Barely Human: dispatches from an underground music anti-history,

by Max Easton

BARELY HUMAN is an underground music anti-history that has taken many forms since 2015: a series of print essays, a podcast series, typewritten zines and bootleg mixtapes. This book collects all the works written over this ten year period, reassembled, re-edited and rearranged to draw a pseudo-lineage from dirty blues, subversive folk, sixties counterculture and proto-punk, through to the punk and post-punk movements, and finally, to the splintered subcultures of the contemporary DIY underground.

291 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2024

About the author

Max Easton is the author of the novels The Magpie Wing (2021) and its loose sequel Paradise Estate (2023), with the third in the series, Now Autonomy, to be published by Giramondo in 2026. He runs Barely Human, a zine and tape label exploring underground music's ties to subculture and counterculture, and has played in several Sydney punk bands including BB & the Blips, Romance and The Baby. His fiction and cultural criticism has also appeared in Sydney Review of Books, The Lifted Brow, Meanjin and Heat.