bumnote

Azimuth Tuesday

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:40:00 +0100

The heads on the 244 were out by enough that the top end fell off a cliff above 9 kHz. We aligned them by ear against a test tone and then, because we are who we are, by ear against a Cabaret Voltaire cassette. The tone won on paper. The cassette won in the room.

The Anatomy of a Wrong Note: Why Imperfection Drives Sonic Counterculture

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 04:20:00 +0100

There is a moment, forty-one seconds into a rehearsal take we have listened to more times than is healthy, where Thelonious Monk plays a cluster so wrong that you can hear the engineer’s chair creak as he reaches for the stop button. He does not press it. That hesitation is the whole history of the music we care about.

This site, as seen from Lynx

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0100

Open this page in Lynx and you get: the masthead as a line of text, the navigation as a numbered list, the lead essay as a headline followed by prose, and every card as a heading with a date under it. No layout survives. Every word does.

Cassette Tape Aesthetics in the Era of Infinite Streaming

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0100

A C-90 holds forty-five minutes a side, and it does not care what you think of that. You cannot skip. You can fast-forward, but fast-forwarding is a physical act with a physical cost: the motor whines, the counter spins, and you land somewhere approximate. The tape has an opinion about sequence, and the opinion is yours, fixed at the moment you pressed record.

About & Manifesto

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0100

bumnote is an irregular independent broadsheet. We publish essays on counterculture, cassette archaeology, rogue typography, and underground music philosophy, and we publish them as plain text first and HTML second.

The name comes from the Miles Davis line about wrong notes. A bum note is not a failure. It is an obligation to play the next one well.

Zines & Prints

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Everything below is made in runs of three hundred or fewer, numbered by hand, and posted in brown craft mailers. Sold-out items are not reprinted. Order by post or by email; we invoice by return and ship when the transfer lands.

On 70gsm

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 09:10:00 +0100

Seventy grams per square metre is the weight of a free newspaper. It creases if you look at it, yellows in a year, and shows the ink from the other side. It is also cheap enough that we can print three hundred copies of a pamphlet and post them for less than a single glossy run would cost.

Photocopier Punk: How 70s DIY Zines Invented Modern Desktop Publishing

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 11:30:00 +0100

Before Aldus PageMaker, before PostScript, before anyone said the words “desktop publishing” without laughing, there was a Xerox 914 in the back of a copy shop and a kid with a glue stick who could not afford the counter price. Everything you take for granted about the modern web interface, the fragment, the cut-out, the hyperlinked collage of unrelated blocks, was invented there, at five pence a sheet.

In Praise of Feedback: Microtonal Noise as Rebel Expression

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 20:15:00 +0100

When Jimi Hendrix pushed a Marshall stack into self-oscillation on a Monday morning in August 1969, he converted an engineering defect into political speech. The anthem came apart under the feedback, and the coming apart was the point. Nobody in the field needed the liner notes.

Markdown as an Anti-Bloat Manifesto: The Joy of Plain Text

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0100

A dispatch on this site is a text file. Not a row in a database, not a JSON blob behind an API, not a component tree waiting to hydrate. A file, with a name, on a disk, that you can open in ed if the mood takes you. This is not nostalgia. It is a position on permanence.