I created The Phonograph in April 2019 after the dissolution of Sound of Pen. Launching my own site and doing everything independently including web design, web maintenance, social media, and content creation (to name but a few of The Phonograph’s editorial duties) was a welcome challenge and an immensely rewarding experience.
From early 2020, The Phonograph passed entirely into my hands and I’ve been solely responsibly for its running. A year of cultivating relationships with PR representatives, developing a regular content schedule, keeping on top of releases and growing our viewership has stood The Phonograph in fantastic stead to continue to flourish. In mid-2020 I began to actively recruit more writers, and I look forward to working closely with my excellent team in the future.
My Phonograph portfolio can be found on my Author page here. I’ve written over 150 articles (and counting!) including single reviews, album reviews, live reviews, interviews, and miscellaneous features and roundup pieces.
The Phonograph’s Mission Statement:
“At The Phonograph, there’s pretty much nothing more pivotal to our lives than music. Tunes for when you’re up, when you’re down, when you’re driving, when you’re in the shower – and that’s not to mention the stuff you have to stop everything for and just listen. Basically, we live and breathe music – and we created The Phonograph to bring together everything we love about it.
Listening to records we’re crazy about, discovering new ones we’ve never experienced the likes of before, promoting what we feel should be shown more love, going to see the artists we adore (and sometimes ones we don’t) – all highlights of being a music lover. But the best part is getting to share our thoughts with a bunch of people as passionate as we are; that’s why we’ve created a home for our thoughts here.
A background of loving music and writing about it is what fuels us. Plenty of prior experience includes writing then editing for Sound of Pen, a site created by Johnny K (formerly of Kerrang!) to guide and give voice to the next generation of music journalists, running another site for those more rock-geared, and the odd article for student publications at Leeds University, where Ims (editor-in-chief) is a Creative Writing MA student and English Lit graduate. The expertise we’ve gathered has only driven our aspirations as journalists to new heights, and inspired us to create our own space that we can cultivate to best represent us, music fans in general, and the current more-exciting-than-ever music scene.
There’s no stone we’ll leave unturned when it comes to representing artists that deserve to be represented. Even just in Leeds, where we’re based, up-and-coming bands make music that we feel is as exciting as bands playing arenas and stadiums, and it’s our goal to make sure they’re getting the recognition they should be.
More and more artists are putting out cross-genre, line-blurring masterpieces – this is something we’re passionate about representing at The Phonograph. There’s no box we need to fit into, because boxes are boring – why should people have to limit the things they love based on something as arbitrary as genre? If it makes you feel something, you’ll find it here.”