Is it a Whatsapp audio-zine? A literary rave tape gone wrong? An snarky inbox mag for the insomniac? Offal is a unique audio and print zine that blends creative writing, electronic music, DIY distribution and AI voiceover. With the release of The Compleat Season One triple tape pack and the first print zine, we chatted to master butcher/publisher Dan Blackrock to get all the gory details, What a fine mess they’ve made!
Which unfortunate churn of events lead to OFFAL appearing in this world? [Insert honest answer or ostentatious origin myth]
Our founder, CEO and Head of Wellness Jeremy Portal was granted the vision for the entire project from start to finish by his spirit guide while on an ayahuasca retreat in Cheltenham. He knows where it will end, apparently, but isn’t letting on.
Did you have a specific look/design language in mind for OFFAL as a physical zine from the start when you were recording audio or did you have to find out as you went along?
We did not. We handed the keys over to Richard Turley and Julia Schaeffer, a legendary design team. They had the ingenious idea to restrict themselves to designing it inside MS Word, using the same software it was primarily written in, and this means it’s all 45% angles and text blocks.
The use of erasure – placing text “sous rature,” as the French have it – works particularly well with our policy of explaining the writing as little as possible, enabling readers to crash into different textures. It feels like the Vorticist journal Blast, which we love. The minimal colour scheme – red, black and white – was our one guideline. We plan to switch it to Klein Blue for issue 2.
If you could pick out a feature or two from the publication as a personal favourite, or leanest mean most grizzly cut, that showcases OFFALs intentions what would it be?
A couple: Nat Ogle’s erasure poems, which do a history of British capitalism in hacked-apart source documents, is the kind of cut-n-paste formal experiment we love; and Alice-Louise MacGillivray’s section of memoir narrating her time as an pole-dancer at Stringfellows and in Ibiza, while dealing with MS, written in a voice with Welsh dialect traces – that delivers the kind of surprise we hope for.
How do you know when a collection of incomplete stuff feels complete?
When the aspic is perfectly set around the terrine.
You recently sat on The Fence mag in one of your printed issues, any more collabs lined up in the abattoir?
We loved working with The Fence, who are, we agree, the UK’s only magazine. Yes, a couple of collabs are under discussion, in different spaces – one record label, one book publisher – but I’m not sure I can say any more right now for fear of nixing them. We’d like to publicly issue a “come and get us” plea to both Sportsbanger and MSCHF, who we love, and could do incredible things with.
Where and when did you first encounter AI voice clone and Lip sync, how long was it before you decided to do something creative with it?
January 2023. It took us about six weeks to get enough material together for episode 1. We’d already been playing around with text generators, trying out various writing experiments, and voice synthesis presented itself as the perfect tool to take the issue we were collating into a different space.
We think the challenge is selecting the right figures to clone, and we set ourselves certain ethical rules about who’s fair game, which we then tend to break. Parody permits quite a lot, and if someone is dead we feel all bets are off – doubtlessly the law will take a different view, because IP will be seen to revert to estates rather than become common property – as, for example, the voice of the Queen surely is.
But basically any numpty can clone voices – see the rightwing Sadiq Khan fake that circulated before the election – but selecting the correct figures for more disquieting, uncanny-valley performances is the art, we think.
Any other writing, zines or audio that you’ve been enjoying behind the scenes at OFFAL?
We’ve been on a bit of a Balearic jag poolside this summer, we love everything the Numbers label does and Actress’s new one is awesome. Kelela. Nick Powers Throat project with McKowski. We’ve been reading quite a lot of historical satire, re-reading Riddley Walker, the ‘zine Weird Walk, and trying not to go down the wormhole on US news.
Your online presence features some lip-synced and AI generated visuals and politician’s speeches (a la Bang Face TV), would you ever do a visual accompaniment to the audio zines?
Ah, man, we have an idea for a kind of sitcom that would be like The Young Ones but with AI visuals and clones, puppets, mechanical automata, musical interludes – the kinds of genuinely anarchic Zoo TV-format that we had for about 10 years in the 90s.
We’d love to do much more visual stuff but we just don’t have the time to teach ourselves and the algorithms seem to crush whatever we do share online. That said, if any of your readers are visual people and would be interested to contribute to the collective, we’d love to hear from them!
Have you always been drawn to bricolage and artistic work that has an air of offcut or otherness? Or did the formation of OFFAL’s drive this and pique your interest?
Absolutely. One of us is a novelist and cultural historian who has worked in the bricolage mode in that space, and written about it as an academic and journalist. We’ve all DJed, and worked together on a couple of DIY projects that were fairly fringe, and nourished by the plunderphonic movement, or art-punk literary/comedy scenes, and these have produced a weirdcore experience for audiences.
Would OFFAL ever work in live context, any events or gigs planned?
We have an installation planned: a bargecore experience – 980 yards of mayhem in a long, dark tunnel, that will deliver the audience to a jetty and an OFFAL party in London. At the event we will offer a voice-cloning booth, so anyone willing to sign a waiver in blood can be used in future offal.
We will be releasing the date for that very soon: sign up to our newsletter to be looped in. We’re also working out a roadshow style set-up so we can drop in live audio.
What more could people do to resist podcastisation, what should we be looking out for? How does OFFAL resist it?
Take the corporate tools and abuse them. Resist the market and recuperation. Culture wants to be free, and variegated. We all lose out when we’re all just selling ourselves. PS buy our products: https://shop.offaloffaloffal.com/
While the print zine is a literary fiction mag, what is it about OFFAL that you think people from electronic music get stuck into? What does electronic music culture still contribute to the mag?
We all come out of rave and DJing. The DIY aspect of that scene, from the free party movement to house parties, to flyer design and tape packs, is central to our project, and not just in a nostalgic way: we make the shit we want to see in the world.
The formal approach of cut-up and sample is cousin to bricolage and detournement. The abstraction of Autechre, the mischief of Aphex, the pure euphoria of the room coming up together – that’s basically what it feels like to read offal.
If you could steal a creative piece you’ve seen recently in another publication, poach it in its own guttural juices, and publish it into an issue of offal what would it be? And why haven’t you done it yet?
Sections of Percival Everett by Virgil Russell are some of the most effective experimental writing we’ve ever encountered. We wouldn’t steal from Perce though, he’s earned the right not to get ripped off.
Chris Morris’ Blue Jam infamously broadcast early morning on Radio 1 to catch revellers and night owls out, which ideal time and setting would you recommend someone listen to offal for the first time?
The gloaming, somewhere appropriately post-apocalyptic.
Sweetbreads, head cheese or chitterlings? What are you serving your zine with at gunpoint, good sir?
Genuinely love sweetbreads, breadcrumbed and deep-fried. Chitterlings we had once, in Missoula, Montana. Absolutely delicious. I think we would probably plump for a single devilled kidney with a glass of black velvet.
