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"This issue of Distort is my final word on Cleveland and is in credit to A. Savage, who contributed a recent interview with Craig Bell, who was a member of The Mirrors and Rocket From The Tombs and X_X. Christina Pap provided fliers and a primo photo. The cover artwork of East 1999 Eternal by Jessie Rose (JR) Streker. All other material is from the first two issues of Distort Cleveland, or rinsed from many a zine or flier collection across the world. Thanks to Johan Kugelberg2 who allowed me to reproduce some of the material for his upcoming book on Cleveland youtube star cakeboi. 116 PAGES, A5. Comes with A3 size posters of DEVO, BONE THUGS N HARMONY and THE MIRRORS." -DX.
Our take: Latest issue of this long-running Australian zine. Cleveland punk has always preoccupied Distort, and this issue goes whole-hog, with 116 dense pages devoted to the topic. There are lots of reproductions of Cleveland punk ephemera, a healthy number of reprints of Clevo-centric material from earlier issues of Distort, and a few new additions like a lengthy interview with Craig Bell of Mirrors and Rocket from the Tombs. Rather than being formatted like a conventional punk book or other straightforward archival project, the issue examines Cleveland through what feels like a cracked and distorted lens, placing a kind of translucent psychedelic curtain between the reader and the source material. Much of the original writingtakes the form of faux YouTube comments written from dozens of different perspectives, some of them insightful and many of them dumb (mostly in a funny way). It’s a heavy-handed choice, but I think it was a great one, and I enjoyed reading this far more than I would have another dry oral history or faux-academic analysis (like, say, the one you’re reading right now). Over the years Distort has transformed from a well-done, albeit conventional punk zine to something more like high art, and it seems like that vision has culminated here.