Miscellany

Bits of writing I've done that don't quite fit in any other category, ranging from slow-motion building demolition to the rabbis who work in airports. A lot of it isn't available online, so I've reprinted it down the page.  

 

Drowning in a sea of words

(Aesthetica, 1 October 2011)

 

South African STR.CRD festival showcases local street culture

(Wired, 30 September 2011)

 

Inside the world of IMAX 3D Projectionists

(Wired,  22 August 2011)

 

At your fingertips

(Aesthetica, 1 August 2011)

 

Five Lion-ready apps you need in your life  

 (Wired, 22 July 2011)

 

Three ways OS X Lion will increase your productivity

(Wired, 20 July 2011)

 

How to upgrade to or restore OS X Lion

(Wired, 20 July 2011)

 

Waytag: Turning your address into a single word

(Wired, 14 July 2011) 

 

Online and on air

(Aesthetica, 1 June 2011)  

 

Behind the London Jewish Museum's ambitious digital archive project

(Wired, 26 May 2011) 

 

Inside SVOX: Google's 27-language text-to-speech upgrade

(Wired, 20 April 2011)

 

Analogue sounds in a digital world

(Aesthetica, 1 April 2011) 

 

All part of the package

(Aesthetica, 1 February 2011)  

 

Electronic memories in music

(Aesthetica, 1 December 2010)   

 

They call him Ragman: the Jewish superhero 

(The Jewish Chronicle, 26 November 2010)   

 

Rabbis on a wing and a prayer

(The Jewish Chronicle, 14 October 2010)    

 

Written in wax 

(Aesthetica, 1 October 2010)    

 

Japanese slo-mo demolition

(Wired Magazine, 6 September 2010)     

 

Close out the summer

(Aesthetica, 1 August 2010)    

 

Producing gold

(Aesthetica, 1 June 2010)     

 

Soundtrack moments

(Aesthetica, 1 April 2010)     

 

What it sounds like

(Aesthetica, 1 February 2010)   

 

Promo for the people

(Aesthetica, 1 December 2009)

Drowning in a sea of words

Nothing has hit the world of music writing harder than the social networking explosion. But the ways in which the writing has changed – and whether these changes are good or bad – are still very much up for debate. Published in Aesthetica Magazine on 1 October 2011.

In 2009, a man in Iowa stood up and told the world that he was doomed. 

That man was Christopher Weingarten, a music critic, and it would be wrong to suggest that this turn of events was entirely unexpected. Weingarten was a speaker at the 140 Characters Conference in Des Moines, an event which explored digital media and social networking. A writer with Spin, Revolver and The Village Voice, Weingarten took to the stage and proceeded to give one of the most inflammatory, hysterical and downright brilliant speeches in the history of music criticism. Possibly in the history of Iowa.

In his speech, Weingarten raged against the effect of social networking on his job, how he would soon be unable to make a living as a music critic, how the relying on the knowledge of crowds was resulting in both mediocre music and mediocre writing. “Crowds are fucking morons,” he said, to thunderous applause. “People have this open maw, this endless abyss…If it doesn’t fit into 140 characters, it’s not worth saying.”  

Two years later, things aren’t quite as doom-laden as Weingarten would have had it. Social networking hasn’t killed music writing, but it’s still had a huge impact on it. Weingarten remains one of the most polarising and complex figures in the debate; he seems to rail against what Twitter is doing to good journalism while actively taking part in the medium (he runs the @1000TimesYes feed, which reviews a thousand new records each year in 140 characters or less. And this is very much a conversation about Twitter – other sites like Facebook and Google Plus are powerful, but they simply can’t compete with Twitter’s immediacy or its ubiquity.)

Weingarten is cheerful, talkative and intelligent. He certainly makes no bones about the level of impact that social networking sites have had on long-form writing – that is, longer, more considered pieces usually found in magazines and newspapers. “Most of my colleagues thought it was a really good idea,” he said. “Some people have lauded it for doing record reviews that work with the speed of records, which is one thing that music magazines and websites haven’t been able to do. You want an 800-word review of [Jay-Z and Kanye West’s new album] Watch The Throne? Everyone already reviewed that over Twitter forty-five seconds after it leaked. Some of the negative feedback was, people thinking I was being really reductive and cutting complicated records to sometimes just one-liners and zings.”

One of the key issues that Weingarten raises early on is whether there is in fact any point to long-form record reviews at all anymore. Professional critics are no longer the arbiters of taste: when you can get an instant opinion on your chosen social network, why would you pick up the NME or The Word? 

“There’s a lot of talk about what the point of a record review is anymore,” says Weingarten. “Long-form record reviewing for a paycheque is completely dying out. It’s not just MP3s, it’s everything else – why would I read 2000 words on this record when I could type in the name on Mediafire and hear it for myself and come up with my own opinions? Twitter is changing the way we read. It’s making us all a little bit dumber, and making us gravitate towards headlines, two paragraphs of weirdness. It doesn’t take us out of our day, as opposed to sitting down and absorbing something. The 24-hour news cycle is hurting long-form writing.” 

He does, however, add that a lot of music writing – a lot of writing in general – certainly wouldn’t be hurt by a little economy. Of course, Weingarten has managed to straddle the best of both worlds, maintaining a full-time writing schedule as well as the active 1000TimesYes. But there’s no question that long-form writing is making less and less business sense. In the UK, the NME – once among the most successful music publications in history – has seen its circulation drop 14.3% to just over 29,000 copies a month in the first half of 2011. The New York Times – a title with a similarly august music section – dropped from 950,000 copies a day to 916,000. 

There’s no quantifiable way to compare those numbers to Twitter feeds, but Weingarten and company have certainly been successful. 1000TimesYes sits at just under 12,000 followers at the time of writing, while the hysterical Twitter review account Discographies (which The Village Voice named as its Music Critic Of The Year in 2010) has over 29,000.

Of course, this still doesn’t answer the question of what social networking is doing to the quality of the writing. Weingarten says that the 24-hour news cycle is hurting it, but others aren’t so sure. Daphne Carr is the editor of the annual Best Music Writing anthology, published each year by Da Capo. She’s certainly no stranger to technology – she talks to us using Skype on her smartphone from a sunny Central Park – but she believes that there’s still extremely good writing available. She certainly hasn’t a seen the quality of the stories she publishes plummet.

“I don’t think quality’s an issue, honestly,” she says. There’s great writing out there. There’s just as much or more than there ever has been in the history of writing about popular culture. The number of places has expanded dramatically, and the number of audience members has expanded dramatically as people have more access to it. The question is: how can I find it all?”

Music writing’s form and availability is a product of its environment. MP3s and cheap technology for making music means that there is exponentially more music available, which means there is less time to consume it. Couple that with tough economic circumstances across the board, and it means that there is less money to pay writers, which means that there is less chance for quality long-form music writing. It’s still out there; it’s just, as Carr says, a lot harder to find, and one has to wade through an awful lot of bad (and sometimes very good) Twitter and Facebook opinion to get to it.

“I don’t want to shit on the democracy of the Internet – which is very empowering,” says Weingarten, “but when everyone’s a writer, everyone’s a writer. Instead of being confronted by a couple of writers, we’re confronted by an endless expanse of shitty writers with a couple of gems peaking through. When we suck the money from all these industries and hand it over to hobbyists, the quality is just going to plummet. It’s exactly why we don’t have any money going to bands to record records, which is why everything sounds like these…shitty tossed-off bedroom projects.”

One of the big challenges that long-form music writing has to overcome is diminished attention spans. In his 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (W.W. Norton & Co.), which was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize, the author Nicholas Carr argued that the always-on, constant-stimulation of the Internet was physically rewiring our brains and affecting how our memory works. Put simply: while it may not be making us stupid, it’s lowering our ability to deal with anything longer than…well, longer than 140 characters. 

Perhaps one of the things that got Weingarten and the people at the Iowa conference so riled up was that social media’s takeover is inevitable. It’s happening, and for young writers beginning their careers, it’s something they have to use – or they’ll simply become obsolete before they’ve started. Says Carr: “It’s definitely generational. Every generation of critics has a completely different engagement with social networking, and different [expectations of it]. I can say for people over 40 and in their mid-30s, we’re still using it primarily as a marketing tool for another medium, or for a place that is a home for their actual work. People younger than that are tending to take it not as a means to another end but as the end itself, and are therefore using the medium to its fullest potential. Instead of saying, here’s a link to my awesome article on Twitter, they’re actually putting it in the character count and having some critical engagement.

“Five years ago, a lot of the top-tier critics wouldn’t be caught dead blogging, but a lot of them were then forced by their jobs to do it. They then find that they enjoy that tone and space even if they don’t like the frequency or having to deal with snarky comments all the time.” 

In many ways, the long-term effects of social media on music writing are still being worked out. Nobody really seems to know what’s around the corner. But what is clear is that social media will have an effect, and it will change the music writing landscape. But, as Carr says, it’s not necessarily something to be feared. “Twitter and social media can be a form of art, or it can be a conversation, or some place between those. But…it’s discourse. It’s talk. And none of that stuff was recorded or broadcast before. And now it’s all there as a permanent record, an enormous amount of writing and data that was just chat before."      

 

And, it would appear, the natural progression for music as well. Much of the interaction between online radio and the music it plays is uncharted territory, and the long-term impact remains to be seen. But there's very little doubt that, even in their short existence so far, Internet radio stations have begun to change the game. 

 

 

But as Rollins says, creative packaging can not only be an artistic statement for a band, but also a business one. "You need something to be a face for the artist," he muses. "You need some sort of [identity]. You want to get something to be excited about, and have a concept to rally around, and tell people what you're about. There'll always be a need for that, for that visual presentation and persona." And nothing, it seems, is better for that than a package which stands out from the crowd. 

 

Written in wax

Vinyl records occupy a very curious space in the musical landscape - but is it a dying format kept on life support by die-hard fans, or is it a sign of something bigger? First published in Aesthetica Magazine in October 2010.

When Jason Draper was sixteen years old, he got hold of a copy of David Bowie's album Hunky Dory. The album was on a vinyl record, and holding it in his hands, Draper realised the kind of power it could have.

"It's much nicer than the CD-sized sleeve, right?" says Draper (b.1983), now a staffer for Record Collector Magazine. "It's four or five times as big. These are iconic things. It was original artefact from that time - the 70s - and I was born [in the 80s] so I'm holding a record that was made seventeen years before. I was sixteen, and that's the time when you start to encounter the [things] that will help form you as a person. And so at this time you feel like you've got this amazing link to this thing that at that age you'd heard so much about… there's something very exciting about that."

Vinyl is a quandary in the current musical landscape. In many ways, people like Draper are something of an anomaly - there are comparatively few people around today who attach the same cachet to vinyl, or even to music as a physical product. But even as music sales have suffered (Nielsen Soundscan, the industry sales data standard, estimates a physical sales fall of 7% in 2009 alone), vinyl seems to be the little format that could. Soundscan clocked over 2.8 million vinyl sales in 2009 - and that's just the new release market. It doesn't take into the enormous trade in back-catalogue vinyl that takes place at market stalls, car boot sales and online. Not bad for a medium that has been declared dead many, many times over.

Of course, this still leaves a couple of questions as to vinyl's role. Is it in? Is it out? How important is it, really? Is this an industry on its last legs - as several reports in the mainstream media have claimed - or is it surviving, even thriving, in a recession-hit market?

 According to Draper, vinyl is very much here to stay - and the reason, he says, is because labels are beginning to exploit it in new and interesting ways. "I think that record companies have realised that they can make money from the release of lots of different things in lots of different formats; I think it's a natural progression of that, that people try and work out different ways of releasing [albums] - or rather cynically putting it, making money from the same thing."

Vinyl has become important again because the rules have been changed. The old cycle that artists went through of studio, album, tour, rinse and repeat has been hugely disrupted by not only the current economic circumstances but the rise of digital media and MP3s. Artists are making a lot more money from tours and once-off releases than they ever did from CD sales. Labels are starting to exploit this: Madonna recently signed a groundbreaking deal with Live Nation, referred to as a 360 deal. The essence of this is that the label makes money from everything the artist does: tours, merchandising and, yes, physical releases. But what that means in turn is that artists are under less pressure to make sure an album by itself does well.

And while Madonna might not be looking to get her stuff pressed up on exclusive vinyl, several small acts are. Even as far back as 2003, The White Stripes pressed up copies of Elephant on vinyl - a risky move at the time. These days, according to Draper, Jack White will "play a gig in his Third Man store, which he cuts to vinyl in real time, sells to exactly the amount of people who are in the store and want it. And then that's it, gone for good... And people spend literally thousands on these records on eBay."

Ultimately, the current musical climate is one in which vinyl has thrived in. The increased reliance on touring and live appearances has meant that it can often be advantageous for bands to press up vinyl versions of releases to accompany their shows. Because labels aren't relying on physical media as much anymore, artists have more flexibility to release their material on any format they like. Some, like hip-hop artist Jay Electronica, seem to be forgoing the release of a traditional album entirely, choosing to release sporadic singles on vinyl.

Of course, there's the fact that even if you don't own a turntable, vinyl has a totemic value that has a great deal of power. "We're already a generation removed from when vinyl was the norm [but] it's a nice link to the golden era of music," says Draper. "It seems cool and somewhat antiquated - and not in a negative outmoded way. It's the same as going vintage clothes shopping. Things have this dated coolness to them. For young bands, in a world where the norm is downloads and giving things away for free on Myspace or whatever, there are a lot guys who think, that doesn't work for us. There was certainly a time when, to release a seven-inch single really set you apart from other artists who are all selling their stuff through iTunes. It's a reaction to what's going on in current trends."

Of course, one might argue that Draper comes from the particular position of a commentator. How are the real shops doing? This is the coalface, the place where this avowedly physical product is sold. If you're in London, that coalface is hottest in Soho - particularly Berwick Street. There, you'll find legendary stores like Sister Ray and Reckless Records (although they answer the phone as Revival Records). And when Aesthetica visits Reckless, they're not just busy: they're pounding. 

Several buyers are hunched over the bulging racks, flicking through the dusty vinyl. "I'm afraid you'll have to come back later," says Duncan Kerr, the store's jazz buyer. "We've just got too many people in right now." Fortunately, Wyld Pytch Records, a few minutes away, is a little bit quieter. It's a tiny room in Lexington Street specialising in hip-hop vinyl. Damien Smith (b.1976), who helps run the store, is upbeat about vinyl's future in a tough market.

"Last year there was an album by [rapper] Raekwon, called Only Built 4 Cuban Linx Volume 2. The first one came out ten years before that. Last year, it was CD only. Now for a hip-hop album, you'd expect it on vinyl… and sometimes you have to wait or hope it gets pressed on vinyl. For the six months, I got asked so many questions about it, I ended up making phone calls to EMI who distributed it, and looking on the net to see if there were even any pirate copies of it. Nobody had done it! And then they did a few limited edition purple vinyl ones, and they were gone. You can't get them anymore! There were people buying vinyl and buying the CD, and not even opening the vinyl. Keep it wrapped up - and I understand that. It was the same when Wu-Tang Forever came out; the American edition was four vinyls, and the English edition was three. People were like, I have to get both."

For Smith, vinyl is a very personal thing. Like Draper and the punters who hunt down new releases on wax, it's something he seems to take a great deal of pride in. "Because I come from the days where there was nothing else, I'm used to vinyl," he says. "Then there's the argument where it's what sells better; most people in the club don't care. They just want to hear the music. But as the person playing the music, as a vinyl collector or crate digger, as I like to call myself, vinyl is…holding it, seeing it, smelling it. It feels better. They all smell so different. With CDs or a computer, flicking through files doesn't work for me. 

"Most DJs who use vinyl, they'll tell you, you can see…" He bends down to a crate of records on the floor, idly rifling through its contents with practiced fingers. "You can see a pile of tunes like this, and you'll know what this blue cover is, this red cover is." On the screen, it's just words. And if it ain't in alphabetical order, you aren't going to find what you're looking for!"

Vinyl won't last forever. At some point, a generation that grows up almost entirely on digital media will become the main buyers, and it simply won't be viable for anybody to press it up anymore. But at that point, physical media as a whole will become an antique concept, meaning that CDs and, to a much lesser extent, cassette tapes will be permanently out of print. For now, vinyl seems to be spending its retirement years in fine fettle. And whether you consider its current resurgence to be a fad or not, there's no denying that for millions of people, it represents more than music.

 

Close out the summer

Although the big music festivals still dominate, August and September are when the more intimate festival experiences come out to play. Here's what it takes to put them together - and why they're worth going to. First published in Aesthetica in August 2010.

For the past few months, Rob Da Bank's handwritten planning sheets have been getting messier and messier. Unlike other operators, the BBC Radio 1 DJ and the man behind Bestival - the much-loved event on the Isle of Wight that goes down every September - prefers to plan his entire festival using pen and paper.

"My team keep on trying to persuade me to use spreadsheets and Excel and all this computer stuff," says the DJ otherwise known as Robert Gorham (b.1973). "I just can't get to grips with looking at a computer screen and bringing that to life in the same way. Even writing that down with a pencil and paper doesn't make it much easier! I'm quite a disorganised planner; I book too many acts for the festivals. I get so overexcited, book too many things and end up having to change times and stages...it's a bit higgledy-piggledy, but it works out in the end!"

He's right to get excited, for Bestival is consistently one of the many highlights of the end of the summer. Although a couple of really big-names like V and Reading are still on the books, August and September are when things start to get interesting. This is the time of year when smaller festivals - which are increasingly called boutique festivals - start to spring up. These are festivals which cater to only a few thousand people (compared to upwards of 178,000 for Glastonbury, according to music magazine NME) and which often feature bands that are overlooked by the big boys. In other words, these festivals are an entirely different experience.

Bestival is, in fact, rapidly becoming one of heavyweights; strange when you consider that it is barely seven years old. But despite its rapidly increasing numbers (50,000 will walk through the gates this year) Gorham is adamant that it's not your typical festival. "Robin Hill Park on the Isle of Wight is a naturally-suited, slightly eccentric festival sight - not just a big flat playing field or one hill. It's all over the place…People also feel liberated on the Isle of Wight that they've escaped the mainland. The magic and creativity of the crowd as well; all the people who come, a lot of them have been to the Bestivals before and are part of the family.  You get this very family vibe which is word-of-mouth. A lot of festivals where they sell tickets purely on who they book, if they don't book a good act they won't sell out. Bestival, people come for the show more than the bands."

One of the better small festivals currently in operation is Green Man, located in Wales' Brecon Beacons region. It's capped at 10,000 people - tiny compared to many other festivals - and has become known for giving opportunities to bands that the mainstream circuit ignores. Although their 2009 throwdown had Jarvis Cocker and Animal Collective headlining, they also found plenty of room for lowkey acts like Andrew Bird and She Keeps Bees.

And then there's the Big Chill, which takes over Eastnor Castle at the start of August. Although Big Chill certainly doesn't skimp on the music side of things (M.I.A, Massive Attack and Lily Allen are all present and correct) it's at the forefront of a growing trend in UK festivals: the desire to go beyond the musical aspect and add visual elements and unusual facilities to a festival to broaden its audience. Big Chill itself is drafting artist Spencer Tunick to create a massive installation involving the festival crowd itself: he wants to create an enormous group of nude people, covered in body paint and set against the backdrop of the castle. If nothing else, it will be something to do between M.I.A and trips to the burger van. In addition, more and more festivals are catering to families as their core audiences get older: Gorham now puts on Camp Bestival, a slimmed-down version of the main event that goes off beforehand. "12,000 parents, 12,000 kids!" he chuckles.

But how is this all put together? Ultimately, the more things you add to the mix, the more work it takes to put it all together. Most festival organisers are more computer-savvy than Gorham - although they, like him, rely on a solid team to help see the thing through the planning stages. This is especially important for smaller festivals, which have smaller budgets and a lot more to prove. It's something that Simon Taffe (b.1980) knows a lot about.

Taffe is the director of End Of The Road, so named because it happens at the back end of September, right before the UK hunkers down for the Autumn. End Of The Road is among the newest kids on the festival block: it's been around for barely five years, and Taffe still runs it as a sideline with his main job, a painting and decorating business. The festival, which takes place in the Larmer Tree Gardens in Dorset, is distinctly more folk-orientated than most: this year, Yo La Tengo and Wilco headline. And Taffe makes no bones about the work he puts into it.

"We're thinking about headliners [for the next festival] even before the festival we're working on starts," he says. "I don't book bands that are not playing other festivals. I book bands that I know and that I like…"It's usually trying to get the headliners [which is the biggest challenge], because they're getting offered festivals all over the world. A band under a grand is easy to confirm, but a band that costs twenty or thirty grand are a lot more difficult to negotiate."

But once he'd started it, Taffe found that there was a clamour for this kind of festival: "Last year we sold a couple of thousand tickets before we'd even announced the lineup - people had faith that we were going to pick bands that they liked."

Taffe says that, although he likes the big festivals, he thinks they rely on what he terms a recycling audience. Reading, whose primary demographic is the under-twenty-fives, consistently tops up its audience levels with school leavers who, as Taffe says, are now permitted to go to Reading by their parents. And while Taffe doesn't think that End Of The Road is immune to this kind of audience, he does think that it has a certain something that keeps pulling back punters - whatever their age.

"We have a lot of the same customers who come back," he says, "and they're probably going to come there with their kids as well. But we have to pull in young people too, and get bands to attract those young people." Clearly, it's working: festivals like End Of The Road and Green Man have just been getting bigger and bigger. Taffe says that for many audiences as well as bands, this time of the year is a "last hurrah" before a long break, and therefore, he says, there's something extra-special about it.

"It's always been quite intimate, and there's only about five or six thousand people who go. The main stage is in these really cool gardens, so the sound is really good. The sound can go all over the place on a big field, especially if it's windy. It was a struggle in the first year because we didn't sell as many tickets as we'd hoped, but we had enough people there to create an atmosphere and we got loads of good reviews afterwards."

Of course, while the audiences are having an amazing time, spare a thought for the guys putting the festivals together. Often, they'll have to go beyond their standard duties to make sure everything runs smoothly. Although his planning sheets are probably stashed away somewhere safe, Gorham has certainly had to take a hands-on approach before

"…The first Bestival, we opened and we didn't have a clue what we were doing," he says. "Totally green in terms of running a festival. At midnight on the Friday, things were starting to wind down a bit. I asked the producer who was in charge overnight, and he hadn't thought about putting anyone in charge overnight - so all the production staff left! It was left to me and my wife to go round the site, shutting things down. It was horrible and scary and I didn't get any sleep that night, but actually it was a baptism of fire and it taught me that you really need to be on the case 100% of the time. The buck stops with us…We crawled into a spider-infested tepee at six in the morning, had half-an-hour's sleep and then had to get up and start getting everything ready for the next day!"

 

 

Producing gold

Although singers often get all the credit, it's the producer that does all the heavy lifting. Creating a great album or single takes hard work - and the guys behind the boards have to play a lot of roles to make it happen. First published in Aesthetica Magazine in June 2010.

A singer, or a songwriter, doesn't have to work that hard. Some would no doubt disagree - especially in the throws of writers' block or in the push to get an album finished - but once the perfect take is captured in studio, the main bulk of their work for that particular song is done. 

Not so the producer. Sure, they're responsible for creating and shaping the music, but the job of a professional producer is so much more. They have to be psychologist, voice coach, svengali, cheerleader. They need to know not only what the track sounds like now but how it will ultimately sound - and more often than not, they'll have a hand in the mixing and engineering to make it so. And unless they're a big-name producer like Rick Rubin or Brian Eno, once the record is out, the mainstream credit goes to someone else.

It's a tough job, but someone's gotta do it. Just ask MRK1.

"When I first got into music seriously, I would go out to clubs and go buy records and start paying more attention to the music," he says. "I listened to jungle, which is fairly minimalist: big beats and big bass. I come from that era, that type of presentation." 

MRK1 (born Mark Foster in 1981) is one of the pioneers of the dubstep genre; a Manchester- based production legend best known for being the creative force behind grime/dubstep act Virus Syndicate, along with the rappers Goldfinger, Nika D and JSD. They released their album The Breakout Trilogy last month, and when we speak to Foster prior to the record's release, he's on the verge of leaving for a short tour to the US. 

"I don't think there is much difference [between a producer and a beatmaker]," he says, when asked about how he works differently to someone who simply creates a piece of music and then hands it off to a vocalist. "I'm still sat in the studio making beats. It just depends what you want to be called at the time! I'm laid back; you could say I'm the guy who makes beats."

We suggest that perhaps there is a difference; after all, a guy who makes music sitting in his bedroom is a little bit different to Foster, who has three rambunctious Virus Syndicate MCs to stage-manage in studio. He demurs.

"There's a lot more direction because…you're a producer and you've got the group there with you. You give them your take on it, and they give you their take and you mix it together. If you're just making the beats - I mean, there are a lot of people who just make beats and give them to rappers who then rap on top of it - it doesn't always glue together as well as it could. If you're in studio with a group, and you can [bounce off each other] it sounds better."

This aspect of production - this psychological manipulating and mixing to balance the egos of group members versus what actually sounds good - is absolutely crucial to the role of the professional producer. It would be disingenuous to suggest that the other members of Virus Syndicate don't know what's going on (one listen to their massive, speaker-shattering tunes dispels that) but when the four are in studio, Foster is the one with his eye on the ball.

"It used to be a bit more like that [me being a ringmaster]. But I've been in the studio longer than they have. I'm 28 now, so I've got ten years worth of producing, and the guys would have got into recording when we did the first album. Back then, I'd have a lot more say about what goes into it. Over the years, they've learnt what sounds good and what doesn't, so I don't really get that involved now. Sometimes I won't like something, and I'll say, try doing this or try doing that…but it's very hard to tell three guys what to do. It's three against one! But we argue a lot in the studio, even if we end up making up."

Of course, Foster is extremely fortunate. He has a rock-solid group, a full studio setup, Room 5 Studios ("It's in a big building with loads of other studios. I think The Ting Tings moved out recently! The building is falling apart, but our studio is OK."), and a ready and willing record label, Planet µ. But he's the minority. Many other producers work from a much more fluid setup; one that is flexible, dynamic and small-scale, and which caters to a far wider group of artists.

Meet Batsauce. He's one of those guys.

The festively-named producer (born Britt Traynham in 1971 - and the name comes from his initials combined with his love of hot sauce) was born in Florida and currently lives in Germany. He's produced for everybody from his wife Lady Daisee and the group The Smile Rays to hardcore Boston rapper Mr Lif. 

Traynham's studio is compact and portable - he's a bedroom producer in every sense of the word. And unlike Foster, he doesn't always make bespoke beats. "Usually for me, I make the beat first," he says, "without even thinking about who might use it. That's usually the beginning, so I end up sending out a lot of beats. Usually, it's just catching different moods and vibes. I try to tap whatever mood or feeling I have and run with it. I did make one beat for Lif specifically and occasionally I'll make one beat for Lady Daisee specifically, but usually I just try to be creative at the beginning of it."

In many ways, Traynham is emblematic of the globalisation of production in the past fifteen years. As the internet has allowed fans to experience music from multiple sources, so has it given producers access to different musical cultures. One of Traynham's more recent projects, Gypsy Diaries, is a free instrumental project which takes in influences from across the globe. "I'm a big fan of soul music, world music, jazz, old rock, psychedelic rock, Brazilian music," he says. "To me, being a producer now is: how big is your palette? You have everything in the world now to pull from, and use, and manipulate, so it's not like you have [a limited range]."

Traynham's production swings between genres like a tail-gunner on a B52: it runs the full gamut between smooth soul, bouncy pop and gritty hip-hop. In his time, he's played bass, guitar, saxophone and keyboards, and has a very particular modus operandi in studio. "A lot of my music is manipulated samples, sometimes looped or sometimes it's highly chopped. I do play music and try to incorporate that, and I have a sample free project that I'm working on…but yeah, I sample in spite of the legal ramifications. That's the raw hip-hop aesthetic."

One of the big industry criticisms of current production is that with the cheapening of studio technology, unskilled beatmakers are starting to proliferate in all genres. Where before only producers with skills and some chops on them could get access to expensive studio hardware, now various software versions can be downloaded for very little - with what can often be an unfortunate outcome for general quality. Traynham, however, calls this cheapening of technology liberating.

"Even though I do this professionally, I'm still very much a bedroom producer - right now, my studio is in my bedroom! I think I couldn't do this right now in the current climate if I had to have a professional studio and pay rent on that as well."

 And does this proliferation of cheap, liberating software and equipment affect quality? "I do think that's true. There's a big difference between a beat and a finished song - and sometimes that does get lost. But again, hopefully, listeners can discern the difference. They know when they hear something good, and when they hear something that sounds like a demo."

Traynham maintains that another of the key aspects of production is what happens to the song after its been recorded. Although big labels and studios will have dedicated engineers employed specifically to make a song sound as good as possible, in Traynham's world - where there are no big budgets or other employees - he's the man, and makes it a point to mix his own material wherever possible. "They're always your babies," he says of his beats. "You're always concerned how they're going to be treated. I'm fortunate enough to work with [artists] where I don't have to worry about the quality of what they're doing, so I generally trust that the artist is going to do it right. I always get concerned if someone else is mixing the beat though, because to me the sonics and the overall texture of the music are a huge part of it.

"I think you have to be a bit of a visionary in the sense that you have to know what the end result should sound like. I think it's more than just making a beat or being an engineer, I think it's a little bit of all of that and knowing what's best for the artist."

 

Soundtrack moments

Whether it's a single song plucked from an album, or tasking a band to create an entire score from scratch, film soundtracks can have a massive impact on the direction and careers of those involved in them. First published in Aesthetica Magazine in April 2010.

If visitors to the frigid Oxford countryside in January of 2009 had ventured a little off the beaten track, they would have come across a very strange sight: Oly Ralfe, the lead singer of Ralfe Band, tinkering with a dusty, worn-out piano that he had put out in the snow and ice. 

Ralfe and his bandmates, including seasoned percussionist and guitarist Andrew Mitchell, were working on the score to an independent film, Bunny And The Bull. Written and directed by Paul King, it's the story of an agoraphobic man who refuses to leave his flat following an abortive road-trip around Europe with a friend.

"The film is quite otherworldly and we were having this otherworldly weather," says Ralfe. It's a year later, and the slightly dishevelled musician is sipping a cappuccino in a Soho café, sheltering from weather nearly as foul as that time in Oxford. "The director drove up and his car slid on the ice, and we were kind of stuck up there. One of the guys I do music with, he sorted out this space for us. We only had a couple of weeks notice, so we kind of had to drop everything and dive in…hire a piano, get the mics set up, get musicians in, start writing, write music every day. As opposed to writing songs here and there or writing a tune when it grabs you."

Although the similarity in the shut-in circumstances between the film and the recording environment were perhaps accidental, there is no doubt just how seriously Ralfe Band took the gig. And they should: an appearance on a soundtrack (used here in the general sense to mean the music in a film) can have an enormous impact on a band's career and direction.

The Recording Industry Association Of America estimates that over 300 million soundtrack albums have been sold worldwide. The most successful orchestral score is that of Titanic, which sold 30 million, while Whitney Houston's soundtrack for The Bodyguard clocked 17 million. Even on a smaller scale, for videogames or TV series, the impact can often be slightly surreal. Imogen Heap's strange and beautiful vocoder song Hide And Seek (come on, you know the one) originally popped up in an episode of The O.C, and went on to appear in dozens of other series and films, forever changing the direction of Heap's career. This is a big business.

There are generally two ways a director or film company can approach the music for a film: they can license existing material from various musicians for use in the film and soundtrack, or they can hire someone to create them an entirely new score - composers like Hans Zimmer or Harry Gregson-Williams often single-handedly write the music for entire films. Although Bunny And The Bull - and indeed Ralfe Band themselves - are quite some way from Titanic and The Bodyguard, they are a perfect example of the second approach.

Says Ralfe: "[The people making the film] knew what we'd done on our previous two albums and then we got a chance to do a demo - an audition in a sense, where we had to record music for a rough edit of two scenes. We basically tried out a couple of ideas, and they went for it. They really liked it. It's one of those rare things."

Ralfe's approach was in line with his frozen, weathered piano experiment: to not only introduce interesting sound elements to the equation but a wide variety of instruments such as kettle drums and castanets to create an almost flamenco-style feel to some of the pieces. In many ways, this also typifies an approach that a band will take when tasked with scoring an entire film: they will throw themselves into it, with the reasonable expectation that not only will it allow them to expand themselves musically, but that their association with the film will do good things for their career.

Ralfe says he and his bandmates never entered with that idea in mind, but he does say that there's been an impact on his band since the film's release in November 2009. "It has opened a few new avenues to what we were doing. Basically, it's pretty hard to get noticed just doing albums and songs, you know, and there's a zeitgeist factor and new bands all the time, and you're constantly competing against the big, cult names, so it is difficult to be heard. But doing a soundtrack is a way of getting heard in a very distinctive way that a lot of people aren't doing."

One band that can look back from the vantage point of a few years hence, and chart the impact a soundtrack appearance had on their career - and a perfect example of what happens when a director picks a track for licensing - is The Shins. When Zach Braff's Garden State came out in 2004, the American band were not only featured prominently on the soundtrack, but were actually name-checked in the script by Natalie Portman.

"It was very early on that Zach wanted to use a couple of our songs for his movie," says lead singer James Mercer. "It was pitched to me as an independent film, but it was written into the script very early on in the process, way before Natalie Portman was booked in the gig. If you were to make a prediction about how the movie turned out, you would say, it would be a really small production…it obviously got some funding somewhere along the way!"

That it did. The two songs featured on the soundtrack - New Slang and Caring Is Creepy - had a massive impact on the band's career, and cemented them into the musical psyches of thousands of film fans as Garden State became an indie phenomenon (Imogen Heap also popped up, performing with her band Frou Frou). Mercer says that it certainly allowed them to expand their audience; record sales for The Shins went right up "for sure", and the growing consciousness of their music allowed them to tour extensively across the US. It was not the first time that The Shins got a soundtrack shot (their song One By One All Day appeared in Jason Lee's film A Guy Thing - Mercer claims he can't remember the name of the film - and they had a song in, of all things, the Spongebob Squarepants movie) but it was certainly their biggest.

More importantly, Mercer says that although he never got too hyped-up about being on the soundtrack, he did remain pragmatic when it came to the impact it would have on The Shins. "It's funny, I think early on I needed the money more," he says. "I was in debt when we first started to make some money back. I had used credit cards to make the first record [Oh, Inverted World]. When we did get an advance from the label I used it to buy a van so we could tour. I wasn't lucky enough to have money lying around. When we started having licensing offers, which was pretty early on, I think I was pretty pragmatic about it right off the bat. It got more comfortable, I guess, as time went on, it allowed us to keep going. If I hadn't done the licensing I did, we might have been in a pretty difficult situation trying to tour and hold down day jobs and pay for equipment, because I was pretty dedicated to this idea of recording the record ourselves. It really made stuff possible."

Of course, sometimes a feature on a soundtrack might not have the impact it's expected to. Blackalicious, a hip-hop act from California, saw their bouncy It's Going Down featured on the soundtrack to the 2002 musical drama Brown Sugar. However the soundtrack, while justifiably revered for selections from relative heavyweights like The Roots and Mary J. Blige, didn't seem to do a huge amount for Blackalicious directly. They've gained a large fanbase through their long career and multiple albums, but Brown Sugar seems to be a footnote rather than a major turning point.

Gift Of Gab (Tim Parker), the emcee who, along with producer Chief Xcel (Xavier Mosley) makes up the group, does say that in terms of industry experience, getting on the soundtrack was invaluable. "The experience with MCA [who released the soundtrack] took Blackalicious from being just an underground kind of group to getting played on BET and MTV and taking us to that larger audience, kind of expanding our audience. The MCA situation was a tool in terms of expanding our audience. Sometimes when you're underground, you don't have the same political ties that a big machine like MCA would have, so that was a great experience."

The long-term impact of Bunny And The Bull on Ralfe Band is yet to be seen; there's no guarantee that such an indy project will grant them a massive career-changing turning point. But any film can be made or broken by the quality of its music, and - as was the case with The Shins - being small-scale doesn't always mean it has to stay that way.

 

What it sounds like

The medium of sound art is a complex, multilayered one that can create a huge palette of experiences. It does however possess a number of internal contradictions, which are affecting the work contemporary artists are doing. First published in Aesthetica Magazine in February 2010. 

A huge buzzing fills your headphones; all-enveloping, whipping from ear to ear. Abruptly, it cuts off, replaced by a warbling, almost-bird-like synth sound, which degenerates slowly as it is modulated, becoming more sporadic and erratic. Eventually, it is replaced by an African man speaking about a piece of music he has made, as synths gradually fade in in the background.

Not a piece of music; rather, a piece of sound art. The sounds belong to John Wynne's Upcountry. It's a recording Wynne made celebrating William Ingosi Mwoshi, a Kenyan musician. Wynne, who first premiered the piece at the Purcell Room in London in 1999, is a sound artist. 

Sound art, at it's most basic, consists of pieces of sound which, after processing and filtering them according to the desires of the artist, are arranged to form a recording which explores a particular idea or motif. Practitioners of sound art are as skilled and as resourceful as those who create art out of clay, paint, stone or metal. The sound they use can come from a range of sources. It can be 'found sound' (recordings made in the field of unplanned environmental sounds, such as a car pulling off from a red light or crickets at night) or heavily processed synth notes made with software instruments. It can take the form of, among others, acousmatic sound (highly processed, abstract and unrecognisable sounds blended together), lowercasesound (pieces which emphasise extremely quiet, soft sounds and large spaces) or intelligent dance music, which rejects the typical musicality of dance and techno for a more nuanced version. 

It is a complex, multilayered discipline, and often an extremely contradictory one. 

One of these practitioners - and one who understands the contradictions in her art form - is Katharine Norman. Trained as a musician, Norman has a PhD in computer music from Princeton University and is a senior lecturer at London's City University. She is a creator of what she terms electro-acoustic compositions, and for starters, she doesn't even like the term 'sound art'.

"I find myself using it because it seems to have a currency and people can understand it…" says Norman. "I think it was a constructed term in the 1980s…people started using the term 'sound art' as a way of talking about art made of sound in the same way you would about visual art…"

Norman, who is also author of the book Sounding Art, is creator of several pieces of sound art. One of these is Islands Of One, a layered, unsettling account of being ill in a remote place. Norman lived for a time on an island off British Columbia, and the piece, which uses the sound of gently swirling water as a backdrop to create themes of insomnia and fever, is a good example of some of the work that Norman does.

Over the past few years, a revelation has taken place in the field of home studios. Hardware and software have become cheaper and more compact; much of the heavy, space-hogging pieces of equipment like equalizers and compressors have become software (the term used for this is 'in the box'). This has changed the kind of sound art being made; although many pieces have a visual element to them as well as an auditory one (Wynne himself has used sound to create "animated architectural drawings" using stereo reflections at an exhibit at the E:Vent Gallery in London) it means that where before complex equipment was required, it is now possible to create sound art with nothing more than a good microphone and an editing program - meaning it's a lot easier to do.

Norman, who says her first forays into audio experimentation were on ancient computers with one pair of headphones shared between four students, agrees. These days, she operates from a single Mac laptop, a lot of hard drives, ProTools to edit sound (plus Final Cut Pro for the images she works with) and a "good pair of headphones."

Norman is enthusiastic about the developments in the artform. "I can remember a few years ago," she says. "Everyone saying that the bedroom studio was going to be the thing of the future, and in many respects it is, but I don't think people knew how it would change the kind of work produced and also the ways and reasons for producing it. I think what I've noticed is that there is a lot more music-making going on in all kinds of contexts between groups of friends; ad-hoc improvisation, and also people making fixed media pieces - which I suppose you might call sound art sometimes, with entirely varying resources. I think that does result inevitably in a much more variable and wider range of…craft and quality. I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing, and I don't necessarily rate expertise in craft as being my main criteria in deciding whether a piece of work is valid or interesting."

Of course, this is another of the inherent contradictions of producing sound art. It's a big one: at what point does a collection of sounds, labelled sound art, become a piece of music?

According to Moeti Damane, a Lesotho-born music producer who goes by the name of San The Instrumonumentalist, such a point exists. "There should be [a dividing line]…It has to be conceptual. Concept has to ring out more than anything else. If you try to fuse sound and art together, then there has to be an underlying concept. There is all kinds of sound out there - even noise counts as sound - so I think it has to have a theme."

Damane specialises in the production of instrumental hip-hop music for a variety of artists but he, along with his production partner, South African Mark Sunners (known as Alias, and collectively known as Inspiration) have been stepping over that line for some time. Their latest project, Numb3rs And Alphab3ts, is a mix of both contemporary beats and elements that push it into the direction of sound art composition.

Take their piece Blood In The Well. It begins with the sound of dripping water, echoing as if in a dark, dense place, before kicking into a highly emotionally-charged beat which melds a regular hip-hop drum break with several different samples. On the surface, it's a piece of music; yet it has several of the stylistic techniques common to much contemporary sound art. 

"What I wanted to invoke [with Blood In The Well] was almost a feeling of you being there as the listener," says San, who, like Norman, works off a single laptop and a pair of headphones. "Being able to interpret the music implicitly. The emotion and the perception has to be somewhat similar to a greater degree for someone listening to a piece of music. I wanted to capture that moment of silence, but at the same time have your mind drifting towards the overall concept of the piece of music which was of people facing all kinds of hardships…with that little moment of silence, I was able to capture that."

Sunners agrees with his production partner that, "both sound art and very good instrumental music would be one and the same thing, because it takes you to another realm. It takes you out of yourself. You experience [something] through the sound, which is what good instrumental music does. That's a commonality they share. It creates an auditory landscape….With sound art, you are being enveloped in an experience, where both the person who is experiencing it and the person who created the art are linking through that experience."

Inspiration are not alone in this type of musical experimentation; others, like Dutch producer Nicolay of the group The Foreign Exchange, uses sound art practices to paint aural pictures of urban environments in his City Lights series. His latest release, Shibuya, explores Tokyo, taking in the silence of Ueno Park before slamming into the controlled chaos of Shibuya Station. 

Of course, sound art is as much about who is listening and how they are listening as it is about the sounds that are being played. It is not uncommon for pieces of sound art to be played through massive installations: speaker stacks scaling up the sides of buildings, huge rooms filled with carefully calibrated subwoofers designed to rattle your stomach, perfectly dark spaces filled with increasing concentrations of ambient sound. With such a wide palette of experiences and artists working their magic, sound art - whether you agree with the term or not - can be an enormously rewarding medium.

 

Promo For The People

Musicians have taken their promotion out of the hands of big companies, attempting a new DIY approach to standing out from the crowd. Everything has changed, from the techniques to the content. Here's how it works. First published in Aesthetica Magazine in December 2009.

Ask Pavan Mukhi about the song Contact - the bouncy new single for his hip-hop crew The Foreign Beggars - and you'll get a perplexed, almost bemused response. "We started a promo on that track about two months ago," says Mukhi, known in his MC capacity as the interestingly named Orifice Vulgatron. "There were a select few people who responded to the tune and like the tune for what it was, and then as soon as the video was released, everybody was flipping over the track. I want to say the track itself is groundbreaking, it's definitely a club banger that can't be ignored, but it wasn't there until people saw the video." Since Contact was debuted on Youtube at the beginning of October, it has garnered over 160,000 views.

He isn't just referring to something you might catch on MTV either. Like many artists, The Foreign Beggars have had to completely redefine their approach to promoting themselves. With copies of a new album, United Colours of Beggatron, to shift and shelf space to fight for, it is video content that Pavan and three bandmates have made to complement the music that is really helping to raise their crew out of the mire of the thousands of other musicians trying to get put on.

It's not just music videos either; the Beggars are also making slick videos of their studio sessions and engineering work, and distributing it to fans via Youtube. And then there's the Audiosonic Neuromedical viral video the band participated in, along with associates Shlomo, Stig of the Dump, Dr Syntax and The Scratch Perverts. That video - not so much a specific song as an experiment in blending hip-hop with fantastic special effects - attracted over 300,000 views. Says Mukhi: "It's that kind of stuff that traditionally would go onto a band's DVD, but you can now pump it out a little earlier to publicise yourself. I think rather than doing a campaign of loads of small things to increase your profile, you can increase your content."

Ten years ago - or even five - promotion was in the hands of a few closed companies, and was a discipline that most artists steered clear of entirely. Because at that time access to music and music videos was almost completely dependent on mainstream music channels, the general rule was for an artist to hire a company that had access to the playlist controllers.

But as clichéd as it now seems, along came the Internet. Things are different now. For starters, there are many, many more active recording artists than there once were. The rise of websites like MySpace coupled with drastic price drops in home recording software and equipment meant that suddenly there were thousands upon thousands of bands, DJs, singers and MCs hunting for your attention; the entry fee was lowered, literally and figuratively. According to web strategist Jeremiah Owyang, there are now more than eight million musicians on MySpace, and that's just one website. That's a lot of people among whom to stand out.

But it isn't just the nature and size of the content that has changed; it's the availability. Videos are now available at the click of a button, as are free downloads of almost any artist's work. The companies paid for their access to those who determine what the public would listen to no longer control the market. They can't; while PR outfits will always have their place, there is simply much less incentive for an artist to hire them, and even less incentive for an artist to work with the traditional music label model.

So musicians have to adapt. They're turning away from the traditional model of being under a label and its associated and often monolithic publishing, distribution and promotional arms (Mukhi runs his own label, Dented Records, which houses the Beggars), and are adopting techniques designed to push their name above everyone else's. And it's not just digital content that artists are using to stand out. Just ask The Kiara Elles. Named for their energetic front woman Chiara Lucchini, the pop-punk five piece has been making some serious noise through slightly more DIY means. "When you first start making music, you have to put a bit of work into realising what stands out," says Lucchini. "You've got to keep at it and have an idea of what's going on around you…bands can't really depend on record sales anymore." To that end, Lucchini and her bandmates decided to (somewhat) turn their back on the digital model and do something different. They've pressed 500 copies of their Odio EP on 7" vinyl, and have hand-stitched individually textured wallpaper sleeves for them, which they are pushing at their gigs to great effect.

Lucchini says the process, which she likens to a production line, took her and her bandmates five months to complete. "We had to buy the wallpaper, cut it up. Emma [Quick, bassist] did all the stencilling. We had to buy rubber and make our own stamps. It's gone quite well - we've sold about 60 copies already." Quick adds: "Selling records is hard. It's easy to get a song off but fans don't buy CDs anymore. We set out to make something really special - to make people see a record as an object again. Every bit of it is done with our hands." It's worth noting that this is another example of something that, traditionally, a band would have handed off to a PR company to organise. The Kiara Elles do still employ such a company, but they're also recognising what they have to do for themselves, promotions-wise, to become the band the fans pay attention to. 

Of course, this kind of do-for-self promotional aesthetic extends far beyond just content creation. As the social networking opportunities of the net have grown and mutated, so too have the techniques of promotion. For a perfect example of removing the promotion work from a private company, one only has to look at someone like Leigh Steven-Jennings. The South African-born dance DJ, known as Little Leigh, has made it her goal to become a one-woman promo machine. Although directly associated with several outfits, such as DIRTYdubbin and Defected, Steven-Jennings has played her own online game to great effect. It's worked, too, landing her gigs in Ibiza and Greece as well as several residencies in London.

Despite her massive presence online, she feels that the major shifts will come in the future. "I feel [nowadays] promotional work is still a hands-on, face-to-face approach as well as using the Internet and social networking sites, whereas in five years time I feel that promotion in itself will be largely Internet based as it saves time and money, and the options are endless in terms of information and resources which are at your disposal to further your career." Leigh's own dedicated website, she says, attracts between 500 and 1000 hits every month from people linking through her Facebook account (exact hit numbers for the website weren't available, as it's only been active for a short time).

Of course, all of this is meaningless if it doesn't have a direct, measurable effect on the artist's album sales - digitally or physically - and attendance at shows. Asked whether the high video viewing figures will directly affect sales, Mukhi is noncommittal. "It just depends," he says carefully. "I think with a song it's stranger, because people hear it again and again and they become familiar with it and it becomes a part of their life, and that increases the chances of them being on iTunes and buying the song. I can't say there's an exact correlation, but I know for a fact that because we are getting so much attention with the Contact video, the number of people who would buy the record has increased."

At the time of going to the press, Beggatron had sold over 1500 copies. "We hope to sell five times as much as our previous records," says Mukhi, who also notes that the 12" version has sold 4000 copies already - up from around 1500 for previous releases. Altogether, Mukhi estimates that due to the massive increase in promotion, the Beggars will sell between seven and eight thousand physical copies (he won't be drawn on digital downloads).

There's no question that, while the tactics are changing, the numbers that The Foreign Beggars, The Kiara Elles and Little Leigh are putting up, while nothing to sniff at, are probably somewhat lower than they would have been in previous years. Whether you put this down to the prevailing economic climate or the overabundance of acts is down to you, but keep this in mind: as artists change the promotional model, these numbers are going to get a whole lot bigger, and Pavan, Chiara and Leigh are just getting started.

 

Legal: The copyright to all words on this page is held by Rob Boffard. All material was first published in the sources indicated. All photography was supplied to the publications for press purposes and is merely being reprinted here. Unauthorised reproduction, copying and use will earn your ass a beat down.