The house
About Small Rooms
What the review is, how its notes are made, who signs them, and what the address carried before the review began.
Small Rooms is a review of one subject: the acoustic show played to a few dozen people in a room that was built for something else. A back room of a cafe, a bookshop after hours, a basement with a stool and a lamp. The review writes down how that show is built, from the time budget of a short set to the physics of a low ceiling, and it checks its numbers wherever a number can be checked.
Five rooms, dated notes
The site is organised as five rooms, numbered 01 to 05: the set, the writing, the instrument, the room and the scene. Each room holds dated notes, and each note answers one question from its first paragraph on. The home page is a register: one line per note, most recent first, with nothing else on it.
How a note is made
Every figure in a note comes from one of two places. Either a primary source that is named and dated at the foot of the page, with the day it was consulted, or an arithmetic the reader can redo from the inputs shown. Where neither exists the note says so, and uses words instead of numbers. Rooms, verses, kits and evenings used as examples are built by the desk for the note that uses them, and the note says so in one sentence. The review quotes no published song, names no writer, no performer, no venue, no promoter, no label and no festival, so that what it describes stays true next season and puts words in nobody's mouth.
Who signs
The notes are signed by the Small Rooms desk. It is a collective signature, not a person: there are no bylines, no biographies and no photographs of anybody. The desk takes no equipment, no tickets and no money from anyone it writes about, and it writes about no one by name in the first place. How that is enforced is set out in the editorial policy.
The address
From 2015 to 2019 this address carried the website of a songwriters' festival. The review keeps the subject of that site, the small acoustic show, and nothing else: it republishes none of its pages, none of its programmes and none of its names, and its own record begins in 2026. The old addresses answer as absent, not as redirected.
Write to the desk
A correction, a measurement from a real room, or a question about a method travels through the contact page, which is an email address and nothing more. What the site keeps about a reader is written on the privacy page.