The synopsis for Quarter Notes Magazine is as welcoming as it gets:
Quarter Notes is a quarterly online literary magazine with a musical ear, founded and edited by writer/musician Lou Turner.
This small digital garden exists to cross-pollinate music, literature, and sound studies. All are welcome.
Coming in strong with a warm, inviting vibe and a subject matter I think most WOTT readers will be on board with. Oh, and Lou Turner is a fantastic musician herself both in solo endeavors and in a band setting.
Each issue is a vartietal offering of poems, essays, lyrics, letters and even the occasional song. Just looking through the Summer 2024 issue, I can’t help but recommend this Scott Bunn piece on The Smeared Sounds of David Bowie, LCD Soundsystem & Cate Le Bon, or this Scott Mattingly June Song, or this letter to Tom Waits from Caroline Brooks DuBois. All of it is good, those grabbed my attention especially but it’s all admittedly subjective.
It’s also worth appreciating the overall format and presentation of Quarter Notes, not just the content within it. Here in 2024, it’s incredibly easy to experience the Internet purely in bite size pieces. Maybe a quick tap through Instagram Stories or a blast through your TikTok homepage. You may spend time reading an article here and there but maybe that’s educational or informative, not creative. Quarter Notes is inviting you to spend time with thoughtful works; to make time for yourself to read through these passages and form an opinion or response, not just a quick chortle before moving on.
It’s increasingly difficult to carve this kind of time for ourselves but Quarter Notes is giving us a wonderful dose of material to find the excuse to embrace that time.
Ironically, you should also follow @quarternotesmag for updates on when new material drops, so you can (once again) make that time for yourself.