Once upon a time…

At the end of the nineties the Italian hard rock and heavy metal scene was alive and kicking… at least when it came to wannabe writers!
Stargazer.it was, back then, one of the very first webzines to pop up in that exciting environment.
Being the internet kind of new (no, not really… but that was the perception that artists and labels had) people got interested in us, so we started receiving promo material to review, we were asked to interview artists, and we really had a good time with that.
We were never big, but we were not unknown, had fun and, in our very humble opinion, we published some pretty strong material. Some of us even got so-called “jobs” in printed magazines and high profile professional websites.

So… what happened?

Basically, we couldn’t keep up. Other webzines were a lot better than us at being organized, and keeping up with the pressure coming from labels and distributors to have regular reviews and meet their publishing deadlines. We had jobs, studies to complete, other commitments and basically less and less time. We didn’t want, and probably we didn’t have what it took, to be “corporate”, to be one of those professional looking websites that all published regularly the same stuff, so we slowly gave up: the labels stopped being interested in us and the readers (that were never that many, honestly) just went away. One day we shut down the site without a word of alert and no one really cared. But it felt good for us.
Other websites who started like us at around the same time managed to survive and to thrive, facing our very same problems with a more professional attitude. We were the unreliable bastards who had just started it all for the fun of it, not in order to become successful. And we just were not willing to give the website away just for it to continue.

Ok, but why are you back, then?

In case you are wondering… no, we don’t suddenly have lots of time on our hands. We have families, kids, dogs and jobs more demanding than before. Some of us still write for printed magazines, and struggle to meet deadlines there. We just came back for the fun of it. We want to write about things that we don’t have the chance to write about in other places. We don’t plan to be reliable, regular or punctual. We actually plan very much not to be. We will write when we want, when we can and about things we want. Some of the old staff will be back, we’ll ask some more people that we appreciate to join us if they want. We don’t care about what’s getting published everyday, we might want to write about new underground bands or very famous huge ones, new records or old ones. Or just no record at all, if we see a band that we like live. We might even “reprint” some of our old stuff. We might update the website once every three months or two times in the same day: we won’t have any deadline or schedule.
But, we want to be clear about this, we will not only talk about stuff that we like. If we don’t like a record and still want to write about it, we will do it. We are honest, just that.

Can you write about us?

If you are a label/distributor/agent and you would like us to have regular coverage of your artists, we’re afraid the answer is no. It would mean for us to get trapped back in the same game as 15 years ago, and we’re just not interested. We don’t expect to have readers anyway, so don’t bother. 🙂  If you are a band and would like to tell us about you, drop us a line and, if we can, we’ll do something. We can’t promise anything, but if we say that we will write about you, we actually will. We won’t waste your time. Of course, keep in mind that the articles will be in Italian (this page is in english just to explain who we are and what we do) and that we are a very underground blog, so don’t expect to reach a huge audience anyway. Or any audience at all.

Now where do we go?

I see a rainbow rising!