“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” - Frank Zappa

SOUND Guest Editors George Booker+Jerome Spencer

We love nothing more in life than dancing about architecture, but that didn’t strike us as a marketable magazine. The opportunity so rarely arises, though recent commercial development has given us occasion for a few monumental throwdowns.  Anyway, most of the time we just have to write about music; which we like almost as much. This is simply a magazine for people who like music. Do you think, or are you ever told, that you like music too much? Good. You’re our kind of people.    24SevenCities covers the spectrum of life in our community; music informs our daily lives so we’re covering that part. The world of music shapes our culture locally, and then that local life shapes the lives around us, some of which belong to local musicians, who spit it back out into a rhythmic circle of life that says a lot more about Virginia than Elton John or Simba ever did.
We want to hone in on that culture, define it, shape it and take credit for it. Or, we could just share our love for music with you in hopes that you’ll enjoy what we have to say.  Hell, you can even learn from it, if you want to. Sounds like a pretty snazzy online poll. Don’t expect too much of that rock critic posturing in citing the most obscure bands we can find in the deepest bowels of cyberspace or the obligatory diatribe about how we all need to unite as a “scene” in order to give our community some meaning and/or credibility. That kind of thing isn’t quite as important as entertaining people. Although, the occasional obscure noise rock is sure to sneak in with Jerome around.
There is not an agreed agenda between us. Where Marie was a little bit country, and Donnie had similar enthusiasms for rock n’ roll, George has been known on his purpler nights to get a little bit disco, and Jerome doesn’t dance. Yet somehow we both love Enigma and Sonic Youth. As you can see from this cat’s cradle, there is no hipster diet we seek to feed you (they don’t eat).

There’s no damn cat, no damn cradle.
We don’t claim to be music experts—music is far too objective and vast to ever claim total understanding—we only claim to be music lovers. Obsessive compulsive music lovers who spend too much time over-analyzing and dissecting music so that you don’t have to. All you have to do is sit back and enjoy the tunes.
The intention of SOUND is to bring your attention to the local music scene in the hopes that you’ll go out to see these shows and have fun. We’ll to our best to keep you abreast of up-and-coming local bands, under the radar shows and the general happenings of the SevenCities aural scene. We’ll focus on national music too, of course. Not just the big acts that are sure to come to town this summer, but the working bands that we don’t want you to miss that will be stopping by smaller venues like The Boot, JewMom etc. (We have more great venues than you may realize.) And album reviews, naturally. Music nerds love to solicit their opinions on the latest releases and we’re certainly not going to shy away from that. Did we mention that you can also keep up with us online?
Most importantly, we hope you enjoy it. It may not look like much to you, but this magazine is special to us. All of us here at 24SevenCities care about the local community and are grateful to be a part of it. And we hope that by creating a medium to express our ideas and share our thoughts with you will inspire you to share yours with us. It’s our community, people; let’s all dance about the architecture together .