Posted by Google News | Industry News | martes 22 octubre 2013 7:47 pm
Do you have a packet of Lurpak butter to hand? Good. See the two twirly things on either side of the central heraldic device? They’re lurs, curved brass horns popular in the first and second millennia BC in and around Denmark. A set of six of them were found in a field in Zealand in 1797, still in playable condition, and the Danes were so proud of them they eventually gave their name to one of the country’s most famous and tasty exports.
Goodall’s book opens with many even more surprising and fascinating factoids. The format of that ghastly show The X Factor was anticipated 3,000 years ago when ambitious or optimistic Greek singer-songwriters would belt their stuff out in front of an audience and a panel of specialist judges. A Mesopotamian clay tablet dating from 2600 BC gives us the oldest list of musical instruments that we have – and instructions on how to play them. But a flute carved from bone found in a cave in Germany has been estimated to be 35,000 years old, while instruments have been found in Swabia that are 12,000 years older still. There is plausible speculation that the sounds produced by these instruments would have been particularly useful for some kind of echolocation – ritualistic or otherwise – within the cave networks in which they were discovered. But the most thought-provoking and sobering detail comes very early on in the book, when Goodall reminds us that, until the late 19th century, it was unlikely you would hear your favourite piece of music more than three or four times in a lifetime.
A book that starts with these gobbets can be said to have done well in the art of grabbing the reader’s attention, and, as Goodall progresses through the ages, he is engaging and informative – apart from once or twice, which I’ll get to in a minute. There’s one of those little stickers on the front cover of my copy which shows his face and the words «as seen on BBC» (sic), though I haven’t seen the TV series to which this is a tie-in. It covers some of the same ground as his last book, from about 10 years ago, Big Bangs: The Story of Five Discoveries that Changed Musical History: musical annotation, equal temperament, the LP, etc. That book read more like the verbatim script of a TV series than a proper history; The Story of Music doesn’t suffer from that fault.
The lur horns, dating from 1200-700 BC. Photograph: Prisma/Getty
It does, however, suffer from the reluctance of the British to think. It’s all part of the grand British tradition of near-philistinism – remember Thomas Beecham’s line about the British knowing little about music, but loving the noise it makes. This country is still nowhere near producing a musical critic as penetrating and controversial as Theodor Adorno, so when Goodall describes pretty much the entire output of music inspired by Schoenberg’s serialism or atonality ‑ Goodall equates the two terms, but he knows perfectly well that they don’t mean the same thing – as having produced «not one piece of music that a normal person could understand or enjoy», it doesn’t come as a shock. And this is the book’s other fault: the last specific piece of music he mentions is «my own setting of the New Testament’s Beatitudes», which he is proud to note «spent half a year at No 1 in the specialist classical charts».
I try not to let this bother me. The rest of the book makes a good effort to transmit the beauty and power of music in words, such as his description of the final cadences of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. His account of the development of music from Haydn to Schubert is masterly (if a little hard on Haydn for my liking, and did he really need to compare Schubert with Adele?). He makes particularly good points, I think, about the contrast between musical style and political turmoil around the end of the 18th century; and, earlier on, the progression from plainchant to the kind of music we accept under that name today. Argue with him if you like, but he knows his stuff, and tells it well.
Posted by Google News | Industry News | martes 22 octubre 2013 2:43 pm
(Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)
News is now leaking that Twitter is on the verge of killing its #Music app, as the company revamps its music strategy in preparation for its IPO. Some of you reading this are probably saying to yourselves, “I didn’t even know Twitter had a music app!”, and that’s the whole point. The company didn’t do much to promote it, which leads to some interesting speculation.
#Music was launched in April and actually had a reasonable first week or so, but usage dropped like a rock after that, getting no traction from the early adopters and no buzz to bring in other users as a result. The app was based upon the infrastructure of We Are Hunted, a company that Twitter acquired that specialized in new music discovery, which was to be the trademark of #Music. But sometimes things don’t work out as planned, as Twitter made two strategic mistakes with the app.
First of all was timing. Introducing #Music in April might have seemed like a good idea at the time, but it turned out to be a very flawed decision. While not knowing exactly what the corporate thinking was, it would seem that the plan was to get some action in music to spike their IPO a little (which was still unannounced at the time). By having a successful music product, the assumption might have been that it could’ve went to market with that additional feather in its tail and goosed its opening share price as a result. But would that really have mattered? I’ve read valuations of anywhere between $10 to 20 billion that are expected once the IPO is launched, so would a successful #Music really have added much more?
In retrospect it would’ve been better to wait until after the IPO to launch a music app, as it could’ve ridden on the coattails of all the publicity already being generated. Plus, there would’ve been extra cash to invest in the project to flesh it out more if needed.
The second mistake was not promoting the app and relying on its virility through the Twitter network to do the job. There are rumors that the #Music wasn’t well thought of within the ranks of the company to begin with, with development leader Kevin Thau leaving the company for another startup shortly after launch. It’s possible that the lack of confidence in the product/feature led the company to just let it quietly languish out of sight, hoping that it would peter out on its own, which is what apparently happened. Once again, the timing of the app’s death is very interesting (if it happens as rumored), except for the fact that Twitter may want to clean up its dirty laundry before the IPO.
Still, any music product from Twitter going forward has to be more than just another music service. There are too many already (with more on the way with Beats Music and the new YouTube streaming service set to launch soon), and even with the soon to be deep pockets of Twitter, it will be hard to compete toe to toe with the existing services. Plus, Twitter is already giving away to iTunes Radio and Rdio the one thing that makes it really different, which is its trending information. This is Twitter’s secret sauce, but the company has yet to find a way to blend it into its own unique gourmet dish.
Twitter doesn’t need to be in the music business, and may benefit greatly by avoiding it altogether, but sometimes the temptation to be hipper than you already are can be too great. If it does enter the music sphere, let’s hope it utilizes all the things that make the service unique, and stays away from being just another copycat.
Posted by Google News | Industry News | martes 22 octubre 2013 2:43 pm
We were so pleased for legacy UK music store HMV, when it turned up with a new iOS app last week. It seems Apple was a little bit over-excited too, having apparently mashed the approve button without really realizing what it was doing. HMV was selling music downloads via the new app, a massive conflict of interest for Apple, and a big no-no in relation to its Ts & Cs. According to HMV Chairman Paul McGowan, Cupertino gave HMV Music the nod on September 15th, but once it noticed the gaffe, only gave the UK retailer until 6pm yesterday to remove the offending feature. Of course, this was too short notice, and as such the app has been pulled. The Guardian reports that the official word from Apple is that the app violated a clause that prevents selling of goods or services outside of the app — an experience the official press release described as «native» despite sending you off to an external site. Back to the developing board for HMV, we guess.
Apple have politely asked us to remove the #hmvapp from the AppStore. We have politely declined.
Posted by Google News | Industry News | martes 22 octubre 2013 9:39 am
A WIGAN pub has been heavily fined and banned from playing music after a clampdown by licensing officials.
The owners of Mortimer’s Bar on King Street were fined £1,600 and ordered to pay £1,592 costs by the High Court after they were caught playing music without a licence.
One of the country’s top judges, Mrs Justice Asplin ruled against the popular venue at the trial last week after hearing that Mortimer’s was caught playing recorded copyrighted music there when the owner didn’t have a licence from music royalties collectors Phonographic Performance Ltd (PPL).
And earlier last week the same judge imposed a similar ban on Club Enterprises Ltd and James McHugh to prevent them playing music at Embargos, at 6 Birkrig, Skelmersdale, along with an order that they pay £2,040 legal costs. The owners were also fined £2,000.
The bans mean they must stop all playing of recorded music and any premises they run until their licences are brought up to date. If they don’t obey the pay up or shut up orders they could end up behind bars.
Failure to obey the orders and turn any premises they run into a music-free zone until all licence fees are brought up to date would be regarded as contempt of court, the penalties for which can be fines of up to £10,000 and up to six months’ prison for any individuals responsible.
The judge was told that a PPL inspector visited the Wigan premises and heard tracks including ‘Wings’ by Little Mix, ‘Spectrum’ by Florence and the Machine and ‘We Found Love’ by Calvin Harris and Rihanna on being played when no licence was in force on 16 March.
When an inspector visited the Skelmersdale premises on May 4 he heard recorded tracks being played which included “Toca’s Miracle”, “Clown” and “Funky Vodka”.
The bans apply to all forms of mechanically recorded music such as records, tapes and CDs in PPL’s repertoire. Depending on the size of a venue and the audiences involved music licences can cost very little but they can also run into hundreds or even thousands of pounds.
PPL spokesperson Nazneen Nawaz said: “PPL is the UK-based music licensing company which licenses recorded music for broadcast, online and public performance use. Established in 1934, PPL carries out this role on behalf of thousands of record company and performer members.
“Public Performance licences are issued by PPL to hundreds of thousands of businesses and organisations from all sectors across the UK who play recorded music to their staff or customers and who therefore require a licence by law.
“These can range from bars, nightclubs, shops and hotels to offices, factories, gyms, schools, universities and local authorities.
“After the deduction of PPL’s running costs, all revenue collected is distributed to members. PPL does not retain a profit for its services.
“With over 6,500 members who are record companies or other recorded music rights holders and 50,000 performer members, PPL has a large and diverse membership. Members include major record labels and globally successful performers, as well as many independent labels, sole traders and session musicians ranging from orchestral players to percussionists and singers – all of whom are entitled to be fairly paid for the use of their recordings and performances.
“PPL’s role and remit increases year on year. The company receives details electronically on a weekly basis for an average of 6,500 new recordings.”
Posted by Google News | Industry News | martes 22 octubre 2013 4:32 am
Stephen Barton – taking video game music into the next gen
GameCentral speaks to composer Stephen Barton about working on the music of Metal Gear Solid and Call Of Duty, and how he aims to make Titanfall sound as good as it looks.
Not only is Titanfall the new game from one of the co-creators of Call Of Duty but its music composer is also best known for his work on the blockbuster shooter series. Stephen Barton has even more experience in film though, and as early as age 19 was writing music for Dreamworks’ Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas. He then worked for seven years with Metal Gear Solid composer Harry
Gregson-Williams, picking up valuable experience and his first chance to work in the games industry.
A Brit living and working in Los Angeles, Barton was recently in London recording the soundtrack for Titanfall at the famous Abbey Road Studios. We spoke to him not only about his work on the new game but his experiences with Gregson-Williams, his own personal history with video game music, and the current state of the soundtrack industry…
GC: I have to admit I don’t remember there being any music in the demos I’ve played of Titanfall so far. If you’re recording it now then I guess that just means it just wasn’t finished then?
SB: We’ve had a few bits in, there’s some very subtle things in there, but there are no final mixes in. But that’s really coming together in the next month or so. The next sort of three weeks really. They had some sort of placeholder piece just for E3 and the builds that have been going around.
GC: That’s a relief, because it’d be embarrassing if I’d heard it and it had been that unmemorable!
SB: [laughs]
GC: So can you just talk me through your early career for a moment, it seems you started out very young?
SB: I started out in the UK at a musical school, this was pre-2000, and I got to the juncture where I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go to music college or not. So I took a gap year and in the middle of the gap year got offered a job working with Harry Gregson-Williams – who’s also done a lot of video game soundtracks. He did the Metal Gear Solid franchise and was one of the first Hollywood composers to cross over into video games. But I came on to really work with him doing writing and arranging on feature films. My background was entirely in film and so the first sort of 20 products I worked on were all feature films.
The game world really came about with… we picked up a little bit of, I think, Metal Gear Solid 2 or 3 – I forget which one it was off the top of my head, I think 3, but whilst we were in the middle of Ben Affleck’s movie Gone Baby Gone we got word through… At that time Harry and I had the same agent, and Harry got word and came to my room one day and said, ‘There’s this video game’. And he didn’t really play video games at all, he always joked that the only video game he’d really played was Pong, and so he was like,’ Oh, there’s this video game that’s some sort of thing… Call Of Duty?’ And I was like, ‘Oh yeah!’
I’d always been a first person shooter fan, so obviously that was something I knew very well and so they set up a meeting and we were going to go over and meet with them. But I had no idea that it was going to be Modern Warfare and set in the present day. I sill had Nazis and Russians and World War II in mind, and that whole world. So we went over to Infinity Ward and the first thing they played us was the nuclear explosion from Shock & Awe, which was the big visual set piece. And they played it, if I remember rightly, without any preamble whatsoever. So that was sort of like, ‘Woah! This is completely different to what we expected’. It looked insane, and there was a sort of massive canvas to really do something different.
So that was sort of how I ended up in the game world. And I still do a lot of film work but the occasional game when it crops up has been a really sort of edifying experience.
GC: So you’re obviously a gamer, if you already knew what Call Of Duty was, but where you one growing up?
SB: Yeah, kind of. It varied, my brother was initially much more into it than I was. When I was very young we had a ZX Spectrum… and we actually didn’t have the memory that went along with it and so we had a book and you had to sit there typing in BASIC for an hour and then hit RUN and there was your game. But I got hooked on that. But then we started hooking up things like Doom over null modem cables and stuff like that. I was always into first person shooters, I was never that much into strategy or the massively mulitplayer games, but I have been a bit since for sure.
GC: And what about your musical influences growing up?
SB: Well, I came from a completely classical background. I was actually a cathedral chorister down at Winchester of all places and then I trained as a pianist, I was a keyboard player. And so I came at it initially from that angle, but when I starting coming out to work with Harry one of the very early things was he was aking was, ‘What do you know about synth and electronics?’ And I was interested but I didn’t know a huge amount, so I was thrown in at the end deep end. I think it was Tony Scott’s Man on Fire, which had some orchestral elements in it but it was largely very heavy electronics, and so that was a sort of baptism of fire [laughs].
So I came at it from that aspect, I came from the classical world and then sort of added these other things that funnily enough now I think I’m now better know for: the more sort of electronic stuff from the fourth Call Of Duty. And big, big sort of epic elements. And when I meet with directors now they know me more from that world and are surprised when they look down my credits and see Shrek and Narnia – which are obviously a very different kettle of fish.
Titanfall – robotic music
GC: Call Of Duty is obviously very bombastic, very cheesy in that sort of Michael Bay style. But the music is almost the only serious aspect. Was that purposeful? Was that your idea or was it basically the only approach that would work?
SB: With the World War II approach there’s obviously a kind of in-built musical language already there. And a lot of the music of the first three games was playing up the heroism and then finding spots to ratchet up the tension. But it wasn’t a million miles away from something you might find in Where Eagles Dare and there’s a sort of almost timeless quality to it, so that it sounds like it’s even further away than 1940.
GC: The games sounded exactly what you expected them to.
SB: Exactly!
GC: But with Modern Warfare it was a little less obvious what direction you’d take.
SB: That was the thing and I think one of the things from the very outset is that they were trying to make a game that, because it was modern and because there was in a way a lot less suspension of disbelief, it was one of those things where you kind of just wanted to heighten the reality of it. Music placed in the wrong place can pull you out of the experience, and sort of remind you that you’re playing a game. And so with Call Of Duty 4 what I think we were trying to do with a lot of the music was enhance the realism.
So in the end… I mean there’s a lot of orchestral elements in it but there’s a lot more ambient and just sort of textural effects. And it was kind of going off what I think the shifting directions in film are, where people have sort of moved away from this sort of literal sort of scoring to something that’s really trying to add subtext and add counterpoint to what’s on screen – instead of that golden age thing of going with every action moment and punctuating things. It’s kind of the opposite to that really.
GC: Ah, well that was exactly one of the questions I was going to ask, but I’m afraid it’s going to make me sound like a musical Luddite.
SB: [laughs]
GC: I did a very interesting interview with a British composer called Andrew Skeet, where he spoke about how in previous decades John Williams was the major influence and how now it’s Hans Zimmer. And that’s why everything’s moved away from melody and recognisable, easily hummable tunes. Is that how you see it?
SB: Yes, that’s interesting. I think generally speaking a lot of it’s to do with… I think the history of cinema music started out at its very inception by essentially trying to cover up for the technical deficiencies of the projector, with silent films. So it was easy to have music along with the action simply because there was this loud noise going on at the same time.
And then what I think’s interesting for me is I’ve always thought that a lot of the reason why the ’80s John Williams scores in particular are so successful was partly because the visual effects weren’t 100 per cent convincing and there was kind of that extra need, that extra push… and now it’s almost come to the point where filmmakers think that they’re overcompensating for something and the visuals are up there on the screen so why do we need to say it again with music?
But that has led to something where there is a potential for quite a lot of scores to have a kind of lack of melodic interest. And there’s no reason why a score can’t be very simple, Bernard Herrmann was the master of it… of a simple atmospheric and textural score but it’s got great content and it’s written with the same care. There’s definitely some scores out there where it’s definitely ambient wallpaper and I think it’s that very fine line of sort of how you eek the most out of simple material. I think that’s often the challenge and that’s met with varying degrees of success.
And every time you come up with a director who says,’ Oh, I don’t really want a theme in my movie’ and sometimes you have to work with them and say, ‘Well, actually what you need is an inner theme that works and something that does actually express something emotional about that film or about the game’. But it’s funny how much then you can actually get away with. There’s a lot of directors who say, ‘I don’t want any orchestra in this! I don’t want to see a single string player!’ And then they suddenly find that when they get to the dub stage they find there’s something lacking from the film there’s a sort of warmth or richness that’s not there.
And it’s funny even then, the number of times I’ve been on films where we’ve been told no orchestra at all and then sort of gradually bled back a little bit. And then it’s come to what one hopes is a happy place. I think it all largely depends on the film, or the game, and the context – and there’s some things that can take more in the way of music than others. And that’s always the challenge really: how hard do you press the button, as it were.
GC: Games are sort of experiencing the same phenomenon in terms of the lack of melody, but they at least have an excuse that cinema doesn’t – in that previously they were really limited to just one or two tunes that they had to make sure you didn’t mind listening to for hours on end. But even so, being able to hum a few bars of Super Mario Bros. or Bubble Bobble… you really can’t do that with many modern games.
SB: Oh yeah!
GC: It’s so frustrating to think that game music no longer has any technical limits and yet it seems far less distinctive and interesting than it used to be.
SB: I think there’s an element where what’s the norm in cinema is often translating across to games, and so I think it’s partly due to that. I think part of it too is that in many ways game music is still in its infancy. I guess it’s only been 10 or 15 years since people have been seriously employing the resources that you would employ on a movie. And when you look back at the 8-bit stuff it was marvellously written, I mean absolute works of genius. They had so little to play with and had to create something that was memorable and iconic, and you just have to look at the Black Eyed Peas to know that that sound that that sound is ingrained into public consciousness. It’s almost the first thing in the video game world that’s done that. So it’ll be interesting to see in 20 years time what’s remembered from right around now.
Video game music is now a serious business
GC: Well, that was exactly the question I was going to ask. Interestingly the two most obvious modern themes I think come from Halo and Metal Gear Solid, which you’ve obviously worked on. Do you think that desire to create a distinctive, melodic theme has rubbed off on you from that?
SB: I think that’s it in a nutshell, I think as a composer the music you write can only ever be as good as the material you put in. And a great tune, it’s funny when I remember working on the Metal Gear franchise, particularly on 3, there is that main theme. And it’s one of those things that’s a remarkably powerful tool – at any point you can choose to sort of land that main tune and as soon as it kicks off you know where you are and it’s a very familiar signpost along the way.
GC: I think it helped to elevate a lot of the cut scenes, can you imagine how unbearable they’d be without the music?
SB: [laughs] That’s the thing and I think once you get a theme and once you get a tune that you can develop, and once you have a melody that can stay and be a familiar friend that returns, then it’s all about how you work with that material and how you work it out… There’s always the danger when you have a really good theme that you end up playing it kind of the same way every time and then you quickly find out whether it’s a good tune or not because after the third or fourth time if it’s annoying you know it’s not working. And that’s been true of music for centuries, it’s why a distinctive melody is so important.
GC: Is there any element of that history of games music you can use today, especially as you’re working on a sci-fi game now? I mean obviously you can’t fade to a chiptune, but is there any other way the old style of music can inform the new?
SB: Well, kind of! Funnily enough on Call Of Duty we did actually have – it wasn’t done by me but the game director, who’s actually the game director on Titanfall as well. Steve Fukuda did this fantastic 8-bit version of the main theme of Call Of Duty which was hilarious. And I didn’t know about it and I happened to be playing it and I was like,’ What the hell is this? It’s awesome!’
GC: My favourite is this unlockable chiptune in Lego Lord Of The Rings. I don’t think it has anything to do with the film but I can just listen to it forever. And I have no idea when it loops, that tune could be two hours long or two minutes and I think that’s kind of magical.
SB: [laughs] I think that distinctive is a word that at the very outset is what we’ve tried to go for with Titanfall. A sound that is very identifiable. There’s a couple of particular main themes that are more extended tunes that develop through the game. I think the other thing is finding a sound world as well. So often, even with straight orchestral elements, you can end up in a place where it can get very samey – especially over a long period of time.
And that’s the other issue with the game being multiplayer: we’ve actually got quite a quantity of music. Because of the permutations and possibilities one of the things we wanted to avoid from the outset is repetition. If you’re going into a map and you get the same bit of music pop up every single time it’s one of those things that’s going to potentially pull you out of the experience. So that’s one of the things we’ve been trying to do, to try and find unique and cool and distinctive new sounds.
And the nice thing with being a sci-fi game is that there’s no real rules as to what necessarily the sound world can involve. We have everything from a very abused hurdy-gurdy sound to heavy electronics. There’s a lot of Morricone-esque baritone guitars, there’s a very very wide-ranging palette to the sounds. Especially with the game having the two sides – the IMC and the Militia – and so we wanted to forge two different sounds so that each side has its own identity and its own musical sound world.
GC: So at what point did you get involved with Titanfall, what kind of influence have you had on the overall sound design?
SB: I became involved just a couple of months before E3 this year. At that stage the two lead audio guys… they’re both very musical and so a lot of our initial conversation was about how can we really try and raise the bar in terms of every aspect of the technical side. Of how we record it, how we put it together, how we’re mixing it. And kind of take the approach that they’ve taken with the game, which has definitely been going back to the drawing board and not really…. the thing that strikes me with the game, what I’ve played of it, is that once you start playing it a lot it really doesn’t feel like Call Of Duty.
There’s kind of a three-dimensionality to it, and it’s also just very, very fast all of the time. Call Of Duty I think offered you the opportunity to stand around and there were sort of sneakier and stealthier aspects to it. And there are elements of that in Titanfall but what struck me was jut the energy of it, it’s so fast paced and gives you this adrenaline rush kind of thing. At the end of the day all first person shooters are going to have you looking down a gun sight but I think it’s a very different world and we try to get that across sonically as well.
GC: And what about the robots, do they have their own themes? I assume the music changes depending on whether you’re piloting them or not?
SB: The main thing is that when you’re running as a pilot the pace is very fast and the mobility is very high. And that’s one of the things that first struck me when I was starring on it: the ability to move in this game is just leaps and bounds beyond most games. When you don’t have a titan I think there’s a need to feel a great propulsion, a greater velocity, and be sort of more agile. So that’s definitely something that’s high on the list of things that we’ve been looking at.
And then the one thing that I liked about getting inside the titans is that it’s not hulking slow, ‘clunk! clunk! clunk!’ They’re reasonably agile, as you’d kind of expect for a more grounded kind of sci-fi. So there’s that element as well. The titans don’t become a sort of stationary artillery, you really can move in them, and you can move fast. I think with the music it’s trying to keep that kinetic thing going on all the time and finding ways to make that vary and make that interesting – and have builds and ebbs and flows and things that give you a sort of arc and shape to each map and each level. That’s the sort of approach we’ve been taking, trying to find things that have a real sort of dynamic, propulsive vibe to them.
GC: You mentioned the online aspect briefly but how does that affect things, especially in terms of it being much less linear than a story-based game? Generally speaking as well as just in Titanfall.
SB: I think that gradually, as games shift to being online it boils down to what is the music trying to do? What’s its function? And this one’s very much been trying to think about what the piece of music has to achieve and do. Is it giving you that lift emotionally or giving you that extra bit of tension in a section? Obviously the big challenge is that the timings aren’t going to be fixed, because every time you play an online game it’s going to be different, from a technical standpoint that’s the technical challenge for the next few years.
It’s how you write compelling music that’s interesting and isn’t too loopy and has musical ebb and flow and structure and gives you an emotional response. And how you write that within the confines of what you have to achieve technically. It’s a new canvas, it’s a superb new canvas to work on, especially when you’re working with developers like these guys who want to really do the very best in every area.
GC: That’s great, thanks a lot for you time.
SB: Oh pleasure, absolutely.
Formats: Xbox 360, Xbox One, and PC Publisher: Electronic Arts Developer: Respawn Entertainment Release Date: Spring 2014
Posted by Google News | Industry News | lunes 21 octubre 2013 11:32 pm
Flung across a few hundred disparate bars, clubs and basements every October, over 1,000 bands from around the world descend on New York City for CMJ, the five-day music-industry and media conference that condenses and intensifies the city’s usual atmosphere of convergence and discovery.
New York itself is too titanic to register the buzz of underground activity at a surface level— most non-music-obsessives here can make it through the week without so much as a deviation from their daily commute. But the acts vying for attention at showcases day and night, official and non, have often used the conference — and its healthy draw of label executives, booking agents and publicists alike — as a springboard to cultural resonance on a much larger scale. In just the past five years acts including but not limited to Passion Pit, Sleigh Bells, The xx, HAIM, Savages and Icona Pop all delivered pivotal early performances that presaged crossover success in the mainstream.
If there were any overarching narratives to this year’s conference one was this: guitar bands are back, and in a big way. A glut of punk, noise-pop, and alternative bands ripped through many of the best showcases, perhaps signaling a pending tidal shift away from the synth and MacBook-enabled electronic music that has dominated the popular consciousness for at least the past few years.
Below, our picks of 10 superb young acts from CMJ 2013, organized by genre, to keep your eye on over the next 12 months.
Palehound The project of Yonkers-based 19-year-old Ellen Kempner, Palehound matches unflinching, whimsical lyrics with pleasantly off-kilter guitar work. Excellent debut single «Pet Carrot» is like early Weezer thrown into a blender with The Blow.
Krill Krill’s woozy, raw, rollicking garage rock gets in your head and stays there thanks to quotable riffs and the ecstatic humanity of frontman Jonah Furman’s belted vocals.
Perfect Pussy Perfect Pussy delivered a 12-minute perfect storm of noise pop and heady punk with its self-released debut EP «I Have Lost All Desire for Feeling» in July. On stage, frontwoman Meredith Graves has the charisma of a star in the making.
Pity Sex Lovelorn Ann Arbor pop-punk outfit Pity Sex have a penchant for fuzzy guitars and dreamy shoegaze vocals. Black-clad and bespectacled singer Brennan Greaves wields an obvious gift for melody, as does co-singer/better-half Britty Drake.
Ovlov Brothers Steve, Jon and Theo Hartlett comprise this savvy Connecticut punk trio that marries shredded guitar and flurries of drums with Steve’s earnest, almost-wistful vocal cadence.
Wet This Brooklyn-based, downtempo indie pop and R&B trio serenaded the first night of Fader Fort just two days after releasing a promising, self-titled debut EP last Tuesday (Oct. 15). Lead singer Kelly Zutrau’s piercing, angelic vocals swirl with lush but thoughtfully restrained guitar and synth arrangements.
Kan Wakan The sweeping, soulful folk of this California collective helmed by composer/producer Crooked Waters is captivatingly complex, with young singer Kristianna Bautista’s husky voice floating on a sumptuous bed of cinematic strings, acoustic guitar and groovy bass notes.
Diane Birch Diane Birch’s just-released sophomore album «Speak a Little Louder» is a finely crafted collection of warm, ‘70’s-indebted rock and soul. Birch is a gifted piano player with a knockout voice, the crispness and twang of which has drawn favorable comparisons to hero Stevie Nicks.
Nonono Swedes Nonono continue Scandinavia’s dominance of catchy, midtempo electropop with compulsively bouncy beats and sing-from-the-rooftop hooks.
The Range 25-year-old producer James Hinton weaves modern classic R&B touchstones (Usher, Aaliyah, Ciara) and obscure YouTube vocal loops into his shimmering and unpredictable soundscapes. Just-released sophomore album «Nonfiction» spirals from atmospheric to dance-floor and back again.
Posted by Google News | Industry News | lunes 21 octubre 2013 11:31 pm
Sean “Diddy” Combs, after becoming established as a hip-hop mogul, artist and entrepreneur, gained a different kind of acclaim for his annual White Party in East Hampton, N.Y. The exuberant (read: over-the-top) gatherings always had
Sean Combs, with actor Michael K. Williams, at the premiere of «Boardwalk Empire.»
unerringly excellent music playlists, of course, long before before playlists were carried around in the palm of one’s hand and revelers “Shazam-ed” their favorite tracks. Now, a mass-market, younger version of the White Party is coming to cable TV: Revolt, Combs’ new all-music channel, launches this evening on Comcast and Time Warner systems in more than 20 million U.S. homes.
Combs, who recently topped the Forbes Five list of richest hip-hop artists, with a net worth of $580 million, has never been one to stand pat. He has spoken of identifying “white space” in the market where MTV withdrew to focus on reality series and stopped playing videos. While Fuse, AXS, Palladia and, to some extent, VH1 are keeping the old-school notion of Music Television alive, Revolt wants to superserve younger music fans more comprehensively than any rival. Cable operators, as part of a regulatory arrangement designed to ensure greater diversity on the airwaves, have offered Revolt favorable initial carriage terms. The network’s value proposition is that music may have been through bumpy times as an industry but the fundamental hunger for new content is as great as ever and the media environment has never been more perfectly conditioned for a nimble, low-overhead, open-source entry. The new network aims to do old-fashioned things like premiere new videos and break news about new songs or scandals in the works and serve as music’s virtual town square. CEO Keith Clinkscales cut his media teeth as an executive at ESPN and points to its well-honed knack for flooding the zone — and scoring clicks and ratings — when it comes to major stories about key sports figures. “For fans, there is no such thing as ‘enough,’” Clinkscales says.
When I spoke to Clinkscales recently for a Broadcasting & Cable interview, he was quick to invoke Combs’ Gatsby-esque stint as a Hamptons impresario as a curatorial model. “I remember for years going to Sean’s parties,” he said. When you were at his parties, he didn’t just play his music. He would play whoever was banging, killing it at the time. ‘They’re killing it. Run it back. Run it back.’ He’s a fan of music.”
Revolt CEO Keith Clinkscales
Speaking with Clinkscales, it’s easy to feel the persuasive pull of Revolt’s mission. (While I am not a millennial, the degree to which the emergence of MTV defined my childhood makes me an alpha target for Revolt in other respects.) Still, there are undoubtedly some steep challenges ahead. And there are reasons MTV long ago ditched its original setup. Here are the five things Revolt needs to do well in order to make good on its strategy:
Deploy Diddy wisely. As much as Combs will power the network, in the manner of Oprah Winfrey with her channel, OWN, the scope of Revolt will be far broader than hip-hop. It will seek to have tentacles in every direction — pop, country, EDM, etc. As Clinkscales says, “If you make a network for fans and you stay true to that mission that we want to be for the fans, then you can’t have it be from one person’s point of view. We got to have as much dialogue as possible. That’s what music is. It creates dialogue. It creates discussion. Do you like it? Do you not like it? And that’s the kind of thing that I think is missing in the music game.”
Combs is a peerless marketer and a titan of social media. His fans pay attention to what he thinks and does. The critical thing will be to use that when it counts. When Revolt was looking to get on the radar of more consumer brands, for example, executives traveled to Cannes Lions this year for some key meetings, which came together as a result of Combs being on the ground.
Never mind the ratings — for now. Executives insist they are not under the gun in terms of generating big ratings right out of the gate. At launch, the ad-supported network will have commitments from about 10 sponsors, and to grow that figure, viewers will obviously be counted. But the low profile of where Revolt sits at launch is far better than Fox Sports 1 or FXX, which have cleared more than 70 million homes in launches this year. MTV’s tack away from music and news and toward reality has brought big success but also escalating pressure to outperform. The privately held Revolt won’t be under the same scrutiny, so it should revel in that freedom. One tends to forget that MTV was commercial-free at launch. How else do you think they were able to veer so appealingly far from center?
Earn a good rep. Combs spoke last summer during the Television Critics Association press tour about Revolt’s goal to develop into a CNN-type brand (echoing Public Enemy rapper Chuck D’s famous declaration about rap music being “CNN for black people”). This can happen over time, but it will depend on a relentless focus on the caliber of news (balance and an avoidance of glaring inaccuracies will help); a keen tastemaking ear and eye; and a feel for the artists and images that deserve to break out, as opposed to just catering to labels, publicists and managers. Music is bubbling up in more settings than ever — videos, declared dead just a couple of years ago, now command tens of millions of YouTube views and propel independent, fringe artists like The Weekend or Macklemore & Ryan Lewis into the mainstream. If Revolt can manage to serve as a reliable guide through this dynamic, ever-shifting landscape, that alone will prove its worth.
Mix and match platforms. If Revolt succeeds, it will be as a full-blown transmedia play, with news breaking on the website and then driving tune-in to the linear channel and vice versa, with social channels amplifying the effect. It is no accident that YouTube clips, Instagram images and a host of other digital messages have preceded the launch of the linear channel. Having closely observed how different networks handle this orchestration, it continues to surprise me how much separation there is at many big TV players, with digital and linear operations still not fully integrated. Revolt has a chance to blaze a trail in that way, and in fact its ability to be truly platform-agnostic (a concept many speak about, few convincingly) will be a key measure of its early performance.
Build trust with millennials. Combs has talked about not wanting to use the term “millennials.” He prefers “young people” or “kids,” as in his statement of purpose about Revolt: “My mission is to get kids back to TV.” It is a fickle crowd to win over, and several others are sniffing the ground where Revolt is hunting. Maybe a more flexible posture should inform the mission. Rather than rallying them “back to TV,” it would suffice to convince millennials to at least keep TV in their media diet instead of cutting the cord.
Posted by Google News | Industry News | lunes 21 octubre 2013 6:28 pm
It’s 2,500 miles from Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, to Nashville. But for producer Joey Moi, the distance from his tiny hometown to Music City is measured in hits, not miles. While the 37-year-old’s path—from producing Nickelback smashes like “Photograph” and “Rock Star” north of the border to recording with Jake Owen and Florida Georgia Line south of the Mason-Dixon—may seem like a twisted one, it makes perfect sense to him.
Moi specializes in populist music that “rocks people’s balls off,” he says. “I just love the larger-than-life version of a song. Drum fills you can play on your steering wheel. You can imagine pyro going off: ‘I can see flames coming up behind the band right now!’ That’s the brand I always wanted to create.”
Moi has firebombed Billboard’s Hot Country Songs and Country Airplay charts during the past two years with his rock and country hybrid, producing a slew of No. 1s, including Owen’s “Barefoot Blue Jean Night” and “Alone With You” (co-produced with Rodney Clawson and Tony Brown), as well as Florida Georgia Line’s “Get Your Shine On,” “Round Here” and “Cruise.” The lattermost spent a staggering 24 weeks atop Hot Country Songs, the longest tenure in the chart’s 69-year history. Not bad for someone who didn’t start dabbling in country professionally until 2009.
“We call him ‘the Wizard’ because his brain is so amazing,” says Brian Kelley, who, along with Tyler Hubbard, make up Florida Georgia Line. “He can create these sounds—the things he can do on the computer, the things he hears in his head. He’s always pushing for better. He takes our songs and makes them huge.”
It’s a sound that has the potential to transform country music and replace its current obsession with dirt roads and pickup trucks with sunny, wide-open songs built around in-your-face drums, massive hooks and ringing,arena-rock guitars. Growing up in his small 3,000-person hometown in Northeastern British Columbia, Moi rocked out to AC/DC and Metallica—until CMT came to Tumbler Ridge and changed everything. “I would just sit and watch CMT after school,” he recalls. “I had my guitar and would try to learn all the songs. It had all these American country songs that we didn’t have access to. I remember just being like, ‘Whoa!’ It was a whole other level of music that we got exposed to.”
While attending CDIS School of Engineering and Sound in Vancouver, Moi befriended Chad Kroeger and the other members of Nickelback, well before their breakthrough album, 2001’s Silver Side Up, which Moi engineered. The pair honed their craft at the school’s studio, which Moi had access to between midnight and 8 a.m. “Chad and I would record bands in the middle of the night,” he says. “We were basically cutting our teeth and learning how to make records sound as good as we could.”
Moi’s relationship with Nickelback evolved from engineering to co-producing such hit albums as The Long Road, Here and Now and Dark Horse, the lattermost alongside his hero, Robert John “Mutt” Lange, whose big, open style, heard on blockbusters from AC/DC, Def Leppard and Shania Twain, Moi emulates. “It was very special to be able to sit next to him for seven months and pick his brain: ‘Remember when you did Back in Black? How’d you get that snare drum sound?’” Moi recalls.
Moi’s work with Nickelback grew to include songwriting, and he went on to write hits for Daughtry and My Darkest Days—making Moi a so-called quadruple threat: songwriter, producer, engineer and mixer. Moi says this gives him an edge in the studio. “It’s like if your car is broken down and you’re a mechanic—you can look under the hood and you understand exactly what everything does,” he says. “I can look under the hood of a song and know what piece is broken and how to fix it.”
Songwriting is also what led Moi to Nashville. In 2008, top country writer Brett James came to Vancouver to write with Kroeger and Moi. James wanted to pen rock songs, but they persuaded him to collaborate on a country tune as well. The result was “It’s a Business Doing Pleasure With You,” the first single from Tim McGraw’s 2009 album, Southern Voice,” which reached No. 13 on Hot Country Songs.
Around the same time, Dallas Smith, lead singer for Canadian alternative rock band Default, told Moi he wanted to make a country record. The pair headed to Nashville for two weeks, armed with a schedule jammed with writing appointments. “We got to write with everybody and, not having any frame of reference, we didn’t really know if it was an A-list writer or a D-list writer,” Moi says. “We were just bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and super-excited to be in Nashville.”
Fortuitously, one of Moi’s songwriting blind dates was with Craig Wiseman, Rodney Clawson and Chris Tompkins of publishing company Big Loud Shirt. “We all realized immediately that we were cut from the same cloth,” he says. Wiseman, writer of such hits as McGraw’s “Live Like You Were Dying” and Kenny Chesney’s “Summertime,” approached Moi about signing a publishing deal with Big Loud Shirt. Moi agreed, and started coming to Nashville to write every two weeks or so. Soon after, he, Wiseman, Kevin “Chief” Zaruk and Seth England formed Big Loud Mountain Records, which comprises a label, publishing, production and management companies.
Moi officially landed his first work with a country artist when Big Loud Shirt writer Clawson recruited him to produce a song he’d penned for Owens. But Moi’s transition from his usual rock recording methods to the Nashville way was a bit jarring. “We’d spend days and days, sometimes a month, on one song, building and writing it,” he says of his earlier rock work in Vancouver. “Coming to Nashville, you book a three-hour block, go into the studio with five guys, they hear the song once and they go and play it perfectly. That was so foreign to me, and an actual terrifying thought.”
Clawson’s song turned out so well, however, that Owen asked Moi to produce five more songs, including the title track and “Barefoot Blue Jean Night,” a late addition that they laid down with the remaining $2,500 in the recording budget. The song became Owen’s first No. 1 on Hot Country Songs in 2011.
The year prior, Moi’s business partner England turned him on to Florida Georgia Line’s Kelley and Hubbard, who were attending Nashville’s Belmont College. “I really fell in love with their work ethic,” Moi says. “As soon as I heard Tyler sing, I thought, ‘There is nothing on the radio like this at all.’”
He signed the duo to a publishing deal with Big Loud Mountain, and then produced the act’s 2012 EP, It’z Just What We Do, which included “Cruise” and “Get Your Shine On.” The former was the first song Moi wrote with the band, building on a tune the pair had already started with Chase Rice and Jesse Rice. They recrafted the tune layer by layer with Moi, rewriting lyrics and revamping certain sections. “It was one of those days where everything was firing perfectly,” Moi says. “No one got hung up or was banging their head on the wall trying to find a word that rhymes with ‘car.’”
The EP attracted the attention of Republic Nashville, which signed Florida Georgia Line that year. Moi added several new tracks to create the duo’s major-label debut, Here’s to the Good Times, carefully incorporating his rock influences without allowing them to dominate.
“If we went completely all the way and had put an active rock wrapping paper on Florida Georgia Line, I don’t think that would have worked,” Moi says. “We still made it really twangy, with a large dynamic. The country audience appreciates a more organic sound.”
After “Cruise” became a country hit, the label suggested broadening the duo’s appeal by creating a pop version featuring a hip-hop artist. Moi wasn’t totally sold on the idea initially: “We wanted to solidify ourselves in Nashville and country radio. We were very hesitant. It was just kind of a scary thought of trying to cross over,” he says. But he knew if the song was promoted to top 40, “we would need an urban addition to legitimize it.” The Moi- and Jason Nevins-produced pop version, featuring Nelly, peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and is up for vocal event of the year at the Country Music Assn. CMA Awards—one of four nominations garnered by Florida Georgia Line.
The success of “Cruise” and “Here’s to the Good Times” helped push the album to 1.1 million in sales, according to Nielsen SoundScan—and made Moi, who lives in Nashville full-time now, very much in demand. “There are definitely some more opportunities coming my way,” he says. But for now, he’s focused on growing Big Loud Mountain and producing its two new signings: the aforementioned Smith, with whom Moi will make another country album (Smith’s Moi-produced solo debut, Jumped Right In, arrived last year on 604 Records), and Chris Lane, a singer out of North Carolina. “This business keeps me locked in this world. I haven’t been able to entertain a lot of outside [offers],” he says.
Moi will, however, take a break from country to return to his rock roots through a new project from Canadian band Three Days Grace in October. Still, Moi says there’s no chance he’s putting his exploding country career on “Cruise” control: “Nashville has kept me really busy, super-obsessed with this new company. I just have my head down and I’m working.”
That’s perfect for Florida Georgia Line, according to Kelley: “We wouldn’t feel comfortable with anyone else touching our music.” —Melinda Newman
Posted by Google News | Industry News | lunes 21 octubre 2013 1:26 pm
Just six months after making a big song and dance about the launch, Twitter is ‘strongly considering’ shutting down its Twitter Music app, according to reports this weekend.
The All Things D blog brings word from Twitter insiders that the social network may hit the mute button on the disappointing trending music portal, as part of a revamp of its music division.
The report says Twitter hasn’t decided exactly when #Music will meet its maker, but «the app’s fate is nearly sealed» according to those sources familiar with the company’s thinking.
There were high hopes for the platform, which plays single songs through Spotify or previews through iTunes, but numbers have been «abysmal» the sources admitted.
Muted response
The idea behind the app is to direct users to music that’s currently trending on Twitter through the #NowPlaying hashtag.
There are Superstar, Popular and Emerging categories as well as Unearthed and Hunted categories geared towards music discovery. Users can also listen to charts from their favourite genres.
The idea sounded decent in principal, but the inability to play more than one song at a time from the artist and the questionable selections made it difficult for Twitter to tackle the likes of Spotify and Pandora.
If Twitter does indeed decide to pull the plug on its experiment, it’ll be interesting to see where, if anywhere, the company’s music strategy goes from here.
Posted by Google News | Industry News | lunes 21 octubre 2013 1:26 pm
Here’s the second part of my interview with DJ Sprinkles
How easy or difficult did you find the process of self-discovery?
Of course, constantly trying to evaluate one’s relationships to cultural dominations is tiring and depressing. It’s why people embrace dominant social and identity patterns in the first place, to maintain (or attain) some mental and social stability. But making those social and ethical concessions required by a life of mainstream “normalcy” is also tiring and depressing.
Any honest person in their 40s or 50s will tell you the same, regardless of their sexual or gender persuasions. I know a lot of people my age who pursued the straight and narrow, and are surprised to find themselves trapped in lives they truly and deeply hate. They really struggle with it, even admitting the very idea of hating where they are and who they’ve become, because to do so goes against the value systems they embraced since childhood. I hate life, too. I hate myself, too. I’m just not surprised by those revelations, because I had to deal with them decades ago. [Laughs.]
What role did music play in how you developed and evolved as a person?
Especially in my teens, electronic music – exclusively electronic, such as techno-pop – provided an alternative cultural soundtrack to the sounds of rock and country embraced by those who gave me a hard time. Clearly, there is a lot more electronic music in the world today. It fills the pop charts, including electronic rock and country. But back in the Seventies and Eighties in the Midwestern US, electronic music and disco were explicitly associated with homosexuality and perversion. The anti-disco campaigns were brutally homophobic.
What inspired you to progress from being a lover of music, to somebody who actually plays and makes it?
As a DJ in the late Eighties and early Nineties, I kept getting fired for refusing to play major label tracks. I collected and played independent deep house from New York and New Jersey, but couldn’t find a place to play in New York that accepted it. So I quit DJ-ing, and decided to release a record in the style of those I liked, wondering if it would somehow put me in contact with people making the records nobody seemed to be playing.
What else did you dream of doing when you were younger?
I think I really thought I would be an illustrator. I drew constantly. And traced constantly – which is similar to sampling in audio production. By the time I was in high school I did a lot with photo copies, like brushing them with paint thinner and then rubbing the black carbon off onto other surfaces, etc. So that kind of production strategy rooted in copies and fakes was there throughout. Again, thank you, Monkees, for the inspiration! [Laughs.] I think my parents expected me to be a doctor, so that idea was also in my head, but clearly didn’t happen.
How did you go about learning how to DJ and getting involved with playing at clubs?
I just taught myself… which is why I’ve never been very good in a technical sense, but that’s not so important for my style of mixing. Before ever getting a mixer and dual turntables, I used to make cassette loops of little passages from songs, and then layer those tracks. The way I did it was to tape a microphone to one side of a headphone, then dangle it in front of a speaker.
I would use a tape player to play the loop tracks through the headphones, then layer in other sounds in real time by playing records through the speakers, recording it all through the microphone onto a second cassette player. It was kind of an elaborate extension of recording songs off the radio as a child. So when I first heard about DJ mixers, I was like, “Oh, s**t! That’s exactly what I’ve been needing all these years!” As for playing in clubs, I just went around with cassette tapes, and handed them to managers at various clubs, saying I was available. I didn’t even go at night. I just went around in the afternoon or early evening, and introduced myself to the managers… most of the clubs were kinda tragic bars during the daytime. Those were different times. I don’t think many people could get DJ gigs that way these days.
When you started out did you focus on transgender clubs, or were you always open to playing wherever?
I did focus on queer contexts, yes. But that was primarily where electronic music functioned in the U.S. at the time, so it wasn’t unexpected or strange to have that kind of focus. It was pretty much a precondition of the genre.
How do transgender clubs differ from so-called ‘regular’ clubs… if at all?
Well, there are as many kinds of transgendered clubs as there are kinds of transgenderism. These days house music has become popularized, but back then there were explicit connections between the emerging genre and queer communities. So there was no “aside from the clientele.”
The clubs were very much about how the clientele – as deviants and outlaws – literally, with regard to the policing of sexual activities. You have your own violent history with this in the UK – socially moved and organized around their sexual and gender object choices. There was no internet, so people did things in person. Even personal ads back then were often done by sending letters written on paper to PO boxes, hoping for a reply with instructions of where and when to meet. There was no internet-style private access to porn, either. Accessing porn meant physically going to the porn shops, or secret distributors, and interacting with others.
I know people today talk of how the internet has helped people organize and be in touch, but it has also done away with many of the secret and unsanctioned spaces where people used to physically meet. So clubs served a very important role in queer lives, in ways that were not simply about dancing or partying. They were safe houses, essentially. That’s why The Shelter was called a “shelter.”
And that meant the “wayward children” entering those safe houses were also from all different backgrounds. They weren’t all like-minded people who met online before agreeing to hang out en masse at some club. For example, at Sally’s II, which was a transsexual sex worker club, a lot of the male clients were straight-identified. But those issues of closeting and secrecy in their lives did not inherently make them the “enemy,” just as the “gender deception” of the transgendered people did not make them the “enemy” within those walls… even though both may be seen or treat each other as enemies on the street (generally the transgendered folk being treated poorly). So there were a lot of inversions and twists of dominant cultural relations happening. I don’t think you will ever find that at a ‘regular’ club… and they’re pretty much all ‘regular’ these days.
You’ve reached a stage in your career where many music fans place a mystique around you, how does it feel to be held in such high esteem?
I guess it feels awkward, because I never learned how to take a compliment. The pro musician move is to flip it into a generic compliment about having amazing fans, or thanking the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ for making all of this possible… What a horrible question for you to dump on someone. [Laughs.] The reason it’s horrible is that it baits a response rooted in subjective feeling and affect, when the only possibly interesting issue buried within that question has to do with how music and media industries manipulate the audience and producer emotions through the marketing and sale of egos. It just reinforces the age-old conflation of esteem with success. That’s pretty much the opposite of everything I am interested in.
Did you ever worry that your sexuality or gender might overshadow your talents as a musician?
With so many people just wanting “music for music’s sake,” it’s a struggle to make themes heard. I absolutely wish issues of gender and sexuality would always overshadow the music. Unfortunately, even when they do, a project’s specific content is too easily transformed into an illustration of some attribute of “the artist’s” identity or character – the latest piece of an artistic ego-puzzle in process – as opposed to opening up social dialogues on themes of sexuality, gender, class, race, ethnicity and other things… Again, an industry focused on the marketing of ego constructs stops us from using sound to represent social issues, because it always insists on tying everything back to the “talented ego figure”.
What music can we look forward to in the coming months?
I just wrapped up two remixes for Francis Harris’ new album (one as Sprinkles, and one as Terre Thaemlitz), and will be doing some DJ support for his US and EU release tour in December. That wraps up my remix commitments for now. I’ve been turning down remix offers to try and focus on my own productions in 2014. I have some ideas for both house and electroacoustic projects, so we’ll see if I can get my shit together on any of them.
You’re soon to be playing at Oval Space in London, what’s your experience of playing here in the capital?
Yes, Oval Space on the 25. I’m also performing “Soulnessless” and DJ-ing in Sheffield on the 24 and 26 respectively. What’s that Alan Partridge line about the capital? “Go to London! I guarantee you’ll either be mugged or not appreciated. Catch the train to London, stopping at Rejection, Disappointment, Backstabbing Central and Shattered Dreams Parkway.”
I get the sense that when it comes to music, London is kind of like Tokyo in Japan. It has the money, it always has plenty of stuff happening, and you can have a good enough time, but the more interesting stuff is usually happening elsewhere in the country. I think that’s pretty much the history of electronic music movements in the UK, isn’t it?
