Originally published in IPSO FACTO magazine, Issue 7. 1989.
Editor and Publisher: John C. Tripp

RE/Search Publications is an independent, underground publishing house known for its provocative and intellectually stimulating exploration of the fringes of culture, music, art, and alternative lifestyles. Founded by V. Vale and Andrea Juno in the 1980s, RE/Search quickly became synonymous with a raw, unfiltered approach to documenting subcultures, from industrial music and avant-garde art to countercultural movements and alternative ideologies. The press carved out a unique niche by giving voice to non-mainstream creators and thinkers, and in the process, contributed to shaping the intellectual and cultural landscape of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

One of RE/Search’s most notable contributions to the exploration of underground music and culture is its groundbreaking series of books that merge oral history with deep, immersive exploration of countercultures. Titles such as Industrial Culture Handbook and Modern Primitives stand out for their fearless and honest portrayal of communities and movements that had long been marginalized or misunderstood by mainstream media.

Using an interview format, RE/Search’s V. Vale and Andrea Juno provide a forum for the investigation and analysis of sub-cultural phenomena. Using their own interests as the basis of the research, the two assume the role of documentarians, giving meaning to such enigmatic subjects as industrial culture, pranks and modern day adornment and ritual.

The two are modern day alchemists — assembling seemingly disparate elements into a cohesive form that becomes an issue of RE/Search. The process isn’t easy though. Beginning with a general focus, Juno and Vale spend months fine-tuning their vision before a text emerges.

V. Vale, the co-founder and editor of RE/Search Publications, is a writer, artist, and publisher whose passion for documenting subcultures and artistic movements has made him a key figure in the underground publishing world. Vale’s previous involvement with Search & Destroy, a punk fanzine he founded in the late 1970s, laid the foundation for RE/Search’s unique approach to documenting countercultures. His eclectic interests and dedication to chronicling alternative scenes made him an ideal editor for a press that aimed to preserve the voices of outsiders and nonconformists.

Andrea Juno, a close collaborator and co-editor at RE/Search, brought a complementary vision to the table. A writer and activist, Juno was instrumental in shaping the direction of the press, particularly when it came to themes of personal liberation, body autonomy, and alternative lifestyles. Juno’s influence helped the press maintain its focus on empowering voices that had often been overlooked or dismissed by mainstream culture.

Having sold their typesetting business, Juno and Vale are now full-time publishers. The most recent RE/Search, Modern Primitives has been their most successful. They were interviewed at their San Francisco office and home, immersed in yet another project, a reissue of Daniel P. Mannix’ Freaks: We Who Are Not Others. The next RE/Search, now in its most preliminary stages, will be on music and will be released sometime in the Fall.

John Tripp: What were your motives initially to publish?

V. Vale: I started Search and Destroy in the Spring of ’77 and that was simply to document what was emergent rebel youth culture, which became known as punk rock. Because it was really much more complex and interesting than most people think. So, I did that until ’79 but then I quit going out to clubs and I still liked the idea of publishing, but the question was to publish what?

Search and Destroy basically had a lot of interviews with bands, although it did have interviews with Burroughs and Ballard, Russ Meyers, John Waters. In 1980 I met AJ and with initial backing from Rough Trade we started RE/Search.

JT: What would you say our Editorial policy was?

Andrea Juno: Well, it was very quickly formed because we did the first book in ’81. In the early days it was that undiluted expression of whatever we liked – unfettered creativity and vision. We didn’t really know exactly what we were doing.

V. Vale: Yeah, we didn’t really know exactly what we were doing but we were doing it. It was named RE/Search and we were making it a research project, i.e. to find out about something we were interested in. Actually our early tabloids are the seeds for a lot of themes.

AJ: It started off with basic philosophical themes: one of them is the surrealistic reverence for the imagination. What is it to be a human being in this society? It’s to really fight against the sort of sterility of a job and everyone needs to have that ability right now to be able to find out what this elusive thing is that is in your own identity. Those were the things we sort of thought everybody should try to do.

VV: Surrealism gave us a whole new set of values initially.

AJ: The Situationists were really important to us then too, and Burroughs. We had an amalgam of influences that we were trying to synthesize and organize. Especially in 1980 when we witnessed the breakdown of a nice packaged underground that was just ready there for the plucking and that’s why they demised Search and Destroy. That’s why those guys decided to stop interviewing musicians and going to clubs anymore. And it’s ten years later and it hasn’t changed. The avant-garde that is avant-garde now is the exact same avant-garde as 1979. Now that’s scary, things that are avant-garde now, something like Negativland, being the same for ten years. There’s something a bit scary about the cessation of a generation.

VV: It’s like all these young bands that are tracing over the archetypes that were established a decade ago. In fact some of the things like Neubauten that came about in an industrialist phase were tracings of futurist theory.

AJ: But there’s a big difference between going from the futurists and then having a generation or a group of people rediscover something and making it new for that time. There’s something quite different about having it never have gone from the ’80s to the ’90s – those things have never gone away, never have even come to be either camp or discarded to be rediscovered again, but just a flat line. It’s almost like a necropolis.

JT: Is it just because of the whole state of things?

VV: This whole post-modern condition of too much information.

AJ: And lack of any synthesis or analysis. That’s what we were trying to do and then it got more and more formative. We never had a credo or dogma, we’ve always tried to resist that. Any of the forms of art or whatever have to always change, so what could’ve been very vital in 1980 perhaps is not now, or vice versa.

VV: We’re just at a time where nothing is meaningful or interesting in itself.

AJ: In our early floundering attempts we would try and synthesize these ideas we had and it truly is a research project. We’re literally researching all of our books, usually through the interview format: discussions, dialogue, great conversations (laughter).

VV: It’s not like we’re interested in everything. There is a certain edge to it, a deep seated kind of social-critical edge.

JT: So, how has it changed now?

AJ: It hasn’t, it’s just evolved. Obviously there is all this new information and new forms that one has to look at. A lot of our basic foundations are still there, it’s just evolved to this form.

VV: I think we’re still engaged in the process of discovering and identifying and analyzing overlooked culture.

AJ: We’re always going to be changing, although I think you have to be more structured now as things get blurrier and blurrier in the outside world.

JT: As RE/Search, you go into something without a great grasp of what it is?

VV: Oh, of course. We’re obviously trying to make up for lost time.

AJ: We make our books, hopefully, accessible to anyone. We’ve always hated elite books, unless if you’ve got a specific function, like a computer book. But our books are for the high and the initiate.

VV: We start with the lowest level of initiation.

AJ: With the Ballard issue, you could be a Ballard fan who’s read every single thing and still find something of value. Or you could be somebody who’s never read a single book. But it’s still never demeaning, we always take the audience as if they were us.

JT: What are the reactions from academia to RE/Search? Have you gotten any feedback?

AJ: We don’t get much feedback from anyone. We do know a lot of academics who do like the book and I’ve met other publishers who claim they really like the book. But who knows? We’re not the people to ask that question.

JT: What do you think of these books that seem to have the same perspective as you?

AJ: I don’t think there are any.

JT: Well, say books like Semiotext(e)

AJ: I’ve met the ZONE people and we, of course, respect their books highly but what they’re doing is on a very different level. It’s something that I don’t even think we’re capable of doing, and vice versa. It’s actually quite complimentary, I’ve met them in New York and they’re very nice.]

JT: I guess what my question is, is there a school that’s emerging here?

AJ: We’re really outside of any academic community, so we wouldn’t know that. Although we do read a lot of theoretical works ourselves. I don’t think as yet there’s any school, at least that we’re part of. Vale and I are fairly isolated.

JT: Do you have problems with that?

VV: No, people come here all the time. We travel once in a while, Vale’s going to Europe.

AJ: We have to travel but we do have a lot of visitors from out of town, but we don’t interact much with the academic or arts world. I don’t really think there’s an academic community that’s that far out there. All the people I know are struggling for some far out idea in the academy are always total outsiders. And the only other “academics” are ZONE and Semiotext(e) and they’re in New York. We respect them very highly, but it’s not like we sit around a coffee table with them. We’re isolated in that we’re workaholics, but there’s some amazing people that either seep up, or we seek out.

VV: But it’s a pretty simple life really – we mostly just stay at home.

JT: How do you generate ideas?

AJ: With Incredibly Strange Films it was a friend that turned us on. There’s always rare and weird pockets of discovery that are very outside of the art world. There’s not an art world of pranks or modern primitives, we always find something that’s within our interests and we’ve made it into a sort of synthesis.

JT: I’ve seen Modern Primitives quoted as a movement. How do you react to what you cover then being viewed as a movement because you’ve presented it as that, purposely or not?

AJ: This is the whole thing of labels creating the movement.

VV: “Industrial culture”

AJ: Exactly. There really wasn’t any until that book came out, and all of a sudden there was a whole movement.

VV: The book was late, four years after the fact.

AJ: We ended it with a picture of a dead horse, that was our only in joke. It was a photo Bobby Adams took in Mexico of this dead horse on the road. But there’s always that thing of when you label something, and that can be the big problem and it can be encrusted in dogma and suddenly there’s this label. But there’s always that push-pull of whether you want to label it and maybe destroy the creativity.

VV: We don’t see anything hipper about tracing over early industrial noise music as opposed to bland pop. It’s the same thing and yet people consider one to be avant-garde, but we don’t see it that way.

JT: Maybe it’s because it’s not Top 40. As long as it remains on one level it’s always considered…

VV: The cachet of hipness.

AJ: Yeah, and I think that right now everything’s been breaking down and even the labels of what is commercial are really getting blended. Almost the preciousness of the avant-garde has nearly gone full circle to being blatantly commercial, almost the commodification of rareness, the hipness of not being blatantly commercial. Now you have a whole revolution in east, and it’s a revolution to shop.

JT: What will be the subject of the next RE/Search?

AJ: Music is next but it’s going to be about 6 months and we don’t like to talk about it. There’s a lot of exploration there, and right now we’re in that organic process of trying to figure out what the hell what the hell we’re doing. We have our ideas but those are the big things. And now it’s sort of filling in the picture and what we have to do is just talk and talk with all these people and things start coming into focus. It’s real exciting and we get a theme gong and it doesn’t really get culled together until just when we’re about ready to lay the thing out or send it to press. It’s kind of exciting because it really is like going into a darkroom after you’ve just exposed an image and seeing what comes off. And it’s very slow — it’s not like we start out with an outline like the bigger presses. If you want to write a book for Random House you’d better go in with a proposal and know exactly what you’re doing. Our way is the meandering way.

JT: It’s probably more exciting and makes it more spontaneous.

AJ: It allows you spontaneity, although we are very structured in what we ultimately want. We know what doesn’t fit, we know what to reject.

VV: We want something exceptional.

JT: In what way do you want to address the subject of music?

AJ: I think memory is one of the most important things right now to grapple with. A friend of mine actually wrote this article on lobotomy as a symbol of our age and memory. I think that memory right now is really very crucial and the fact that we remember nothing, and it is sort of a lobotomized age of images floating through with absolutely no memory and analysis of the past.

And it’s getting worse and worse. This newer generation of musicians has absolutely no memory of the fact that even 20 years ago, 10 years ago, there was similar stuff but was far more fresh and had a whole set of historical contexts and ideas. So in a certain sense you have to constantly drudge up…

JT: And remind people.

AJ: Yeah, the reminder factor and then sort of update it for now. You can always be excited about something but there are very different needs right now. It was like that seeing the Residents cause they were wonderful and they were part of a narrative tradition. This is a whole of a story with elemental themes and mythic images.

VV: Iconographics.

AJ: I don’t even know if I’d even want to listen to music out of context. It depends — if it’s past stuff, somehow that seems to work. Almost like my analysis of painting — a great painting of the past has a certain resonance. I can look at that. But when I see modern painting, for some reason I just think it needs the whole. It’s a broken down fragment and it’s no longer feeding the needs of meaning. I’m just trying to formulate this and this is what we’re in the process right now of formulating about music. Right now I think music really needs the visuals and that’s why I always look at soundtracks. Soundtracks for films are really exciting.

VV: With the evolution of western classical music in the last five hundred years the opera was finally it, the complete thing: plot, dialogue, tragedy, rise and fall of character, playing with themes of destiny.

JT: My association with music and visuals would be something like MTV.

VV: It’s very fragmented, very reductive.

AJ: It’s also “what is the music that is being presented.” The contents are obviously a very important factor, what are the visuals of the music that you’re listening to? Although I tend to think that maybe it’s going to be the seeds for something later on, obviously not now. Now it’s just programming and this flat line of response. There’s no crescendos and…

VV: No dynamics.

AJ: Dynamics. Music right now is almost like a flatland. A high level, high noise flatland.

VV: It’s all loud. It so loud that it doesn’t have any loudness anymore.

AJ: Then there’s always these people harping back to folk, like “why not just listen to the old folk music.”

JT: It used to be easy to know what I liked. Now it’s difficult to do that, I have to view it completely differently.

VV: You have to transform all of these formal categories. You can like anything from any formal genre.

AJ: Now it’s actually better because now you can’t have a simplistic cloaking of the music you listen to or the clothes that you wear to define your commitment in life or your identity. So now it’s a lot harder, you really have to know your identity without those superficial trappings and unfortunately a lot of people really get caught into that as we’ve witnessed with several undergrounds and cloakings.

JT: It’s safe.

AJ: But it’s no longer even relevant anymore. Even ten years ago there were certain cues but now there’s absolutely none whatsoever.

JT: That’s what really struck me when I moved to San Francisco, seeing all of these stereotypes walking around and saying “God I thought that was over.”

AJ: We’re known as the petrified forest of the underground ages.

VV: Right, you can see the hippies frozen in time, the punks frozen in time, the beatniks.

AJ: It’s like taking a core sample, we’re kind of one of those famous geological areas.

JT: You just wonder why people get locked in like that, that’s the way their life is defined.

AJ: In the ’60s you had this wonderful bunch of movies with this whole consciousness. You know, the man in the grey flannel suit, and he was empty and he just wanted to kick free and materials things weren’t gong to solve your ills. And people kind of forget, after the ’40s materialism people did really feel this aching.

JT: Maybe that’s what people will realize again in the ’90s.

AJ Well, it was a really large issue in the ’60s what’s weird is how very quickly people forget and how it gets recycled in a far more blander, weaker way. It’s really strange to see. And it was also in the ’20s and ’30s. I think each generation gets worse and worse with its forgetfulness of how the past was. It’s remaking the past to a far blander image of what it was like.

Re/Search Publications: https://www.researchpubs.com/