Exact Change is the name of an independent small press run by Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang. The duo, who were members of Galaxie 500 and now play as Damon & Naomi, started the imprint in 1990 in order to repress 19th and 20th century avant-garde lit—kind of like a reissue label for the likes of John Cage and Salvador Dalí. Over the years, they’ve repressed books like The Blue Octavo Notebooks by Franz Kafka and Everybody’s Autobiography by Gertrude Stein.
This year, Damon & Naomi took the name and ran with it, expanding Exact Change to also include a digital app-based e-zine of literature, music, art, film, and video published by 29th Street Publishing. “Zine is a word that dates to our first experiments in music, writing, and photography,” Krukowski said in an email around the launch of the publication. “It was the punk rock of publishing. To me, the word still represents the DIY spirit that led us to start a band, as well as Exact Change—the idea that anyone can do it. We weren’t trained as musicians, or publishers.”
In order to read the issues, you need to download a free iPhone or iPad app. Then you either purchase a subscription ($2.99/month or $29.99/year) or an individual issue downloads are ($4.99). To celebrate the end of the publication’s first year, every issue is now available to download for free. The first year includes contributions by Damon and Naomi, Kim Gordon, Jim O’Rourke, Stephen Merritt, Julia Holter, Ian Svenonius, and many others. Overviews of each issue are online here.
