Piscine magazine is keeping it amorphous
Published in Glasgow, Piscine is an arts and culture magazine that’s made by people who work full time in the city’s bars and restaurants. We delivered the first issue to Stack subscribers in February, and then last month we spoke to some of the team for our Magazine Club evening. I was joined on the call by editor Finlay Mackay and designers Molly Hooper and Calum Herbert, and I loved hearing the story of how the magazine came together.
Finlay says he met his fellow editor Alex Ralston one night through mutual friends, and a week later, Alex called him to ask whether he wanted to make a magazine together. Their initial plan was to call it The Scene, but Finlay says he was working in Asda, pushing trolleys and hating it, and getting frustrated at the idea: “What a terrible name – more like The Piss Scene…”
In that moment Piscine was born, and it evolved away from the original concept to become something stranger and more interesting. And they’re making sure that the project keeps on evolving – they want it to change from issue to issue, and several times during our conversation they referred to the magazine as an “amorphous blob”.
The idea is that it shouldn’t settle into any kind of comfortable format, and instead it should keep shape shifting according to the content and the context. (The next issue is going to take the form of a broadsheet newspaper, printed on sheets of newsprint.)
The magazine bounces along with tons of energy and humour, and a fair amount of anger, and it was great to hear how they brought that together on the page. If you haven’t already seen this magazine for yourself, I hope the video below gives a taste of what makes it so special. And I hope you’ll consider subscribing to Stack so we can deliver our surprise magazines to you every month. We won’t deliver Piscine magazine again, or at least not for a couple of years, but there are loads of brilliant independent magazines out there at the moment and we’d love to send them to your door.
