My god the excitement.
The sheer, dizzy thrill of having our very first quarterly digital magazine issue out in the world and going about its business.
Wait, wait. Let me begin this right. Let me tell you first, who we are. What we do. What we are, who we do.
indieBerlin (I will speak of us for a moment if I may in the third person) is at its heart the blog/online magazine you are reading right now. We opened our digital doors nearly ten years ago to fight the forces of darkness, seek out corruption, engage the dark lord in mortal combat, and feature and celebrate all things independent and cultural in our city of Berlin.
I started the blog, being into music and words, with my partner Mia, she being into pictures and fashion. We intended, as I say, to cover everything and I mean everything that comprised, comprehended, condescended to being independent culture.
Fashion. Books. Photos. Visual art. Music. Lifestyle. Film. Even, in our time, indieSex (that was a lot of fun!).
We found in the end that with a tiny team and while doing jobs that paid the rent, it wasn’t after all possible to cover everything, so we’ve trimmed away the fat here and there, checked ourselves in the mirror, and reduced (for the moment anyway) to mostly music, fashion and a teensy bit of lifestyle.
Oh yes, and we’ve just brought in a brand new literary editor (shoutout to Laura McClain-Smith!), so the books are coming back as well I guess.
While it’s a lot of fun having a blog, there’s just something a bit -ish about having a proper regular magazine. Retro yet not…cool on another level…and while we look forward to eventually having an actual hold-it-in-your-hands physical magazine that you can put under your pillow and say goodnight to every night, we’ve started with a quarterly digital magazine, available for free on issuu.com. Especially cool for people with tablets! Cos that’s the best way to do this whole digital magazine thing.
So have a gander, look through, peruse and page the indieBerlin Summer Edition, out now in all good magazine shops on the magazine platform issuu.com…
We also always knew that we would want to branch out at some point, that we wouldn’t always be satisfied with just being a blog or digital magazine…
That’s why as of January this year we’ve established a brand new events agency, indieBerlin Events (shoutout to Anna & Chloe!), plus kicked off a PR & Promotion team for bands and artists (although we’re always open for offers outside of that remit of course) and are looking at branching out into other areas like merchandise (with our own online shop), content creation, website design and probably at some point a label too.
Meanwhile we’re still amazed and delighted at the unending tsunami of exciting happenings, performances, events, event makers and artists of every stripe in Berlin, whether passing through, born and bred or working on becoming part of the furniture.
And we always really wanted to start doing this – a regular magazine: digitally at first, and later well who knows – because we’ve just got SO MUCH TO SHOW YOU and SO MUCH TO TALK ABOUT.
So there’s that.
Welcome, at any rate, to the first ever indieBerlin quarterly magazine. It’s nice to have you here, and I really hope we see you again in Issue #2.
Noel Maurice
Co-founder, chief editor and blogger relations dude.
Creator of chaos, destroyer of worlds.
Gin & Tonic fan, sandwich connosseur.
Coffee junkie.
