Not today Justin
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$LAYYYTER
wallacepolsom
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Love Begins
we're not kids anymore.
RMH
🪼
cherry valley forever
noise dept.
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★
Kiana Khansmith
Jules of Nature
todays bird
Claire Keane
Misplaced Lens Cap
occasionally subtle
Peter Solarz
seen from United States
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seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Czechia
seen from France
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@soundisnotasleep
Each tour I do, more and more they either want the history stuff, or the newer deep stuff... They want the grooves back, which is really interesting. I’m pulling out tracks on dubplate that were never released and people are going, “What the fuck is this?” And I’ll go [laughs] “this is Loefah from nine years ago!”.
Joe Muggs in conversation with dubstep pioneer and originator, Hatcha, over at FACT. [read the whole thing here]
Very sad news about Bob Casale from Devo passing away today.
Here's Bob on guitar, with the band playing 'Uncontrollable Urge' on US TV in 1980.
Sometimes we play the music, sometimes the music plays us, sometimes... it plays.
Ralf and Florian from Kraftwerk, as interviewed by Geoff Barton in Sounds magazine, September 1976.
Here's an absolutely wonderful live video of Broadcast performing 'Winter Now' on TV. Trish Keenan, the lead singer, sadly passed away in January 2011.
Quick tips: writing a bio.
When writing an artist bio, all you're doing is letting people know who you are, and what you do. Those two things should be in your head at all times when writing one of these things. I don't want a long convoluted story about how at the age of 11 you picked up a guitar, or how your parents used to play Motown 45s in the house all the time - I want to know who you are, and what you do.
Keep it short, keep it snappy, and try to avoid release details. I can't emphasize that enough, as all too often bands get carried away with bios and start talking about albums that are "coming out soon" in 2011 and forget to update it 3 years later, so instead of the bio acting as a little introduction to who you are and what you do, it becomes a kind of weird time capsule. It also shows you're not bothered enough to update it over 3 years, so stay away from it.
Who are you, and what do you do: I don't want to read 15 paragraphs of life history, or philosophical quotes about how much music itself means to you. It doesn't mean anything, and it doesn't help me figure out who you are and what you do.
Acknowledge the silliness of having to write them if you have to, and break the wall between you and the audience. It's ok. It's fine. Try to keep it in the first person as much as possible too, as doing stuff in the third person makes things tricky and insincere.
A few choice namedrops are OK, like if Steve Lamacq loves you, then sure, feel free to bob that in, but don't give me a massive list of every publication that's ever mentioned you. It's boring, and if you've really been that well received, I'll pick up on it anyway. It'll speak for itself, in other words.
To sum up: keep it short and sweet, avoid release details, and don't include your musical CV.
Regardless of what you think of the Gallaghers, or Oasis in general, this commentary from the always entertaining Noel on some of the bands videos is absolutely hilarious. Kudos to his honesty!
For smaller bands and artists, the money dried up long ago, argues Gavin Miller from Ghosting Season
I wrote a little piece for Drowned in Sound about Spotify, the internet, and how you should stop whinging and give some bands you love some money.
The Big Dada anti- leak stickers
Amazing work from Ninja Tune.
When Frank was asked to support the boy band Bros at Wembley. There were 50,000 people in the crowd. This was a huge stage for Frank – his biggest ever, by about 49,500 people. It was his chance to break through to the mainstream. But instead he chose to perform a series of terrible Bros cover versions for five minutes and was bottled off. The show's promoter, Harvey Goldsmith, was glaring at him from the wings. Frank sauntered over to him and said, "I'm thinking of putting on a gig at the Timperley Labour Club. Do you have any tips?"
An absolutely wonderful anecdote about comedian Chris Sievey, better known as comic singer Frank Sidebottom, from Jon Ronson in the Guardian today. [read all of it here]
Yes, we like to play somewhere nice... We stay out of pubs — places that stink of piss and bollocks
Sigur Rós (now ex) keyboard player Kjartan Sveinsson talk to Select Magazine's Roy Wilkinson back in January 2000.
Absolutely stunning footage of Christian Vander's mid 70s prog rock project, Magma, performing live on French TV in 1978.
A lot of prog rock has a reputation for being quite stuffy and humourless, but Magma is beautiful, uplifting, crazy, elegiac, and just an absolute joy to watch.
He's not singing in French either. As part of the project, Vander invented an entire constructed language called Kobaïan. Read about it [here]
This is why the release of Beyoncé was so ingenious: The window of time to talk online about any record, no matter how popular, is quite small. Interest in 2013's biggest albums was normally exhausted by the time they were finally released. But to tweet about Beyoncé, you had to buy it immediately, just like you have to see a movie opening night or watch a TV show "live" as it airs. Every other pop star in 2013 tried to tailor their records for an audience they wish still existed; Beyoncé fashioned her music for the audience she has (even if it was sort of an accident).
A line from a brilliant article on why big pop albums failed to ignite in 2013, and how Beyoncé stole the show by bucking the trend in 'spending a shit load of cash stupidly and not getting anything in return'.
It seems people do still want to be a part of something: a shared experience, a communal event, a surprise record release.
Create your own world and invite people into it, don't hang an 'open' sign on the door. Come over to our side, softly.
Read all of Steven Hyden's article over at Grantland [here]
In which I wade into the Spotify debate.
Using Twitter, The Quietus ignited another debate on the pros and cons of Spotify earlier. Four Tet acted like a bit of a dick (which is becoming quite the norm these days), and lots of other massive bands joined in slagging it off. So here's a point of view from someone who hasn't spent 10+ years on a massive label, playing to thousands of people at a time (originally in form of sporadic tweets at the TSINA twitter):
Spotify serves a function, sure, and it does that well. There's no money in it, but there's no money in anything else, either.
Unless of course you're on a big label, with a decent booking agent, etc. For the rest of us, it's fighting for scraps on the dinner table.
Spotify is just one of the scraps. Doesn't mean much to artists and bands that still have to fight.
It'd be interesting to hear from artists and bands that haven't had 10+ years on a sodding major/ big indie label talk about Spotify.
I'd hazard a guess at most of them would be ambivalent to it. Nothing else pays the bills, so why should Spotify?!
There is money to be had out there in the music biz, but not much from the 'music' part of it, is my point.
To sum up: if this debate is going to have any effect, please stop asking multi-millionaires who've spent the last decade or more releasing on big labels, and start asking bands that regularly play to 3 people in a dank room.
I don't prefer to be misunderstood when I can be understood. That's just like saying nothing when you had a chance to say something. You blew it.
Gil Scott Heron, talking to Davitt Sigerson in Black Music from April 1976.
X Factor gets a huge amount of flak for soullessly churning out artists year-in-year-out, but it looks to me like the ‘credible’ UK A&R world is sometimes no better - perhaps even more guilty of wastefully casting aside raw talent in favour of a hot young thing.
An absolutely brilliant line in an equally brilliant article on Music Week from Tim Ingham about the pitfalls of labels and management constantly chasing anything new. [read the full thing here]
Be a band, for fuck's sake.
All too often I keep seeing bands, and very new, young, good bands, fall into the trap of trying their hardest to be 'legit', and sacrificing the time it takes for a band to really find itself and really enjoy being a band, to chase the empty promises of 'industry' bullshit.
Guys, c'mon - be a band. That means enjoy playing music together, pile into a van and play in front of 3 people in Cornwall, put out a CD and hi five each other when you sell out of a run of 20 copies. This is what being a band is all about when you first start out.
Be driven, be opportunistic, be ambitious - these things will see you through the grey days, but for fuck's sake, stop trying to throw it all away and get managers and labels and PR guys and all that nonsense. If you get it right, and manage to work with great people, who know exactly how to push you as a band, then that's awesome. Unfortunately, this doesn't happen very often.
You need time to be a band. Forget blogs, forget 'premieres', forget online PR campaigns and forget trying to play the big industry game, when you're not big industry. Have fun, experiment with what you release and how you release it, change your stage show, try new things, muck about - honestly, it's ace and you can have some real fun doing it.
The minute everything starts to get about online profile, or your Facebook stats, or having to compromise on releases, is the minute it starts to get boring. Managers and PR guys are ten a penny these days, and with the increase in quantity, there's a decrease in quality. You'd be surprised just how much you can do yourself if you just go shake a few hands or not be a dick on emails.
Beware of false prophets - if only you knew about how some 'DIY' labels operate, you'd run for the nearest major, I promise you. So don't be sucked in with empty promises.
Stop it. Be a band, have fun.
I mean, you have people who make songs that come and go. You have 'Whoot! There It Is', the shit was a hit, then it went. Then you got someone like Rakim, whose lyrics stick in your head for years. Why d'you think you still have certain parables that were spoken years ago? Because the words were so deep they just rolled on forever
Gza (aka Gary Grice) from the Wu Tang Clan in an interview with Angus Batey in Hip Hop Connection from September 1994.
