"Legends of the Diamond"
I have no idea who made this spare little zine, but I think they are a genius. A cursory search reveals that the esoteric sounding title is in fact lifted from a 1992 baseball simulator developed for the NES, otherwise no name is signed to it and no other identifying information can be found. I bought this zine from Electric Eye Records in Florence MA, in 2017 or 2018. I’m biased but I still think it’s the best record store ever, every time I went in Andy would turn up something cool for me. On the rare occasions I’m sad I sold all my records, it’s usually over something I bought from him.
Legends of the Diamond is 20 pages of xerographed collage masterwork. Cartoon characters overlayed with other cartoon characters, a humanoid dancing Oreo with sunglasses and a pompadour in conversation with a praying monk from whom a billowing pattern of noise issues forth, cut up text joining pornographic action with the descriptions of sci fi weaponry, haunting faded faces run through with the classic vertical roller marks that’d be apropos for any power electronics album art.
Photocopiers were an obsession for me at the time I came into possession of this svelte publication. I owned a suitcase sized copier you’d feed each sheet into individually to make copies, that left horrendous roller marks on the output, that I used to make most of the Noise Party fliers when I still booked shows. Once in a manic craze I drove out alone to an architectural firm in the Berkshires responding to a free ad and managed to load an entire corporate sized xerox system into the back of my car- I needed three people to help me get it into Cold Spring Hollow and it broke almost immediately. In Providence, I recall receiving a tip that the Sam’s food store in Olneyville Sq. had the most marvelously fucked up copier that would totally mangle your images for 5 cents a page- but by the time I got there, it had bit the dust forever.
I love the aesthetics of xerography, how the older machines flatten everything into high contrast black and white. It smooths out hard cuts and imperfections, there’s just enough play with the controls for creative work, feeding the output from one impression back into the machine, composing your collage right on the glass plate. Xeroxing a xerox, blowing it up 500%, reduces any input into a distortion field. By the time I was interested in these machines for making creative work, it was already getting tough to source toner cartridges and working models. There’s plenty of nostalgia for digicams today, there isn’t so much a market for the hulking printers of the same vintage. There’s a good chance Legends of the Diamond was made offhand in an afternoon, a stoned creation birtged from some paperbacks and a few magazines, but I find it exemplary of an entire aesthetic field, one which can now only be imitated as the machines have become too nice, the outputs too clean.