La Chaîne is a monthly-ish newsletter/infolettre that is printed and distributed in Montreal since 2022. It's been running steady for a year and a half now and has become a staple in every kitchen/bathroom in town. Printed on a single double-sided 8.5x14 sheet of paper, La Chaîne is big and colourful and hard to miss on the door table at a show. Here, Taylor (the mind behind La Chaîne), puts down some of her thoughts on starting and running the project for over a year.

The idea for La Chaîne

Around 2018-2019, Montreal DIY had asked me to design and print a few of their monthly physical show listing calendars. I’d always really appreciated that project making show listings available because if you’re not on Instagram or Facebook (which I’m not), you can’t really see events, stories, posts, etc, so it’s pretty hard to find info about shows. As someone who benefited from the listings being compiled, I was super happy to contribute to getting that show info out into the world. I was going through kind of a stressful period in my life and getting to do a really fun and low-stakes creative project was really nice.

There was a period where I designed the show calendar a few months in a row, and I started kicking around the idea that it would be funny to do a punk broadsheet newsletter on the back, with scene news, reviews, classifieds, etc. When the pandemic hit, there obviously weren’t a lot of shows, so the degree to which subcultures like punk and hardcore (as well as people’s entire social lives) existed on social media really accelerated. I came out of that period with a lot of energy and a renewed urgency for doing something really tangible and DIY, that might help migrate some of the content of the scene and our lives back off of Instagram and other platforms and back into our own hands.

The First issue

I put out the first issue in October 2022 – it’s kind of silly, and looks really different from the subsequent issues. The period between when I decided it was “go time" for the project and when I put out the first issue was really short, just a few weeks. I didn’t want to overthink it, I knew if I tried to figure out too much stuff beforehand I would stall out and maybe it wouldn’t happen – I got the first issue out, and knew I would figure out the rest as I went.

I called it “La Chaîne” because I wanted it to sound cool and be roughly bilingual. “Chaîne” also has multiple meanings in french – it’s not only a physical chain with links (like the meaning in english), but it can also mean channel (e.g., s’abonner à une chaîne YouTube = subscribe to a YouTube channel).

Design and Print

I’m a big nerd about typography and design and layout and I do graphic design work sometimes, but La Chaîne is not my job, it’s my fun punk project where I get to fuck off a bit. So I keep it really simple and mostly stick to a template – I never want a creative block to be the thing that stops me from getting an issue out, and getting enough content for an issue is already challenging enough. When I do have excess energy or inspiration during issue assembly, I can channel it into illustrations and custom lettering, or doing fun things with the colour layers.

I’m really lucky to have access to a Risograph stencil duplicator, so that’s how I print La Chaîne. It’s really fast, the cost per impression is low, and it looks punk. I really love it.

I pay for the paper out of pocket, but it’s not that bad – maybe $10-15 per issue. If I didn’t have the means to do it this way I would probably just do what I did to print zines when I was more broke and figure out a good copy scam. Over the winter I organized a new band show that was a fundraiser for the project – five brand new bands played and I did a special La Chaîne t-shirts, buttons and posters. It was a huge success and also a lot of fun, and I was able to net a bit of money for the project. I’ll probably just try to do a benefit show like this once a year-ish to keep the project roughly sustainable, but even if I’m spending my own money to keep it going it feels worthwhile.

Content

The first few months were a bit irregular, but now I basically put out an issue around the end of every month, which includes upcoming shows and events for the following month. The deadline for submissions and release date usually fluctuates a bit, but I pretty much just pick what I think is gonna be the biggest gig around the end of the month and use that as my release for the issue. I’m currently working on issue #19.

Probably the biggest challenge is getting content. It’s taken over a year to start getting a slow trickle of submissions, and even then it’s still mostly my close friends and I still really have to hound people a lot. For anyone thinking about doing a submission-based project: don’t assume people are gonna be pounding down your door to submit content, be fully prepared to do basically everything yourself or with a small dedicated group of friends. Some of my favourite larger features have been interviews or tour journals of local bands, but often an issue is composed of several smaller pieces like show reviews, lists, etc.

Montreal has a trilingual punk scene (English, French and Spanish), and La Chaîne is bilingual English/French. Most people here can read or speak French and English to at least some degree, so I encourage submissions in whatever language people feel comfortable writing in and rarely translate anything unless the author specifically requests it. The language mess is something I really love about Montreal, and I think having a chaotic, franglais newsletter makes the project feel super grounded here. Most submissions come in English, I think just because the people I feel close enough to to bug for submissions lean anglo these days. I would love more French submissions though, and I would probably print a submission in Spanish if I got one (although I’d have to get help reading/editing it).

Distribution

I distribute La Chaîne somewhat haphazardly. I usually have copies of the latest issue at every show I go to, and I always leave some copies at the door or at my zine table if I’m tabling that show. Sometimes I walk around and ask my friends or people I recognize if they want a copy, and it’s a nice excuse to make the rounds and say what’s up to everyone. Sometimes I hand out copies as people are leaving. It really depends on how social I’m feeling that day (often not very social). Sometimes my very kind partner offers to hand them out. I was hoping that at some point people would figure out to ask me for the latest issue and I wouldn’t have to have so much initiative, but it hasn’t really happened yet. People usually respond pretty enthusiastically when I pull them out though.

A few months ago, I repainted an old newspaper box and put it in a central and publicly-accessible location in town. I keep it stocked with the latest issue, but so far only a small handful disappear from there each month. I’m hoping it will get more traffic now that it’s about to be summer, and as people learn about it’s location.

I print roughly 100 copies of each issue – if I print more than that I usually end up with extras and if I print less I usually run out, so that seems to be the sorta sweet spot for the scene at this moment.

Contact

The only web presence for La Chaîne is a publicly-viewable Mastodon account where I post little updates about when the next issue deadline is and where the new issue will be available. I upload the back issues to archive.org once they’re a few months out of date – the idea being that if you want the newest issue you have to find a physical copy.

For submissions and correspondence, I have an email address set up, as well as a VoIP hotline phone number set up where people can hypothetically call or text. I am always kind of disappointed that more punks don’t text or call the hotline – most of the voicemails I get are weird spam or wrong numbers. There used to be a show hotline phone number where you could call to get the weekly show listings, and I’ve thought about reviving that on the La Chaîne number, but haven’t gotten around to it!

Conclusion

I plan to keep making La Chaîne for the foreseeable future. Maybe this comes through in the tone of my writing, but sometimes I do feel a bit ambivalent about it. I try not to let those feelings freak me out, because I know that at least once per issue, usually when I’m assembling everything together, I’ll kinda step back and look at it and feel really proud of and excited about what I’m doing. That feeling is basically always worth pushing through any doubts.

In order to do something like this, you have to have a strong internal motivation – you really can’t expect other people to care about it. But when someone does care, or when you hand a copy to a someone and it kind of blows their mind – it feels really fucking good. Meeting other fellow weirdos who do punk scene newsletters like this and trading papers is also one of my favourite things in the whole world. I hope this project keeps picking up steam and becoming a place where people in my scene can hype their projects and stay up on what’s going on. And I hope that if someone in another place or time picks up a copy of La Chaîne, they'll be able to get a small taste of how cool and weird and special the DIY punk/hardcore scene in Montreal is right now.

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