8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

Hash Brown No Filter

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That’s an actual photo of this morning’s sunrise. For reals. As Kimmy Schmidt says, “Hash brown: no filter.”

I soft-launched the new blog today — which means I let my ‘friends’ know about it on Facebook — with an expanded version of yesterday’s tribute to Pete Shelley. The reaction so far is positive. David even thinks I’ve got a “good blog name.”

I was posting mini-blog posts on Instagram (or, ‘status updates,’ as I was calling them, inspired by Warren Ellis’s experiment) to get warmed up for the daily blogging routine, which I’ll explain tomorrow. Once I get going here I’ll probably stop the Instagram posts — or maybe not? This is a work in progress, and I’m happy to change it day-to-day.

We watched Hereditary. That’s a crazy movie. Crazy good, too. Terrific score by Colin Stetson. I like how its nuttiness is on a slow simmer for most of the movie, and then in the last fifteen minutes the nuttiness pot boils over and messes up the stovetop. It reminds me a lot of Kill List, a movie you should see if you haven’t (and, like Hereditary, best watched without knowing anything about it). Am I the only one who thinks the hidden subtext of Hereditary is a warning about the dangers of smoking bowls in high school?

I got the notion to watch Hereditary because Terry Grant AKA More Ghost Than Man created a Spotify playlist of his favorite modern film score selections. It’s a fantastic listen, from top to bottom:

Here’s a paragraph I like from the article Twenty-Five Years After His Death, Frank Zappa Lives On in Playboy (insert ‘reading it for the articles’ joke here):

Zappa always flirted with Modernist string music, but he really married the form in 1983 with the release of London Symphony Orchestra, Vol. I, his fourth project to employ an orchestra. The album inspired revolutionary recording and editing techniques to take on an orchestra, but when asked if he expected to make any money off the concerts and tapes he flatly said no. “Why then do you do it?” a TV reporter asked him at the time. “I came here to spend money on an English orchestra to record my music so I can take it home and I can listen to it. And if somebody else likes that kind of stuff I will make it available on a record so that they can hear it,” Zappa replied.

I’m not the biggest Frank Zappa fan (his appearance on Crossfire is my favorite work of his), but I have loads of respect for the sentiment of making the music you want to hear, and if someone else comes along who’s into it then bonus time.

I’m obsessing over the look of this blog. That’s what I’ll be doing most of the weekend — working on a blog. The theme is called Alia, and the developer has been a sweetheart, kindly answering my constant questions with helpful nuggets of CSS code. I think this place is looking pretty good so far.

Singles Going Steady

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I’m self-taught on guitar, and I learned by playing along to some of my favorite records. I started on one string, which strengthened my ear and warmed up my fingers. Over time I’d add another string, then another, and eventually I could pick out and play chords.

The records that I selected had to fit specific criteria. First of all, they couldn’t be too complicated: mostly open chords, not too riff-based. And I needed to love the songs — I’d be enthusiastic about learning if the songs were favorites. Also, it was a bonus if a whole album fit these specifications — then I could just put the album on and play along, like a concert. Circa 1985, when I was starting to learn guitar, two records perfectly fit the bill: The Feelies’ The Good Earth and Buzzcocks’ Singles Going Steady.

The Buzzcocks got back together around 1990 and did a tour of the USA, which brought them to Jannus Landing in St. Petersburg. I made the drive over from Orlando to see them. The Buzzcocks were as good as I hoped they would be. Once the show ended and the club emptied, I stayed behind in a happy daze from finally seeing one of my favorite bands. That’s when I looked over to the bar and saw Steve Diggle, the lead guitarist, sitting down for a drink.

I walked over and introduced myself, and after his casual acknowledgment I decided to tell him, “I learned to play guitar to your songs.” Diggle’s reaction was like no one had ever told him this before. “Really? To my playing?” He then quickly ordered a pint for me and exclaimed, “You should meet the rest of the guys!”

So he took me backstage and introduced me to an incredibly friendly Pete Shelley. I stuck around, drinking their beer and chatting for about an hour. Somehow, they had no qualms about this excited fanboy hanging out in their dressing room while they were decompressing from the show. Everyone was so nice, and even Pete seemed interested in my compliments and questions. One of my best ‘meeting my heroes’ memories.

Pete Shelley died yesterday of an apparent heart attack. At 63 he was way too young. The Buzzcocks were still a going concern, with the reunion never quite ending. I see they were supposed to do a show in a couple of weeks.

Before you get to an age when your friends start dying, you experience your heroes dying. In a way, the loss probably feels about the same. You’re losing the ones you love.

Here’s the Buzzcocks song that’s rolling around my head today (not one that I would have expected):

And this one, too, which was used as the end-credit song for the great documentary They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (no correlation — Pete Shelley was very much loved while he was alive): 

Update: A friend with a much better memory than mine and who was also at the show reminded me that it actually moved to the smaller Club Detroit because, if you can believe it, Buzzcocks didn’t sell enough tickets to adequately fill Jannus Landing. We also figured out the year was 1990. BTW – this friend saw Buzzocks in Manchester in 1979, opening band: Joy Division.

Unhelpful Minimalism

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Stepped outside yesterday afternoon and happened to look toward the easterly sky, and caught the tail end of a SpaceX rocket as it left the atmosphere. We’ve got a great, unobstructed view of Cape Canaveral launches from our house, even though we’re just under 60 miles away. The sky was cloudless, so I wish I had seen it from the beginning. Is there any way to receive alerts for impending rocket launches from the Cape? There are a couple of iPhone apps I’ve tried that supposedly do this, but they don’t work — no notifications received yesterday.⁣⁣⁣ (Dec. 18 Update: the iOS app LaunchTime did send a notification an hour before today’s aborted launch.)

Read a fine profile on Phillip Glass in the Washington Post, titled If You Think You Know Who Philip Glass Is, You Probably Don’t. ⁣⁣⁣From that article:

Glass also addresses the fallacy that all he does is play the same chords over and over. Certainly the language he developed, unhelpfully labeled ‘minimalism,’ involved subtle variations of similar patterns. But, “It never repeated all the time,” Glass writes in his memoir, “for if it had, it would have been unlistenable.” The chords are constantly shifting and changing; that’s the point. ⁣

Some amusement here at the label of minimalism as ‘unhelpful,’ as most approach the categorization head-on.⁣⁣⁣
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Last night we watched the documentary McQueen (streaming on Amazon Prime): fascinating, heartbreaking.⁣⁣ I learn a lot from documentaries about creative people who I previously knew nothing about.

I’ve started slowly working my way (and it will be slow) through Quietus’s ‘Albums of the Year’ list, a yearly tradition. I’m at 100 and enjoying the album Lekhfa by Maryam Saleh, Maurice Louca and Tamer Abu Ghazaleh … we’re off to a good start. (UPDATE: now I’m on to 99, the latest Simian Mobile Disco album, which a treat as well.)⁣⁣⁣⁣

An Enthusiastic Hug

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I finished a long, great 1993 New Yorker profile on the late Ricky Jay, Secrets of the Magus. It’s fascinating, and it makes me want to watch the documentary Deceptive Practices again. I’m thinking of how mastery and dedication of his level are often once-in-a-lifetime in any art, and what is lost until the next time around. Oh, he was in Deadwood, too. From the article:

Studying videotapes of him and observing at first hand some of his serendipitous microbursts of legerdemain have taught me how inappropriate it is to say that ‘Ricky Jay does card tricks’—a characterization as inadequate as ‘Sonny Rollins plays tenor saxophone’ or ‘Darci Kistler dances.’ None of my scrutinizing has yielded a shred of insight into how he does what he does. Every routine appears seamless, unparsable, simply magical.

The vintage card in the above photo was given to me by my step-grandfather who was a budding Vaudeville performer in his day. He had a love of entertainment and performance. I hadn’t heard of Thurston, but since this card came into my possession, he’s been popping up in documentaries and conversation. Like magic. This Ricky Jay article briefly mentions Thurston.

The news that the band Galactic has purchased iconic New Orleans nightclub Tipitina’s makes me reminisce about the great shows I saw there back when I lived in Louisiana. Though I didn’t live in New Orleans — I was up north, hours away. My favorite Tipitina’s moment was when Jad Fair gave me an enthusiastic hug after I told him that I drove 5 hours to see Half Japanese play (1988, I think?). ⁣ ⁣⁣

This sentence from Matty Karas in yesterday’s MusicREDEF email newsletter sums up one reason why I’m optimistic about music and music fandom as we hurtle through the 21st century:

The New York club was sold out and packed wall-to-wall with a young audience for whom I suspect the difference between these particular improvised saxophone, vibes, harp and electric-guitar solos and, say, a good house-music DJ is academic at best. {…} Sonic and cultural differences are ever-collapsing …

He’s writing about a jazz concert led by drummer Makaya Mccraven, whose new album Universal Beings is fantastic. Listen to it. ⁣⁣

What Am I Doing Now? (June 2018 Recap)

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What Am I Doing Now? (May 2018 Recap)

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What Am I Doing Now? (April 2018 Recap)

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Why Streaming is the Future of DJ’ing

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Download sales are in a free-fall as acceptance of music streaming continues to grow. If you’re in the dance music industry, you might feel some immunity (at least for now) as DJs are your primary customers. And DJs have to download, right? They still need the digital files on a USB, or a CD if they’re (ahem) old school. Well …

Complete Music Update:

Dance music download platform Beatport has acquired Pulselocker, the DJ-centric streaming service that ceased operations late last year.

Pulselocker allowed DJs to access music to include in their sets. It integrated with various DJ software and hardware systems, worked offline, and reported usage back to rights owners. As a result of the deal, Beatport plans to utilise Pulselocker’s patented technology within its own planned streaming service later this year.

Coverage of this acquisition has noted that Beatport previously attempted a streaming service and failed. But it’s easy to see that the plan here is much different. While Beatport’s earlier streaming ambition was to be like a dance music Spotify, the Pulselocker acquisition promises something new: a subscription streaming service for DJs.

I remember once terrifying a DJ friend of mine with the prediction of a ‘Wi-Fi CDJ’ that would access the DJ’s library from the cloud. The result is not that much different than inserting a USB, really — the DJ would be found scrolling through song titles on the CDJ’s screen and queuing selected tracks for play. It made sense for this prediction to be subscription-based, and for the DJ to be able to organize the catalog with folders and tags beforehand using an app. There would also be an offline element in case the network connection got spotty. My friend was worried as this alternate future killed dance music’s market for downloads.

But the last market flying the flag of paid downloads isn’t as healthy as we’d like to believe. DJs are a tribal group, bonding tightly over music and club life. The thought of piracy may not ever enter their minds but sending MP3 copies of a dozen hot tracks to a DJ buddy is an acceptable notion. The dance music world is also rooted in an often desperate promo culture, with labels sending links to free downloads of the latest release to hundreds (sometimes thousands) of tastemakers in one go. Don’t get me wrong — many DJs are still buying downloads, but many others are incentivized not to.


The streaming DJ set-up is disruptive and offers an alternative. The convenience of instantly adding to one’s library transforms copying and sharing amongst DJs into recommending. And I can also see promo services doing deals with Beatport or other streaming-for-DJ services, allowing private ‘lockers’ of pre-release music accessible only through invitation.

There is an issue of bandwidth and audio quality. Discerning DJs prefer the uncompromised quality of a WAV or AIFF audio format, which means large file sizes. But bandwidth and speed are always getting better, and I can imagine these futuristic CDJs utilizing a cellular network in addition to Wi-Fi internet, or can be reliably wired in by ethernet or other systems. There’s also the offline option, and I guess that libraries would be downloaded ahead of time into temporary onboard memory – or transferred to a USB for backup – in case of network failure. If this all works as planned then why even play MP3s? The DJ has the preferable WAV or AIFF option at her fingertips (or, likely, a future lossless format devised for streaming DJs) so why settle for inferior sonics? The overall sound of clubland improves.

For labels and self-releasing artists, the available data will be mind-blowing. Theoretically one could check stats on a Monday morning to see how many times a track got played over the weekend, in what cities, and maybe even — if these future CDJs are geo-located — what clubs. There’s also a payment to labels per play which might mirror Spotify’s subscription model (though I hope Beatport considers adopting a subscriber share model). At first, this may seem a severe downgrade from download income, but when one considers the decline in shared MP3s and the potential monetization of promos (not to mention the improved potential for discovery), then things get a little rosier.

Another factor making a difference is the conceivable ease of reporting venue play for performance royalty collection. Ideally, I’d like to see the streaming service or even the CDJ itself automatically report the set list to performance rights organizations. If that doesn’t happen, then the DJ or venue can easily output a list of the songs played during a set for online submission. This innovation, coupled with the advent of audio fingerprint technology in play identification (already being tested in a handful of countries such as Germany and the UK), helps solve the longstanding problem of inaccurate distribution of venue-related performance royalty. Historically, a nightclub’s yearly license payment to a performing rights organization (such as BMI and ASCAP) goes to an assumed pool of top-tier artists, no matter the music policy of the club. These technological solutions would radically change the landscape, and non-mainstream clubs could finally see their mandatory licensing fees going to underground artists. So, in the near future, a dance music producer could find direct income from DJ play via streaming subscriptions and venue performance royalty.

It’s inevitable that DJs will use streaming or cloud-based services as their ‘record crates’ (well, save for the vinyl hold-outs — like me). DJs are not strangers to disruption, having transitioned from 12”s to CDs to USB sticks to laptops in just over thirty years. But this is the big one, changing how we select, promo, discover, collect, play, and monetize. The art of DJ’ing responds to the technology so it will be interesting to see how this next step affects the DJs, their ingenuity, and the sounds they play.

What Am I Doing Now? (March 2018 Recap)

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Musical Memories from Imaginary Places

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I came across this wonderful article in The New Yorker about a YouTube-posted version of Toto’s “Africa” made to sound like it’s playing in a shopping mall:

In my 3 a.m. mood, the YouTube edit, uploaded by a user named Cecil Robert, was almost too affecting to bear; it sounded like longing and consolation together, extended into emptiness, a shot of warmth coming out of a void.

Oddly, listening to Toto’s “Africa” in a mall seems to trigger some fundamental human emotion … hearing a song you love when it’s playing from elsewhere is a reassuring, isolating experience: you feel solitary and cared for at the same time.

Recall that Brian Eno conceived of what he termed ‘ambient music’ after being forced to listen to a harp recording at low volume, accompanied by the natural sound of rain outside his window. Eno probably never heard a harp mixed with outdoor rainfall before, so there wasn’t a past emotional reference that affected him. It was the context of where the music existed in his mind, inspired by factors like environment, volume, reverb (natural or otherwise), and sonic quality (the frequencies that were accented or muffled). Just the same, I’m not sure if the author of the New Yorker article experienced “Africa” at a shopping mall in her childhood. But the combination of imagined context (a shopping mall, where she spent time in her youth) and a beloved song from the era triggered an emotion from a memory that probably never happened.

The YouTube clip shows a photo of a shopping mall interior, located in Everytown, USA, and the parenthetical subtitle “playing in an empty shopping centre.” This description in itself is odd, as the poster’s US origin makes me expect “center.” Perhaps he’s fittingly an anglophilic victim of the ‘80s British Invasion? But I digress – my point is that the recording would not have the same effect without the photo of the mall or the subtitle planting the seed in our heads. Instead, the picture could be of an aircraft hanger, subtitled “playing in an empty aircraft hanger.” Would retired airplane mechanics suddenly get all swoony?

Probably not. The shopping mall is powerful for contextualizing as we’ve all heard music blaring through similar retail compounds. It’s doubtful an airplane mechanic regularly heard music blasting through a hanger. The potency is in connecting two parts of the brain that agree on a possible spatial and temporal environment for a song. This song sounds different — that’s because we’ve been told it’s playing in a shopping mall. Our experience allows an understanding of this context, and now we’re feeling twice as nostalgic.

This experiment is insightful. I’ve always felt that, as a music producer, creating make-believe settings for songs can accentuate the song’s ability to connect with listeners. By constructing a world that the song takes place in – whether a particular room, or a landscape, and/or a different time – and allowing this to influence production decisions like reverb, stereo placement, equalization, and extraneous sounds, the song has the potential to open the listener’s imagination. However, there’s no reason to state that you’ve set the song in a shopping mall or any other imagined territory. By following through on intention and delivering context, the song becomes more of a living thing and cinematic, with the listener encouraged to create his or her story.

This idea isn’t original. There are a number of songs and albums inspired by fictional places. But, if you haven’t considered this creative game, then I recommend it. And I’m asking you to fabricate the whole story, look, and feel of the place. Is it rocky or is it soft? Is it high up or underground? Are you there alone or are people, plants, or animals with you? Does this place have a name?

Early in my recording career, I met producer Howie B., and he gave me this advice: “Invent a mental movie scene and record the soundtrack.” Howie meant this in terms of an imaginary film dictating the builds and turns of a song, but the movie’s setting would naturally influence the sonic characteristics. Even without action, a scene set in outer space gets scored differently than one occurring on the Amalfi Coast. And, to emphasize this point, no one has to know the location or plot of your mind-movie. Keep it your secret – that will encourage you to stretch, go to places that you might be embarrassed to reveal, places from your memory, or even appropriated scenes from movies that exist in the real world.

I’m simply proposing a creative exercise to give your muse some extra juice. Unless you’re making music that Eno would define as ‘ambient’ — that is, background music meant to be listened to alongside its environment – you shouldn’t use a fantastic imaginary setting to compensate for a half-written song. And subtlety is key. Overdoing your ‘sailing through the Grand Canyon’ tune with heaps of reverb and bird noises will probably be more distracting than affecting. But contextualizing music, as an occasional practice, might guide the producer toward fascinating discovery and, like Toto in a shopping mall, give the listener an unexpected jolt of emotion and haunting familiarity.