[this originally appeared here; the column in question appears here]

Ronen Kauffman currently hosts the Issue Oriented podcast; guests have ranged from Jersey Beat editor Jim Testa to artist
Derek Hess to Thursday’s Geoff Rickly. He maintains a web presence here.

Kauffman was also interviewed for my EMP paper on basement shows.

The Degenerics have a myspace page and a recently released discography; Endeavor’s Constructive Semantics
remains one of my favorite punk/hardcore albums — hell, one of my favorite albums, period. Not mentioned in the interview but covered in Kauffman’s book are Stormshadow, a power trio who I’m suddenly craving the need to hear. From what I
remember, they were very much influenced by the spirit of mid-80s SST; given that I’m deeply fond these days of two Minutemen-covering power trios…yeah.

Trevor Kelley is the co-author of Everybody Hurts. Norman Brannon’s The Anti-Matter Anthology should see release later this year. Brannon’s writing was a huge formative influence on my own writing about music; Anti-Matter, along with Trustkill and Rumpshaker, was one of the primary reasons for starting my own zine, which is how I
(a)met a bunch of likeminded folks, including the subject of today’s column and future Georgie James/Q and Not U guy John Davis; (b)ended up writing about music for the next dozen years (and counting).