I started "Cool And Strange Music! Magazine" in 1996, when I noticed there were no magazines that exclusively featured what was then known as "Incredibly Strange Music". At that time, I had just gotten my first computer a couple of years earlier. The internet was just starting to ramp up then, but rather than creating an online publication, I made the decision to start my magazine as a print publication . My main reason for making it a print magazine was that I could justify my charging a subscription rate, and being able to solicit advertising from record companies.

Within the next following couple of years, subscribership started climbing and over the course of seven years subscribership was up to 3600 readers.The magazine had a very professional staff of illustrators, writers and associate editors, most of whom were volunteers. I was the graphic designer and General Editor, as well as the advertising sales person. I only wrote a few articles myself, because I was so busy with these other duties.

The magazine was not a " 'zine", which was kind of a fad at the time. " 'zines" were smaller publications that were usually Xeroxed and perhaps only had a circulation of 100 or so copies. I thought much bigger than that. Right off the bat, I got a business license, a circulation manager and a tax number. My magazine was professionally offset-printed at a commercial printer in the industrial section of Seattle, WA. I spent $18,000 a year in printing and mailing costs. I never made much money from the magazine, but it always recouped it's own costs with suscription checks, and advertising checks. It NEVER went into debt, and I never had to borrow money from our household account to sustain the magazine.

The magazine garnered a lot of respect, and the local papers did interviews with me about it's success. Record companies would contact me to interview their artists, including some very famous ones. I sometimes got backstage press passes and tickets to concerts, and well as tons of CDs, sent in for review. Some of my favorite interviews that we did were the ones with Martin Denny, Ferrante and Teicher, Robert Moog, Les Paul, Jo Stafford, Tom Lehrer, Billy May, Esquivel, and so many others.

After seven years of publication for various reasons, it felt like it was time for me to move on to other projects, and I sold the magazine to a young fellow who seemed to be the perfect guy to take over. But instead of being the perfect guy, he ran off with the money in the company bank account, a brand new computer that I had supplied him with, and all the subscribers' and advertisers' money, as well as their trust and faith. He never published a single issue, and I never found out what happened to him.

It was a hugely disappointing thing to have happen, as I was really proud of the magazine, and I wanted to see it continue on without me.
More information about the demise of the magazine is here.

The magazine actually had a lot of clout in the music industry, and since the magazine folded there have been many other magazines and books that have drawn information from the interviews and articles that we had featured in "Cool And Strange Music! Magazine". To this day, the magazine is one of my proudest achievements, and I continue to get compliments on it.

In 2025 I was approached by Bear Manor Media, a book publisher who asked to reprint all 28 issues in both hardbound and soft bound books. Those are now easily found on Amazon and on other book outlet websites. I'm hoping that these books will end up on library bookshelves as reference material, if physical libraries even exist in the future!

Buy copies of the 4-volume Cool and Strange Music book set here.

You may still be able to buy select individual back issues of the magazine here.

You can view an index of ALL articles in every issue of the magazine HERE.

There exists a very old list of cool and strange links that you may be interested in, but be warned that many of the links are now dead.
Try it HERE.

- Dana Countryman

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