Datacide is a radical magazine covering the overlapping areas of countercultural noise & beats and (anti-) politics, critical theory, and post-situationist practice. The things that matter right now.
We have been around for a while. The first issue came out in spring 1997. It didn’t come out very often, but in recent years activities have picked up. In 2015 we published a complete collection of our first 10 issues, a big tome of 364 pages in A4 format and a massive word count, bringing together a unique compendium of the countercultures associated with hard electronic dance music.
This week the fourth printing came back from the printers.

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This year we step up the publication of the magazine to twice a year, with 68-76 pages and a colour cover each time. Since 2015 the magazine is amended with the publication of a yearly ‘Almanac for Noise & Politics’ in a pocket book format of 104 pages.
We are also planning several book releases, covering datacide issues in depth.
Luckily printing technology has developed in recent years to a point where it is possible to print small runs for relatively little money, giving a lot of flexibility to small publishers, including those with a radical or subversive agenda.
But digital technology not only made a number of things easier in the production process (such as printing small runs cheaper), it also has changed the ways how people interact with cultural production. This has thrown media outlets from the smallest size to the size of corporations into turmoil and putting many out of business.
Datacide is one of the tiny ones, but even we are not operating on an economically sustainable level. But we firmly believe that what we do is of crucial importance. For this reason we want/need to call on our readers to support these activities:

You can subscribe to datacide by sending EUR 15.00 (or more) to us for a subscription of 3 issues. Please state which issue you want your subscription to start with. You can include back issues in the subscription, issues 11-15 are currently available.

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You can donate money via paypal to info(at)datacide-magazine(dot)com
If you don’t have or don’t like to use paypal, write to the same address and find out about other options.

You can advertise in datacide. If you have anything to sell or to promote, consider putting an ad in the next print edition. Write for our very reasonable rates.
Attention record labels or book publishers: We usually will accept records or books as payment!
Attention zines: we are interested in ad swaps!

You can donate stuff which we can sell!
Got records, books, anything of interest you don’t want anymore?If you think you have something for us, let us know.

We set up an ebay account of which all proceeds go towards making the next issue – and more – happen!

Last but not least get your records, books and coffee from Praxis Records & Books!

Datacide can not exist without the solidarity and support of its readers!

Die Menschenhauttrommel (The Human Skin Drum) was first published in Flash Team Report (Vision 18) and reprinted in the Almanac for Noise & Politics 2016 as a companion piece to the article about the Vision label and to show a connection to the present, namely the release of ‘Skin Craft’ – RIND & NOL, works by Alex Buess and Daniel Buess on Praxis in 2016.

Osha Neumann, son of Franz Neumann and stepson of Herbert Marcuse, member of the Motherfuckers; lawyer, artist, and author of the book Up Against the Wall Motherf**ker. A Memoir of the ‘60s, with Notes for Next Time. Interviewed by Adrian Mengay and Maike Pricelius in 2010, first published in datacide fifteen in 2016.

AM: In the 1960s you were a member of a radical political group called “Up against the Wall Motherfuckers” based in New York City. Could you explain what the Motherfuckers were?

ON: The Motherfuckers were a small group that formed on the Lower East Side in 1967. The Lower East Side of New York was a predominantly Puerto Rican ghetto at this point. It had been the entranceway for immigrants for many, many years. It had been a Jewish ghetto before the Puerto Ricans moved in. We have been called many things. Some people called us ‘a street gang with an analysis’. Ben Morea, who was one of the key figures, was identified as an anarchist. Others of us did not particularly identify either as anarchists or as Marxists or in any of the traditional political categories. We considered our base to be what the media called hippies – dropouts, freaks, countercultural youth who swarmed into this ghetto around the time when we were forming. It had been a place where the beatniks had been before the hippies, and then the punks came afterwards. It had cheap, cheap rents. There were squatters mixed in with the Puerto Rican population. At that point our base was, as I say, these hippies primarily, although attached to us at various times were groups of young Puerto Ricans, who would come to our events and our demonstrations.

AM: How was life in the Lower East Side? And what exactly did you do as Motherfuckers aside from organizing demonstrations?

ON: We lived largely communally, in crash pads or houses we had. We put on free nights, we gave out free food, we had feasts, we had a free store where people could come and give away things for free, and various other institutions. We published lots of – at that point – mimeographed flyers and then some pages in an underground newspaper that was published in the Lower East Side. After only a couple of years, actually, the situation began to change, both internally and externally, and the Lower East Side, the counterculture, although subject to the stresses of survival and repression from the police, had been still more or less free and joyous. But it got a harder edge. The drugs changed from pretty good acid to heroin, crack and speed. Gangs moved in – biker gangs – to contest with us for the turf, and also our rhetoric changed.

MP: How was the interaction between the Motherfuckers, the black community, and the Puerto Rican community on the Lower East Side? [Read more →]