r/postrock • u/dissonanttore • 1d ago
Discussion! Post-rock and the early internet
Hi everyone! I hope this community is the right place to start a discussion on the online history of post-rock music.
I'm a music researcher interested in how indie music scenes transitioned from offline spaces and print media to websites, blogs and message boards around the turn of the millennium. Post-rock is an interesting case: A musical style that emerged at the exact time that more people gained access to the internet in the late 1990s. Online spaces were key to the formation of what we now recognize as a post-rock scene/community around the world.
Doing research on this period of internet history is difficult. Some websites are preserved and survive mostly intact, others have disappeared. I am hoping to get in touch with people who were active in online communities at the time. Bloggers, forum administrators, webzine authors, people sharing MP3's and making compilations, tapers and bootleg archivists... Or even earlier stuff like email-lists and IRC channels.
It seems to me that post-rock online activity picked up steam around 2006 (that's the year when The Silent Ballet and After the Post Rock came online), and then peaked around 2007–10 with quite a lot of blogs + intense activity on MySpace and Last.fm. But I am more interested in the stuff that predates this era. Late 90s and early 2000s. Does anyone have any leads? Anything or anyone that comes to mind?
Thanks!
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u/bewareofmolter Steve / Beware of Safety 1d ago
The Silent Ballet was a staple for post-rock back around the late-00s.
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u/OKcancel 1d ago
I used to frequent the #postrock channel on IRC EFnet (I think?) This must have been around the late 90s and early 2000s. Got to know some cool people there (as well as #radiohead) who pointed me in the direction of Mogwai and GYBE. Good memories, haven't thought about that for a while!
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u/dissonanttore 1d ago
That is super interesting. I just checked and there are a few people still active in the #radiohead channel!
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u/SoraShima 1d ago
Those were the days! IRC was so great. Such an innocent time. The (online) world was so much better before social media.
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u/radieschen-von-unten 1d ago
I remember that I was registered in the message board of the German metal band Eisregen. There were a lot of discussions about other genres, too and a lot of people burned CDs and shipped them around with indy/niche music. This was around 2004/2005 I believe.
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u/Kholdula 1d ago
Similar story with Metal Hammer in the UK - we had several CD exchanges in the early 2000's.
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u/DefyPhysics 1d ago
I was very active in IRC channels and groups that focused on releasing new music (pre-releases or 0day releases) and archiving music in high quality mp3s. Mainly punk, hardcore, post-hardcore, emo and post-rock related. This online scene is where I discovered a lot of post-rock, and felt that some post-rock bands overlapped into the online and offline scene that I was in (Russian Circles, Mono, Explosions in the Sky, Sigur Ros, 65daysofstatic were all shared between us). I think between 1998-2006 I was pretty very active in this scene. It wasn't post-rock specific, but the big umbrella covered post-rock and I felt post-rock was connected and part of the same whole that was a huge venn diagram of punk, hardcore, metal, ska, indie, post-rock, post-hardcore, emo, math rock and adjacent and/or overlapped other scenes as well. This wide range was evident by the tours that would happen at the time. All those sub-genres of underground would tour together, so a post-rock band playing the same show as a hardcore band and a ska band wouldn't bat an eye (except some would complain).
I'm not sure if that's helpful because it isn't exactly post-rock specific community, but I was an active participant in the time and place that I think launched a lot of more niche genres and funneled in enough fans to create a distinct scene because of larger online communities that got bigger over time. I felt like I was an early discoverer of post-rock while it incubated inside the big umbrella alt-rock scene, but I never followed that thread further to where it became distinct and separate.
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u/nescio2607 1d ago
As a starting point Sigur Ros and GYBE got raving reviews on Pitchfork which already was a leading indie and alternative rock review website back then.
I sourced most music through audio galaxy back then.
There was an active group of people doing music reviews called the Web Review Community including message boards that touched upon a lot of great music. While the sites focused a bit more on classic rock, some of the reviewers did newer stuff and the community itself on the message boards certainly talked about post rock as well.
Just a few pointers of what I say way back then
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u/DrWinstonOBoogie1980 1d ago
There was a great Sigur Rós–dedicated site called 18 Seconds to Sunrise that I used to frequent in 2001 and for a couple of years after. No idea how long it lasted, but I still have an .mp3 of Falkánir's folk-stomp cover of my favorite SR song, which the webmaster told me was more of a joke than I was taking it as (I legitimately love that cover, and apologies if I've mangled the band name; my Icelandic is pretty rusty).
As for Godspeed, it was surprisingly easy to find their stuff on Napster (and slightly later services), which is how I got into them. Distinctly remember calling people into my dorm room in 2001 to listen to "Moya."
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u/Motherboy_TheBand 1d ago
In 2003 I joined a college file sharing group where music discovery was fast and efficient (kinda like Spotify today actually). Certain data hoarders on campus would seed every album on pitchfork.
Hypemachine was also great for discovery
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u/waveuponwave 1d ago
It's not focused on post-rock per se (more like all kinds of independent rock), but in Germany plattentests.de has been going since around 2000. It has tons of reviews including post-rock and still active forum threads going back 25 years
The same person has been running it (with a team of volunteers writing reviews) for the whole time. You can probably get in touch with him and ask for contacts of reviewers who focused on post-rock back then
Personally speaking, as a German teen in the 2000s that's the place where I basically found all my favorite bands once I started looking further than what played on MTV. I basically owe my complete taste in music to that site
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u/dissonanttore 1d ago
Thanks! Nice to learn of some important sites outside of UK/US-oriented english-language stuff
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u/atwistedwarmembrace 1d ago
I'm also interested in learning about this. My introduction to the post-rock was actually through a UK music magazine called Rock Sound in the early 2000s. They used to provide a CD every issue and I was introduced to bands like Pelican, 65daysofstatic and Youthmovies through that. They certainly had somebody on the editorial team who was fond of post-rock as there was always a track or two on the CD that fell into that niche.
I expanded upon my interest by going to their gigs and festivals with them on the lineup (Rhâââ Lovely Festival and dunk!festival in Belgium). last.fm also aided a lot in discovery of similar artists.
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u/Morris_Piper83 1d ago
Post rock did get a fair bit of mainstream UK print coverage back in the day. I’ve still got a copy that infamous NME edition with Godspeed You Black Emperor on the cover. Mogwai also got on the cover when Rock Action came out. I remember being pretty amazed by the coverage the first ATP festivals got in 2000 . Also the term post rock was coined by Simon Reynolds in the Wire magazine. Xfm used to play Mogwai during the day in the late 90s. Though you had to live near London to catch it.
John Peel played a lot of this stuff. Mogwai, Labradford, Mono, and Godspeed and Rachel’s all did sessions. He also played aTtortoise album in full.
That was my main exposure. Internet wise, there were a few good places. Some have been mentioned but the Slint and Electrical Audio forums were great. There was an awesome fan site for Mogwai called Brightlight that was good. Southern Records - the UK outfit that did all the distribution for the likes of Kranky, Constellation, Touch & Go/Quarterstick has tons of pages for those artists.
Brainwashed was and is really good. It was the first to go into video.
Epitonic did free mp3s and album previews.
Finally there was one which really stood out. It reviewed albums like food and rated them on a x all seeing eyes out of 5 basis. I have no idea what it was called but it got me on to Stars of the Lid. A band I’m still obsessed about 25 years later. I’d love to see that again.
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u/jft_3_1838 23h ago
Brightlight was amazing. Great comprehensive gigography that in addition to set lists (actual photographs of set lists from those that attended) included numerous published and fan reviews of shows. Rob did an outstanding job. Site was so impressive.
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u/somastars 1d ago
I qualify as one of the people you’re referring to. My main source of finding new indie music in the late 90s-mid 2000s was an online message board called the Angry Potato Punk Page. It was based around the Boise, Idaho punk/indie/whatever music community. One of the community members introduced me to post-rock (Rachel’s, Tristeza), and then I learned more and more new bands through the community. Despite having punk in the name of the online forum, it was really more open than that. I would say it was more about indie rock, post-rock, post-hardcore, etc.
I don’t know how people on that page all found bands, but it was my best source for learning about somewhat obscure and underground music. People were always finding unheard of stuff and recommending it to each other, and then word would just keep spreading.
I know some may be like “Boise? Lame. It’s such a small, conservative place, there’s no way it was good recs.” But it was. I only lived in Boise for like a year of my life, and most of my message board participation happened after I moved away. And many other board members also moved away, but still used it to talk music with friends. I’ve lived a lot of (bigger) places and been involved in a lot of music scenes, and that board was hands down the best source of finding music that I had. I think that’s partly because it wasn’t algorithm based. It was just humans sharing stuff, and we tended to recommend good stuff we found, without rules or genre barriers.
I’m not sure what else you want to know, but I’d be happy to answer more questions. The original board is no longer on the net. I’ve seen various iterations of it pop up here and there for nostalgia purposes, so if you find one of those, please know the archive of the era in question is not on whatever iteration might still be up.
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u/alexcoates13 Alex / Civil Service 1d ago
A niche mention for the Hope of the States message board.
For an alt. rock band with a tiny post rock crossover, the band and fans provided me with so many post rock touchstones in the early days (2004-05). Everything from GY:BE!, ASMZ, and local British acts to keep an eye out on.
There was a person who posted under a handle with '65dos' in it; I'm still not sure if it was actually just a member of 65daysofstatic or just a fellow fan, but they were pushing 65' in 2003, which feels pretty niche 😅. One of the best bands I discovered on that forum.
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u/Nerdsrock22 1d ago
I was in a very small PR band in the early 2000s. We played around Macon, Atlanta, and Athens (GA). Finding other bands was tough, but I remember mostly using MySpace and also just talking to openers at bigger shows. We had one album, The Walthall Tango.
Very cool project you’re doing!
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u/tennesseesalmon 1d ago
For late 90s to around ‘02, I think location was more important than internet sites/communities but this would be hard to quantify or validate. Most of the post rock anyone could see or hear depended on regional touring and local bands. In Tennessee I would see Shipping News (Louisville, Ken) 3 or 4x for every one time bigger bands like Sigur Ros or GYBE would pass through town. Local bands like Ibrahim (Knoxville) or Emery Reel (Murfreesboro) would play almost every month. The people who enjoyed this music discovered it and followed it far more through being at shows than by being on the internet.
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u/Olelander 1d ago
Jealous of the proximity to Louisville scene, which was my personal gateway. However, proximity played zero role for me as a kid growing up in Juneau Alaska. I am hard pressed to even recall how I got my foothold in all of it, but over the late ‘90s and early ‘00s I fell in deep.
I did end up working in a record store over these years in Alaska and I had a pretty cool boss from the heyday of the ‘70s-‘80z New York music scene and he turned me on to a lot of interesting and different stuff from his era (Can, lots of no wave stuff, and outsider jazz things).
I know the internet played a role for me and my tiny circle of friends into the same stuff… but I am hard pressed to recall which specific corners of the internet.
My friend randomly found Shippjng News Save Everything album in a thrift shop in Juneau early on, not long after we first discovered Slint, and it was mind blowing for me, so Shipping News is the first thread I started pulling. Still hold that band in a special place.
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u/ch0dey 1d ago
garageband dot com was a site (completely unrelated to the app) that was around ~25 years ago that allowed bands to submit their music for review by other bands and worked on a credit system -- something like you had to listen to and review 10 tracks from other bands before yours would get a review. There was a lot of early post-rock on there, most of it probably gone forever.
Others have mentioned Last.fm, IRC, MySpace. Soulseek was helping spread things pretty early, too.
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u/Ok_Pool_9767 1d ago
I was on the message boards at aperfectcircle.net and echoingthesound.org around 02-06 which is where I found out about these existence of post rock and metal.
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u/Bukkakeface 1d ago
For me it was decoymusic.com back in probably like ‘03. I had just discovered GY!BE and Pelican and EITS and was diving into post rock hard. They had a post rock bracket, 32 bands or something and people voted on them. I basically used it as a template to find all of the bands worth knowing at the time.
They covered other music as well. I got really hooked into the message boards. Whoever was reviewing the albums they covered had like exactly the same taste in music as me because if they rated it 5 stars I was always completely in love with it. There’s so much that I still listen to today that I owe to them.
At some point, they did a drastic redesign of the site and things just kinda fell apart and the site died out.
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u/kkbigband 15h ago
I discovered post rock in the early-mid 00s through a filesharing forum called either yousendit, YSI or Etcetera depending on the era. I can't find any information about it after a quick Google search. It had sub sections for genres and one was post rock.
I imagine a lot of others in that era found out through forums which have faded into the sands of time.
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u/PatriarchPonds 1d ago
RIP After the Post Rock. Great site. Such a shame it vanished.
My main contribution to this is recalling the post-rock torrent packs that circled c. 2005. I still have dozens of files from those on various drives (and have been slowly buying the albums I still listen to on Bandcamp, to compensate for my earlier greed, so virtuous I know). The internet was really, really big for me as a kid living in a rural place, to finding this music and finding something really precious. It's still the case that 'IRL' I have about 3 people who actually know the first fucking thing about post-rock.