8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

Slippery Between Fingers

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The Web is Too Damn Complicated → Robin Rendle says, “The web doesn’t have to be this ugly and embarrassing thing … the web can be made beautiful.” He’s made a beautiful webpage to prove this case. Rendle has illustrated his scrollable essay with vintage woodcuts and metal engravings that are surprisingly effective in amplifying his points. And those points are about how the recent ubiquity of email newsletters is a missed opportunity for a blog renaissance.

Rendle is really asking, “how do we make the web for everyone?” He sees the rise of newsletters as an encouraging sign that people are moving away from social media’s grasp. But why not embrace blogs, which are capable of much more creativity than allowed in email? Because, ultimately, the open web is not as convenient. Website-building is not intuitive, nor is website-following (“RSS is for nerds.”). The creators of Substack know this and made a publishing tool that’s easy to use and receive. 

“If we could subscribe to websites easily,” says Rendle, “then the web itself might not feel quite so forgettable.” He suggests that browsers should include built-in RSS reading. In a way, I guess this would be like a global version of Facebook’s newsfeed. That feed is essentially an RSS reader, but one can only subscribe to feeds within Facebook’s prison camp. 

I do like newsletters. On second thought, I actually like that more people are writing and sending out personal essays. The email newsletter is merely the delivery method. Thanks to Feedbin, I read my newsletters in an RSS reader, living side-by-side with the blogs I enjoy. 

I have an email newsletter but, if I had to choose, this blog is my preference. It feels more open, free, and permanent (as permanent as something on the web can be). I do fear that newsletters may prove a fad — both Facebook and Twitter are jumping on the newsletter bandwagon, which hints that ‘peak newsletter’ isn’t too far off. Blogs remain that scruffy outlier, unpeggable and persistent, slippery between fingers of profit-hungry CEOs. Email’s okay, but blogs keep the web weird. 

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New Wave Eye Candy → That’s a tag on Simon Reynolds’ Hardly Baked blog, and there are three installments in the series (so far). These posts contain a long scroll of vintage graphics from album covers, adverts, and posters that exemplify the look and attitude of the post-punk new wave. It’s also a remarkable glimpse of cutting edge graphic design just before the days of Photoshop et al.

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Emily A. Sprague – Hill, Flower, Fog → “Mirror” is the unassuming third song on Emily A Sprague’s latest, Hill, Flower, Fog. As gentle as a shower of cotton puffs, the song lightly bubbles and pings in sensuous repetition for over nine minutes. The changes are subtle — a lonesome synth swell lingers in the background, pining for recognition, and stereo echoes increase patiently. “Mirror” is the best kind of unobtrusive, and it’s almost shocking when it ends. It feels like a sound that should last forever. 

It’s tempting to say the same about all of Sprague’s latest album for RVNG Intl. — its warm reassurance is a welcome companion. It feels real, and, over six sonic tapestries, Sprague turns a Eurorack’s cold toughness inside out and brushes its circuitry with earth, dew, and sap. Like mysteries of the natural world, Sprague’s electronics feel emergent.

Hill, Flower, Fog is a pandemic album, recorded last March as the world started to realize the trials to come. But these songs magically (and sonically) trade impending sense of loss and uncertainty for sonic intimacy and optimism. One could note that Sprague’s cyclic melodies and looping treatments reflect the imposed routines of lockdown. However, the music is encouraging, inferring these daily patterns as something cherishable, an opportunity for reflection and moving inward. It seems to say, “one day at a time.”

User-Centric Dreaming

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User-Centric Dreaming → The user-centric streaming royalty model — explained and critiqued here — was the focus of a new study by the National Music Centre in France. Using data from Deezer (who are publicly open to exploring this model) and Spotify (who aren’t but might be shifting), the study determined a small advantage for niche artists, offset by the amount of major label back-catalog material that makes up the majority of streams. Here’s Stuart Dredge in Musically:

There is plenty more to parse from this new study, such as the likely increases for genres like classical music, jazz, metal and blues (and corresponding drops for streaming’s biggest genres: rap and hip-hop). Meanwhile, catalogue music is a beneficiary, which – again, as indicated in previous studies – is one reason why user-centric might not be the redistribution of revenues from major labels to independents that might have been expected.

The user-centric model dispenses of the system of pooled royalties that go out to artists streamed on platforms like Spotify. Instead, a listener’s subscription money only goes to the artists that a listener streams. So, if you listen to nothing but Merzbow1preferably at an ear-splitting volume on Spotify Premium for 30 days, then all of your $9.99 monthly subscription fee goes to Merzbow.

This model may not change the royalty pay-outs much, according to the study. But I’m still into the model for two reasons. First of all, I feel like it would give listeners more emotional investment in the artists they stream. I want to think we’d feel an additional connection with our listening choices, knowing that our streams contain direct support for our favorite artists. Though it’s worth noting, the much-maligned per-stream rate isn’t likely to change.2Though, as a Spotify Premium subscriber, if you only listened to one Merzbow song in a month, then that single stream is worth $9.99. Crazy, eh?

Second, and more significantly, the user-centric model would destroy the shadow industry of stream farms. These are the “pay X amount of dollars for ten thousand streams” folks who load songs into a wall of smartphones, playing a song on each repeatedly to increase stream counts. These plays also theoretically increase the royalties paid to the farmed songs, but it’s at the expense of other artists legitimately streamed on the platform because of royalty pooling. Under a user-centric model, if the stream farm pays $9.99 for a premium account, then the only potential royalty from that account comes out of that $9.99, even if the song is looped a kazillion times. And it won’t affect the royalties of valid artists.

As the Musically article points out, right now, this is all pie-in-the-sky thinking. That’s because for the adoption of the user-centric model, the major labels — many of whom are Spotify shareholders — would have to agree to it. As the model helps niche artists, even slightly, the majors are not going to let this happen.

Anyhoo … want to grok some more pros-and-cons on user-centric streaming? This analysis of how the model changes an artist’s digital marketing strategy, via Bas Grasmayer and his excellent MUSIC X newsletter, is an illuminating read.

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Daniel Lanois on WTF with Marc Maron + Rick Rubin on The Moment with Brian Koppelman → Possibly the best thing I did all week was listening to these two podcasts back-to-back. These conversations illustrate how a music producer’s role can overlap with some combination of philosopher, personal coach, and crisis manager. It’s not just about drum sounds and reverb. Lanois talks specifics about the process of wrangling great work from icons (and their giant egos), and Rubin expands on that with the big picture view. I recommend you listen in that order — a masterclass in the mindsets required to inspire others into action, not just applicable to inside a recording studio. Bonus: this interview with Trevor Horn conducted by Prince Charles Alexander (also a producer of renown) has a lot more ‘shop talk’ than the previous two but is still a fascinating listen. Horn is such an engaging interviewee. 

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Burdy – Satellite → Back in the ’90s, all of us downtempo-headz listened to lots of Fila Brazillia and the other artists inhabiting the Hull, UK, imprint Pork Recordings. One act that stood out was Baby Mammoth, a duo who shared Fila’s knack for melody and sly rhythmic constructions. An amicable gent named Burdy was one-half of Baby Mammoth. We ended up becoming friends thanks to his semi-frequent sojourns to the US, where we often DJ’ed the same club nights. After a couple of solo releases and a stint as an Australian, Burdy took a long break from music-making. Now he reaches out from his new base in chilly Canada, surprising us with a delightful album of fresh music. Satellite is out today on Filtered Deluxe Recordings and features ten tracks that won’t disappoint fans of the Mammoth or their Pork label-mates. The songs feature Burdy’s sense of melody, sense of humor (“Murder Hornets,” anyone?), and his sense of style. Meaning, this is stylish stuff — pleasantly sloping beats, a rush of organic and electronic instrumentation, and vibes for days (or daze) make me wistful for when we used to pack dance floors with 100 BPMs and below. Start with the second track, “Kananaskis,” with its road-movie guitar, watery bounce, and cryptic chants, immediately pulling you in for the long haul. 

Small Potatoes

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Sample-Snitching → One quiet morning in the early 2000s, I arrived at my label’s office and listened to the voice mail no sampling record producer wants to hear. The call was from a lawyer representing the estate of the leader of an obscure ’70s funk band. He knew that I used a 2-bar drum loop from this band on a song from my first album. It didn’t matter that this loop was fairly common, used prolifically in both mainstream hits and underground white labels. It also didn’t matter that I probably grabbed the loop off one of those erroneously named ‘royalty-free’ sample CDs that were common in the ’90s. The lawyer (and, presumably, his client) wanted his cut. 

Long story short, the fact the loop appeared in several mainstream hits probably worked in my favor — once the lawyer saw the requested final sales figures for my album, he realized I was small potatoes. I guess I wasn’t worth the effort, and I never heard from him again. But the most disturbing thing was how he found me. He was going through listings of songs that sampled his client on a sample-identifying website. 

I’m not sure which site the lawyer used at the time. Today’s most popular one, WhoSampled.com, launched several years after that frightening phone call. But the fear persists among producers. A new article in Pitchfork by Mosi Reeves details how representatives of legacy catalog use WhoSampled to source potential litigation, despite its intended purpose of pointing fans to old records:

It is a useful resource for rap listeners, despite its complicated role in sampling culture. Chris Read, the London-based company’s head of content, said that using the website as a fact-finding tool for potential lawsuits is a violation of its terms of service, and that the practice “stands in opposition to the reason WhoSampled was created, which is to provide a place for music fans to discover the origins of the music they love and celebrate sampling as an artform.” He acknowledged that the site does not distinguish between cleared and uncleared samples in its listings, because information about sample licensing is not always made publicly available. Producers can request takedowns of listings related to their work if there is information that “they would prefer was not published” on the site, he added.

The law is clear, so producers using uncleared samples — myself included — are unambiguously in the wrong. Many in the music industry’s creative roles have called for an overhaul of these laws to recognize sampling as an art form and create avenues for producers working outside the profitable mainstream. Some lawyers, like the one who contacted me and ended up letting the sample slide, would seem to agree. But then there’s the challenge of differentiating those who use samples artfully vs. those who use them to profit off the notoriety of earlier works. Yes, music rights are complicated (a phrase that’s in the running for the motto of this blog).

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A preview of Marc Méan’s forthcoming album Basteln → Friend of the blog Marc Méan has recorded a new album, titled Basteln. It’s out next week on Neologist Productions. I’m sure I’ll write more about it upon release as it’s terrific, maybe even better and lovelier than his previous effort, Collage. You can listen to the advance single (or, perhaps, it’s an excerpt as the album consists of two 20-minute tracks), recorded using “Cocoquantus, piano, voice & FX.” 

Marc lives in Zürich. The Swiss city has been on my mind as I’m near completing Kim Stanley Robinson’s fantastic near-future climate change novel The Ministry for the Future. Zürich is the setting for much of the novel, and the descriptions of the city are inviting. However, Zürich was already on my radar as the home base of the founders of my favorite art pranksters, the Dadaists. Here’s where Cabaret Voltaire got their name.

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Optional Essentials Vol. 1 → My friend Dr Olive — who once took me to the top of Mont St-Michel — recently launched a new label, 3 to the 3rd Music. The latest release is an ambitious two-part compilation cheekily titled Optional Essentials. The hype-text describes this collection as “the home-made home-listening soundtrack to one of the strangest years, written by music makers from 7 countries.” The sound is chill, overall, but audacious. There’s a diversity of instrumentation and mood-scapes, never a dull moment. The sequence is thoughtful, easily pulling the listener into its zone when played from beginning to end. And I have a connection — I contributed the song “Tarkovsky” under my Q-BAM moniker. I recorded this song ages ago, inspired by repeated visits to Moscow and my admiration of the Russian filmmaker named by the title. And I sampled Robbie Hardkiss saying, “Everything is cool.” Also on the compilation: amazing new tunes from my friends (and label-mates) Monta At Odds and Gemini Revolution.

The Isolator

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Hello, Distraction, My Old Friend → I meant to take a two-week break with my email newsletter and ended up taking five weeks off. That surprised me. It also made me think about distraction. The holidays — during which I announced my ‘short’ hiatus — are always a considerable distraction already. And then, this time around, we’re also navigating a pandemic and a volatile news-scape.

The beginning of each new year is usually calm and reflective, and I assumed the first week of 2021 would be the same, allowing time to seize back attention. Nope. So far, this new year has been a crazy one, a worrying one, a hectic one, and, as it turns out, a not entirely unexpected one. All attempts to write and publish Ringo foiled and unraveled.

Distraction’s a problem, always has been. Things seem to be settling down a tad, in both the outside world and my personal sphere. Here’s hoping the political winds change, and distraction levels decrease, but I’m not holding my breath. Personal and professional occurrences are distraction enough. I’m on a Sisyphean quest to defy and deny distraction so I can more easily do things I want to do this year — like send out a weekly Ringo. 

Anil Dash recently posted about his Personal Digital Reset. This piece poses his alternative to New Year’s resolutions, a typically 2021 cleanse of one’s digital life. Many of his proposals make sense: a lot less (to no) social media, ingesting online news and information solely with intention, replacing FOMO with YAGNI (‘You Aren’t Gonna Need It’). Others, such as wiping your computer and reinstalling everything from scratch, seem drastic but might actually be a good idea. Honestly, getting bogged down for hours maintaining a computer sounds like another distraction to me. But we are recalibrating here, right?

Have you seen The Isolator? Here’s a helmet worn while working, to relieve the writer of all distractions. It even includes an oxygen tank, so you don’t have to come up for air. On the other side of the coin, there’s the TV Helmet — an enclosure that feeds the wearer nothing but distraction, uncontrolled and divorced from intention. Notice how similar these are in concept despite the dichotomic applications. Happiness is found somewhere in the middle, no headwear required. 

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Ken Burns’ Jazz → Noting this because chances are you are an Amazon Prime subscriber so you can get those dark gray vans to visit your doorstep frequently. Jazz is available on Prime’s streaming service at no extra cost right this very moment. This astonishing series from K-Burns was released in 2001. That was just in time, as I doubt many of the interview subjects were around much longer. This thing is massive — is it like 20 hours, maybe more? Well, the pressure’s on because I think it’s leaving Prime (as a ‘freebie’) on the first of February. You’ve got a week. At the very least, watch the first few episodes — the origins of jazz are compelling, instructive, and say a lot about US history. Of course, the history of any country is in the history of its music.

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Elijah Knutsen – Pink Dream → Elijah Knutsen is a regular occurrence on the blog, and he’ll continue to pop up as long as his ambient experiments remain so alluring. Pink Dream is his latest, the second in a promised series of ‘micro releases’ issued through Knutsen’s new Memory Color imprint. The showpiece is “Wonder How,” which opens the EP with cavern-drenched guitar chords and reverb-maxed plucks. Bonus birdsongs add to the heavenly atmosphere — one almost imagines a giant, glowing harp in luminescent clouds — and the overall effect neighbors the instrumental passages on Cocteau Twins’ seminal Victorialand LP. Other cuts are shorter but no less fascinating, especially the closing “Somewhere Knows.” An intro of gentle crowd sounds fade into a ballet of organ tones and swooping hints of melody as the light throng of people slowly returns. The tune doesn’t sound like anything else that’s recently hit my ambient inbox, which is about as high a compliment I can give for something in this genre. 

Infect the Mainstream

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Spotify Song Purge → There’s something fishy going on in streaming-land, according to entertainment lawyer Wallace Collins:

It appears that on January 1, 2021, Spotify enacted a massive, global takedown of music from thousands of independent artists. Upon information and belief, some 750,000 songs were removed, the vast majority of which appear to have used Distrokid for distribution. This appears to be targeted at any independent artist who used a third party playlist or independent marketing service to promote their music – or any third party advertising outside of the Spotify platform … in the case of my particular clients, we are talking about legitimate third party advertising and promotional services as opposed to “bots” or other artificial means of generating increased streams.

It’s worth noting that Spotify has a financial stake in Distrokid, which was also named by the platform as one of its ‘preferred distributors.’ If Collins’s info is accurate, then this is an embarrassing moment for Distrokid. Hypebot spoke to a source within Spotify who claims the purge wasn’t as dramatic and didn’t favor Distrokid.

I also wonder, outside of Collins’s clients (who surely make up only a tiny percentage of that 750k), if these removals are mostly due to bootlegs and identical track schemes. Spotify has received recent bad press about podcasts filled with unlicensed songs and the proliferation of ‘white noise scammers.’ Knowledge of these issues has floated around for a while, but a featured article in Variety might be the thing to inspire this sudden action.

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The Toxic Music Svengali → Phil Spector’s death is renewing uncomfortable — but necessary — conversations about the artist’s separation from the art. Generally, it’s okay to appreciate the beautiful art of horrible people. But the artist doesn’t get a pass when the art is brilliant and influential. BBC News’s flubbing of Spector’s obituary headline illustrates the outrage of not understanding this nuance. Laura Snapes addresses this eloquently today in The Guardian:

Spector is known as the innovator of the “wall of sound” recording technique and countless moments of pop sublimity. They are inextricable from his everyday barbarism, waving guns around and holding them to musicians’ heads to enforce his will. The combination created a pernicious infamy: if the songs are so majestic, then the behaviour must be justifiable. Where Spector’s famous “boom-cha-boom-cha” drum sound on Be My Baby (played by Hal Blaine) instantly summons a pristine moment in pop history, Spector’s living legacy is that of music industry abuse going unchecked because the art is perceived as worth it – or worse, considered “proof” of wild and untameable genius.

The whole piece is worth reading, addressing a history of behind-the-scenes producers (all men) using aloofness and supposed genius to excuse terrible behavior. As Snapes notes, “Not all producers are violent predators, but the role offers ample cover for anyone who chooses to exploit it.”

It’s fine to continue enjoying the cavernous qualities of Spector’s production, but not without remembering (and discussing) the man’s cruelty. One simple part in punishment for abuse and awful deeds is linking the work to the context of the monster who had a hand in creating it. That doesn’t necessarily make the work any less brilliant, but can serve to instruct others of their responsibilities as artists and mentors. 

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Hyperpop Redux → A tip of the hat to Joe Muggs for turning me on to this educational video about the emergent genre of hyperpop. I previously gave hyperpop some ink in my examination of genres here on the blog, and I remain fascinated. In a clickbaity way, the video title asks if hyperpop is “the future of pop.” The short answer is “no,” but hyperpop is undoubtedly influencing the future of popular music. I believe Simon Reynolds once pointed out that one can look to the extremes in genres for oncoming trends that will infect the mainstream. 100 Gecs might not become pop, but dialing back their excesses creates a blueprint for an edgier top 40. And, as you sample recent work of some of the artists named in the video, you’ll hear moves away from some of hyperpop’s defining characteristics. It’s a genre in flux, which is evidence of its potential longevity and influence. 

Dream Songs

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Here’s a bit of fun to close out this Xmas weekend. This video, by British comedian (and accomplished Bowie impressionist) Adam Buxton, imagines the recording session for “Warszawa,” a track from David Bowie’s 1977 album Low. Buxton’s video isn’t new, and you’ve probably seen it before. But this is one of those rare things that gives me a chuckle and brightens my mood every time I watch it. I’m probably responsible for at least one hundred of its 600k+ views.

Adam Buxton also interviewed Brian Eno on the former’s excellent podcast. A good sport, Eno refers to this video as “one of the funniest things I’ve seen on the internet” but, “unfortunately, I keep meeting people who think it’s a real depiction of how things were between us in the studio.” Don’t make the same mistake, dear reader. 

The interview, in two parts, is casual and fun. Here it is on SoundCloud:

I also ran across Tony Barrell’s history of Brian Eno’s solo song “The True Wheel,” from 1974’s Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. (I love in-depth articles that break down the origins of individual songs and recordings.) It turns out that the song is a reenactment of a mescaline-fueled dream. Even some of the exact lyrics appeared to Eno in his fevered slumber:

[Brian] had a surreal dream about a bunch of girls, which included his friend Randi, serenading some sailors who had just come into port. The men weren’t exactly regular sailors: “They were sort of astronauts,” he clarified later, “but with all the psychological aspects of sailors.” […] The girls in the dream were singing: “We are the 801 / We are the central shaft.” When he returned to the real world, Eno jotted the phrases down and realised he had something interesting (to use one of his favourite words). It sounded meaningful, though he didn’t understand it, and it used the first-person plural. “I woke up absolutely jubilant, because this was the first bit of lyric I’d written in this new style.”

Barrell touches on other songs and lyrics written while asleep, including when Paul McCartney famously had a dream that bestowed “Yesterday.” Have you ever had a song, or anything, given to you in a dream? 

When I was in my early 20s, I dreamed that I was in the passenger seat of a car that was speeding precariously down a dirt road. It was night, and I could only see the road and the surrounding forest in headlights, kind of like in a David Lynch movie. I was frightened and looked over to the driver’s side to see who was at the wheel. It was Lou Reed. 

Lou noticed that I was scared, so he looked at me reassuringly (while still driving) and sang a song to calm my nerves. The song went, “You’re so evil, oh Macbeth … you’re so wicked, oh Macbeth …” 

I woke up and hit smartly hit ‘record’ on the boombox next to my bed. I sang the fresh song and then fell back to sleep. In the morning, I looked at the boombox and wondered if that really happened. I hit ‘play,’ and there’s half-asleep me singing the lyrics and melody for this dream song. It wasn’t bad. A few years later, the first band I joined in Orlando played the song (with me singing). I have a recording of it somewhere in that box of 4-track tapes I mentioned in the previous post.

From the clandestine processes in the studio to the shadowy visions in our heads, music (and music-making) remains a delightful mystery.

Update: Adam Buxton has released a delightful follow-up to his video above to commemorate David Bowie’s 74th birthday, almost five years after his death. Check out the “Ashes to Ashes” Clown Suit Story.

Ghosts of Christmas Past

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I was obsessed with my Tascam 246 Portastudio. I mowed a bunch of lawns, saved my money, and somehow found the Tascam for sale (cheap!) in the local newspaper. A church was selling it. The Tascam was practically new. I assumed the church bought it to record choirs or whatever and then realized a four-track multitrack recorder was more than what was needed. 

I lucked out. At the time (1986), the 246 was the Rolls-Royce of Tascam four-track recorders. It had features like two speeds (you could run the tape faster for better audio quality), pitch control (handy for creative tomfoolery), and an effective dbx noise reduction system. I learned most of what I know about recording from my experiences with that Portastudio. I recorded my punk band, one-off ‘bands’ with various friends, and my solo experimentations. I ended my teenage years by recording almost every day. 

I was a fan of albums over songs, so I was always recording with some future ‘album’ in mind. Sometimes I assembled songs into an album, fitting them snuggly on a 60-minute cassette — or a 90-minute cassette if I was feeling proggy. I was always looking for ways to connect songs for these imagined albums, or finding ideas that maintained my interest for the time it took to record a long-player from scratch.

It was on a Halloween — again, probably 1986 — that I walked into a shopping mall and heard Christmas songs. Though we now accept the Christmas season seemingly starting earlier each year, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. How dare anyone play Christmas music on Halloween? At the very least, someone should ‘spookify’ the songs, giving the holiday standards a ghostly twist. 

Light bulb moment — my next album project was born. I called it something like Have a Spooky Christmas, but I don’t know for sure. I don’t remember a lot about it. 

There’s a box in my closet with all the original four-track cassette tapes from those years. But I can’t play them without a Tascam 246 — these are one-sided cassettes recorded on four-tracks. They’re at double speed, encoded with the 246’s aggressive dbx noise reduction that rips the sound quality apart when played on anything else. 

Maybe someday I’ll hear this (and my other teenage tape experiments) again. But, for now, it sits only in my fractured memory. Chances are it sounds better trapped in nostalgia. In my experience, my music never sounds as good as I remember it. That doesn’t mean a lot of it sounds terrible — just not as good as I think it will. 

Here’s what I do remember:

  • A version of “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town” turned into a horror soundscape, voices ominously whispering the unaltered lyrics revealing the creepiness of the words: “He sees you when you’re sleeping … he knows when you’re awake …”
  • “Jingle Bells” as a funeral dirge. The “laughing all the way” lyric triggered multi-tracked tortured, maniacal cackling. 
  • “Twelve Days of Christmas” was epic. It was a somewhat straight cover musically, but I substituted the various items (turtle doves, lords-a-leaping, etc.) with sounds from Halloween sound effect records. Thus, “On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: (werewolf howling).” This track was a particular endurance test (just like the real song) as it cycled through all the Halloween sound effects in reverse order as the song went along. This was long before I ever touched a digital sampler, so I have no idea how I technically pulled this off.
  • Out of all the tape’s songs I want to hear again, “Silent Night” sticks out. I remember creating all sorts of droning ambient tones and noises as the initial music bed. Then, I plucked out the “Silent Night” melody from memory using an echoed piano-ish Juno-106 patch. I didn’t rehearse and didn’t know the song ahead of time — I figured it out while the tape was recording, one take only. This is my memory talking again, but I recall the song ending up especially spacious, mysterious, and melancholy-sounding. It was my personal favorite on the album.
  • I know I recorded two or three other songs. I did a strange version of “Blue Christmas,” but I don’t remember anything about it except that I drearily repeated the song’s opening line throughout. 

I filled a 60-minute cassette, dubbed off about ten copies, and gave them to my close friends as Christmas presents. No doubt, confusion and concern for my well-being followed.

Someday I’ll get ahold of a Tascam 246 and go through this box of four-track tapes. Those old Portastudios aren’t cheap nowadays (retro fever — catch it!), so it won’t happen anytime soon. But, when it does, the spooky Christmas album by 17-year old me is the first thing I’ll revisit. 

I’d love to follow up this post on a future Christmas day with a stream of this odd early attempt at an album. But only if it sounds at least half as good as it does as I sit here remembering it. No promises. 

I hope you’re having a wonderful Christmas day.

Gingerbread Mixtape

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ASCAP, BMI Partner To Launch SONGVIEW Comprehensive Song Database → If you’re a music publisher, perennially at the top of your Xmas list is a central database for looking up song rights information. In other words, a search engine that’s PRO agnostic: input a song and find out the writers, the publishers, and the shares no matter the rights owner. But BMI’s search only shows songs with BMI representation, ASCAP shows only ASCAP, and so on. So, until you strike gold, you’re going from PRO-to-PRO to find writer and publisher details on a song. 

Here’s a start: today, BMI and ASCAP announced Songview, a search platform that shows results from both repertoires. It’s slicker than the companies’ previous search engines (it’s especially an upgrade for BMI) and seems to return more accurate results. This will make things easier, but I’d love SESAC and the others to come on board. And my face would assume a permanent joyful expression if one day Songview included details from international publishers and PROs. How cool would it be to look up a song and see if other publishers control it in different territories? Often it seems that half of a music licensee’s job is figuring out this complexity, investigating like a song-rights sleuth. Regardless, I’m encouraged by Songview. Fingers crossed that these are early days, and the participation of other PROs on the platform is on the horizon.

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Every holiday season, David and Jennifer send us (and other lucky friends) an assortment of hand-crafted gingerbread cookies. This year I got a mixtape. Goes great with coffee. (Be sure to check out David’s blog 1000 Cuts.)

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Holy Tongue – Holy Tongue → No one knows where dub goes. UK duo Holy Tongue are doing their damndest to track it down. Witness: Post-punk spliced with dub the way it was done, anachronistic but futuristic like if at the end of Primer the time machine room was revealed to be This Heat’s Cold Storage studio. Holy Tongue are Valentina Magaletti on drums and percussion and Al Wootton on guitars, synths, and the occasional siren. The performances are improvised, phase two of the magic apparently happening on the mixing desk where the Tubby/Sherwood spirit inspires all manner of echoing, hi-hat filtering, spring reverbing, and other ravishing embellishments. The result is as good and gritty as many early ‘80s On-U experiments. It’s refreshing in 2020 to hear something so raw yet technical, unsequenced but rhythmically tight. There’s no word whether Holy Tongue is a one-off or a continuing affair. I’m rooting for the latter (and live shows!). This tradition of exploratory studio hybrid-dub needs to live on and on and on, like a tape delay’s rising, infinite ghost tail.

Hitting Me Sideways

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Mapping the Creator Economy → Online tools are aplenty. It’s impossible to keep up. To the rescue: Hugo Amsellem is doing his best to track various ”companies are building stand-alone tools to help creators create more and better content.” His article is an invaluable, bookmark-able resource, listing over 150 apps and sites that can help you monetize, build an audience, and manage your content business. Hugo wasn’t thinking of record labels and recording artists when he put this together, but there is a lot here for the music-minded. Side note: If you’re an artist manager, or want to be one, familiarizing yourself with all of these tools (and trying them out) is now part of your job. The most valuable managers will learn the differences between tools and platforms, knowing the ones that are the best fit for each represented artist. You do the research and make recommendations. It’s your artist’s job to use them and create.1And if you’re an artist without a manager, don’t stress or spend too much time on tools. Just quickly sample what’s available and trust your first impressions when choosing.

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Unendurable Line → Here’s a brilliant short film that illustrates the “thresholds hidden in everyday life” and “how things change from A to B when a parameter exceeds a certain value.” The examples are seemingly mundane, but tension is amplified by charting the distance to the threshold, accompanied by dramatic choral music. It’s brilliant, and more of these videos from Design Ah! (a Japanese educational show that explores different types of creative thinking for viewers of all ages) are available here. (h/t Kottke)

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Body Meπa – The Work Is Slow → Body Meπa named themselves after an Ornette Coleman album (though Coleman’s lacks the crafty pi sign). They create an occasionally-at-odds-with-itself rumble that isn’t too far off (at least conceptually) from what Coleman was transmitting on that album. Music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, Grey McMurray, Melvin Gibbs, and Greg Fox handle a standard guitar-guitar-bass-drums line-up but, in righteous post-punk fashion, Body Meπa sonically exiles standards. The Work Is Slow is Body Meπa’s new album, comprised of mesmerizing riffage, cometary improvisations, and a sharp rhythm section guiding the reins. There’s no nonsense to the production (in the stereo field, Sasha is credited with “right guitar” while Grey wields the one leaning to the left), but the variety of squeals, squalls, and cyclical melodic phrasings bends the album away from simplicity. And you kinda want to see just what is happening to these guitars. A good intro track is “Money Tree” with its opening eterna-looped guitar and double bass action (I think — which would be a call-back to Sasha’s dual-bassed former band Ui), calmly landing in Tortoise territory. Body Meπa’s album has earned many listens in my lockdown space, a noble achievement in a time when new music temptations are relentlessly hitting me sideways. As for the title The Work Is Slow, Sasha had this to say in an installment of his essential email newsletter: “I use ‘the work’ as a way of describing a daily practice of spiritual health and emotional sobriety, but you may have another discipline that fits the bill.” A limited number of bumper stickers with the phrase are available.

Infamous Bathrooms

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Listening After Months in Lockdown → In The Quietus, Daniel Dylan Wray (who claims to listen to five new albums a day) feels that 2020 deadened music’s healing power for him. As the months (and pandemic) dragged on, music only added to the deluge of information (“Pressing play sometimes felt like opening up Twitter …”), and silence was often preferable. Though Daniel still experienced euphoric music moments, a lot of music (or the act of listening to it) felt “draped in sadness.”

Daniel has a theory. His 2020 listening experiences are happening in a singular space — the same place where he’s locked down, living monotonous days, working from home, endlessly worrying. He’s not bonding with music in grungy nightclubs or record shops, or discovering new tunes with friends, or equating albums to time spent on road trips or in unfamiliar cities. Daniel explains:

The process of discovering and experiencing music is intrinsically linked to a sense of place. We all have indelible memories – from the profound to the prosaic – attached to where we were during a musical epiphany or awakening. This year that process has been hacked down to nothing more than sitting in front of a computer screen at home. … Music is a multi-sensory experience, from the sweat and pulse of a club to the stench of stagnant gig venue carpets, and from rifling through fusty charity shop records to perfectly programmed light shows that dazzle the eye as music tickles the ear and chugging smoke machines engulf you. 2020 has robbed music of these other senses.

He has a point. I do equate many of my favorite songs and albums with events, people, or places. And I don’t go out as much as I used to (even before COVID-times), which might be why I don’t have too many current songs with strong memetic connective tissue. 

Music critic Ann Powers writes about similar feelings in her moving new essay Diary of a Fugue Year. Like Daniel, she refers to music as another layer of information to digest. But she also finds that her mindset toward music has transformed after months of lockdown, flavoring the act of listening with a strange intimacy: 

Music makes me yearn for what feels lost: a whisper pushing breath onto my neck, a voice singing loud into a crowd yelling back at it. In my solitude, though, recordings become a lifeline. Spending time with music has never felt more private, a way of both sheltering from and mediating the noise from outside. At the same time, the sound always takes me somewhere; it’s often the only way I hear a stranger’s voice on any given day. See what I’m getting at? Nothing’s got just one meaning. In a year crowded with contradictions, music’s way of enhancing emotion can feel clarifying, or it can overwhelm. Like every other form of information, music is reaching people through static-filled channels, distorted, muffled, feeding back.

We know many new practices will linger after the pandemic: working from home, live-streamed concerts, and telemedicine, to name a few. We might also listen differently, our ears heightened to receive the emotion of the moment. At home, songs will continue to sound much more personal than before COVID-times. And in the wild, music discovery becomes a visceral experience like few others. 

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CBGB Virtual Tour → Experience the grime, grit, and magnificence of CBGB & OMFUG just before shutting its doors in 2006. I was lucky to visit the club in 1991 (Monster Magnet were playing — this was during CMJ Music Marathon), but I could only handle about five minutes as the place was so hot, tiny, and packed. I had a better time next door at the Gallery, where I watched Jad Fair stomp his feet and sing songs a cappella.1He mic’ed the floor so his foot stomps would be amplified. The bemused sound guy spent 10 minutes moving microphones around until Jad was satisfied with the sound of his stomps. This virtual tour is a trip, though. Don’t miss out on the infamous bathrooms. And Unsane were quite strategic with their band stickers, weren’t they? (h/t Joe Livingston)

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Matthew Cardinal – Asterisms → If calming those pandemic nerves is the aim, then Asterisms is the game. Matthew Cardinal, a member of the Edmonton band nêhiyawak (described in the press release as ‘moccasingaze’), pleasingly layers tones and washes of sound throughout his solo debut’s enchanting 43 minutes. There are some things to decipher here — the song titles are dates without years, and it’s not clear if “Dec 31st” and “Jan 8th” are yet to happen or already passed. Maybe these are the days the tracks were recorded, or when best to listen. And the album’s title either references typography or astronomy, both realms where the term “asterism” exists. This fuzziness reflects the music, lost somewhere between past and future, between rigid text-space and intangible star fields. There are hints of melodies that fade in and out of each other, and occasionally a Schulze-esque synth sound will bubble up from the haze. And with nearly half the tracks clocking in at under three minutes, these aren’t elongated, drifty drones, but the shorties also don’t come off as unfinished snapshots. There’s enough variety here to imbue a thoughtful motion to the album, as recalling past days in our lives reveals different colors and fading experiences. Most importantly, Asterisms is a comforting listen, and I happily give in to its spell. Matthew Cardinal has confidently earned his gold star among the busy field of 2020’s ambient exporters. (P.S. Here’s a kaleidoscopic video for “Dec 4th.”)