For 12 years, Evan Minsker worked at Pitchfork, primarily gathering news overnight and on weekends. It was a great job but still, you know, a job.
“The news is not always good news,” he says. “The news is not always news you care about, but it's news, and that's that's your job. You have to call people to be like, ‘Hey, is it true that DMX is dead?” And you hear from a manager, ‘No, DMX is alive.’ Then you post, ‘Hey, DMX is alive.’ And then two days later, you post an obituary for DMX.”
Tracking the mortality of rap legends isn’t Minsker’s job anymore. He was a casualty of Pitchfork’s brutal 2024 layoffs, when parent company Condé Nast axed many of the site’s longtime staffers.
But rather than slinking away from music journalism (a perfectly reasonable decision given the dwindling opportunities in that field), Minsker followed the path of an increasing number of unemployed writers and editors: He started his own publication. See/Saw focuses on the garage punk Minsker didn’t always get to cover at his old day job, with features and reviews of bands from him and several other prominent music journalists.
Minsker has been plugging away for a full year at See/Saw in Menomonie, Wisconsin, where he and his family have lived since 2019 (his wife teaches studio art photography at UW-Stout). And to celebrate, he’s rounded up some of his favorite bands to take over two rooms at the Eagles Club in Minneapolis on Saturday night.
See/Saw is a descendent of a column Minsker wrote for Pitchfork called “Shake Appeal,” where he got to cover the bands he was genuinely passionate about. (Despite much pestering he wasn’t able to get permission from Iggy Pop to use the same title for his website.) “It was great, but it wasn’t what they paid me to do, so I had to invent the time to do it,” he recalls. “But I was staying up late, losing sleep, you know, and after a while I was like, I can't justify this anymore.”
Now Minsker works a part-time corporate writing job on the side, which frees him up to follow his passion with See/Saw. And his relationship with his audience has totally changed.
“I get a lot more feedback now that I ever did at Pitchfork,” he says. In those days, impressed high school friends would occasionally recognize his name. “I would hear from people when it was like, Nine Inch Nails were coming back, or something big, like something that played great on Facebook. But if I reviewed my favorite punk band, nobody saw it except the band. And the band would normally be like, ‘What?’ And that's probably the appropriate reaction.”
And the readers he interacts with are much more enthusiastic. “The joy of having a niche garage publication is that the people who are here for it, like, bleed for it,” he says. “They really love this stuff. They're not showing up out of a passing interest.”
If See/Saw is the digital equivalent of an old punk zine, it’s bolstered by 21st-century adjustments like a podcast, Punk This Week, with Nina Cochran.
“It's accidentally mostly a podcast about snacks, because we record at snack time, so inevitably, we’re just like,’Hey, what are you snacking on?’” Minsker jokes. “Nina and I have a lot of overlap in taste, but we also have our specific zones. Nina is into a lot of like, you know, kind of like post hardcore and emo stuff and I'm a lot more into the garage punk stuff.”
As for Friday’s nights show, you’ll see the sorts of bands that you’d read about on See/Saw. The lineup includes Montreal’s Retail Simps, Judy and the Jerks outta Mississippi, Minneapolis’s own Neo Neos, Cincinnati’s Artificial Go, Detroit’s 208, Denver’s Abi Ooze, and the new Twin Cities band Panel.
And a day earlier, on Friday, there’s a pre-party at Cloudland with Feeling Figures (Retail Simps in a different configuration), Chicago’s Answering Machines, and locals Bermuda Squares and Yuasa-Exide. Add up both nights and that’s way more than one year’s worth of rock.
A year into See/Saw, with 2,200 subscribers, Minsker feels no pressure to expand or set unrealistic goals. “I don't have to ever again take into consideration ‘Will this hit a KPI goal of blah, blah, blah?’” he says. “I don't care. I have a Google Analytics thing set up. I don't look at it. I genuinely am driven by what is interesting to me, and that's pretty much it, which is great.
“The growth is really gradual, and there's really no pressure to strap or rocket to my niche blog," he says. "It can just sort of go slow and steady and gradually find its people.”
See/Saw First Anniversary Party
Where: Eagles #34
When: 7 p.m. Sat., April 5
With: Retail Simps, Judy and the Jerks, Neo Neos, Artificial Go, 208, Abi Ooze, and Panel
Tickets: $30; more info here
