When a hiatus is taken on something, a lot of people think to themselves, “Well is it over?” “What happened?” “Did they just quit?” When an organization, musician, celebrity, influencer takes a break from producing content, we as the consumers always assume the worst.
Like right now, we have no idea if Kendrick Lamar or Frank Ocean are ever going to release new music because we haven’t heard from them for about half a decade now.
However, where we consumers fault is we often fail to look at the creators of the content as regular human beings. We put them on a pedestal, but these curators are just like you and me. They’re just you’re average collection of atoms trying to find their joy and purpose until their time here on this Earth comes to a close.
On March 9th, the company Seven Ply Mag hosted a release event with four live bands. Bands included were the Will Shamberger Band, poorsport., Flawless Victory, and Blind Fortune, which fortunately I got to see an entire set where the cops didn’t get called like for a previous Our Town Reno story.
The event hosted a release of Seven Ply Mag’s third issue of their skateboarding magazine which features Skateboard photography, abstract art pieces, and an interview.
There are three main people who run the magazine. The first is Nick Felton who takes a lot of the photos for the zine and helps out with editing and production. The second is Jordan Carlson, who is the editor in chief. Last, but certainly not least, is Alan Chou who is the creative director and co-editor in chief.
Chou recently joined the group after the second issue, so this is their first release all together. It’s safe to say that they were impressed with the turnout. “It’s just crazy,” Felton said. “I think we’re just stoked right now on the turnout and how everything turned out.”
“Crazy that this many people came out on a Wednesday Night,” Chou added.
“[It’s] pretty solid,” Carlson said. “It definitely shows the support for local bands and for local projects. The support from the community, no matter what day of the week it is they still came out here which is pretty sick.”
Seven Ply had a pretty long hiatus that lasted almost two years. The crew had a lot of personal turmoil and family issues that needed to be dealt with before even thinking of starting another issue. The crew values making unique and “hand-made” work and that’s simply not something that can just be rushed overnight. The gang waited until the smoke settled in their personal life so they could really dedicate their vision and their craft to stepping up their game from the second issue.
“Every few months we would go and look at it and be like what the f*** are we doing,” Chou said. “[We’d] change it up, we would all look it with three different eyes and at different times, and didn’t know what we were doing. Then we all three got together and we finally we’re like ‘oh I agree on the layout and like pictures and like what’s in and what’s out.’ So, it was sick when us three finally got all of our eyes on it together.”
“The hardest part is there’s a lot of preparation when getting ready to put on a show, not to mention doing the show itself,” Carlson said. “Which Nick did an amazing job setting things up and finding a venue and communicating with the bands and having to take photos whenever necessary. We sometimes would meet for six hours in the evening just to be able to get to a consensus just on what shirts we want to buy, you know those days do add up. It does take a long time to try and get everything produced for it.”
“It was quite the process to get this one done just with everything that was going on,” Felton said. “Like for the first two issues it was just me and Jordan, but then Alan came in during the second premiere and he was like, ‘Yo, let me help out in any way that I can’. Then he became the third part of Seven Ply, which helped tremendously and I felt like that was a big part of getting this issue going too. He was there making sure we were doing stuff. He was making sure me and Jordan weren’t like bickering because it’s easy to think, ‘well my idea is better’ and it’s good to have that third person help bring this project together.”
“To keep it short and sweet we are just really stoked to put this out because we put a lot of hard work into it and we’re stoked so hard to see the outcome. Hopefully, it’s a big success, so we can keep doing this thing,” Felton said.
They plan on releasing more magazines and hosting more events throughout the rest of the year and keeping their foot on the pedal. Colton Templeton also played a huge role in bringing the magazine together, and the guys are very appreciative of him.
“If it wasn’t for all of us putting in the equal amount of effort then it wouldn’t have happened,” Felton said. “That was a big part of this one was all of us coming together to do what we needed to do and saying what we need to say even if it wasn’t easy.”
This was the first Seven Ply event that included live bands. The last event took place a Mira Loma Skatepark on Go Skate Day, and the crew thought adding in live bands would bring a stronger sense of community.
“We just wanted it to be a full-blown local event, you know bring the local bands, we’re kind of helping them out, putting this on and they’re kind of helping us bringing their crowd,” Felton said. “We just want to keep Reno tight-knit, it doesn’t just go for skateboarding. We’re all like very into the music scene, whether the genre you know it’s cool we’re kind of genre-mashing with the lineup.”
“Everyone in Reno is all about supporting local, so it’s amazing that we have one of the sickest scenes, music, art, skateboarding, whatever else,” Chou said. “We have the sickest scene out there for sure.
Frank Ayala did a lot of the art for this issue and the Seven Ply crew gave him a huge shoutout for the work he put in.
While you can’t currently purchase anything to support Seven Ply if you didn’t go to the event, they are working on getting a website up and running and are working on building a stronger social media presence. If you want to stay tuned to see when their next event is going to happen or when the website goes live, make sure to follow them on their Instagram @sevenplymag.
“We’re just hoping to make it apparent that we’re here to stay, we’re not going anywhere,” Felton said. “We were gone for a while, but like Alan said in the intro of the mag, ‘We’re back baby!’ and we’re gonna keep that vibe going for the rest of the year.”