Chaos Control is a pioneering electronic magazine that has been online since 1993. While focusing primarily on electronic music, it also covers other styles and topics.

I started work on Chaos Control in 1992 when I was in my Junior year at Emerson College (Boston, MA) and writing for various local music publications. Because there were too many bands that I wanted to write about than my editors could ever use, I decided to start my own zine. Issue #1 of Chaos Control was a small, 8 page black and white photo copied magazine. The lead feature was an exclusive interview with Trent Reznor, who I met over the Prodigy on-line service, and other bands covered included Single Gun Theory, Meat Beat Manifesto, Utah Saints, and D.D.T.

That issue was sold in a few local record stores, but the majority of the copies were sold by mail order through on-line promotion. This started me thinking…. Chaos Control was designed on a computer, and distributed mainly to people with computers. So why bother even printing it? I looked around for tools that would enable to create an electronic magazine, and selected Hypercard. After teaching myself the program, I was able to finish the first electronic issue about three months later. I featured all the articles from the printed version, plus many more, including interviews with Pigface, Stereo MC’s , and ZIA.

For the next two years, the electronic Chaos Control evolved. A new issue came out every few months, and each one had a higher degree of interactivity and a stronger design. Hypertext has always been an important element of the magazine, with many of the articles appearing in completely non-linear form. As modem speeds got faster and people became more accepting of large downloads, the use of colorful graphics and audio samples from some of the featured bands started to play a bigger role.

All along, Chaos Control has just been a hobby. But at the same time, I was using it as a vehicle to experiment with and promote skills as an interactive designer. The hard work paid off in the summer of 1994, when was asked by a BMG rep to create a Chaos Control-style interactive promo kit for Killing Joke. Shortly after that, I was hired by Sire to create a similar project for BiGod 20. This lead to a bunch of freelance projects for that label, including The Cult, Jane Siberry, and Mudhoney.

At about the same time, it became obvious that the self-contained downloaded format of Chaos Control needed to change. It could only be viewed on Macintosh computers, and everyone began talking about publishing on the World Wide Web. So I taught myself HTML and launched the web version you are looking at now.

-Bob Gourley
(founder of Chaos Control Digizine)

Bob Gourley is available for freelance multimedia work (web sites, games, cd-rom, enhanced cd, digital photography) – click here for more information.

Please send all press kits to: Bob Gourley, PO Box 1065, Hoboken, NJ, 07030

Or email : chaoszine@gmail.com