|
Unsung Forum » Regular Non obscure music |
Log In to post a reply
|
|
|
|
| Topic View: Flat | Threaded | |
IanB 6761 posts |
Edited Oct 04, 2013, 12:15
Oct 04, 2013, 11:44
|
||
|
stray wrote: You should end your posts with 'Now, get off my lawn". When the world arrives on a high horse then that is a logical response! Interesting that people chose to ignore the point about technological innovation being a driver. I guess it's too much of a myth buster that the musician is so often at the mercy of what industry provides.
|
|||
|
IanB 6761 posts |
Edited Oct 06, 2013, 08:40
Oct 04, 2013, 11:52
|
||
|
stray wrote: Solus 3 is good stuff, but I don't hear in it at all what you seem to be striving to find. The first risk that must be taken is in the work after all. I worry that you're just jaded, stuck in a negative mindset, and refuse to acknowledge that the creative reality may actually be different somewhere. Seriously, are you saying you've stopped looking because the channels you expect to find the 'good music' have dried up ? For some the effort of the search is the reward. I would rather wrestle with the making-of or understanding-of something else than waste any more time trawling thorough the new releases. Especially the releases for which people make all sorts of wild claims of greatness. I simply haven't found that the end has justified that quest and the quest itself is not enough. I think the quest also distorts the critical faculties of those who undertake it. If you go looking for gems eventually you will convince yourself you have found one. A lot of great new records seem to find me and that serendipity suits me, it just happens that hardly any of it belongs anywhere near the rock bin and most of those new rock culture records I do hear justify not much more than a polite acknowledgement of the efforts of all concerned. Including the efforts of those who would prosletyse it. S3 meanwhile is a collaborative effort. Three, five, seven and then eight people bringing the sum of their own experience and listening to it. No one gets told what to play. It is not an auteur project. So the person who really likes Spandau Ballet or the person who really likes Prince gets the same input as the person who might like using loops with no fixed time or the person who fancies trying to bring 12 tone scale into dub based music to see what happens next. Change three people and something else happens as long as everyone else stops playing long enough to listen and then respond. That's what makes it interesting to us. If the process is interesting to anyone else then that's amazing but if you are going to go to trouble the scorers and put something into the market place then there is an additional effort involved if you want people to care. In which case you have to take the risk that the world will shrug. I don't think our records are anywhere near as good as some of the reviews we've had and I think maybe people have mistaken eclecticism and odd instrument combinations for something else*. Which is symptomatic of my great complaint / "whine" about where musical culture is at.
|
|||
Sin Agog 2253 posts |
Oct 04, 2013, 12:06
|
||
|
IanB wrote: That's what makes it interesting to us. If it is interesting to anyone else then that's a bonus. That's the self-same attitude that fuels thousands of musicians today. And it's healthy, by gum! And, I believe, an evolution over most methods of yore.
|
|||
|
IanB 6761 posts |
Edited Oct 04, 2013, 12:43
Oct 04, 2013, 12:11
|
||
|
Sin Agog wrote: IanB wrote: That's what makes it interesting to us. If it is interesting to anyone else then that's a bonus. That's the self-same attitude that fuels thousands of musicians today. And it's healthy, by gum! And, I believe, an evolution over most methods of yore. Yes true but we probably put as much effort into getting someone on the Observer to write about the record as we did making it. And I am well aware of the double standard herein but if you are going to bother to get a load of people together to make a record and sleeve it and master it then you might as well make the same effort to let the world know about it. It's not about a review being an end in itself more a case of wanting to get shin your way up somewhere near the top of the pyramid of the self-releasers in the hope that a few people wave back. Anyway I don't mean to be as rude or as full of bluster as I can come across but I think it is worth examining if the excitement of the quest for finding new things is standing in for the thing itself.
|
|||
stray 2057 posts |
Oct 04, 2013, 12:17
|
||
|
IanB wrote: stray wrote: Solus 3 is good stuff, but I don't hear in it at all what you seem to be striving to find. The first risk that must be taken is in the work after all. I worry that you're just jaded, stuck in a negative mindset, and refuse to acknowledge that the creative reality may actually be different somewhere. Seriously, are you saying you've stopped looking because the channels you expect to find the 'good music' have dried up ? For some the effort of the search is the reward. I would rather wrestle with the making-of or understanding-of something else than waste any more time trawling thorough the new releases. Especially the releases for which people make all sorts of wild claims of greatness. I simply haven't found that the end has justified that quest and the quest itself is not enough. I think the quest also distorts the critical faculties of those who undertake it. If you go looking for gems eventually you will convince yourself you have found one. A lot of great new records seem to find me and that serendipity suits me, it just happens that hardly any of it belongs anywhere near the rock bin and most of those new rock culture records I do hear justify not much more than a polite acknowledgement of the efforts of all concerned. SOLUS3 meanwhile is a collaborative effort. Three, five, seven and then eight people bringing the sum of their own experience and listening to it. No one gets told what to play. It is not an auteur project. So the person who really likes Spandau Ballet or the person who really likes Prince gets the same input as the person who might like using loops with no fixed time or the person who fancies trying to bring 12 tone scale into dub based music to see what happens next. Change three people and something else happens as long as everyone else stops playing long enough to listen and then respond. That's what makes it interesting to us. If the process is interesting to anyone else then that's amazing but if you are going to go to trouble the scorers and put something into the market place then there is an additional effort involved if you want people to care. Cool, I've always worked the same way. I misunderstood where you're coming from, sorry. I don't search looking for gems, the search has never been the reward. There is too much shit out there for that ever to be true. I just hear a lot of good new music by nature of who I talk to and who talks to me. People send me things, I read various things etc, etc. As someone who makes music I think it's a duty to at least make some kind of effort to listen to what others are doing (as anger inducing as that can be sometimes). Its a bit too egotistical, insular, and in some ways, self obsessed and selfish not to. I have an old DJ instinct too, I can tell from a few bars if I want to hear the rest of something ;). So the searching process, as haphazard as that can be, is hardly a time sink. Good internet radio stations have contributed a lot of new artists to me over the years (and not all new artists either). I've gotten into that mode of having the radio on in the background again most of the days I'm home, a habit I fell out of for about ten to fifteen years. Completely agree about being intolerant of music that's principally phoned in. Rock music though, I listen to that to hear god rock music, not to hear innovation. Frankly, I've always valued good far more than innovative. You really don't like the idea of netlabels, or Creative Commons Licenced music at all do you ? You never pass any comment on it when it's raised.
|
|||
|
IanB 6761 posts |
Edited Oct 04, 2013, 12:50
Oct 04, 2013, 12:35
|
||
|
stray wrote: You really don't like the idea of netlabels, or Creative Commons Licenced music at all do you ? You never pass any comment on it when it's raised. This is a conversation for the pub but it is not a question of not liking. It is a question of dealing with practical reality as ethically as possible. What I do for a living is help artists (mainly established and some not) who want to own their own publishing and masters and still be in the market place in a meaningful way without having to dance with all the various devils that are waiting for them. I got approached by representatives of the main advocates of creative commons about eight or nine years ago and was asked if I could talk to one of my better known clients to see if they might throw their independent catalogues into the creative commons pool for the good of you know ... society. The conversations that ensued convinced me that the advocates of this approach had not the first idea of what in a practical sense goes into the making and selling of music. Ignorant to an astonishing degree. I find the idea of people with tenure at an Ivy League college telling musicians (of all people), who are scraping a living out of the bottom of what's left of the barrel, how to live really nauseating. It's using artists to beat the music industry with. However venal that industry it's the wrong tool and I don't see Lessig giving his books away on Amazon. At the crucial moment the debate around file sharing became co-opted by those who would use the music business as a wedge into capitalism as a whole. What was needed was a concerted effort to shame record companies into splitting digital revenues 50/50 and zeroing all un-recouped balances so that even those owing their labels fortunes would be paid out on the digital side. That would have helped everyone. Instead a whole generation saw free music as a right and were encouraged in that by both the RIAA and Lessig and co. That said I think creative commons has a lot of conceptual merit. I just need someone to explain to me how art that needs forces greater than a bedroom studio is going to get made and at the same time the infrastructure existing and the artists and other contributors not starving in the process. That for me is the unanswerable question while capitalism prevails. Right now we have a lot art that is being widely exposed that is being made by the youth of the upper middle classes because they are the only ones who can afford to hang around along enough unwaged while waiting to get noticed. Not paying creators is not helping that situation one bit.
|
|||
|
Sin Agog 2253 posts |
Edited Oct 04, 2013, 12:57
Oct 04, 2013, 12:36
|
||
|
IanB wrote: Interesting that people chose to ignore the point about technological innovation being a driver. I guess it's too much of a myth buster. It's actually just another line of a myth. The myth that on the first day the Lord gave us Classical and after an aeon-long interim there was Blues, then Blues begat Rock, then---uh. The music industry has no story. There's no three-act structure. Instruments and innovations and zeitgeists can make seismic waves, but the sea never dries up. You don't have to see everything in terms of how it relates to a greater culture. And even if you do that, is the Uruguayan music scene perfectly in line with ours? These music stories people tell to each other get awfully hazy when you get beyond the provincial nature of English and American rock. You will have to learn to individualise your tastes if you want to accept the way music works these days. Just enjoy a good song for what it is. You don't need to worry about how many others are or aren't listening to it, or if they were drawing influences from so and so. Let their passion sway you- as passion is what's at the root of all good art. I'm not saying don't think; thinking's wrong. Art does carry traces of its environment. I just don't think you're interpreting it very soundly. You're imposing your own ennui onto the music. Is it not even a minor possibility that you're recoiling from your own aging body by saying it's the culture itself that's decaying? IanB wrote: Similarly the culture of championing the obscure for the reflected glory and status of being a cultural prospector of outsider art is nonsensical as it rates music, at least initially, on the basis of its inability to reach the market. Also, this is classic "I will label all my enemies a certain way so I can deal with them collectively rather than individually". It's not the obscurity itself that attracts people. "Oh, come to me my beautiful obscurity. Let me nestle beside you and we together will make that nasty world with its nasty people pay for what they've done to us!" Whenever someone doesn't like something, they assume that other people are just...pretending. It never occurs to them that they might just like it for the thing itself. Perhaps a lot of people just gravitate to certain musical aesthetics which, by their very nature, don't sway the general public. Like most Industrial, Punk Messthetics, Free Folk, Hardcore Techno etc. etc. I'm not surprised that some dingy American No Wave film or Hungarian psychedelic animation I love isn't popular. It's the visceral energy of the former and the otherwordliness of the latter that attracted me to them- specific qualities- not how many people have seen them. Believe it or not, not all other people appraise things by where they exist in the grand scheme of things. Personally, I don't think there is any grand scheme.
|
|||
|
stray 2057 posts |
Oct 04, 2013, 12:47
|
||
|
IanB wrote: If you go looking for gems eventually you will convince yourself you have found one. What sort of elitist drivel is that ? Seriously roll that sentence around in your head for a bit. WTF yeah ? Sorry, replying again to keep up with your edits. So you got a review in the Observer, a leg up as you said in a reply earlier. It required effort to get that review as well, as you note. Then you bitch and moan that the review is better than you think it should have been.. basically because the reviewer does not have a good enough musical education. Holy fuck man, sort yourself out. It seems to me that for you its all about the effort of making a tangible product and then making damn sure that the world notices it. Then bitch about consumerism, while at the same time contributing directly by trying to fit into its model. One of the best ways to circumvent that is to not bloody make a physical product. Thus avoiding risks, and any subconscious effect that knowing of the risk will have on the production/composition of the work. Do you feel that making the effort of producing a product and fishing for a national review makes your work more important, serious or valid ? That would a be a ridiculous and utterly ugly point of view to take wouldn't it. You may hide from it, but it seems the point for you is success and recognition, and some money. This flies in the face of all your other stances. People wave back ? How many have to wave back to stop your incessant incoherent whining about the state of things. The lack of musical education (which of course is subjective, as in it's musical education on your terms), and the general poor state of creativity ?
|
|||
|
stray 2057 posts |
Oct 04, 2013, 12:53
|
||
|
IanB wrote: That said I think creative commons has a lot of conceptual merit. I just need someone to explain to me how art that needs forces greater than a bedroom studio is going to get made and at the same time the infrastructure existing and the artists and other contributors not starving in the process. That for me is the unanswerable question while capitalism prevails. Agreed. But the laptop is the most powerful and most personal musical instrument ever made (quoting someone else there). You can plug other things into one as well. Also check the bloody link I posted, climb the fuck out of your judgmental tower of bitching and try to listen to something and what CC artists are saying and doing. In fact, a hell of a lot of the Jazz and Improv music scene has now gone over to CC.
|
|||
|
IanB 6761 posts |
Edited Oct 04, 2013, 12:55
Oct 04, 2013, 12:55
|
||
|
Lovely. Elitist? I hold my hand up. The rest is bollocks. There are easier ways, I can tell you. Though, if that is what you really believe, it makes me question the basis on which you pick your would-be remixers ;-)
|
| Pages: 11 – [ Previous | 1 … 4 5 6 7 8 9 | Next ] | Add a reply to this topic |
|
|
|
| Unsung Forum Index | |
