Secret Thirteen Finishes a Website Rebuild That Took More Than a Year

The news is small and specific: Secret Thirteen has a new website. The account its editor has published around the relaunch is not small at all. The rebuild ran past a year, carried out mostly in evenings and weekends after the day job, and it kept the black and white palette and the roughness of the old site on purpose.

What the text documents is cost. Sleepless nights, hours taken from family and friends, health problems the author mentions without detailing them. There is the embarrassment of repeatedly telling people the site was nearly ready, and the particular fatigue of being unable to stop thinking about a broken page while trying to answer an artist’s email. “I can be pleased with what I’ve made and admit that I’m tired too,” the editor writes.

This is the ordinary condition of independent music publishing, rarely written down. A finished piece carries one name, but around it sits the correspondence, editing, artwork, uploading, coding, promotion and the paying for things. Contributors pass through at different points, and preserving what they made becomes another task on the pile.

The harder decision was how much to alter before the place stopped feeling like itself. The monochrome stayed, and so did the abrasion. Visitors are meant to arrive, press play and think about what they hear rather than the labour behind it. The rebuild is finished. The conditions that produced it are not.