Broken Flag, noise, and underground print culture
Even When It Makes No Sense – the Broken Flag Story by Steve Underwood traces the history of one of the defining labels in the English noise and power electronics underground. Published by Korm Plastics in November 2024, the book expands a text that first appeared in 2010 in As Loud As Possible into a fuller document of sound, print, and cassette culture.
About the book
Broken Flag was founded in 1982 and remained closely associated with Gary Mundy and his project Ramleh throughout its active years. The label's catalogue extended to figures including Le Syndicat, MB, Controlled Bleeding, and Giancarlo Toniutti — a cast that placed Broken Flag at the harder edges of industrial and post-industrial music, where noise, power electronics, and small-edition releases formed a coherent underground world.
Underwood's approach treats the label not as a discography but as a scene document. The book reads Broken Flag through the structures around it: fanzine culture, cassette design, underground debate, and the visual identity that carried through its releases and printed matter. That framing gives the material a density that a straightforward chronology would not.
The expanded edition adds new interviews and updates to the original text, reprints two issues of the Broken Flag fanzine, and includes reproductions of many of the label's cassette covers. The result functions simultaneously as narrative history and printed archive — a record of how the label sounded and how it looked.
About the publisher
Korm Plastics is a Dutch imprint with a long engagement with noise, experimental, and underground music culture. Founded by Frans de Waard — himself a key figure in the noise and experimental underground that Even When It Makes No Sense documents — the imprint has consistently produced publications that treat this music with archival seriousness.
This title is listed under Music Books & Sound Culture at Lokator100.
