Text page
Vague Post-Punk Memories
"Vague Post-Punk Memories" treats jungle, techno, garage, or club culture as a laboratory for thinking futurity, rhythm, and public theory.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The central claim is that music scenes are not just illustrations of theory but engines of temporal and cultural experimentation. Jungle, techno, garage, and breakcore become methods for thinking futurity from below.
These texts work by translating rhythm, production, and scene memory into conceptual vocabulary. Club cultures become sites where time, collectivity, and technological mediation are actively reworked.
That matters because the archive's sonic line depends on culture moving through dance floors, pirate radio, and interviews as much as through philosophy. Public theory here is inseparable from musical circulation.
How to read this text
Read for how the page connects rhythm or scene history to larger claims about time, futurity, or collectivity.
Notice where criticism turns into method. The strongest pages in this cluster use music discourse as a way of building concepts, not merely decorating them.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
10 “Vague Post-Punk Memories” A Lecture byTom Vague, and Conversation with Mark Fisher (11|12|14) The fanzine or zine was one of the most important forms in which post- punk culture circulated. Many of the most renowned post-punk writers and artists — including Paul Morley, Jon Savage, and Linder Sterling — began as the producers of zines.
Definition · paragraph 2
Vague 1, November 1979 Tom Vague: Vague fanzine was founded in 1979, as Margaret Thatcher came to power, at Salisbury College of Technology and Art in Wiltshire — by me, the illustrator/cartoonist Perry Harris, and a Dutch guy called Iggy Zevenbergen. It was done as a “postpunk popular-modernist search for the new” — or for something to do other than attempt to play guitar or sing — rather than with any literary or artistic aspirations.
History · paragraph 18
In early 1981 we were evicted from the Bournemouth Vague office and I was dumped by Jane Austin, for being a too-real vagrant and economically unviable. This was the end of the rural punk literary romance for me, as well as the actual punk-rock and post-punk music scenes, more or less, we had lost and it was the 80s.
Afterlife · paragraph 2
We started Vague in the wake of the first Futurama post-punk science-fiction music festival in Leeds featuring Public Image and Joy Division. Thus it was inspired by post-punk and reggae; Adam and the Ants, the Banshees, the Clash, Joy Division, PIL, the Pop Group and the Slits, and Tim Aylet’s Channel 4 fanzine. The Vague launch gig was at Mere Youth Club in Wiltshire, 20 miles from Stonehenge, featuring the Sterile Androids from Winchester,
Afterlife · paragraph 4
covered the West Country punk scene, focused on Bournemouth, where we saw the Clash, the Damned, the Jam, the Banshees, Buzzcocks etc. at the Winter Gardens or Village Bowl, and also gigs in Southampton, Bristol, and London. I had done proto-Vague “how’s-the-tour-going?” interviews with the Jam and Eater at the Bournemouth Village and we had ligged with XTC and the Pop Group in Bristol. In 1978 we started planning to do an Ants/Banshees/Public Image post-punk fanzine.
Appears in sections
Sonic Futures and Audio Theory Primary section
Jungle, Hyperdub, sonic warfare, and the sound-centered pathways into the archive's theory culture.