My close friend and bandmate, Johnny Angel, introduced me to Meg Lee Chin’s music almost two years ago. But it was only recently that her name kept appearing across the Facebook audio groups as a result of the name-change petition against Gearslutz. With new attention upon the company, Meg Lee Chin posted (see below) something about the company which caught many off-guard: Meg had in fact built, developed and co-founded, “Gearslutz” and wanted to inform the public of her role in creating its popular forum.
For a bit of context, Meg Lee Chin is an American singer, songwriter, audio engineer, producer, writer, and activist who lives in London. She is an early pioneer of DIY (do-it-yourself) recording and in 2000, she was the first DIY producer to be featured by EQ Magazine, one of the foremost audio publications at the time. She has also been a member of supergroup Pigface, a band with over 100 rotating members including Martin Atkins and Trent Reznor. Signed to Invisible Records for five years, she left the label in 2002.
Chin is a beloved artist in the industrial underground. She has released various albums and tracks as a solo musician and producer. Freed from the constraints of a label, Chin’s work became increasingly political and in 2019. True to her DIY ethic, she sporadically released tracks with accompanying music videos and even a documentary—all of which were entirely self-written, recorded, and produced. For example:
In 2014, she released “I Can’t Pull the Trigger,” an anti-war song and music video using Vietnam-era war footage.
In 2019, she released both a music video and accompanying full documentary which provided explanation to the song, “England’s Mask.” It warns of Britain’s danger in losing its status as a leading creative superpower across the arts.
In 2020, she released a music video of “Venus,” a call-out for a new era of feminine power. That same year, she released her “Celebrity Saviour” music video, a damning indictment of celebrity culture.
Johnny and I were honored to catch up with Meg Lee Chin last month in an interview, a link to which can be found below, where we learned more about her life and work as an artist and about her involvement with “Gearslutz.” Her story can be read in her own words at GearWarz. She is also in the middle of developing a new mobile app called “Talkosaurus,” and writing a book about this and many other topics important to her and her life in music.
Inspired by Meg, Seattle engineer Lilian Blair and I founded gearfanatix, a site dedicated to highlighting underrepresented voices in the audio through demos, reviews, and forums. The forums are a safe space for anyone to talk all things audio.
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