them bending over and picking a copy off the stack on the ground. They don't have to interact with the judgmental record store dude, they can just pick it up and walk out, and hopefully it'll empower them to go back and explore the acts that were featured in the magazine.
CB: I agree with all that you're saying. Distribution is the hardest part for an emerging magazine—especially a niche title—and making it free is half the battle over and not just for the publisher but the audience as well. It does however raise an interesting question of whether you get as much out of the process as the artists that you feature or the audience that gets to read it?
DLG: I'm not quite sure how to quantify who gets more out of the process. I know that it's allowed me to contact and form relationships with both musicians and visual artists that I admire. I've made some solid friendships out of this experience, and not just in Sydney but all around Australia and overseas. It makes me feel a little less like a fanboy when I can approach a band and actually have something to offer them. It's definitely been one of the most rewarding experiences that I've been involved with. So, in that respect I definitely don't feel like I am being shortchanged in the process.
CB: Yeah I probably wouldn't like you if you didn't have a magazine either. But seriously the idea of friendship seems to be a recurring theme when I speak to publishers about why they keep publishing. I think a lot of people on the outside of the industry might not see that element, it certainly didn't occur to me until I started doing it. Immediate friendships aside, you are growing a broader community around the publication through launches and events but how do these things, which are demanding and can often fall in between the cracks, fit into your priorities?
DLG: When we first launched the magazine, the original plan was to only have a party for the first issue but we all had so much fun that we felt like we should continue to launch each issue. That expanded into having launches down in Melbourne too. For Issue #3 we combined with Goodgod Small Club to present Gold Shoulder, where Mountain Fold hosted every Friday night for 3 weeks with the final night acting as the launch for the issue. It turned out to be quite successful and we plan to do another one when the time's right. Obviously, the magazine takes top priority but with these events it works to actually present the music that we cover. I believe it helps to cultivate an audience because they are able to interact directly with the music they've read about. There is definitely room for us to expand in this direction. It'd be nice to think we'd be able to tour some of the international acts we feature in the future.
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