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note to self: don’t send copy of new faux pas album to the age.

“son, we don’t take kindly to your folk around here…. jimmy, pass me the new kings of leon”

the negative review of qua’s new record that appeared in last friday’s age is an absolute shocker: dismissing one of melbourne’s more humble and unassuming musicians as a “3065-postcode hipster“; equating his virtuosic production and composition to that of a “14-year old kid with a Mac“; and more or less saying that his album sucks because it doesn’t sound like Air or Daft Punk.

this is probably the kind of thing that should just be left alone – perhaps it’d be best for this review to simply be something for cornel (qua) and his mates to chuckle about, and then move on and forgetabout it. and don’t get me wrong i like critical reviews, even of my favourite records. but they have to be a lot more thoughtful than this.

the thing is, for me, this review is symptomatic of the australian mainstream music media’s lack of respect for music that actually pushes the boundaries a little. i used to think it was a bad thing that most of the country’s more interesting music gets ignored by the mainstream music press – now i’m beginning to wonder whether its better to be ignored. note to music editors: if your reviewers don’t understand “electronic music”, and if this is how you’re going to write-up one of the more respected electronic producers in the country – then please just leave it well enough alone. we can continue to play amongst ourselves and you guys can keep lauding the fashionable haircut rockers, shallow synth-pop combos, and heartbroken singer-songwriters.

what worries me most is that this might be the first time many age readers have heard of qua – and its a horrible and completely out-of-line (if mercifully brief) representation of him and his music. make your own mind up about qua at http://myspace.com/quamusic

the review can be read over at the to and fro blog, where you can also read an elegant dressing down of the review from my radio cohort dave, along with (more of!) my two cents.

and yes, these are just the personal rants of a couple of emotionally invested dudes who want to stick up for a guy whose music they like. we’re just mouthing off, but hey, thats what blogs are for. perhaps next time a reviewer decides to write a review that basically amounts to a not-so-thinly veiled attack on a kind of music they simply don’t like, they should consider blogging about it instead. we expect more considered responses from professionals.

a must-read article over at wired.com, surveying the effectiveness (or rather the damage done by) the RIAA’s five-year litigation campaign against individual p2p users. over five years, the RIAA has sued over 30,000 Americans for piracy – and only one case has actually made it to court:

Despite a fallow legal landscape, most defendants cannot afford attorneys and settle for a few thousand dollars rather than risk losing even more, Beckerman says. “There are still very few people fighting back as far as the litigation goes and they settle.”

“It costs more to hire a lawyer to defend these cases than take the settlement,” agrees Lory Lybeck, a Washington State attorney, who is leading a prospective class-action against the RIAA for engaging in what he says is “sham” litigation tactics. “That’s an important part of what’s going on. The recording industry is setting a price where they know you cannot hire lawyers. It’s a pretty well-designed system whereby people are not allowed any effective participation in one of the three prongs in the federal government.”

only one RIAA file sharing case has gone to court – that of minnesota mom jammie thomas who was last year ordered by a jury to pay over $200,000 for sharing 24 songs on her home computer. that verdict was overturned last month when the judge from the original case had second thoughts and declared a mistrial – so a court victory for the RIAA is still proving elusive despite having had 5 years to land a guilty verdict.

30,000 pirates settling out of court with the RIAA for a few thousand dollars each – that amounts to a sum of money but surely not even remotely enough $$ to cover the costs of their ongoing litigation campaign. never mind the fact that the money is not redistributed to the artists whose music is at the heart of the debate. the litigation was never about the money, but just about instilling more of that homespun fear into the already beleaguered hearts of americans:

The RIAA admits that the lawsuits are largely a public relations effort… Spokeswoman Cara Duckworth of the RIAA says the lawsuits have spawned a “general sense of awareness” that file sharing copyrighted music without authorization is “illegal.”

yeah, a “general sense of awareness” that if the RIAA decides on a whim to match your IP address to your kazaa profile, and you happen to have been sharing a couple of sade tracks and maybe something from lenny kravitz, you’ll be paying them a monthly stipend of $110 until february 2013.

the most surreal aspect of this – something absurd enough to make me think twice as to whether its some kind of piss-take – is that litigation targets can settle their lawsuit online at www.p2plawsuits.com:

This site will guide you through the settlement process for your case. You can pay the settlement by credit card, using either Mastercard, Visa or Discover. If you wish to pay the settlement by cashier’s check, you will need to telephone one of our settlement representatives.

In order to process your settlement, you will need to have your case identification number. That number appears above the salutation of the letter sent to you by the record companies.

is this for real? or are anti-RIAA crusaders subtly trying to undermine the litigators through the art of really lame web design?

here is the full wired article on the riaa’s 5-year litigation campaign.

i’ve been engaged in something of a social networking spree over the last couple of days, where time has allowed, going around sprinking fairy dust into the crevices of the various places on the net that say “faux pas” in big bright letters, the places where in my dreams i imagine cool people hang out online, saying “gee what a lovely chap, what fine muzak to enjoy with my nightcap”.

most immediately obvious would be that this blog has had a long overdue makeover – behind the scenes, an upgrade to wordpress 2.6.2 WHAT A NERD and a new theme courtesy of some warhammer gaming dude (seems fitting). but also various other places round the net getting a spit and shine and its making me wonder about how cool (or uncool) it is to be spread so keenly across the informatic superhighway.

i mean, this is something i genuinely, straight up, enjoy doing, updating or maintaining my web presence. providing a little internet playground for the faux pas fans i imagine in my dream-fantasy-land to wander around in. communicating with people who have an interest in the music i make is something i enjoy almost as much as making the music, and the internet facilitates 99% of that, for me anyway.

its a funny thing. i think there is definitely a thing with indie music, where to be inaccessible is quite fashionable, quite cool. its one thing to be a myspace featured band, but its WAY cooler if you don’t even have a myspace profile. shit, you mean you don’t even have a gmail account? you don’t even know what gmail is? woah, so cool! i suppose with this medium its so easy to over-promote yourself, even when you have the best of intentions; put everyone on the back foot about what you are doing by emailing them too often, spamming them with myspace fliers, hounding them on facebook et cetera. it makes sense that people who remain distant from the internet are in many ways taking the safer route in terms of not alienating dudes.

its cool to be ‘mysterious’ but its uncool to let too much yourself out there. people lost their shit about burial, for example, and it always bugged me that so much of a fuss was made about the fact that no one knew who he was. staying behind the curtain like the wizard of oz is so much more fashionable i guess than putting yourself out there.

i suppose more generally this relates to the idea that, particularly with some forms of music, it makes sense to try and abstract it as much as possible. not just taking it easy on the internet presence, but more than that – give your songs names that mean nothing so that people can attach their own meanings to them; make your album cover just a splatch of blue lines and a red dot; give yourself a non-committal band name or whatever. perhaps this train of thought applies to instrumental music the most – once you put words in the mix, you are (unless you are ranting a sort of inane drivel in your lyrics, heaven knows how rare that is) committing yourself to meaning… something… but its the same reason why songwriters whinge about explaining their lyrics to people, they don’t really want to commit to something because they don’t want to take anything away from the listener. whether you say thats because they genuinely value the listener’s experience of subjectivity that highly, or because they just don’t want to alienate potential customers, that depends on how cynical you are.

listening to music is so much about escapism, and people like to embue music with their own dreams and feelings. finding out too much about the person behind the music – and learning, perhaps, that they might be the kind of person or personality that might grate with you in the ‘real world’ – even something as simple as “oh what? you mean, this guy doesn’t even use capital letters when he blogs? what a douchebag” – can sometimes really taint that escapist experience of letting music carry you away. like when i realised daedelus dresses up like he’s going to a bad fancy dress party in every press shot (its ok, i got over it). its like meeting that hot dude at the party, and making out with him, and next day finding out he’s a family first voter. you don’t look at him the same after that.

when you make music largely without words, you really are leaving it open for people to attach their own emotional or intellectual or whatever type of symbolism to your music – sometimes i wonder whether blogging (in so much that me posting youtube clips of robert palmer and whinging about negative ratatat reviews constitutes ‘blogging’) might taint the experience of my music for some people.

ahh this is simply more thinly veiled narcissism here from me i guess, but yeah, i’m a web coder and a social networker myself, so i quite like wandering around myspace, facebook, youtube, changing the colors of things, redrafting bits of copy, all the general maintenance. i’d like to think its not just pure ego, but primarily to do with wanting my music to get heard, and also providing a little faux pas sandbox for people to play in, alongside whatever they might get out of the music. but sometimes i catch myself thinking “would faux pas seem ‘cooler’ if i just shut it all down and left an empty black page where everything else was?”

in related news, here is jens lekman’s myspace profile.

web stats. they tell me what pages refer to this one, they tell me what google searches lead people to come here, and also what files are the most downloaded. i’ve always had an unhealthy affection for statistics, and when the statistics are about myself, well its that perfect blend of market research and narcissism that i find so irresistible.

like, for example, did you know that aside from “faux pas”, the most popular google search term that led people here in 2006 was “daniel vettori.” here is daniel vettori, he is appealing:

very appealing.

looking at my web stats is also how i found out that in 6 weeks there have been 40,000 downloads of a moody blues edit i posted in july. whoops. sorry moodies – i never intended to become some major kind of hub for moodies piracy but it looks like i temporarily did (i just removed the track). funny thing is i can’t figure out where any of that traffic has come from, but thats another matter. suffice to say, if you’re here reading this because you came here to download that moody blues track, dude, get in touch and tell me how you got here.

the main thing i wanted to do here, however, (aside from reiterating my attraction to daniel vettori) was reflect briefly on the number of downloads of faux pas tracks since this site started almost 3 years ago. giving music away as mp3s, its something i’ve always wanted to do and something that i support. you often hear debate about the merit of it but you don’t often see the stats. anyway, i was pretty surprised when i did some quick sums, and i wouldn’t say that its changed my opinion on giving stuff away for free… but its food for thought.

MEGA DOWNLOAD CHART (aka faux pas narcissism index #274) November 2005 – August 2008:

For the Trees – 20679 downloads
White Light – 10166 downloads
Tim as a Brim – 8532 downloads
Hermann’s Hermans – 8429 downloads
Barry – 6203 downloads

TOTAL – 54009 downloads

now lets take into account the fact that there is a fairly high percentage of false downloads – from googlebots and other automated spiders corrupting the data, and also people who maybe get half way through downloading a song and then think better of it (understandable) – lets be conservative and say that 50% of the downloads are false. thats still about 25,000 songs i’ve given away for free in close to 3 years. its about 25 a day. if each of those songs had been a paid download, lets say 50c each, i’d have about $12,500. not necessarily enough to quit my day job and move to the bahamas with robert palmer (weekend at bernies style, of course) but… that’d be more than enough for someone like me (someone who isn’t necessarily beholden to exorbatant studio hire costs, giant promotion budgets, or extravagant coke habits) to make another record or two.

but thats not how it works any more and we all know it. the idea that you could sell a song to someone was invented by record labels when they figured out a way to mechanically reproduce (and mass produce) sound – technology invented the idea that recordings had economic value and now technology is turning it around. the framework that underpinned this whole idea of reproducing and selling recordings is an industrial one (one of factories, machines, plastic and vinyl) and its being completely undermined by the internet like so many other outdated mechanical ideas. one day we’ll all be giving it all away for free – and most artists of a certain profile already are giving it all away for free, whether they want to or not, as most of you freeloading mp3-aggregator-loving torrent-seeding hippies are more than aware. selling music, whether it be on shiny discs or in ones and zeroes, is a 20th century idea thats simply taking a long time to die.

i, for one, look forward to the time when i can give all of my music away completely for free to anyone who wants it, and thats exactly what i’ll do if i can figure out another way (patronage, licensing, bank robbery, selling fake watches on ebay) to sustain the little cottage industry that is faux pas. in the meantime, did i mention i sell t-shirts?

local fidelity continues their series of local artist q&a’s by interviewing sydney soundscaper tommy mcsmith aka cleptoclectics. asked to describe his music, he responds with “swinging interval meditations” and “syncopated granulation edits”, and mentions that his dream collaborator would be rahsaan roland kirk. he also reveals:

I find Sydney isolates people a little, I’ve found it easier so far to get gigs in other cities. I’ve played almost as much in Melbourne, without really trying, even though I hardly knew anyone down there when I started. So my music isn’t made with much consideration for my immediate context, which is I think something that a lot of music from Sydney has in common, a kind of spatial dislocation, which paradoxically comes from the city perhaps.

read more here. local fidelity has also recently posted q&a sessions with catcall, firekites and me too.

tom from cleptoclectics recently put together a mix of jazz and downbeat sounds for our radio show – including faust, tarentel and sun ra – which we’re hosting over at the to and fro website. its a thoughtful mix that will probably make your brain expand a little. also, something you may have missed – a cleptoclectics remix features exclusively on the itunes release of my “changes” ep, which is available here. its his remix of an unreleased faux pas track called “live shine see.”

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and speaking of the radio show – tomorrow night dave and i speak to evan mast from new york’s ratatat about the recording of their new album LP3. i think that the new ratatat album is basically the greatest thing i’ve heard all year, so i had to do my best to avoid completely slobbering all over evan during our pre-recorded interview. it goes to air at midnight australian eastern standard time, tomorrow (tuesday) night, on 3RRR 102.7 FM.

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i’ve noticed some way off the mark reviews of this new ratatat album. the pitchfork review starts off by linking the album in with the concept of production music – on the one hand an interesting way of trying to put ratatat in context (as instrumental composers with a history of commercial placements for their music) – but on the other hand a potentially really lazy way of engaging with instrumental music in general. more worrying for me is the dismissal of the album as merely “a solid instrumental record…” –

“Aside from what visual or informational stimulus someone else augments Ratatat’s music with, there isn’t really that much content there – or, conversely, there’s potential for the music to be and sound like anything but no one discernable identity… Even the best beats on this album feel unfinished without vocals. There’s nothing intrinsically flawed about what’s otherwise a solid instrumental record, but so much of it feels so close to many of the things happening on the radio and the pop charts right now that, 90 seconds into a song, the mind might start wandering and wondering what this kind of stuff would sound like with Wale or Rihanna on top of it.”

Even the best beats on this album feel unfinished without vocals. as someone who has heard more than once the recommendation that i should get some vocals happening on my primarily instrumental music, i find this kind of approach to evaluating ratatat’s music, well, a little offensive. i have no beef with rihanna… mmm, beef with rihanna… but one of the reasons why this album is so captivating, to me anyway, is because of its overwhelming ‘musical-ness’. no vocals required. i know that a lot of people struggle to appreciate instrumental music on its own terms – but, believe it or not, there’s a lot of things to appreciate about music even after lyrics and vocals are removed from the equation (melody, rhythm, ambience, structure, texture, wow its like a whole world of sound)… even saying “removed from the equation” unnerves me a little because it implies that music without vocals is somehow lacking, somehow minus something. anyway, i understand some people don’t get that, but i’d expect more from a reviewer. i think its a credit to ratatat that their music is so laden with melody, structure and instrumentation that it can rival vocal-driven pop music in terms of holding a casual listener’s interest. for me at least, there’s more narrative, more dynamics, more fun in any of the tracks from the recent ratatat album than on most of the fawning indie pop that i hear championed on the radio recently. but of course, i am biased.

for a truly wayward review of the ratatat record, check out the one over at popmatters. i’ve always had a soft spot for the pseudo- (and, in fact, often very non-pseudo, but on-the-money “for-real” booksmarts) academia of the popmatters music reviews, slightly nerdy and bookish, much more likely to light a fire of cultural analysis in your hedgerow than, perhaps like pitchfork, simply try to establish markers of whats cool or not. but their LP3 review is really not so hot. i mean, only in a popmatters review will you have a reviewer attacking an album for not “establishing a leitmotiv or achieving cultural transcendence or musical syntheses.” leitmotiv? at least with popmatters reviews, i’m always learning.

more troubling than leitmotiv is this perhaps very casually thought-through idea of “cultural transcendence” – i’m not entirely sure whats being hinted at here, but i think the implication is that the “international” instrumentation of the album (his word, not mine) is some kind of tokenistic grab at exotica… and thats definitely not what i hear when i listen to the album. i think the use of “international” instrumentation is much more a case of them using what instruments they had at hand to create melody and rhythm. in fact, where other albums maybe falter by too overtly tagging their non-western (or read non-”rock”) elements as ‘ethnic’ or exotic elements – i’m reminded of some of the issues raised in the comment boxes of cyclic defrost last year over emmy hennings’ review of unkle ho’s self-consciously ‘exotic’ album – i think ratatat astutely avoid engaging with that by keeping the focus on ‘musicality.’

i mean, if this dude hears a tabla and immediately starts making assumptions about cultural transcendence or lack there of, it says maybe more about his hang-ups about “western vs exotic” instrumentation than any kind of cultural short-sightedness on the part of ratatat. and well, when he criticises the album for being “culturally amorphous”, i mean… welcome to the 21st century! in this grand paint-bucket blend of culture and globalisation, i’m not sure an album can be criticised for blurring the lines, if thats even what ratatat had in mind. its a shame that he doesn’t hear the album for what it is – a celebration of melody and sound – and instead takes to, in one particularly jarring paragraph, cataloguing the various “international” influences (Middle-Eastern, Japanese, Turkish…. Rasta!) like some kind of dirty laundry list.

anyway, thats just one way in which the review rubs me wrongly. he criticises “Flynn” for not having a beat (! – ); he concedes that “Imperials” succeeds in generating a carousel atmosphere but bemoans its lack of “allegorical motif”; his musical reference point for “Shempi” is, somehow, Justice; and he wraps it up with what reads like a punchline: “After peaking with their tried and true formulas, the group—unintentionally reaching predictability and mediocrity—should look to evolve their sound beyond the arcade and into the dance clubs, and one’s soul.” now thats either criminally misguided music writing or an elaborate and hilarious music-reviewer in-joke.

man it feels good to be a fanboy and come out swinging for one of your favourite bands, on one of the most inconsequential forums for doing such a thing, the goddamn internet! but yeah. they are not the only two “damning with faint praise” reviews i’ve read of LP3, and its just kind of shocked me because i think its one of the better things i’ve heard in ages. it reminds me a little of some of the reviews of the last few air albums – do a bit of googling and try and gauge the critical response to every air record since “moon safari” and you just get a lot of confused people writing reviews that seem to heavily praise them but at the same time kind of slap them with the back of a glove, like, “yeah air, they’re doing what they do, its really amazing, but, um, how boring”. i don’t know. i wonder if ratatat and air both fall into that category of bands who are actually way left of the norm, but accidentally hit upon some kind of wider level of awareness.. celebrated at first and then kind of ignored or castigated later. another example: some of the poor reviews of the last hot chip record. their sound and approach didn’t change much – but reviewers’ reaction to them did. anyway.

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and now, to lighten the mood… here is rahsaan roland kirk, live in 1969. i don’t know what that thing he’s playing right at the start is – before he gets into his trademark, playing five saxophones at once, including two with his nose and one with his ear – but i have a feeling it may be a very early hacked nintendo DS synth controller prototype… i’m happy to stand corrected if someone can tell me what that thing is (i ain’t no expert on these things)