“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.

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.

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.

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?

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)

what?

love! give a 4 year old an autotune and you get pure love! this youtube clip is better than 99% of music released this year. i’m serious! its even better than vampire wolf france! but yeah. you can basically layer this clip over the top of any song that you like, and the song instantly becomes 10 times better. honestly i’ve tried it, tonight. a lot. just pull up itunes or whatever, get a song started, then come back here and press play on the clip. love!

hate! google continues to funnel rabid pixies fans to my pixies ms paint creation / time-space continuum solution – although, the latest one was confused as to whether or not to actually hate or not. love or hate!? all 21st century dilemmas essentially boil down to this. hobble over to the right hand column to check out his love/hate indecision. its ok to love! also engaged in recent conversation with this blog – connie from network solutions weighs in on my last post. i can’t say it was my intention to get the attention of anyone at network solutions when i wrote that rant on the perils of parked domains – i didn’t even really refer to them in my post, their name was merely quoted in the article that i was referencing – but yes its still fascinating to me that companies now employ people to monitor the blogs and go into bat for them. i guess this is very 2005 but it still intrigues me.

love! i’m just coming off a moody blues bender, and i’m just starting on a bit of a robert palmer curve. here’s a bit of a taste of what my head is sounding like at the moment. the moody blues track is not a real edit, don’t get excited. i just took out some of the middle bit. you won’t even notice.

MP3: The Moody Blues – Question (edit) (1970)
(removed due to 40,000 downloads in 6 weeks… whoops… sorry moodies)

MP3: Robert Palmer – What You Waiting For (1983)

hate! gotta hate how long its taking new faux pas material to come together. hold tight! the anti-climax awaits! the newest news i have on this is that the album is going to be called “CHARISMA MODIFIER” and its going to be a concept record about a 4 year old who communes directly with the forces of time and space (ie the pixies – voiced here by justin hayward and the guy from thin lizzy) finds an autotune plugin while searching for the lost orb of frobozz, and then buddies up with a savvy domain name registrar employee named connie to save the people of earth from the devastating forces of… well… dudes who wear white sunglasses! here’s the revised album cover:

love! tuned into a golden oldies station on the way home from work this evening i heard a song by bland mcbland band snow patrol that totally contained the lyric “Put Sufjan Stevens on / And we’ll play your favorite song” i knew you’d get yours, stevens!

shucks now i empathise with you again. i feel great pain… and… suffering

before i get into it – its short notice (as usual), but tonight i’ll be appearing on maudie’s show “dappled beats” over on 106.7 FM PBS FM in melbourne… i’ll be selecting some tunes and talking some crap. maudie has great taste, lots of electronic and leftfield type stuff (check her playlists here) so it should be a lot of fun. pbs fm streams online here.

its the PBS radio festival this week, which means they are hollering for your support. so if you want to directly contribute to a true music-lovers station – and the ’sister’ station to the one that i do my show on, RRR – give them a call and become a subscriber. its cheap, and you win prizes. if you subscribe during maudie’s show (between midnight and 2am tonight) you can have a free faux pas cd! as if thats something you want!

ok lets go:

MP3: Moonbeam – Slow Heart (2008)
this is simply a beautifully produced and arranged piece of heart-tugging minimal techno music. or progressive house or progressive trance, or something, i don’t really know… ‘this type of music’… but this track (by a russian duo) is somehow bleedingly emotive without being too saccharine, and sits just (and only just) on the right side of that line that so much of ‘this type of music’ seems to cross – the line that demarcates heartfelt from tacky, accessible from obvious. a lot of ‘this type of music’ is so utterly boring, and so much of it is so utterly trashy, this track is like 10x the achievement because it is so easy to make bad bad generic music when you are working within a genre with what seems like such strict conventions. it makes me think of one of my favourite albums, “wearemonster” by isolee… although in many ways i feel like that isolee album succeeds so well because it breaks out from the generic conventions that i associate with ‘this type of music’. what is isolee doing now anyway?

every single sound in “slow heart” just sounds perfect to my ears… the cymbal rushes, the… is that a guitar?… the layers of alien technology. anyway. its a late night song, obviously.

see also:
MP3: Sascha Funke – Mango (2008)

a lot of my favourite recommendations of the more edged electronic variety come from leighton’s blog keytars and violins, so at this point i would like to shout out to him. LEIGHTON FROM KEYTARS AND VIOLINS

MP3: Thom Yorke – The Eraser (XXXchange mix) (2007)
this song is almost exactly what i think music should sound like. i mean, i don’t want thom yorke singing on every song, but i think you know what i mean. this is the kind of track i listen to on repeat, studying it to try and unveil its secrets, only to be left confused and a little alienated, perhaps coming to the conclusion that this kind of thing only happens by accident. the case for aleatoric music strengthens.

from one thom to two toms:
MP3: Tom Tom Club – Lorelei (1980)
sometimes i get the distinct impression that the tom tom club is a great secret kept by those in the know. recently i finally tracked down a copy of the self-titled tom tom club album, the one with the hits on it, i’m talking “wordy rappinghood” and “genius of love” of course. the album is basically everything i thought it would be and more – so innocent, so thoughtful, and so great to dance around to in your loungeroom in the middle of an intense board gaming session

imagine listening to this track while playing an intense german board game about farmers in wooden shacks trying to make cows breed and shit. agricola! did i mention its my birthday soon? this track is so totally about farmers in wooden shacks trying to make cows breed. probably also about a girl.

MP3: Regurgitator – Feels Alright! (1999)
another song to go batshit to while you are playing board games. well i guess anyone who knows me knows i have a soft spot for vocoders. who doesn’t? this song has a vocoder. it is from the regurgitator album that we had to have, that no one really understood, called “art”.

regurgitator and custard are two – much-maligned maybe? – bands straight from the heyday of australian alternative music, the mid- to late- nineties, when triple j ruled our tastes not with an iron fist and a copy of NME but with dreadlocks, a devo greatest hits album and a bong. it was kinda cool to be daggy, or at least i imagine it must have been in brisbane, if bands like the ‘gurge and the ‘tard rose to dominance – hell even just the names are hilariously reflective of the times.

i really hope that in the future these two bands in particular – regurgitator and custard – are remembered as being iconic, important, influential bands, and not just some pseudo-novelty pitstop that australian music made in the 90s as it slid – on what, to me, seems like a strangely linear and now obvious progression! – from generic 80s pub rock to 2008 modular (capital M and no capital m) “fash” electro. when the musical archaeologists try to piece together the history of australian popular music in the late 20th and early 21st centuries (and surely they’ll only do it as a kind of irrelevant footnote to the history of music in general worldwide), they might be puzzled about how this ‘new electro’ thing took hold in this country, in some ways out of nowhere. thats until they unearth the fossils of a presets concert, the one in 2011 where everyone was killed in a freak concreting incident, immersed and preserved for millenia in some carbonite-type han-solo-type shit… thats when they’ll realise the crowd – you know, all of ‘their people’ – have the exact same DNA as the cold chisel fan fossils they unearthed from back in the late 70s!

pity me my befuddled theses and ill-conceived tea-leaf readings into the future of concreting and electro! honestly even i’m not sure what point i’m trying to make here – all thats really important here is that there’s a whole lot more ideas and risks being taken on that “art” album than on those two modular albums – the hoodied elephants in the room that is electronic music in australia – put together.

perhaps this is a good time to remind you that one of custard’s more famous songs was a song called “music is crap” which basically was about aliens coming to earth to tell us how crap our music was.

MP3: Custard – Music Is Crap (1998)

Don’t matter what you like, aliens hate it…
And I’ve found they dig the silence, hate the sound

sometimes when i listen to radio, i think i’m one of the aliens…. and the guys at work have been telling me recently that i’m hating more than usual… but you have to voice strong opinions in order to combat the dark forces of homogeniety, isn’t it. even if you have to force them out of you. or couch them in poorly chosen allegories.

i guess at the end of the day its all personal and subjective… its my perogative, to paraphrase bobby brown… and ahh i guess i just really like risk. this “new electro” or whatever you might like to call it, in this country, is about as risky as eating a sandwich. hegemony is bad if you appreciate forward-thinking music! kick against it. its also really fashionable and i don’t like that either. in fact i hate it! look ma! hatin is easy!

somewhere in another universe there is a tim who can tie all of this together – from aleatoric (or “dice”) music to dice-rolling board games, from risky fractured music to homogenous fluoro cardigans.

in conclusion… risk.

“electronic” music in australia. choose which side you are on, dudes!

i’ve never been so acutely aware of how much i rely on my mouse when making music. it really is the main physical thing that mediates my creation of music – i’ve got keyboards and knobs and faders and pads too, but an unnervingly large amount of my work is done via the frustratingly fine movements of my shaky hands, trying to wrangle a little white arrow to do my bidding. drawing envelopes, grabbing hold of virtual pots, tapping in tempos and drawing midi notes with the unreliable click of the mouse button. now that i’ve got this new mouse, i’m finding that i have to learn its movements – its sensitivities are subtly different, the shape of the mouse in my hand is different. i took for granted how transparent my use of my mouse had become. now when i’m trying to navigate my way around music software i’m finding that my formerly trusty motor memory can no longer be trusted – i can’t make the fine and immediate adjustments i used to, because when my hand moves to where my brain thinks that things are, the mouse pointer now consistently misses the mark. i feel like a guitarist who wakes up to find he has webbed fingers. i must resolve to become less reliant on my mouse.

this, combined with the unseasonal heat, has plunged faux pas productivity to record lows in the last weekend but it means i’ve been doing a lot of reading. i’m learnin mama i’m learnin. a friend of mine – lets call him an ‘academic’ though that might make him shudder – he told me the other night that he wished that he could just learn knowledge and not be expected to do anything with it. i feel the same way. i have a tendency to suck knowledge in and then struggle to find meaningful ways to re-express it. knowledge just cumulates and confuses in my mind. i’m not sure what practical or specific use most of this knowledge has – i hold on to some lame hope that one day something will spring forth from my subconscious thanks to years of the gestating knowledge-mess. my mind is like the compost heap that i continue to pile shit on to, hoping that miraculous flowers will emerge despite my complete lack of interest in gardening.

–

i find this whole trent reznor thing that happened last weekend really exciting and fascinating. i’m not a NIN kind of guy, though i’ve got a soft spot for the perfect drug (admit it, you do too). reznor still gives me the willies for sure. his $1.6 million windfall points to a couple of things. firstly, if you are a musician with control over the distribution of your own material, and you also happen to have a huge, obsessive, internet-savvy fanbase, new digital distribution options give you the opportunity like never before to suck millions of dollars out of your plebs.

now, let me stop here for a sec. i’m going to riff a little bit on music and money. if it makes you uncomfortable reading about this stuff, look away now. i, like many others, am trying to make sense of all of this because it feels like somewhere in there, with all these new options, there might be a way in which i can set myself up to have a sustainable music career without making artistic compromises. thats a pretty big carrot dangling, so i’m not ignoring ‘the new model’ or leaving it to someone else to figure out. i’m no expert; lets figure it out together.

click to follow me down the rabbit hole (mice hole?):

750,000 or so people bought or downloaded the NIN release, either for free or at one of the various tiers of reznor’s pricing model. at the top end, 2500 people paid US$300 for the deluxe reznor-doodled edition of the 4-CD set. straight up, in aussie dollars, thats $800,000 right there. obviously you got to minus the costs of production, but still, thats a lot of money. its really those 2500 obsessive fans – whatever their motivations – and not the 750,000 or so others that have made the most important contribution to the reznor windfall.

can this kind of tiered model be adapted for struggling indie artists at the much much lower levels, who would be more than happy with a return of $8,000 than $800,000… ? eerily, a few weeks before the NIN release a guy called kevin kelly wrote up a great article called 1000 true fans. (thanks to ryan for the link):

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version… Let’s peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.

now if you’re starting to squirm in your seat, you’re not alone – when you start talking about capitalising on ‘true fans’ it starts to feel like you are painting these people as kind of mindless cash holes, ultraconsumers that somehow you brainwash into buying everything you produce, or as kevin says “the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat”. we can only guess at the motivations behind those 2500 mega-reznor-fans who paid premium but its probably fair to say that they weren’t motivated by the thought that their $300 was going to help reznor to keep making music. i mean, he’s doing ok.

but as a bedroom DIY indie, i think the tiered pricing model is pretty exciting. lets say we have three pricing options. give away some of your music for free. lets say half of your album. then, offer a very attractive low cost option for people to buy your full album on CD. here’s a crazy idea: sell your CD for the costs of production and postage. you’re a bohemian artist, you’re not in it for the money, you just want to get the music out there. make this clear to your potential customers. they are getting what they are paying for – they are paying for the cost of production and postage. thats where the money is going, not to some imagined coffers, not to retail middle men. let them know. you’re not going to make any money off this level of the model but as long as you don’t lose any…

and then you offer a premium package, for $50 or something, where you throw in some bonus things with the CD, like providing the tracks from your songs as separated parts for potential remix (a pretty cool element of the reznor idea to be honest), or some handmade artwork or extensive notes or something. charge a (reasonable) premium amount for this package but don’t spend heaps of money in the production. this is the level with the profit margin. and make this point clear to your fans and prospective benefactors. if they spend $50 on the premium package, make it clear to them that most of it is going into your bank account. they are not exchanging money for your product – they are, in fact, donating to your cause, and receiving your CD as a thankyou gift. they are benefactors. this is a more noble vision of ‘true fans’ – true fans want to be your benefactors. and never mind 1000. just get 100, including your nan, who wants to see you succeed. if you’re making $40 on each purchase, then you got $4000. thats small change to reznor, but that amount opens up a lot of possibilities for bedroom artists to take steps towards bolder plans.

perhaps the key here is transparency in the costs of production. is this a revolutionary idea? – when someone comes to your online store to buy your CD, tell them exactly where the money gets spent. give them a breakdown on the costs of digipaks, of shiny discs, of envelopes, stamps, bubble wrap. show them that you are willing to give your music away for free – because you are, because you really just want it to be heard – but then give them a clear opportunity to make their own informed decision to put a much higher value on your music. show them the math.

sooo i’ve been in a bit of a low patch, creatively emotionally et cetera, and most of it is just due to frustration and a hint of desperation regarding working on the next faux pas album… things just aren’t going well with it right now. i’ve turned to some good friends for counsel in the last few days – i think its helping to crystallise a few things in my mind tank, and i thought i’d get them down as a means of maybe moving this blog past this uncharacteristic – may i say, first (and last?) – official emo blog patch and get back to the important things like posting youtube clips of robert palmer and talking about zork.

for better or worse, when i got home from overseas last year and started working on this album, i decided that i should try really hard to make the next album… you know…. “really good.” for my first album i threw a lot of sounds at the wall, some stuff stuck together, and i put it on a shiny disc. the album was started and finished (i mean, pressed onto discs) in a couple of months, which is pretty quick. almost 2 years later i can look back at that album and say honestly that i’m proud of it, it documents something. but its not a great album. so i decided this time around i would try really hard, make myself keep going until i made something great.

so — this is, like, way harder than it looks! first, you have to define great. i think some people make music because they have stories or messages or whatever that they just desperately need to express – the process of making a record for them is just about getting it down, accurately and with candor, getting it across. so “great” is kind of tied maybe to some kind of authenticity, being true to yourself or true to your vision or stories. this is especially true for twee dudes who write songs about girls, or something. it all sounds so noble. you strive to achieve your vision. or stay true to your heart. or tell that story about your grandpa, you know the one where he was in the war and people died and shit. meaningful shit! so therefore to make your music great – and that is, lets be clear, to satisfy your own desires, to make music yoou think is great, not other people – is really just about knowing yourself and having a clear vision. fucking noble.

for me its waay more coarse and obvious – and problematic – because i think i struggle not judge my own musics by the same standards that i judge the music that i love. back that up, what i mean is.. i want to love my own music the way i love my favourite music. is this even possible? do only conceited pricks love themselves? or on the other hand is it possible – no, mandatory – that you strive to make art that you can love, be so deeply proud of, fight for. but to set those standards by comparing yourself to your idols (really didn’t want to drop that word but can’t think of anything more appropriate)… well this is self-hating 101: set yourself unachieveable goals, fall short, hate yourself. fuck!

i should be inspired by great music, right?. at the moment, i’m paralysed by awe. i can’t help this feeling sneaking up on me that.. whats the point of even bothering when there is so much great music already out there? i listen to an album i love and it should inspire me… but often it just humiliates me. i read this blog post a while back.. it quotes a max tundra interview where he says:

“There is music everywhere that is very, very similar to music that already exists… making records and CD’s from an environmental perspective, there’s all this new plastic in the world, which is so wasteful. That’s such a responsibility, that you have to justify the existence of that product in the world. And if it’s really similar to something that already exists then you’re just messing the world up really, you’re polluting it.”

you have to justify the existence of that product in the world. shit! i have to justify the existence of my music, and its got to be more than just “it exists because i had some spare time and i made it”? damn. that is cold. and hard. also from that blog post:

“if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.”

fuck you charles bukowski looking into my soul! i got doubts enough to deal with without you giving me this extra layer of compelling shit! at the moment it is not bursting out of me. has it ever? bukowski you literary bastard!

so anyway what seems like deep shit is at most just some emo bullshit by a whiney guy who just needs to deal with the fact that he is not a special flower. this is not a nuclear crisis or anything. we are not at defcon one. security alert was beige at best. the problem here is – to paraphrase someone that i spoke to today – one of the dangers with trying to take your music or your art or whatever seriously is that you can begin to tie in your ideas of self-worth directly to how you feel you are doing creatively. what i mean is – on this stupid trip of making the “great” album, when things are going well i feel ecstatic. when things go badly, if i’m a bit uninspired or have a few bad days in a row, it kind of inevitably leads to despair. which doesn’t help the music any. if it sounds stupid that someone can be driven to existential crisis because he’s having trouble making a song sound right, its because it is.

the fact that having a sustained bad time working on my album can lead to a more general existential funk obviously says more about my personality than it does about anything else. people have different ways of dealing with stress, and i suppose some people see success and failure as binary while others are more generous with how they measure themselves.

so yeah what now? just finish the stupid music, put it out there, and try not to think about whether i think its “great”? or keep going with my ‘chinese democracy’ style approach of continually deconstructing and reconstructing my music because its ‘not quite there yet’… chasing some idea of greatness which i probably cannot get to, whether it be through lack of skill or because i’ve purposefully set myself an unachievable task in order to give myself a reason to hate myself. how am i not myself, bitches!? at the end of the day it is really just about knowing yourself.

countdown to return of normal programming commencing… might have a couple more emo posts in me but i will exorcise the demons and then get back to the usual shit

top ten mp3s most listened to according to last.fm

1. paul mccartney – letting go
2. cornelius – omstart
3. bachelorette – a lifetime
4. pikelet – bug-in-mouth
5. solo andata – a ballet of hands
6. phillip glass and david bowie – heroes (aphex twin mix)
7. j dilla jay dee – stop
8. the knife – silent shout
9. steely dan – king of the world
10. inxs – burn for you

top five obsessions

- paul mccartney (wings-era and mccartney ii)
- late 70s / early 80s soft rock
- last.fm
- that dodgy theremin synth sound from ableton that appears on nearly every new faux pas track/remix created in 2007
- dungeons and dragons

top 15 good times and great classic hits

10cc – the things we do for love
christopher cross – ride like the wind
fleetwood mac – big love
foreigner – urgent
icehouse – cant help myself
loverboy – turn me loose
michael jackson – human nature
michael mcdonald – i keep forgettin
prince – i would die for you
robert palmer – looking for clues
simple minds – promised you a miracle
steely dan – rikki dont lose that number
suzi quatro – primitive love
toto – i’ll supply the love
wings – band on the run

top two late night infomercials

- the midnight special
- the soft rock collection

bottom two late night infomercials

- proactiv
- that thing with the ball and nick lachey

top five unlikely places i went to in 2007

- japan
- living in country victoria for three months (the coastal town flooded on my birthday)
- walking around perth in the wee hours of a saturday morning with a microphone wearing a cardboard andrew g mask
- to and fro on rrr program grid
- triple j rotation

top ten albums that won’t be appearing in my top ten list. sorry

- justice
- midnight juggernauts
- animal collective
- panda bear
- lcd soundsystem
- burial
- italians do it better
- battles
- caribou
- m.i.a

everyone liked the same albums this year, which i found boring (the homogeneity, not the albums)… most of the albums this year everyone thought were amazing, i thought were simply great or even just good… to be honest about half of these i haven’t even listened to i’ve been so put off by the hype

top one prevalent over-arching musical trend, as has always been and always will be

- recycling

my top ten overseas

1. black moth super rainbow – dandelion gum
2. the field – from here we go sublime
3. bachelorette – isolation loops
4. oh astro – champions of wonder
5. skeletons & the kings of all cities – lucas
6. james blackshaw – the cloud of unknowing
7. yeasayer – all hour cymbals
8. disasteradio – visions
9. antibalas – security
10. paper – as as

seven more albums i liked from overseas

artanker convoy – cozy endings
bruce haack – the electric lucifer
folk is not a four letter word vol 2
pantha du prince – this bliss
principles of geometry – lazare
tele & the ghost of our lord – beach party blast/quasi immaculate deception
tussle – telescope mind

top three life-changing live shows

- andrew wk at meredith
- andrew wk at meredith
- andrew wk at meredith

top two most misjudged albums

architecture in helsinki – places like this
air – pocket symphony

favourite australians, alphabetically

aih
aleks and the ramps
always
brothersister label
cleptoclectics
curse ov dialect
devastations
nick huggins
pikelet
pretty boy crossover
roam the hello clouds
solo andata
zeal

top three rediscoveries from past headspaces

metallica – ride the lightning
simian (pre mobile disco)
the alan parsons project

new years resolutions

- learn to play ‘big love’ on acoustic guitar
- build a kingdom in that house on the hill
- figure out whether i like space/beardy/italo-disco or not
- become more inaccessible and change my name to ‘major cartologist’ in a cynical move to endear myself to the avant garde hipster set and too-knowing trendoid blogopshere
- become more accessible and buy myself over-sized novelty sunglasses in a cynical move to endear myself to the so-uncool-its-cool indie-disco doorlist jagermeister set
- become more drunk, buy myself tight leather pants, and vomit and/or bleed during live performance and also just general conversation in a cynical move to endear myself to the great unwashed melbourne dont-know-why-i-do-but-i-love-dirty-rock-despite-being-an-accountant massive
- become more theatrical in my descriptions of my character’s movements and give away magic items from my backpack in a cynical move to endear myself to the other PCs in my party
- become more cynical in a cynical attempt to endear myself to you

2008 anticipations

- ween touring australia in march
- new album from max tundra… i hope…?
- jason forrest band tours melbourne (cmon jason, DO IT)
- hot chip
- 19 debut albums by joh-un
- debut of faux pas live show (one man on stage in pyjamas sobbing uncontrollably into a microphone – think the famed commanding onstage presence of nick drake combined with the charisma of daryl somers and the musical talent of a pigeon with one leg and no ears)
- not one but two new faux pas albums

time spent writing these totally well thought out and meaningful end of year lists

- 20 mins

more top top lists:

- amazing, inspiring and obscure top 50 with mp3s, from rad turkish blog undomondo.com
- great folk-flavoured top lists at moteldemoka.com
- cool hipster disco lists at alainfinkielkrautrock
- local acts including always, francis plagne, geoff o’connor (and me) posting lists at rosequartz.blogspot.com