What follows on this page is a comprehensive history of Lines In Wax over the last 9 years, so if that’s not something that particularly interests you, I’d move on. Cheers for checking out the site!
Lines In Wax began life in 2011 as somewhere to show off my slowly growing vinyl record collection. In the good ‘ol days, each post had pictures of the record sleeves: back to front, inside out, disk labels, close up of the vinyl surface and etchings. The most time consuming part of working on the site was all the photography that I was doing. Borrowing my girlfriend’s Nikon D300, a series of lighting tricks, and my dad’s Olympus tripod, I’d painstakingly photograph every aspect of each record. All of these have now been made obsolete in regards to the site, but a lot of them live on forever on the Discogs website, and in my Photobucket account.
This went on for the first few hundred posts, and the first three years of the site’s life. As I got back into the grindcore underworld, and was heavily trading and swapping with bands and labels from around the world, it became increasingly apparent that I would have to start doing posts about CDs, cassettes and other formats too. Once, I received a series of floppy disks which contained noise music. I also have two 1” lathe cut records, cut on different materials, and a hand cut record etched onto a piece of thin plastic shaped like a heart.
By 2014 I’d left my job of 8 years, attempting to break into a different career path. I was working in a kebab shop and moonlighting a foundation degree in ICT, so was able to take the summer off and visit Thailand. After spending a month eating pork and rice, and living in huts, returning to my home filled with shelves and shelves of pieces of plastic and cardboard that I’d spent thousands on, something clicked and I decided to stop collecting and focus on the more important things in life.
As I slowly worked through selling off my records to better and more appreciative homes, I opened up Lines In Wax to any and all music, regardless of whether I owned it or not. With the growing streaming habits that the world was slowly adopting, this seemed like the right decision at the time. The only dilemma I had was that the site was called Lines In Wax (after the Flux Pavilion EP) because it focused on vinyl, but here we are in 2020 and the site is about pretty much anything and everything, so there we go! LOL
In 2015 the site hit its 500th review, with the clanking nightmare that is Swans’ Filth. Again in 2015, I put feelers out to friends and folk in the local music scene to help grow the site. This resulted in many submissions by guest writers, mostly by my good friend Gareth, but also credit is due to Gumpy, Tom, Kris from Red Venice Records and a local black metal musician writing under the alias of Griefmonger. I discovered some fantastic records through the reviews that these people submitted, and whilst that element of the site fell to the wayside after around 2 years, I am forever grateful for it.
Around the same time, Photobucket became a freemium service, causing thousands of my pictures to end up behind a paywall (and a blurred watermark) overnight. This was partly my fault, for someone who ended up as a backup / storage tech for 2 years I’ve always been horrendous with contingency plans and backups. Nowadays I have drives coming out of my arse, but back then I was a bit naive. This resulted in me manually re-uploading images for about 300 or so posts, after sorting out a new storage solution over at AWS, but even to this day, some of the posts over on the Blogger version of the site retain their blurred out paywalled images. I just simply never got around to fixing them all.
In 2017 I added in film and TV, after falling into the deep end with horror and exploitation. I’ve always steered away from films myself, especially horror movies. There are multiple reasons for this, most if not all of which are beyond the scope of this About section, but when I finally decided that I was probably missing out, I really fell in headfirst. In 2019 I hit 1000 posts, and at that milestone decided that I’d best be taking ownership of my site and contents and move over to a proper hosting. I’d been taking backups in spreadsheet form from Blogger, which I could import into WordPress or something should everything tank overnight, but I kept having this horrible feeling that one day Google’s TOS would change and I’d be out on my arse, what with a lot of grindcore / death metal record sleeves most definitely being classed as adult content LOL
And that leads us to where we are today. I bought the domain and the rest is history. I don’t have any social media anymore (it’s been years now and honestly its the best thing) so regressing from a WordPress / blog kinda layout into a traditional website just felt right. It would mean, of course, that the site would be kinda janky, writing the HTML/CSS by hand once again after all these years. But, I felt if I just peppered things with awful animated .gifs and gave things a personal touch, then this would be a pretty cool place to be online.
So, dusting off an old template I wrote for my college assignment (this layout was adapted from my The Wire and Breaking Bad fan sites haha), and a few tweaks later I’m here, working in CS5 Dreamweaver or BlueGriffon, depending on which device I’m using. We’re live, and the work of porting over the 1000 reviews begins. I write between 5 and 10 new articles a week, and there’s gonna be a ton of fun stuff under the Misc section of the site, so I couldn’t be more excited with my latest time-sink. If you’ve read all of this, thank – you you’re either crazy, lost, or genuinely interested in what is going on here. Take care out there! Cheers!
– Sean O))), Lines In Wax, 2020