Post-rock and the early internet

[u/dissonanttore]

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!

[u/DefyPhysics]

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.