VCSS practice.
Ricky Singh, “Moment of Truth Vol. 2”
Fanzines hold a special place in the heart of most punk and hardcore kids. They’re the textbooks of a disenchanted generation, the entire history of a movement written between pages that are cut and pasted together, scanned and photocopied to a point of illegibility and beyond. We grew up with them, dissecting lines from interviews with our favorite bands and reading about stories from the road. There was a feeling to the whole thing then that can never again be replicated. It was like stumbling into a new world that suddenly rendered everything outside of it completely irrelevant, and zines were our windows into it. Life had meaning again, and just in time too.
Over the course of our lives, almost every one of us involved has attempted to do a fanzine at one point or another. The process is long and arduous, and many of us quickly realize that it’s something we’re not quite cut out for. And yet, whether we gave up halfway, or actually went through with it, the idea that every single person is entitled to write, speak and be published is what matters most. That process of physical creation has held out against a world that’s increasingly digital, the number of zines in circulation certainly no less than when I found hardcore more than a decade ago. That being said, it’s not easy to make a zine that stands out. For each zine that I’ve read religiously, there’s been dozens more that I’ve skimmed through and tucked away into a box beneath my bed.
Ricky Singh’s fanzine “Moment of Truth” is one of the few that sticks out from the rest. He and I spent a lot of time sitting next to each other in shitty vans over the past few years, and although we had our quarrels from time to time, I like to think that I got to know him better than most. He likes to sleep, and he likes to party, but he’s also the sort of person that can get good at anything when he really works at it, and that hard work comes through in this latest project. “Moment of Truth Vol. 2″ is a good read from cover to cover. What it lacks in grittiness, it more than makes up for with hi-res photos and and cool spreads. Featuring interviews with Judge, Kill Your Idols, Down to Nothing, Turnstile and more, it feels and looks like an actual magazine.
The zine is 36 pages, printed full color on gloss paper with design work from Doug Aldrich, Make sure to grab a copy from the “Moment of Truth” webstore before they’re all gone.
