Excellent episode. Also many curious things, like Mike getting notch more personal, mentioning how podcast is almost like therapeutic thing to get mind off from all the nuisance happening in life. Health problems and such. It explains quite nicely why doing podcast should be most of all fun!
Many things one could use as starting point for discussions. One is that he mentions hopes that someone would start podcast for new stuff, since they had set up goal to cover the oldies. Complimenting WCN for stepping up for new artists. This is curious situation, since notion of what is "old" and what is "new" has changed quite a lot.
I was recently browsing through Freak Animal #11 in attempt to find specific information and happened to look at the Grey Wolves interview. It was fresh interview at the time (1997?) and GW mentioned they have been around for long long time - that was like 12 years.. First tapes being published in 1985. Back then, there was two kinds of talk. Some people seemed to consider that this 85'ish artists were flogging the dead horse as original industrial and power electronics was dead and gone. Others seemed to feel that GW was indeed very much part of the original industrial and seemingly been around forever. 12 years was damn long time when thinking many of the early protagonist existed only handful of years before moving on or quitting.
Sure, 12 is a lot, but from todays perspective, with Exit Strategy album GW was already 30+. Since then no new material, merely reissues have happened. Old timers being around for several decades is feeling long, but reading old interview of band that has been around for 12 years, means now that if someone would be now talking about that, it would mean being from 2011.. that feels almost like "new project".
It might be also matter of perspective. Anyways, I agree with Mike welcoming people to cover new things. This is something I wonder, that back in the day, interviews in UG zines were most often done with people who were just getting started. Bands and artists who had merely couple tapes in circulation or couple gigs behind. And that would be enough. People who just had found out about type of music, first attempts to make it, and instantly supported by "UG press". This is way less common now, and if feels little odd that someone would have to first sort of become acknowledged veteran before interviewed? Of course SI magazine features new projects all the time, but there is also intent to cover even newer. That perspective of movement, that there are new things happening, and also interesting things happening, that could catch now and not wait till artists already "retired" and then everybody can say how underrated they were... hah.
I was told the 1+ patreon extra is even better than this public episode. Any extra comments on that, of course welcomed.