Interlude: Karaoke Kritisismo
Cover and layout design for a zine of collages and lyric essays about karaoke
Cover and layout design for a zine of collages and lyric essays about karaoke
Interlude: Karaoke Kritisismo
Publisher: Self-published
Author/Designer: John Daryl Alcantara
Zine dimensions: 8.25 in x 5.85 in
Year: 2020, 2022
Author/Designer: John Daryl Alcantara
Zine dimensions: 8.25 in x 5.85 in
Year: 2020, 2022
“At ayaw ni Peer na may nagmamaganda, ayaw kumanta. Maaari lamang magmaganda sa tampok na aktibidad sa karaoke, ang pagkanta. O kundi man, hinihikayat ang pagkulot ng mga nota, pagiging song bird na bine-belt ang lahat ng bahagi ng kanta o parang acoustic music, the-mellow-touch. Koersibo ang karaoke kahit walang nakatutok na baril.”
—Rolando Tolentino,
"Karaoke Koersyon: Politikal na Protesta sa Kulturang Popular"
"Karaoke Koersyon: Politikal na Protesta sa Kulturang Popular"
About the Zine
The zine's epigraph above is lifted from Rolando Tolentino's 2008 essay, which served as inspiration for the zine's project of using karaoke both as its subject and as its tool in its critical exploration of Filipino popular culture.
Interlude was first produced as one of the creative components of the author's undergraduate thesis, small pressing issues: Alternatibong Paglilimbag sa Panahon ng Neoliberalismo, which was awarded by the Department of Humanities, UPLB as the Best Undergraduate Thesis (Creative Category) in 2019.
Its first edition was published in 2020 for Munzinelupa, and its second edition in 2022 for BLTX.
Design Notes
The zine aims to popularize and laymanize critical discourses on popular culture, so I deliberately designed it to not look and feel like a typical journal article. The most obvious departure from the academic design language was the decision to incorporate collages, but I wanted to take things further by also formatting everything in landscape A5 pages.
This atypical dimension for an essay collection aided in making the reading experience feel more like browsing a photobook or reading a brochure. However, this chosen dimension's wide horizontal space posed a problem on readability, so I decided to arrange all the essays in two columns. To save cost in printing, all the collages are done in monochrome. Print textures like noise and halftone were used to evoke the tactility of collages made from newspaper clippings.
