8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

Brian Eno on the Oblique Strategies, 1978

by // Leave a Comment

A terrific conversation with Brian Eno from 1978 was just republished online by Interview magazine. He speaks quite a bit about the Oblique Strategies deck and its uses:

The Oblique Strategy was an attempt to make a set that was slightly more specific, tailored to a more particular situation than the I Ching, which is tailored to cosmic situations, though I suppose that with sufficient skill one could use the I Ching. And of course, all of those oracles work in the same way. You can either believe that they carry intrinsic wisdom of some kind, or else you can believe that they work on a purely behavioral level, simply adjusting your perception at a point, or suggesting a different perception. Or you can believe a blend of both.



I always pick at random. Other people sort through them, but I never use them unless I come to a point where a piece isn’t getting anywhere and needs help. When I work there are two distinct phases: the phase of pushing the work along, getting something to happen, where all the input comes from me, and phase two, where things start to combine in a way that wasn’t expected or predicted by what I supplied. Once phase two begins everything is okay, because then the work starts to dictate its own terms. It starts to get an identity which demands certain future moves. But during the first phase you often find that you come to a full stop. You don’t know what to supply. And it’s at that stage that I will pull one of the cards out.



Later on you might be faced with a number of options that seem equally desirable—again I might pull one out rather than try all the options. I’ve used them on nearly every record I’ve made.



{David Bowie and I} used Oblique Strategies quite a lot. On one of the pieces {on Heroes}—”Sense of Doubt“—we both pulled an Oblique Strategy at the beginning and kept them to ourselves. It was like a game. We took turns working on it; he’d do one overdub and I’d do the next, and he’d do the next. The idea was that each was to observe his Oblique Strategy as closely as he could. And as it turned out they were entirely opposed to one another. Effectively mine said, “Try to make everything as similar as possible,” which in effect is trying to create a homogenous line, and his said “Emphasize differences,” so whereas I was trying to smooth it out and make it into one continuum he was trying do to the opposite.



Read the full interview HERE.

A Comprehensive Reissue Of Big Star’s Third Album

by // Leave a Comment

Complete Third, a three volume (CD) reissue of Big Star’s convoluted but brilliant third album is out now on Omnivore Recordings. The set features loads of demos and outtakes and is an illuminating look at an album I thought I knew inside-out. A fine article from A.V. Club explores the album’s inception:

Due to the heavy amounts of alcohol and pills that were being consumed by all concerned in the fall of ’74, the accounts of the Ardent sessions differ. In the broadest sense, this appears to be what happened: After Big Star finished another disappointing tour, {Alex} Chilton returned to Memphis and put together acoustic demos of some offbeat new songs, then recruited respected local musician/producer Jim Dickinson to help bring them to fruition at Ardent. {Jody} Stephens came along for the ride, as the only other remaining original member of the band, and contributed one song (the gorgeous “For You”) plus some string arrangements; because Chilton didn’t share what he was doing with his drummer, the percussion tracks were sometimes improvised. The sessions were long and contentious, with engineer John Fry often begrudgingly spending his days cleaning up whatever madness a stoned Chilton churned out in the middle of the night.



The project just sort of trailed off when no one could stand each other’s company any more, after which Dickinson and his Ardent cohorts shopped around their finished versions of the songs without Chilton’s input. Whenever he deigned to talk about the record at all, Chilton would often say that no released version of Third represents what he had in mind. Sometimes he’d even say that the sessions was never meant to be for a Big Star album. The original tapes were labeled as “Alex Chilton,” “Alex & Jody,” or “Sister Lovers”—the latter of which may have actually been a proposed new band name, referring to the fact that Stephens was dating Lesa Alderidge’s sibling, Holliday.



I was lucky to meet and have a short chat with Alex Chilton on a few occasions. The first time I was introduced by a mutual friend who warned me beforehand to not mention the Third album, and especially not the song “Holocaust”. “Alex is a bit touchy about that period,” my friend said, and alluded to having made this dire mistake previously. Regardless, despite his moody reputation, Chilton was always warm to me. He remains one of my favorite songwriters.

 

A Quick David Mancuso Memory

by // Leave a Comment

It was the late nineties (I think, my memory is a little fuzzy) and I was wandering Manhattan with a couple friends hitting all the necessary record stores. One friend mentioned this new shop opened by a Japanese millionaire that specialized in hard-to-find jazzy disco type fare and Asian vinyl imports. Completely up for it, we made our way across town and into the shop which was compact, clean, and immaculate and we might have guessed a Japanese millionaire was involved if we didn’t already know. The only people in the store were us, the Japanese man behind the register, and a familiar figure in the corner set-up to play tunes for the shopkeeper and anyone who happened to enter. This guy apparently had the job to sit and play records all day, drawing from a combination of his collection and the store’s stock … we did see him pull something off the racks and place it on the turntable at one point. One of my friends leaned over and broke the mystery by whispering in my ear with awe: “That’s David Mancuso.” And we spent more time than planned in that small shop having a semi-private listen to Mancuso’s selections. Since then I’ve often wondered about the unique mix of notoriety and obscurity that would grant such an influential selector the day job of Manhattan record store atmosphere-maker.

The New York Times

David Mancuso, a self-described “musical host” who revolutionized night life in New York with weekly dance parties he gave at his downtown loft, beginning in 1970, died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 72.

Mr. Mancuso brought to his Saturday night gatherings the values of the 1960s counterculture, an audiophile’s fascination with sound technology and a voracious appetite for all styles of music. The parties at the Loft, as Mr. Mancuso’s apartment came to be known, became a near-religious rite for the city’s underground.

A Mancuso party was a ’60s dream of peace, love and diversity: multiracial, gay and straight, young and old, well-to-do and down-at-heel, singles and couples, all mingling ecstatically in an egalitarian, commerce-free space.

Mr. Mancuso did not call himself a D.J. He shrank from the limelight. His goal was to disappear into the music and allow its power to transform the audience.

The Last Steps: A Short Film About The Apollo 17 Mission

by // Leave a Comment

It’s a good time to remember that humans (and us Americans) are capable of great things when we come together and fuel our endeavors with hope rather than despair and animosity. Here’s a wonderful video documenting the final Apollo moon mission, containing oodles of awe-inspiring footage that I’ve never seen.

Watch on YouTube

On December 7, 1972, NASA launched Apollo 17, a lunar mission crewed by Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans, and Harrison Schmitt. It would be the last time humans traveled beyond low Earth orbit, the last time man landed on another celestial body, and the last time man went to the moon. The Last Steps uses rare, heart-pounding footage and audio to retrace the record-setting mission. A film by Todd Douglas Miller.

Taming Facebook’s Fake News Problem

by // Leave a Comment

The Guardian:

Facebook has been accused of potentially swinging the election … by failing to acknowledge the fact that its algorithm was promoting fake news to millions of users. According to Buzzfeed news, more than 100 pro-Trump fake news sites were being run from a single Balkan town in the run-up to the election.

Cutting off the revenue to such sites by limiting the amount of money they can make from advertising may help limit their proliferation. But Facebook in particular faces a more fundamental issue given the ways in which its algorithm selects posts: if users engage more with fake news than real news, as seems possible, then Facebook’s algorithm will promote the fake news.



Tech2:

Called the B.S. Detector, this Chrome extension claims to identify and flag news that seems to be fake.The new project was released on Tuesday and can identify articles on Facebook that seem to be from a questionable source. When a user scrolls over an article that seems to be fake, a warning appears informing the user that the source of the article may not be from a credible source.



“I built this in about an hour yesterday after reading [Mark Zuckerberg’s] BS about not being able to flag fake news sites. Of course you can. It just takes having a spine to call out nonsense. This is just a proof of concept at this point, but it works well enough,” said {creator of the extension Daniel} Sieradski.

img-0

  



Update: via The Verge:

Today, Google announced that its advertising tools will soon be closed to websites that promote fake news, a policy that could cut off revenue streams for publications that peddle hoaxes on platforms like Facebook. The decision comes at a critical time for the tech industry, whose key players have come under fire for not taking neccesary steps to prevent fake news from proliferating across the web during the 2016 US election. It’s thought that, given the viral aspects of fake news, social networks and search engines were gamed by partisan bad actors intending to influence the outcome of the race.




“Moving forward, we will restrict ad serving on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher’s content, or the primary purpose of the web property,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement given to Reuters. This policy includes fake news sites, the spokesperson confirmed. Google already prevents its AdSense program from being used by sites that promote violent videos and imagery, pornography, and hate speech.



Update 2: solid think piece from Slate:

People tend to read, like, and share stories that appeal to their emotions and play to their existing beliefs. Without robust countervailing forces favoring credibility and accuracy, Facebook’s news feed algorithm is bound to spread lies, especially those that serve to bolster people’s preconceived biases. And these falsehoods are bound to influence people’s thinking.




And yet, in the days following the election, as criticisms of the company mounted, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg downplayed and denied the issue—a defensiveness that says even more about the company than the fake news scandal itself. Zuckerberg’s response points to a problem deeper than any bogus story, one that won’t be fixed by cutting some shady websites out of its advertising network. The problem is Facebook’s refusal to own up to its increasingly dominant role in the news media. It’s one that is unlikely to go away, even if the fake news does.

Other Music and the Bigger Ends

by // Leave a Comment

The New Yorker:

This Saturday, Other Music—the tiny, beloved, and outré record shop on East Fourth Street—will cease its retail operations. Critics can and have read Other Music’s bow-out as representative, in an allegorical way, of any number of bigger Ends: the End of music as a physical medium to be collected and doted over, the End of curated off-line retail, the End of curation, the End of the East Village, the End of New York. Most of those Ends—whether real or imagined—have already been eulogized so aggressively that to revisit them now seems plainly indulgent. In our accelerated culture, collective nostalgia, in which we mourn the freshly antiquated for reasons that are unclear but still enormously potent, is its own cottage industry.

There are no record bins anymore—no little plastic signposts signifying content, broadcasting a set of principles, musical and otherwise. Genre itself—or, more specifically, genre affiliation as a means of self-identification—feels like another End hovering in the atmosphere this week. No one is asked to choose one affiliation at the expense of another. Instead, it is perfectly normal, even expected, that a person might have a little bit of everything stacked up in her digital library. The idea of “Other Music” as it was conceived in 1995 is unknowable now.

On Exclusives and Windowing

by // Leave a Comment

Jonathan Galkin, Co-Founder of DFA Records, in PIAS Blog:

“All of these ‘streaming exclusives’ are for the 1%. This is not my fight. It sort of feels awful all around, regardless of the scale of the artist. It’s like having to join a gym in order to buy a pair of sneakers.

“This is the least democratic way to hear discuss and enjoy new music. It shouldn’t be a scavenger hunt to find an album, and albums shouldn’t be used as bait to build tech companies.

“But, you know, good for Kanye and Drake and Beyonce. But it leaves little room to focus on the discovery of new music, which is what DFA is all about.”

Music Business Worldwide:

Per Sundin (Universal): “It’s exactly what happened in the US with physical product. Best Buy said, we’re going to buy 2m AC/DC albums, and it was: ‘Wow, 2m albums.’ But eventually when you looked at the real record stores, the Towers that closed and others, you’re killing the people who feed you.”

Mark Dennis (Sony): “It’s the wrong thing, without a doubt. People who believe that exclusives are going to bring the market forward are the most naive people in the world. We have to learn from what’s happened in the past: when people haven’t been able to consume music in the way they want, they turn to piracy. We’re just not learning! We’ve got to be realistic. What will move the market forward is having content across all platforms, giving the consumer the ability to make their decision and use great products.”

So, not much love for streaming exclusives. However, windowing may soon have a new champion. Via Music Ally:

With no free tier, Apple Music has been able to pitch itself as a premium-only option for album releases, as has Tidal. SoundCloud, meanwhile, made premium-windowing part of the industry pitch for its recently-launched SoundCloud Go subscription tier.

Sources have told Music Ally that Spotify was in advanced discussions with Radiohead’s management company Courtyard and label XL Recordings about a deal to make A Moon Shaped Pool the first album to be windowed to premium subscribers on the service.

“We are always looking for new ways to create a better experience for our free and paying listeners, and to maximise the value of both tiers for artists and their labels. We explored a variety of ways to do that in conjunction with the release of Radiohead’s latest album,” said {Jonathan} Prince {of Spotify}.

“Some of the approaches we explored with Radiohead were new, and we ultimately decided that we couldn’t deliver on those approaches technologically in time for the album’s release schedule.”

Reading between the lines of Prince’s statement, it seems that this is less a case of getting cold feet about premium windowing, and more a case of Spotify wanting to make sure the technology to make it work was robust.

Hard Times for MP3 Sellers

by // Leave a Comment

I missed this article from almost a year back, and it’s an extra-interesting read in light of industry events that have taken place since. Beyond that, there’s some valuable food-for-thought to process here.

5 Magazine:

Unless you’re Amazon and the market takes your lack of interest in making a profit with good-hearted cheer, this is a tough time to be selling goods in the music industry. It’s even harder if those “goods” happen to be music files.

I’d heard it said as recently as a year ago that a DJ-centered market would be protected from the massive shift in consumer expectations driven by streaming, to a world in which every sound ever committed to tape can be listened to for free. This is clearly not the case. After all, it was once claimed that DJs would always have a “need” for vinyl, too.

This is a bitter pill for people with some skin in the game, who look and see a larger market for music than has ever existed before. There are also more DJs now than at any time in history, but selling that market on a product with zero duplication costs and unlimited supply has been a tough racket.

Recorded music was once the foundation of billion dollar corporations – corporations which were largely gutted by sexy tech start-ups that could do everything better… except turn a profit. Now we’re entering the next stage, in which the business of selling “records” (however you want to define that) is simply too low-margin to attract the big, dumb money of a Robert Sillerman. The precise shape of that next stage of the recorded music industry is unclear but one would like to imagine it characterized by artist-centered services like Bandcamp existing in the shadow of the streaming services – a business big enough for you or me or a guy doing this out of his bedroom or a bigroom but too small for the lumbering giants to bother with.

The True Story of the Fake Zombies

by // Leave a Comment

Buzzfeed:

Before the decline of the major label system and the rise of the internet and social media, enterprising and less than scrupulous businessmen ran the industry with relative impunity, with artists serving primarily as commodities to be exploited. Famously, Elvis’s manager Colonel Tom Parker pocketed anywhere from 25 to 50% of the star’s gross income for the duration of his career. Allen Klein, who managed the Rolling Stones after the release of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” in 1965, promptly signed the band’s publishing rights to his own company ABKCO, resulting in a string of lawsuits spanning decades. If this treatment was the norm for the era’s biggest stars, it’s not hard to imagine how lesser lights would fare.

The Zombies, unaware of their stateside success — this was possible in 1969 — had already moved on to new musical projects or day jobs. This vacuum meant anyone could tour the United States pretending to be the Zombies, even a four-piece blues band from Dallas.

There were in fact two different bands touring the United States in 1969 calling themselves the Zombies. Both impostor groups were managed by the same company, Delta Promotions, the owners of which insisted they’d legally acquired the songs of the Zombies and other bands. It was an operation that would be impossible to attempt today, perpetrated in an era when fans didn’t have unlimited access to artists’ whereabouts, or, in some cases, even know what they looked like.

The plan was simple: Find competent musicians, convince them Delta was on the level, get them to a reasonable point of Zombies-like ability, and send them on the road. Once the prep was completed, they’d send the bands on tour while Delta took a healthy slice of the profits.

As for the fans who were getting swindled, {Delta Promotions employee Tom} Hocott says, “When they were told, ‘Here’s the Zombies,’ they bought it. Even the strange parts, like the fact that they were touring without a keyboardist.” Fans left disappointed and the bands left town as quickly as possible. The less remembered, the better.

The full article is totally worth a read. And, of course, shenanigans like this aren’t unique to the ’60s / ’70s … remember fake Frankie Goes To Hollywood?