Thomas Scovell

atmos.co.nz

When I was 18, a disturbingly long time ago on reflection, I launched a little website about electronic music and local events. It being 1995, and my being in New Zealand, meant that there was precious little out there like it. So for a while it was a useful site for Auckland’s fledgling electronica “scene”.

My flatmate at the time, Matt Mariu, had a habit of referring to great gigs as having lots of “atmos” – hence the name. The hideous image to the left is the first flyer I made for the site. Blame it on the rave…

I’m thankful that archive.org didn’t index the site, as the design was beyond hideous. I’d blame the web safe colour palette but there is really no excuse. Gideon Keith from seven did us a nice logo (which he’d probably rather I didn’t credit him for) which you can see below.

He also gives a description below of why/where atmos went – along with its subsequent incarnations as various mailing lists.

“your all newbies… even Olivia… the forefather of the list phenomenom… though not a list in the strict sense… was @mos… created by the unseen hand of re:act and wreckage… a Mr Thomas Scovell… with help from matt m… unfortunately atmos died from extreme bloodloss… a nasty gash in its wallet… and then came psurkit… which, like wreckage, imploded under the weight of bitching and back biting… and now we have re:act… enjoy it while its here!… it won’t last forever…”

The original url was bitz.co.nz/ATMOS – a local hosting outfit. But I managed to shell out enough for a domain after a few months and it lived at atmos.co.nz for a time. Back then I was paying for both disk space and data transferred by the meg at extortionate rates (NZ’s link to the world was a tin can and string at the time) – which added up, especially for a broke student, so it really was “bloodloss” and a little cynicism that killed it.

I actually let the domain lapse eventually – but just noticed recently it was available again so I grabbed it.

See the thing is… in a small way, atmos is back.