Phillip B. Klingler: Now that Electronic Cottage has been published in hardcover form, it feels like an appropriate moment to address one of its lesser-discussed chapters. My connection to EC was direct and personal. I contributed articles, placed advertisements in nearly every issue, and was fortunate to receive thoughtful coverage there. Because of that involvement, I feel a responsibility to speak about something that has long lingered in the margins of its history: the publication of advertisements for Mark Solotroff’s AWB Recordings, widely regarded as one of the most openly racist noise labels in the United States.
AWB was not the only label promoting racist ideology at that time. The deeper concern was this: in a pre-internet era when print magazines were primary gathering points, if such material could find space within Electronic Cottage, what might prevent other racist music groups from converging there, using it as a shared forum and gradually bending its public face toward their own ideology? Revisiting this moment is not about reopening old wounds, but about clarifying the historical record and acknowledging how fragile independent cultural spaces can be when confronted with calculated provocation.
Lately I’ve been carrying a quiet grief for my country.
For a time, it seemed the country had crossed a threshold. The election of a Black president suggested that certain historical barriers were no longer immovable. But beneath that visible shift, a countercurrent was already forming. The backlash was not sudden; it was sedimentary, layered over years of resentment, grievance, and fear. A significant segment of voters responded with hostility, particularly toward what they dismissed as “wokeness”, a term that, to me, is simply another word for empathy. It became a sneer aimed at the unsettling act of recognizing oneself in another.
We are living in an age of amplification. There are many angry and isolated people, and the digital spaces they inhabit intensify that anger, reinforcing division rather than dissolving it. The isolated are told they are embattled; once embattled, they are told they are righteous. Division becomes identity.
Being “woke” does not mean I despise those who aren’t. Growth unfolds at different speeds. Sometimes it takes something personal to shift a worldview: a child coming out as gay, or trans; an interracial relationship within a family; a close friendship across racial lines; the quiet recognition that the “other” is human, complex, and familiar. Real proximity dissolves abstraction. Life itself can erode dogma.
What I cannot accept, however, is the deliberate cultivation of hatred through lies, and the manipulation of those lies into ideological fuel.
That is why the reappearance of the AWB advertisements in Hal McGee’s Electronic Cottage hardcover book unsettles me. There they sit, fixed in paper and ink, alongside artists who were building something exploratory, generous, or at least unburdened by racial mythology. Especially the ad in issue #5 where, in response to the backlash he had ignited within the community, Solotroff embraced the controversy and doubled down with a full-page ad bluntly declaring: “To suit a variety of tastes, AWB Recording Artists are RACISTS, occultists & sadists.” The latter terms were posturing; the first was the point. In the context of where we now find ourselves, it is both uncomfortable and embarrassing.
The narrative that underpinned that project, his story of persecution by minorities in a supposedly hostile neighborhood, was revealed to be fiction. Yet Solotroff wielded his lie as justification, as aesthetic posture, as a rallying signal. Later on, these racist references would be framed as artistic provocation, as performance, as transgression. But the phrase “AWB Recording Artists are RACISTS” remains, and stands embalmed in hardcover permanence, no longer ephemeral, no longer contextual, but fixed within the historical record.
Provocation is rarely neutral. Even when framed as performance-art artifice, it participates in the atmosphere of its time. Seeds scatter. Some fall on stone. Others take root in climates already primed for resentment. The cultivation of division, even under the guise of shock or mythology, has consequences. We are living in a cultural climate shaped, in part, by years of normalized antagonism and reactionary rhetoric. The continued demand for AWB’s early releases within sympathetic circles makes plain that the rhetoric was never merely aesthetic. It was received as signal.
To be fair, Hal McGee has since suggested he would not run those ads again if given the chance. History complicates itself. The uproar those advertisements caused also sparked anti-racist responses within the underground, including the Anti-White Bastards co-release I did with Frans DeWaard in 1990 - work born explicitly in opposition to that rhetoric. Even Solotroff, who initially reveled in the disturbance, eventually shifted course when it became clear that the damage to his own legacy was real, and that the consequences extended beyond performance.
Still, the pages remain.
And that is the lesson, perhaps: gestures meant as shockwaves can become sediment. Mythologies, once printed, do not dissolve. They linger in the cultural soil, contributing, however subtly, to the weather we now inhabit.
We are living in that weather.