8Sided Blog

a zine about sound, culture, and the punk rock dream

More Ghost Than Man: A Spark in the Dark

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Terry Grant is a painter, a filmmaker, a guitarist, a tinkerer, a voice-over actor, and who knows what else. He’s also More Ghost Than Man, producing music on the knife’s edge of dystopia, meaning his songs seem like they were recorded a few minutes into the future. It’s the sound of NOW while paradoxically vibing out a step or two ahead of the present time. And the path foretold through Terry’s music — and nearly all his work, really — is a dark one, wrapped in inescapable surveillance, technological near-collapse, societal ennui, and lots of shiny, black wires. Yet, despite this potential downer, remember that the act of such creative ambition is inherently optimistic. After all, the artist must assume someone will be around to process and perhaps enjoy all the work. That’s part of the spark that keeps Terry rolling, even though it’s not necessarily a light at the end of the tunnel. 

The Worlds We Made There is the latest long-player from More Ghost Than Man, initially recorded just before COVID-times. The pandemic and its ensuing uncertainty, along with deadly tornados and a strange Christmas Day explosion in Terry’s home base of Nashville, forced the producer to rethink his album. Thus the final result may be darker, angrier, and dense with complaints — I’m sure Terry will tell you it is — but the songs are eerily euphoric. It’s not quite catharsis, but a sort of hesitant reassurance bubbles underneath. Terry’s vocals, especially on “Demons For The Void” and “A Penny Sitter,”can’t help their warm invitation. And the album begins with a ‘mission control’ countdown that initially accompanied a rocket launch. That’s obvious, but my interpretation is it’s counting us to the end of what came before and to the dividing line that sits just before the next age. For better or worse, right?

The newest More Ghost Than Man single reveals a colorful trip of a video for that countdown song and the unreleased b-side “Christianblood.” On the heels of that, I (virtually) sat down with Terry for a deep chat. We talked about our creative processes and how we philosophically approach making albums. Terry also describes how he grabs the spark I alluded to above and why images significantly influence his audio experiments. 

I’ve transcribed a highlight from our conversation, and you can listen to the whole 25-minute chat in the handy audio player. Enjoy.

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MD: Have you seen After Yang yet?

TG: No. I’m dying to, though.

MD: There’s some great world-building. One thing that’s done in the movie, which I love, is there’s a lot of stuff happening that’s not explained. For example, the cars. There are a lot of scenes inside cars. You don’t see the actual car, like in the movie Her where you don’t see any cars because they don’t want to imagine what a car will look like in the future and be wrong.

But inside the cars, there are plants and moss. It’s not very explicit — I missed it at first. It’s like, what is that doing there? And it’s never explained. And then you start noticing other things like there’s a lot of greenery everywhere,

This world they live in maybe had an ecological disaster and they’re trying to move back to this greener world. And it’s little things like that which are left unexplained. That’s one of my favorite things — when any form of art does that, where there’s context beyond the obvious.

So, sometimes when I’m working on songs, I like to come up with a concept in almost a pretentious way. Like it’s a concept album and this is what all these songs are about as a whole. But the difference between me and, say, Yes is I don’t tell anyone the concept. It’s for me only to know. The concept serves only as a thread that ties it all together. Do you do anything like that?

TG: If anything, I might have my own set of emotional goals at the outset if I know I’m going to sit down and make a record, as opposed to just making music. I don’t think I’ve ever made an album where I just record twelve songs and then I’m like, “Oops, I guess I have a record.”

I basically sit down and say, “Okay, I’m embarking on an album-oriented project.” It’s like the Hobbit trying to get back to the mountain and throw the ring in the fire. But for me, I think as complicated as it ever gets I have a set of emotional goals that I’m looking for.

For example, here’s how I’m feeling about the world around me. Right. I’m a little angrier than I was last time I did this. Everything is basically like a touchstone in relation to where I was the last time I put a pin on the map in that respect, compared to the last album. I’m a little angrier and frustrated, maybe a little colder about this, maybe a little warmer towards this. And so I think the music does reflect that in the end. And the album should reflect that if I have been honest with myself all the way through the process, But while making it, I try not to worry about it too much.

I think as long as you’re honest with yourself from the beginning to the end, all the shit in the middle works itself out. But in terms of an overall concept, I don’t know that I’ve done that yet. Although now that you mention that I might try it because I am a big fan of not spelling things out for people and letting them bring their own interpretation to the table.

I mean, not only does art not belong to the artists, but I don’t know that it even really counts as art until someone has looked at it and says, “This is what I think this is.” That’s the moment where it actually becomes art because that’s the moment where it becomes useful.

MD: There are two things that art needs: intention and reaction. I don’t think you can have art without either of those.

TG: And the process of creating is the only part that ever really belongs to us. I’ve been trying to learn to find the majority of my enjoyment of creating art in the process and not from the final result. And then be willing to accept whatever the reaction is because I can’t control that part.

So try to get your purpose and your happiness out of it from purely the creation of it. And then at some point, just let it off into the world where it becomes everybody’s.

More Ghost Than Man - All The Time In The World

MD: I guess the reason why got on a tangent about hidden threads is that your album [The Worlds We Made There], especially after sequencing it, does sound like world-building.

There’s something about it when listening to it as a full album from song to song. One can kind of imagine the world this album is taking place in rather than imagining different tiny worlds where each individual song is taking place.

TG: The whole thing, like when you’re making an album, when you’re in the process of it, it’s like this fever dream. Once you snap out of it, you have a hard time remembering what it was like to be inside the process.

That headspace while making it — you have to channel some other version of yourself or some other energy during the process of making an album. And so it’s hard to think back to what I was really going through emotionally, or analytically when I was making [The Worlds We Made There]. I suppose there is always an element of world-building — you’re trying to tell a cohesive story. Right. An album should be more than just a collection of songs.

MD: But I do think you can get bogged down if you have the mindset of, “I’m recording an album and the album has to be this.” I agree with a strategy of just recording songs and the songs that belong together will find each other. Keep recording until you have those songs. Choose the songs that come together as a concept.

Returning to what you were saying about your music reflecting how you’re feeling at the time or the goings-on in the world, I almost feel like that’s a thread that’s even invisible to you. And a lot of the time it does create something cohesive. This is why we have a Prince vault. He was obsessed with this.

TG: I don’t know about you, but every time I cut a record, if it ends up with 12 songs on the album, that means I had 30 ideas in the demo stage. And then I probably had 20 almost finished songs three-fourths of the way through. Eventually, I choose the 12 that are the most cohesive together when everything’s 75% or 80% done. It’s fully formed enough that you can say, okay, I’ve got an idea what this is going to be like when it’s finished, That’s how I get 12 finished songs. I started with 30 and whittled it down. And so I can absolutely see how someone is obsessive about that as Prince would have endless days’ worth of music hiding out somewhere because I would like to think he probably worked that way, too.

MD: I remember reading an interview with Prince’s engineer Susan Rogers where she said he’d record a song and she would just be like, “This is the best song you’ve ever written.” And then he’d be like, “Nope, not going on the album.” He knows it doesn’t fit. And that’s how these songs appear out of the vault that are amazing. Why did he never release this? It was just because he was obsessed with songs that went together, that fit together.

TG: It honestly has nothing to do with the quality of the idea or how well the production clicked. It’s just if, for whatever reason, you knew that the song was the odd man out, It’s just like when I went back and found “Christianblood” which came out on the single last month. I cut that song not because I didn’t like it, but because it was already too similar to a couple of the things that I knew I wanted to have on the album. Putting that on there, too, would have been like three shades of gray when I only needed the two that were already there. And so I had to set aside.

It’s not like I’m saying I’m going to cut the head off the chicken and it’s going to bleed out. I’m just setting it aside for a little while and maybe I’ll come back to it later and everything will be fine. And it may be even in a different context. And at that point, the only thing that’s really changed is me or what I’m feeling in my approach. So what I was doing when I made that song, you can see something in a whole different light, even though nothing literally has changed about that piece of work.

→ Be sure to explore More Ghost Than Man’s discography on Bandcamp.

Marc Méan’s Collage: Imperfect in the Best Way Possible

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Long before Brian Eno dreamed-up the term ambient music, there was “Furniture Music.” Coined by composer Erik Satie in 1917, “Furniture Music” intends to “make a contribution to life in the same way as a private conversation, a painting in a gallery, or the chair in which you may or may not be seated” (Satie’s words).

There’s a story of the debut of “Furniture Music” (or more correctly “Furnishing Music” — ‘musique d’ameublement’). Satie performed it during the intermission of a play, and the audience was encouraged to mill about as they usually would during a theater break. Instead, and much to Satie’s frustration, the audience stayed seated and listened. 

Marc Méan is a Zürich-based musician who has found inspiration in Satie’s “Furniture Music” 100+ years later. It informs his fascinating album Collage, a set — and cassette — of two twenty-minute compositions that vibrate from ethereal soundscapes to lightly percussive sound design. It’s experimental in sound and process and, though “Furniture Music” serves as a launching pad, like Satie’s intermission music Collage leaves the listener more attentive than passive. 

“[Satie’s] approach fascinated me,” Marc says. “Before that, I was playing mostly jazz and improvised music, which required me to be active and personally involved as a listener and as a performer. It’s music where you have to be highly reactive to everything around you, where everything happens fast, where one prefers evolution to repetition. I wanted to find an approach to music where I could slow things down, where I could stretch time, be more passive, find simplicity.”

The inspiration came through the acquisition of an unusual electronic instrument. Marc explains, “It all began when I acquired Peter Blasser’s instrument the Ciat-Lonbarde Cocoquantus. It is a weird synthesizer-sampler that has a life of its own.” 

Originating in Portland and partly hand-crafted out of wood, the Cocoquantus is a sampler combined with looping delays and multiple analog synthesizer engines for modulation. Blasser himself describes the Cocoquantus as “not for the faint of heart: but once you speak its language, nothing else is quite the same.”

“Peter Blasser’s instruments don’t come with manuals,” Marc says. “Nothing is labeled on the instrument, so you have to explore it yourself. And I have never been someone who likes to practice for the sake of practicing. I always need to work in a musical context to learn something new. So while taming this new instrument, I recorded all my experiments.”

The process developed into a creative game (or, as I like to say, a tiny accident). Marc explains: “I like the idea of organized chaos, of controlled randomness in my work. The more I surprise myself in the creative process, the more interesting the music will be to me afterward. In the end, I felt that the material had a strong unity because of the gear I used. The Cocoquantus has such a strong personality that it binds the recordings together.” These exploratory pieces were combined to form the backbone of Collage. 

The resulting album is a lovely and imaginative trek through experimental ambiance. There are haunting piano moments, teasing through snatches of melody transmitted from a distance. Distinctively electronic antics appear, manipulated bleeps and clicks that soon give way to luminous passages. For all of its digital manipulation, Collage is warm and organic sounding, and the two twenty-minute stitched-together compositions don’t sound stitched-together at all.

Though there are elements of ambient ‘drone’ music, Collage‘s pieces develop and subtly change, sometimes offering surprises for the listener. “I can’t help myself but to have things evolve and have some drama,” Marc says. “The two sides are designed as a response to each other. One doesn’t need to listen to both sides back-to-back, but I would recommend listening to each in its entirety.”

I get this impression even as I listen to Collage as a digital stream on Bandcamp. The nature of the tracks, their grainy sound, and 20-minute lengths make Collage imaginable in a cassette format. Marc embraces Collage on cassette: “I like when music can be tangible; when music pairs with an object. It grounds things into a reality in this era where everything is virtual. Also, analog tape was used during the recording to transform and give color to certain elements. So for me, it makes sense that Collage is available on a physical medium.”  

Thus Neologist Productions has issued Collage on cassette, limited to 30 copies. The artwork is beautiful and visually fits the tone of the music. And, as Marc points out, the cassette may be the best way to experience Collage: “Because of the physicality of the cassette the listening experience is different. Cassettes sound different than a digital medium. Cassettes are lo-fi in comparison, they wobble a bit, they age, they are imperfect in the best way possible.”

Listen to Collage on various streaming platforms or on Bandcamp (where you can also purchase the limited edition cassette).

Sweet Jesus: Steve Cobby’s One Man Cottage Industry

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Steve Cobby - Sweet Jesus

A lazy Friday in May revealed a righteous surprise. Without warning: the arrival of Sweet Jesus. This event wasn’t a religious awakening, but for fans of Fila Brazillia, it was like unexpectedly finding an apparition burned onto the morning toast. Steve Cobby, one half of the aforementioned Fila B, had dropped his latest solo album — yes, Sweet Jesus — on Bandcamp.

The album opens with the ringing strings of a gently played guitar. The thing that always struck me about Fila Brazillia’s oeuvre is its innate organicness. Though considered an electronic band, the duo (Cobby in cahoots with David McSherry) wasn’t afraid to toss in the odd guitar riff, live drum kit, or shite harmonica. As out-of-place as folksy fingerpicking might sound on Sweet Jesus, it’s all part of a modus operandi that’s a long time in motion.

Recognizable elements of Cobby’s velvet-textured production come into play — the intro of “Chauffeur De Camion” brings to mind at least a couple of Fila B’s mid-90s moments — but it’s the renewed intersection with a prominent guitar that inspires imaginative shifts. Notably, there’s “Feline Plastique” which incorporates a rhythmic Latin shuffle alongside a wealth of melodic riffs and optimistic tones. And jazz features more than we’re used to, allowing the guitar to explore on extended cuts like the Liston-Smith-laid-back-space-jam-ish “Truer Than Words.” Introspection rarely feels so sunny.

The mechanics of the release of Sweet Jesus interest me, too. Steve Cobby is no stranger to independent labels. After a stint with the major-aligned Big Life via his band Ashley & Jackson, Cobby played a part in the formation of no less than four different independent imprints. Déclassé is the latest, launched in 2014, and is the home of this new effort. But it appears a one-person operation, making the surprise release of Sweet Jesus an intuitive experiment.

Steve documented the launch of the album in real-time, live-streaming the click of the ‘publish’ button on his Bandcamp account, followed with a listen of the album accompanied by an affable and enlightening commentary.

I’m always curious about artists who thrived in the independent sector pre-Napster and how they operate now. It’s no secret that I’m one of those artists. Though I get excited about the potential of today’s DIY freedom, the changes remain a constant struggle of adjustment. Cobby’s embrace of the Bandcamp and live-stream platforms led me to believe he’s a lot more confident than me in the modern landscape. But, after an email chat, I see he’s playing it by ear like the rest of us.

Says Steve: “[These tactics were] borne of desperation and curiosity. I prefer to be just creating. I never anticipated being an owner-operator at such a late stage in my career, but necessity is invention’s mother. The times have moved a great deal. I wouldn’t say I’ve moved with them 100%. But I have autonomy so I can try out things signed artists might struggle with. The live-stream idea, for instance, only came to me about a week before the planned release on the 10th and the night before I was still tweaking tunes and mastering. I cannot envisage that scenario being duplicated many places where a committee is involved.”

How long did it take to figure some of this out and how rough was the transition?

“2004 to 2014 was a fallow decade for me. Couldn’t get anything to traction with the collaborative releases put out on the labels I co-owned. Once I went completely solo in ’14, consolidated all tasks to myself, and went direct-to-customer it was revolutionary. The light appeared at the tunnel’s end, and I began to earn money again. I’m a digital busker now, and almost everything that goes in the hat comes home. I think this is more like the many-to-many publishing model we’ll move towards. You’re sustained by a very bespoke coterie that you’ve curated.”

But, that’s liberating, right? So much nicer than being under the thumb of a label I’d imagine.

“I would much prefer financial security to be honest. My one man cottage industry is simply the only way I can get my material to market without interference. Certainly far from an ideal. I did enjoy the liberation of delivering an album completely ‘fresh’ and sans promo. But I’ve not worked within the traditional label machine since being signed to Big Life in the late eighties. They were pricks who wanted to dictate what we did and who we worked with. But If I was signed to an open-minded label, then I don’t see why I couldn’t make the same decisions I’m making now. Who knows.”

Whatever liberation there might be, a lot of artists are finding that Bandcamp is an essential tool for achieving it. Not only is it often used as a direct-to-artist platform, but Bandcamp also encourages artist fandom rather than passive playlist loyalty. I asked about Bandcamp’s role in Steve’s ‘one man cottage industry,’

“Bandcamp has been key to my turnaround. It’s the platform that delivers uncompressed and compressed downloads as well as streaming whilst taking the smallest cut of any retailer. This release was a Bandcamp exclusive for the first six weeks to help promote some more traffic that way. I’d still bother without it, but the returns would be less as all other online portals are serviced through an aggregator. “

I wondered: was Sweet Jesus‘s surprise release date set in stone and was there any temptation to push it back? And, as Steve was tweaking and mastering the album less than 24 hours before he clicked ‘publish,’ would he ever go back and update any of the tracks, Kanye-style?

“The beauty of the surprise deadline is it can be moved on a whim, but I was confident it was coherent work. I’d set that deadline for myself to avoid over-procrastination. As for reviewing post-release, the egg is fried. I don’t beat myself up once material is published and I would only ever re-upload a track for a technical reason, never creative.”

Despite the backed-into-a-corner nature of a self-release (and I can relate), I’m heartened and inspired by the freshness and ingenuity of Sweet Jesus, both in its playful roll-out to Steve’s fans and its bright, sanguine, and thoughtful sound. But, without any constraints, how would Steve Cobby release this album differently?

He answer: “To fifty thousand subscribers.”

Follow Steve Cobby and his Déclassé label on Bandcamp to help him get closer to that number.

An Interview With Sync-Club Podcast

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Listen to “Rolling the Dice with Michael Donaldson | 001” on Spreaker.

Steven Cleveland — of the electronic band Ping Trace who I’ve worked with — has started a podcast titled Sync-Club. As I understand it, the podcast is Steven’s journey in better understanding the worlds of publishing, licensing, and synchronization with the listener along for the ride. The podcast will feature interviews with professionals working in synch as the knowledge gets dropped. It’s a great concept. The synch world could use some demystification from a learner’s point of view.

I’m honored to help launch this podcast by being the interviewee on the first episode. Steven and I have a fun and informative conversation. I go deep on a variety of licensing-related subjects, and towards the end, I reveal a few tactics for the best ways that an independent artist can reach out to music supervisors.

The podcast conversation is also like a taste of one of my consulting sessions. I cover similar ground with my label and artist clients. Interested? Send me a note.

One of my favorite riffs concerns how an artist should not overthink the synch market, falling into the trap of creating music that might be ‘great for licensing.’ Music your fans love will end up being the music that supervisors love, so don’t abandon both by writing music to some imagined spec. Here’s a transcription of this riff from the podcast, edited for clarity:

There is a market for creating music specifically with sync in mind, and that’s called library music. And if you want to make library music that’s fine if that’s your prerogative. But if you’re looking for something beyond that, then you still need to create the best music you can for your fans, your audience.

A music supervisor, a showrunner, or a director will want their project to be cool and distinctive. So they’re going to look for cool and distinctive music to match their perception of what the project should be. When you’re making music to spec or to what you think someone is going to want to hear, you’re not making distinctive music. It might sound cool, but it’s not going to be distinctive.

And another issue is I feel like the library music industry is in jeopardy because of AI music. Creating music to spec — for example, songs with glockenspiels and handclaps with the lyrics, “you can do it!” — is intentionally generic. But people make songs like these because they’re the kind of songs used in a lot of videos. It’s a race to the bottom, and nothing is going to be closer to the bottom and able to do spec better than a computer in two or three years.

I feel bad for people that are making a living in the library music industry because I think they’re the ones who are going to be hurt by this. But on the other hand, artists and bands with distinctive sounds and sticky stories — a story behind the band and who they are and what they’re about — are going to stand out in the synch world. Those kinds of bands may even see an increase in the money they’re making from synch as the field of distinctive, story-driven artists will actually narrow in a crowded marketplace.

You also have to think in terms of who music supervisors are when you’re pitching music. You have to put yourself in their shoes and understand where they come from. Music supervisors are music fans. That’s the reason they got into the profession. I was thinking earlier today about how a lot of newer executives in the record industry are tech people rather than music people. It’s almost like music supervision is the last area that’s entirely populated by music fans, and I don’t see that changing.

Your average music supervisor was in a band once, or they were a DJ on a college radio station or at a nightclub. They might have worked at a label or written about music professionally. When you realize that you better understand how to pitch your music. Music supervisors want to discover bands. They want to support a band that has a story that they connect with. And obviously, they also want a really good song that fits the project. But if you have a compelling story, then you have a greater chance of getting your song to them.

Check out Sync-Club’s website here, and be sure to subscribe to the podcast’s newsletter — and the podcast itself via your favorite listening platform — as I’m sure it will provide a wealth of useful information.

An Interview on the This Is Orlando Podcast

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I appeared on the This Is Orlando podcast, interviewed by the affable and capable Rob Coble. It was a terrific discussion and I was able to touch on many of my pet topics including:

• my beginnings with the Eighth Dimension collective
• the importance of the artist’s story and the ‘body of work’ mindset
• trading physical scarcity for streaming’s abundance
• how the diversity of Orlando’s music scene is its advantage and disadvantage
• social media as the hammer, not the house
• why I switched from the artist life to the music business life
• how I find new music and strive to listen with intention

Have a listen on the This Is Orlando page or via Overcast.FM (or download it in your preferred podcast app).

PS – Overcast’s new clip sharing feature is amazing. What a great idea. That above excerpt video won’t be the last you’ll see on this site, I’m sure.

Trevor Horn: Digital Sampling with a Sense of Humor

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Thanks so much to Jaco & Co. for turning me on to this fantastic three hour (!) conversation with production hero Trevor Horn:

Hearing Horn’s ’80s production work when it was new and still otherworldly had the hugest influence on me, as his sound transformed my teenage daydream goal of rock star to music producer. When I heard Frankie’s Welcome To The Pleasuredome (with its insane technical details in the CD liner notes), Propaganda’s A Secret Wish, and – especially – (Who’s Afraid Of) The Art Of Noise? I had to know exactly how these recordings were made. This led me down a rabbit hole that I’m still enjoyably descending.

Fondest memory of the time: via Art Of Noise, learning about this thing called a ‘digital sampler’ and then, mind blown, writing down a long list of all the household objects I would sample once I eventually acquired one. That record rewired my brain and the way I listened to everything around me. And, before you ask, I, unfortunately, have no idea what happened to that list.

One of my favorite parts of this conversation (hosted by Trevor Jackson who gets some delightful anecdotes out of his subject) is when Horn talks about his Fairlight CMI sampler, bought using “Video Killed The Radio Star” royalty. (An aside: this made me think how different music production history would be if that record hadn’t been a hit!) Horn reckons that he was the only prominent Fairlight owner who treated the device with a sense of humor, the other early UK Fairlight-ers being Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush. This was cool to hear as the fun and levity that Trevor Horn (and Fairlight engineer / Art Of Noise member J. J. Jeczalik) brought to sampling was one of my attractions to this work, and shaped how I approach my time in the studio. I think you can hear this in my own music.

Trevor Jackson’s musical selections in this show lean toward rare remixes from the period and it’s fascinating how prescient they were, and how Horn somewhat humbly downplays their brilliance. I was reminded of this stunning (and, yes, humorous) 1986 remix of Frankie’s “Rage Hard” which I hadn’t heard since it was relatively new, and I’d totally forgotten about it:

Previously.