ELECTRONIC COTTAGE
The '80s, '90s hometaper network, chronicles in a zine and now a book
by Daniel Barbiero
(April 2026)
Every network requires nodes--those points of connection that transmit information and bind it together. This is as true of human networks--communities of like-minded people engaged in a common endeavor--as it is of computer networks. For the network of hometapers of the 1980s and 1990s, some of the most important nodes were the zines, the homemade publications that provided a forum for them to air their concerns, advertise their releases and (hopefully) get them reviewed, trade tips on recording techniques, and simply stay abreast of what others were doing. One such zine was Hal McGee's Electronic Cottage, which was published between 1989 and 1991. The complete run of six issues has now been collected in facsimile in Electronic Cottage: Complete Edition 1989-1991, a deluxe, 468-page volume published by Frans de Waard's Korm Plastics imprint.
McGee, a DIY musician active as a hometaper since the early 1980s, conceived the idea of putting out a publication in 1988. It grew partly out of his circumstances at the time. Following significant changes in his personal life, he relocated from Indianapolis, where he'd been creating homemade music as Dog as Master and co-ran the Cause and Effect International Cassette Distribution Service, to Apollo Beach, an isolated community in Florida. Once in Florida, he ceased his creative activities. Inauspicious circumstances, to be sure. The antidote? A new project. Starting a zine would, as he wrote in the editor's preface to the first issue, help him to recover "the original ideals I had when I first got involved in the home taper scene--a kind of giddy, youthful idealism and visionary, semi-mystical approach to reality and creativity." In addition to affording this personal reinvigoration, the zine would serve the hometaper community by covering the scene in depth. Other zines devoted some coverage to independent music, but McGee felt that a new publication was needed to focus specifically on the DIY music community and its cassette culture, which he thought hadn't been given the serious attention it warranted. Hence, Electronic Cottage was born. The name reflected McGee's idea that the hometapers represented a kind of cottage industry of modern folk artists. It was a designation that, as we will see, raised some objections.
In his preface to the first issue, McGee set out his vision of the magazine. It would:
feature writing by independent/underground artists themselves, telling all about what they do, their experiences, methods, ideas and philosophy in a highly personal, intimate fashion...EC will be a forum for the discussion and debate of timely and current issues of importance and relevance to independent music culture.Electronic Cottage No. 1, produced on McGee's father's Macintosh computer and offset-printed in a run of 1000 numbered copies, certainly lived up to that vision. Dated April 1989, the zine ran to a substantial 64 pages and included contributions by 19 writers in addition to McGee. The cover story was a long interview with hometaper and Sound of Pig label producer Al Margolis, which was followed by Margolis' diary-style account of his September 1988 tour of California and Colorado. Other articles included label profiles by Jeph Jerman and Chris Phinney; an account of his own ND zine by Daniel Plunkett; first-person stories on the creation of work by Scott Colburn and Amy Denio; a pair of editorials by Dave Prescott and Carl Howard on the state of the scene; and Miekal And's "Polyintermedia and a Strategy for Electro-magnetic Survival," a loose-jointed theoretical essay on hypermedia complete with cites to Edgard Varèse, Stephane Mallarmé, Joseph Beuys, Hugo Ball, and Claude Levy-Strauss, among others. And of course, the issue included plenty of reviews of music releases and publications, as well as classified ads and advertisements for labels and self-releases by individual artists, many of them done in a rough-and-ready, Dada-punk ransom-note aesthetic. It was a good initial offering filled with thoughtful contributions. Electronic Cottage was off to a promising start.
Subsequent issues largely followed the same editorial format as the first. There was a cover story focused on an individual artist, who was interviewed at length; a series of articles, in-depth interviews, and opinion pieces covering various aspects of the independent music scene; letters; lots of ads; and a bulletin board for announcements and artist networking. And of course, each issue opened with McGee's preface, a combination of exuberant greeting, statement of principles, response to feedback, and general pep-talk. The zine's one major format change was the dropping of reviews after the first issue. In his editorial preface to the second issue, McGee explained why: he felt that the review was "outmoded" as a form and unable adequately to cover such a "volatile scene."
The zine's articles ranged widely in subject matter and sensibility. For example, the second issue included Walter Alter's "Home Music Projects for Kids"; issue three included "Expatriate Thoughts on the Cultural Aspects of Improvisation" by Dick Metcalf, aka "Rotcod Zzaj"; number five was graced by Steven Defoe's "Comparative Analysis: Electronic Music and Leave It to Beaver"--a surrealistic bringing together of distant realities if ever there was one--and an interview with the Technical Director and a professor at the venerable Mills College Center for Contemporary Music, formerly known as the San Francisco Tape Music Center. This last piece showed that although Electronic Cottage was dedicated to the non-institutional music underground, it was egalitarian enough that it could run an article on an academic music establishment alongside pieces about home recording studios. Nor did the zine limit itself to domestic artists. Cassette culture was international, and thus we find "The Current Situation of Really Independent Music in West Germany" by Uwe Hamm-Furholter in the third issue, and the sixth and final issue including a piece by Lord Litter on hometapers in Latvia.
Electronic Cottage was successful in its efforts to foster a sense of community, but even a community with shared goals can be quarrelsome, and no editor, no matter how conscientious--and McGee certainly was that--can please everyone. As early as the second issue, dated September 1989, a controversy arose in the letters section over the first issue's inclusion of a review of a release by an artist identified with white nationalism. In the editor's preface, McGee responded to criticism and defended his decision to publish the review. He unequivocally denounced racism while affirming his principled commitment to maintaining Electronic Cottage as a forum for the free exchange of ideas. As McGee recalled in a 17 November 2011 interview for Don Campau's Living Archive of Underground Music, the controversy cost the zine some advertising support, but he pointed out that Doug Walker of Alien Planetscapes, who had once been a member of the Black Panthers, supported the decision to publish, albeit with "with strong reservations of course." As he further explained to Campau:
Electronic Cottage was a public service project. It was there to inform, to educate, to share ideas, as a forum. I made no money from it personally, and I put hundreds of hours of work into it. I did what I thought was best for the community as a whole, even if that was "difficult," contentious, controversial, painful. I was a firm believer that the open exchange of ideas and viewpoints in the hometaper community would enhance its growth. There was heated debate and discussion and fiery disagreement in those pages. The editorials by various writers, on a multitude of topics, got people fired-up! At least they talked about it, aired their thoughts and anger and disappointments and differences of opinions.A less explosive controversy ensued when in his editor's preface to the third issue McGee described Electronic Cottage as being "dedicated to contemporary independently-produced electronic folk arts and culture" made by people who "are producing new, exciting, challenging and highly personal artistic visions in their homes, much like the folk artists of the past." It may seem strange now, but this seemingly innocuous observation was heavily criticized--many found the comparison of independent music to folk art to be offensive. Clearly, McGee didn't intend the comparison to imply that DIY music was somehow unsophisticated; his point was simply that the hometaper scene was a kind of folk art to the extent that its music was handcrafted and came directly from the people making it. If anything, the label reflected a view of hometapers as artists willing to protect their artistic integrity by maintaining their independence from the commercial music infrastructure and all the compromises it would entail.
Controversies aside, as a publishing venture, Electronic Cottage mostly thrived during the approximately two years it was produced. The page count steadily increased from the initial issue's 64 pages to 68 pages each for issues two and three; 72 pages for issue four; and 84 pages for issue five. The final issue was slightly shorter than the penultimate one, coming in at 76 pages. The first four issues paid for themselves with advertising and subscriptions, but when McGee went to a larger format for the final two issues, the production and mailing costs increased to the point where they no longer were covered by the zine's income from advertising and subscriptions. McGee had to make up the difference himself. The zine had become economically unsustainable, and that foretold the beginning of the end of Electronic Cottage.
By the sixth issue, which came out in July 1991, McGee was simply worn out from the effort involved in producing a zine single-handedly. To be sure, he could rely on a number of contributing writers to supply content, but it fell to him to maintain the zine's correspondence, solicit advertising and subscriptions, and administer the finances. And there was the physical labor involved in putting together--literally--a magazine in runs of 1000 or 700 copies. The keying in of text, laying out and pasting up of pages, collating, folding, stapling, packing and mailing--all of this was done by McGee, by hand. Besides the financial and physical strains, there was an emotional cost as well. Criticisms of his policies had worn on him psychologically. As he told Campau, he had reached a point where he "experienced total, complete absolute burnout on a personal level."
And so with issue six, Electronic Cottage was through. By October, McGee had moved to Gainesville, and had dropped out of the independent music scene altogether. He would be back eventually, but for the time being, he was finished.
Fortunately, the zines were preserved and have been made available once again. Reading through Electronic Cottage: Complete Edition 1989-1991 is like looking into a well-stocked time capsule. With it, we get an unparalleled view into what the hometapers were doing, thinking, and aspiring to during a brief slice of time in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
