8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

Hitting The Links

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Italian Photographer Documents The Ruins Of Former Nightclubs Across Italy

“Discotheques, the symbol of ’80s and ’90s hedonism, were fake marble temples adorned with Greek statues made of gypsum, futuristic spaces of gigantic size, large enough to contain the dreams of success, money, fun of thousands people. And then the dreams are gone, people disappeared and nightclubs became abandoned wrecks, cement whales laid on large empty squares, places inhabited by echo and melancholy.”



Billy Name’s Enigmatic Images Of Warhol’s Silver Factory And The Velvet Underground

Billy {Name} was Warhol’s brief lover, long-term friend and celebrated archivist, documenting the glamourous and surreal goings on of the Silver Factory, which he was commissioned to decorate by the artist in 1964. This decor took the form of coating the East 47th Street space almost entirely in silver foil or silver spray paint – hence its name – and creating a futuristic-looking playground for talents like The Velvet Underground and Edie Sedgwick.



How Punk And Reggae Fought Back Against Racism In The ’70s

Putting black and white bands on stage together was a political statement in itself. We didn’t go on stage shouting “smash the National Front” and all that sloganeering, but we did want to extend the argument and talk about Zimbabwe, South Africa and apartheid, Northern Ireland, sexism and homophobia. We wanted to go, “Look, the National Front is not just against black people, they’re against all of this as well.”



How Brian Eno Created A Quiet Revolution In Music

A proper “furniture music” had to wait until the invention of recorded sound. This made possible a new form of listening, which Eno’s Music for Airports embodies to perfection. Recorded music is infinitely repeatable, and subject to the listeners’ will. We can ignore it or pay attention, as we choose. Ambient music celebrates this special form of listening like no other genre. As Brian Eno said: “I wanted to make something you can slip in and out of.”



HC-TT Human Controlled Tape Transport

The HC-TT Human Controlled Tape Transport is a compact cassette manipulation device that lets you play a cassette tape with your hand, similar to how you scratch a vinyl record. It’s like the love child of turntablism and musique concrète, letting you ‘scratch’ cassette audio recordings and more.

SoundCloud’s Life Raft Floats In Rough Waters

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Digital Music News:

SoundCloud has now finalized an incredibly important licensing deal with Universal Music Group, according to details confirmed by both sides Wednesday morning. Exact details on the tie-up are still trickling in, though SoundCloud is likely paying a handsome pound-of-flesh for UMG’s blessing. That probably includes a sizable equity share for Universal, with upfront payouts also a possibility, according to top-level details not yet confirmed.



The deal leaves Sony Music Entertainment as the lone major label not licensing Soundcloud, with Sony CEO Doug Morris demanding for more tear-downs and payouts than other big label CEOs. As UMG crosses the line, earlier sources predicted that Sony would be more likely to forge an agreement as well, though that still remains a separate negotiation.



With some punishing (and somewhat speculative) details of the arrangement outlined in this article, and the real possibility that Sony will want even further concessions, there’s little likelihood that SoundCloud will resemble its present form this time next year. The service does have the advantage of a huge active listenership as it begins this transformation, but it’s safe to say the majority of those users are interested in what makes SoundCloud different and more interactive than the other digital service providers. If new stipulations force SoundCloud to homogenize towards another free tier / subscription tier streaming service then it’s anyone’s guess how they will fare.

David Bowie’s Music Industry Future Vision

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The Week:

{David} Bowie’s capacity for groundbreaking even extended into the arena of economics. In 1997, he pioneered the idea of using his future royalty payments as backing for financial securities that could be sold on the markets to investors. The so-called “Bowie bonds” themselves didn’t work out too well. But the idea of turning the streams of royalty payments from intellectual property rights into a financial security took off in film rights, comic strips, pharmaceuticals, restaurant franchises, and more. Such oddball securities now make up 21 percent of the U.S. market for asset-backed insurance.



But what’s even more interesting is why Bowie cooked up this idea. In 2002, in the heyday of Napster and the free file-sharing craze, Bowie told The New York Times he thought the entire business model of the music industry was collapsing. Fourteen years later, things did not pan out as dramatically as Bowie predicted — but he got the basic thrust right.



David Bowie in The New York Times, 2002:

”I don’t even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don’t think it’s going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way,” he said. ”The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing.”



”Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity,” he added. ”So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.”

Streaming’s Elephant In The Room

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Music Business World:

If you missed it, video music streams – YouTube with a bit of Vevo, essentially – were bigger and grew faster than audio streaming services in 2015 {according to recent Nielson data}. That’s all audio streaming services combined – including AOL, Beats Music (RIP), Cricket, Google Play Music, Medianet, Rdio (RIP), Rhapsody, Slacker and Spotify.



In 2016, then, the music business’s quest to restrict YouTube’s dominance of ‘free’ music looks like a bigger challenge than ever before. “This is absolutely the legacy Lucian {Grainge} is determined to leave,” one ally of the UMG boss recently told MBW – referring to Grainge’s recently-inked new contract with Vivendi. “Getting ‘free’ under control and dealing with the YouTube problem is his No.1 business priority.”



Yet there might be one more ace up the sleeve of Grainge and his old mentor Doug Morris. Sony and UMG are both major shareholders in Vevo – a platform that’s part-rival, part-partner, part-moneymaker and part-irritant to YouTube.



As many have pointed out, if Vevo’s YouTube relationship fell apart, it would be a in a world of pain. Lots of people can’t even distinguish between the two brands. But what’s often overlooked is that the Vevo/YouTube balance is more reciprocal than many appreciate. According to ComScore, Vevo uploads bring in around 38% of YouTube’s monthly traffic. (Videos from Warner Music, which isn’t an investor in Vevo, independently attract another 20%.) Messing with Vevo means messing with a significant chunk of YouTube’s existing $9bn annual revenue.



With all this talk of Spotify and publishing lawsuits, YouTube’s dominance in the free arena remains the hulking elephant in the room. Personally, I’m much more eager to see them reined in than Spotify.

Total Music Streams Doubled In 2015

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Digital Music News:

Song downloads plunged another 12.5 percent last year, and a depressing 23.4 percent since 2013, according to preliminary US-based stats from Nielsen Music. Indeed, downloading is plunging downward, but streaming is absolutely soaring: according to the same dataset, the total number of streams doubled in just one year. As in, gained 100 percent, in 365 days.



Also from Digital Music News:

Accordingly, the music world will witness a more dramatic download plunge in 2016, with 12.5 percent shifting towards 18 percent, according to conservative DMN estimates. The decline will subsequently accelerate to 25 percent in 2017, with a 40 percent drop anticipated in 2019.



The reasons for this aren’t mysterious: last year, the number of music streams doubled to 317.2 billion streams in the US alone, thanks to explosive growth across Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music, among others. That is directly assassinating paid downloads, with Apple accelerating the plunge by aggressively pushing consumers towards Apple Music streaming accounts.



The rest, as they say, will be history, with downloads occupying a niche space in music listening experience, alongside CDs and other marginalized formats.



The tone of these articles is a little gloomy, which is interesting from a site called Digital Music News. I see the download decline as inevitable by nature of the technology (just wait until the wireless / streaming CDJ is invented for the club DJs), and the rapid acceptance of streaming as a good outcome. Those numbers will get higher and higher as download numbers plummet. It changes the game, but I’m confident fleet-footed independent labels will adapt and succeed.

8D Projects: E1sbar’s “Du Jour” In Nude Nite Video (NSFW)

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Now here’s a spicy music license from our 8DSync agency. Nude Nite is a annual event held in Orlando and Tampa that focuses on artistic nudes and it’s the largest event of its kind in the country. Nude Nite brings together hundreds of artists for three evenings of visual art, performance, and a cast of characters both in costume and out. Before each new show a video teaser is created with highlights from the past year’s event. This latest video features the lovely sound of E1sbar’s “Du Jour” to accompany footage from the sensual festivity. As may be obvious, this video is probably not safe for work. You can listen to more tracks from E1sbar HERE and you can find info about Nude Nite HERE.

Rhymes With ‘Naughty’?

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The Daily Beast:

While music might be intended to inform or incite, it is also designed to entertain. And as a glance at bestsellers lists can attest, conspiracy sells. The search for hidden meaning and coded symbols adds another level on which a product can be enjoyed. Which might explain why Jay Z keeps putting occult references in his songs and videos, even while he explicitly denies being part of the Illuminati. “Great rap should have all kinds of unresolved layers that you don’t necessarily figure out the first time you listen to it. Instead it plants dissonance in your head,” Jay wrote in his 2010 book Decoded. And what better way to plant dissonance than canny use of subversive imagery. Hip-hop was predicated on sampling and remixing older ideas into something new and relevant, and Illuminati myths and symbols can be sampled the same way a drumbeat can.



Then again, there might be a more pragmatic reason why hip-hop latched on to the idea of the Illuminati. As Rakaa Iriscience of the trio Dilated Peoples pointed out in a 2014 interview with Hiphopdx.com, “There were a lot of organizations that existed. That one [the Illuminati] just happened to rhyme with body, party, naughty and a lot of other things. It sounds cooler than some of the other ones do.”

Remastered, You Say?

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If labels are seriously seeking to make streaming a more organic, listener-friendly experience then an easy first step would be to eliminate this practice:

(click image to expand)

All that is accomplished by appending technical ‘remaster’ information to the song title is it makes things more clinical and distracting. Not only does this show up in the album list but also on the single song title as it plays. I can assure you that no one cares about this information … I’m a big fan of both Talk Talk and Wire and I just want to hear the songs, no matter the version. I may seem nit-picky here, but this is the kind of stuff that subtly clouds the whole. Having technical notes added to the title of a favorite song reminds us that we’re participating in a digital process when we just want to get lost in the music.

If the services (and labels) really want this information out there then they could add it to the liner notes on the album’s page in the streaming app. Oh, what’s that? Liner notes aren’t available on album pages? There’s a good second step.

Note: The screenshots are from Apple Music as that’s what I use, but it is the same on Spotify (I checked) and, I assume, all the other services (I didn’t check). Thus this technical data added to song titles comes from the labels submitting album metadata across the board. It would still be nice for the streaming gods to demand this ‘remaster’ stuff be filtered out or provide the liner note option.

2015: This Is A Recap

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I admit, I do like end-of-year ‘best of’ lists.

I’ve used my work – and being immersed in client music – as an excuse not to listen to much new music. I’d bashfully tell people “I’m actually a bit out of touch” when a new release or band was mentioned. These past few months I’ve aimed to change this, in part by training myself to listen to music while working (for me, it’s a practiced skill to not get distracted by music). Then, armed with a handful of ‘Best of 2015’ album lists and an Apple Music subscription I made a truncated journey through the year in album releases. And I’ve been loving it. Here are some of the lists I’ve been consulting:

FACT’s 50 Best Albums of 2015
The Quietus Albums Of 2015
Bleep’s Best of 2015 (good re-issues + compilations sections here, too)
NPR Music’s 10 Favorite Electronic Albums Of 2015

There are other lists bookmarked that I’ll be hitting, but this is what I have covered so far. What have I found? That I really like these albums:

Colleen – Captain of None (Thrill Jockey)
– My most exciting discovery. This album is fantastic and otherworldly.
Floating Points – Elaenia (Luaka Bop)
– I think I’m a little late on Floating Points but this album was an impressive introduction. The 10+ minute “Silhouettes (I, II & III)” is a stunner.
Four Tet – Morning/Evening (Text Records)
– Fout Tet has obviously been on my radar, but not much of his output has grabbed me quite like this two song album.
Cliff Martinez – The Knick, Season 2 (Original Series Soundtrack) (Milan Entertainment)
– I actually haven’t seen this on any ‘best of’ lists yet, but Martinez’s work on The Knick (also recommended) is among his most compelling. My current favorite ‘gotta focus on this tedious computer task’ soundtrack.
Shye Ben Tzur, Jonny Greenwood, and the Rajasthan Express – Junun (Nonesuch Records)
– There’s not a whole lot on this to differentiate it from purely an Indian / world music album, but it’s still a great one. Greenwood’s input isn’t always obvious, but when his influence is apparent – like on the rapturous “Roked” – it’s the kind of fusion that really piques my attention.

As you may have noticed, spacey and somewhat laid-back electronic music is what’s turning me on at the time of making this list. Though, on the grungy shoegaze tip, “Firehead” by Infinity Girl rocked my boat repeatedly since its release a few months back. Their album’s not bad, either, though I’m not sold on the band name.

I’m continuing this adventure of listening to new music and going through ‘best of’ lists so mine above is hardly complete. I’ll continue to practice my ‘listen while working’ skill in 2016 so next year’s list should be more of a corker.

When it comes to movies, it is interesting that my two favorite films of 2015 were not movies per se, but are in fact BBC produced documentaries. Adam Curtis’s Bitter Lake blew my mind in January and continues to do so … I watched it for the fourth or fifth time last week. Its content is eye-opening and incendiary, but Curtis’s use of visuals (the bulk being found footage, mostly discarded, from BBC News’s Afghanistan coverage) and music is revolutionary. And then there’s Atomic – Living In Dread And Promise, commissioned as part of BBC’s Storyville series. With help from a moody soundtrack by Mogwai, Mark Cousins (known for his expansive and essential The Story of Film: An Odyssey) has crafted a sort of meditation on life in the nuclear age. Like Bitter Lake, this film is made up of found footage juxtaposed to give additional meaning and emotion, and is narration-free, at least verbally.

Of the handful of ‘real’ movies I saw in 2015, I loved Paul Thomas Anderson’s divisive Inherent Vice most of all, and I discovered profound meaning where I know many others found complete nonsense. I can dig it. Mad Max: Fury Road is the only other movie I saw multiple times, which puts it in odd company with Bitter Lake. If I’m feeling down I just imagine I’m the guy whose job it was to mash up all those automobiles. Ex Machina was fine stuff, though I wasn’t as nuts about it as others were. Fantastic score by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and composer Ben Salisbury, too. The End Of The Tour gave me a lot to think about and used Eno’s “The Big Ship” in a wonderful way. And I believe Mommy is technically a 2014 film, but it opened in the US in January and it’s a definite favorite. 26 year old director Xavier Dolan is responsible for one of the most moving and heartbreaking sequences I’ve ever seen in a narrative film … that one towards the end, and you definitely know what I’m talking about if you’ve seen Mommy.

Unlike music, which I listened to more of this year (though mainly in the past couple months), I usually watch a whole lot of movies. But this year I consumed a lot less – as I worked a whole lot more – so I’m sure there’s a bunch left out, and a bunch of 2015 winners I’ll see later on that would’ve made it up there. But I know that’s everyone’s story.

As for me, 2015 brought on a lot of professional changes that don’t feel confined to this year as they are ongoing. I’m in the middle of planning a new creative project that I’m quite excited about, but it probably won’t see a launch until the middle of 2016. I’m also opening up 8D Industries a bit more to provide ‘virtual assistant for the music industry’ services, helping with things like contract management, music publishing organization, royalty calculation, web site administration, and so on. More news on this soon. 8DPromo continues to develop into an increasingly efficient promotions machine with a fine group of labels on board. 8DSync looks to expand with new catalog and site features added early in the new year. It seems my plate is full.

So, indeed, here’s to 2016. {glass clink} I’m anti-resolution, but making new friends and connections is paramount in this coming year. If there’s a way you think we might be able to work together, or if you just want to reach out with a ‘hello’, question, and/or comment then please do so. Let’s make things happen.

Hitting The Links

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Tom Wilson, Record Producer For The Velvet Underground and Bob Dylan

As monumental as were those Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel albums {he produced}, Wilson’s most challenging work in the recording booth came after Columbia, when he became a staff producer at MGM/Verve in 1966 and helmed the debut albums by both Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention and the Velvet Underground within a two-month period (March-May 1966). You couldn’t get too weird for Wilson, who released cosmic freejazz philosopher Sun Ra’s first album in 1956. Jazz By Sun Ra came out on Transition, the label Wilson started in 1955, right after he graduated from Harvard with a degree in economics.



Vintage Drum Kits From The 1920s And 1930s

I am fascinated by the early drum kits: they were very creative assemblages that generally included Chinese tack head tom toms, wood blocks, China-type cymbals, the “low boys” or “sock cymbals” that preceded the modern hi-hat. And of course the big bass drums and snare drums on their spindly little stands. To me these first American forays into multi-percussion setups are things of sculptural beauty.



Brian Eno And Peter Schmidt’s ‘Oblique Strategies,’ The Original Handwritten Cards

The Oblique Strategies cards were idea-generating tools and tactics designed to break routine thinking patterns. While born of a studio context, Oblique Strategies translated equally well to the music studio. For Eno, the instructions provided an antidote in high-pressure situations in which impulse might lead one to default quickly to a proven solution rather than continue to explore untested possibilities: “Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation—particularly in studios—tended to make me quickly forget that there were other ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach.”



The Neuroscience Of Musical Perception, Bass Guitars And Drake

How humans perceive music is, of course, far more complicated than simply tuning in to tempo. Music draws up — and draws from — memories, emotions and pleasure and reward activity in the brain. Other acoustic qualities like melody, harmony and timbre also play important roles. And our conscious ability to apply symbolic meaning to sounds, lyrics and song — and to recognize when listening to music that what we’re listening to is supposed to be music — also certainly influences human musical perception.



Secrets to Long Haul Creativity

Being creative over a career involves a whole subset of nearly invisible skills, a great many of which conflict with most people’s general ideas about what it means to be creative. What’s more, being creative is different than the business of being creative, and most people who learn how to be good at the first, are often really terrible at the second. Finally, emotionally, creativity just takes a toll. Decade after decade, that toll adds up. So here are eight of my favorite lessons on the hard fight of long-haul creativity. A few are my own. Most are things I learned from others. All have managed to keep me saner along the way.