(Puget Sound Metal Bulletin is a print zine created by Old Man Winter, guitarist in the Seattle-based melodic death metal band Veriteras. Last week the fifth issue was published and distributed, and it includes Winter’s interview of our own Islander, presenting a discussion that focuses on NCS and Northwest Terror Fest, preceded by a bit of background about Islander’s involvement with metal. And of course we’re re-publishing that interview here today! For more info about Puget Sound Metal Bulletin and how to get it, see the links below after the interview’s conclusion.)
NO CLEAN SINGING doesn’t literally mean no clean singing. Well, it used to. As Islander, creator of the long-running metal webpage, puts it on the No Clean Singing about page: “When the site began, the name of it was serious. But as time has passed, my own tastes have broadened and other writers have joined us, and they’re even more open-minded than I am. Now, the name just confuses people, because sometimes we write about metal that includes actual singing instead of (or in addition to) growling, howling, and shrieking. But it’s kind of like if you named your kid Rufus. When she grows up, it confuses other people, but she is what she is and it might confuse people even more if you legally changed it.”
Personally, I assumed the name meant that they only reviewed metal songs that consisted entirely of swear words. But regardless of the reasons for the name, No Clean Singing has been one of the biggest online metal sites for the global metal scene for nearly two decades, providing interviews, album reviews, premiers, and a Pacific Northwest show calendar (which happens to be a primary source for the metal bulletin’s list of shows on page 7).
Not only does Islander run No Clean Singing, he’s also one of the creators of Northwest Terror Fest, one of the region’s top metal festivals, drawing fans from across the US, Canada, and beyond.
Read on to hear how these two pillars of the metal scene came to be…
A little bit about Islander:
You live in the Seattle area, I believe? Are you from here?
I do live in the Seattle area. I’ve been here since 1995, but was born and raised in Austin, Texas, went to school there, and worked in Houston for a dozen years before moving here with my family.
How did you come to like metal music?
I had dabbled in metal-listening back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but it wasn’t really in my wheelhouse and I never went to a metal show in those years. It was really my kids who got me into metal back when they were both in middle school. They were listening to stuff like melodic death metal and metalcore, and I started listening to their favorites mainly out of curiosity. It struck a chord with me – the emotional and sonic intensity of the music.
I went to lots of live shows in my teen years and early 20s (not metal, mainly punk), and I thought my kids ought to be able to see bands playing the kind of music they loved and feel the energy of live shows, so I then started taking them to Seattle venues for metal shows, and that got me even more enthusiastic about it myself.
Having been bitten by the bug, I spent a fair amount of time trying to learn about the history of metal and digging into a lot of what I had missed while listening to other genres of music.
No Clean Singing:
I’ve read the background on No Clean Singing (NCS) and how it’s evolved over time, and that the site never has (and never will) have advertisements. I’m curious what led up to you deciding to launch the website, and what motivates you to keep it going?
I thought it would be a way for my kids and me to do something fun together based on a shared interest. I had been reading MetalSucks and Reign In Blood, two very early metal blogs at that time. They were light-hearted and became a good way for me to discover new metal. So I pitched the idea to my kids that we ought to start our own metal blog just for the hell of it, and we started NCS together in 2009. Of course, none of us had any training in writing about music (and none of us were musicians), but I thought any kind of writing would be worthwhile for all of us, and a good challenge.
The two of them eventually drifted away from NCS when they started college, but I was still having fun with it so I kept going by myself, trying to write something every day. It was just a good break from what I did for work, and it fit very naturally with the fact that I was listening to new metal all the time anyway (while continuing to dig into stuff from decades past).
Over time other writers from around the world have drifted in and out, but two of them (Andy Synn and DGR) have been writing with me for at least a dozen years, and others have been with us a long time too.
I guess the short answer about what motivates me to keep going is that it’s still a lot of fun (though it’s also a lot of work). And as the audience for NCS has grown, it has made all of us who write for the site feel like we’re doing something useful and good, helping to spread the word about music we believe in.
You probably have a lot of requests for reviews of albums come in each day (how many?). What are some of the factors you consider in deciding whether to review something or not?
You’re right – we usually get dozens of requests for reviews every day. It’s way more than we have any hope of listening to, much less writing about, especially because every writer at NCS is doing it part-time and without pay.
I don’t assign reviews to any of the other writers, and never have. I want them to make their own choices based on their own listening tastes, as long as they want to honestly recommend what has seized their interest. I try to coordinate a bit so we don’t have different people reviewing the same record, but otherwise I usually find out what they’ve been working on when the reviews come in.
As for myself, it’s mostly a very haphazard process. I write all of our music premieres and always include reviews with those. So that’s a function of who’s contacted us and whether I like what they want to premiere. Beyond that, I spend time every day kind of randomly and impulsively checking out new things I’ve seen or heard about, and I usually make picks from that to include in “roundups” of new music I post on the weekends. Those choices are themselves pretty impulsive and random, although I’m only featuring music I’m really enjoying.
Northwest Terror Fest (NWTF):
What’s the story with NWTF, how did it come to be?
Now I have to go back to my kids again. Through taking them to shows over a lot of years, and then continuing to go to shows with my daughter after she became an adult, I got to know lots of people in the Seattle metal community. At some point she and I and mutual friends started talking about how our community needed a metal festival. But none of us had any experience organizing or promoting shows, so it was mainly just a pipe-dream.
And then at some point one of our friends told us about a musician named David Rodgers who had put on the Southwest Terror Fest in Arizona for several years and had recently moved to Oregon. I can’t remember how we made contact with him, but we did, and we asked him to help us put on a festival in Seattle. He agreed. And to kind of capitalize on the reputation of his Arizona fest, we decided to call it Northwest Terror Fest.
David ran the operation for the first 2-3 years, basically using his contacts to recruit bands and his experience to give us the marching orders. Eventually he thought we could handle things on our own and he stepped back. We will be forever grateful to him and his wife Miki for getting NWTF off the ground.
Why do you think NWTF has been so successful?
I’d point to five explanations:
Joseph Schafer is really good at curating the bands and other artists who are on our line-ups to provide a diverse experience.
Second, Leah Solomon (who is one of the small group who work on this thing year-round) is an incredible “field general” during the event itself. She knows everything that needs to be done, who needs to do what, never loses her cool, and is the key reason it runs so smoothly and why the bands are always so happy to be here. Leah also plays the most important role in getting sponsorships and in organizing the kinds of NWTF merch we sell at the fest and year-round. Sponsorship contributions and merch are vital to our financial ability to keep doing this.
Third, we have an incredible crew of volunteers, including stage managers, who have been working the fest long enough that they are a key reason it runs like a well-oiled machine. We also have a great working relationship with the Neumos/Barboza venue and security staff, who are all big reasons why the atmosphere of the fest is so chill.
Fourth, we’ve received so much support over the years from people in the Pacific Northwest metal community, people who buy tickets, help spread the word about NWTF every year, play the shows, believe in what we’re doing. People now come to the fest from places way outside the PNW, but the PNW is still the core of our support.
And last, I think the fest has been a continuing success because none of us are in this for the money. It’s really not a “for profit” business. Almost no one involved in organizing the fest gets any compensation. We do try to be very businesslike in the way we do things, and we try hard to cover all our costs, but if we manage to make a profit, we always plow that right back into helping pay for the next year’s event. We do this as a labor of love, we really do. No one’s fighting over money, no one’s making any decisions based on how to squeeze out a margin, and we do our best to keep ticket prices as low as possible while still covering our costs (mainly, what we pay the bands).
In summary, what strikes me about Islander and his adventures running NCS and NWTF is that they have their roots in a desire to connect. With his kids through launching a metal blog, and with the broader metal community through NWTF. Massive respect and huge thanks to you, Islander, for doing everything you do to make our beloved metal scene a thriving and vibrant one!
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