Music Archives
April 04, 2008
Doctors. Don't talk to me about doctors
I've not been well. Two weeks laid low by a mystery virus. My doctor disagrees: I'm in perfect health, he says, refusing me medication. He's pursuing some kind of Californian mind control strategy. I take him nasty symptoms and he denies they exist. The other day I told him I was feeling breathless. "Listen", I said, wheezing. He countered with an oxygen saturation test - "100%" the little read-out blinked. "You're in perfect health. You could join the fire brigade. In fact here's their number. You'll be up a ladder by tea time". "No thanks" I said. "Coast Guard?"
The other day Russell was complaining about space film music and proposed Palestrina as an alternative to the usual orchestral stuff. I can see his point but I think I can hear something different, something muckier and a bit less heavenly out there in the void. So I made a Muxtape: my first go is a kind of fantasy space-noir movie soundtrack. Muxtape is really addictive fun and, incidentally, exactly the kind of thing the music biz should be embracing. Imagine millions of these things legally doing the rounds. Of course, what they'll actually do is ignore it then complain about it and then probably shut it down.
March 11, 2008
Buy my old records!
I thought it was easy to sell vintage records on eBay. Evidently no one wants a 1985 Run DMC 12", a White Vinyl Dollar single or a 1982 Grandmaster Flash 12". What's going on?
September 05, 2007
Mid-century masterpieces
Another great big muscular 20th Century prom last night, with exceptional music from the old Austro-Hungary. I'm a sucker for this kind of ambitious, cerebral and passionate music: something dark and vital about it. Something to do with its origin slap bang in the middle of Europe during its most turbulent century too.
These works are like the mirror twins of the big-hearted, optimistic, melodic American music I blogged last week. Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta is particularly awesome and mysterious and the Ligeti is the most gripping, claustrophobic sound you'll hear this week (both pieces were used by Kubrick in movie soundtracks, by the way). Listen again here (at least until next Tuesday).
July 02, 2007
Planklantis
The story: Russell and his friends from the Electro Plankton Quartet played for ten minutes on their Nintendo DSs at Interesting 2007. The music was recorded, of course. I twittered an amazing video from the launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis and Garret Keogh twittered back that I ought to pair the music and the video. So I did. Result: masterpiece.
November 16, 2006
These men could make it all better for the music business
At yesterday's Beyond The Soundbytes music biz conference I ran into Paul Sanders, a major blast from the past (like it says on his web site: "since 1994") and the man behind State51 and all sorts of other music-related online thingies. Anyway, he was with Paul Hitchman, his partner in Playlouder, a clever broadband 'Music Service Provider' that really ought to be vast by now but has found progress difficult since their model depends on striking licensing deals with stupid record labels.
Playlouder's model is simple and persuasive. I've always liked it and will certainly sign up like a shot once they've got better coverage with the labels (Currently Sony/BMG and the indies are covered). You pay a monthly subscription for your broadband including an approximately £10 per month additional charge which entitles you to download all the music you want. Playlouder passes a sensible proportion of this levy onto the labels – and therefore to the artists – thus magically 'decriminalising' your hideous file sharing naughtiness. Additional benefit to you the shameless music thief: no DRM.
Benefit to the labels, artists, collection societies et al:
• a predictable annuity return on their investment in new music
• recognition for the value of the music that's already circulating in the file sharing networks
• some measure of control over what appears there (they could start to seed the networks with good quality, properly marked-up copies of their music instead of the rubbish that's out there now)
• a business model that's actually in line with what their customers want
I could go on...
I guess the encouraging thing about the conference for the Playlouder boys ought to be that the various music biz types present enthusiastically backed the idea of a shift to a subscription model (or at least an experiment in that area). If the industry's devotion to 'unit sales' is finally fading, then a business like Playlouder ought be well-positioned to help them make it happen.
Fly in ointment: as Jeremy Silver, another old-timer, pointed out in one of the panels, only one of the four majors is a UK-based company so the owners of the majority of the world's recorded music couldn't give a damn what happens here.
September 05, 2006
Joy Division on YouTube
So what is it about this nearly thirty year-old video that makes my spine tingle. Bloody hell...
September 04, 2006
OK. I give in
So, I've always been suspicious of orchestral music. I'm no musician (no kidding) but I love music and a long time ago I decided that orchestral music was all together too bourgeois for me, too big and industrial in scale. Orchestral music in the nineteenth century mold – hierarchical, formal, un-ironic (capitalist, black tie music, I used to call it) – made me uncomfortable and I took refuge in much more direct and emotional chamber music from the same era (Schubert, Beethoven, Haydn, Mendelsohn...). But, obviously, you can't ignore the orchestras and their repertoire. They're a presence, an unarguable cultural force, even in these difficult times for classical music.
So I tuned in to tonight's big prom: The Philadelphia Orchestra's epic double header attempt at the fifth symphonies of both Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. First of all, watching it on the TV, the Beethoven was so awesome and so honest and the whole orchestra so committed that I was totally won over. Then, in the interval, Christoph Eschenbach, the orchestra's super-charismatic conductor (the kind of guy you'd really want as a boss) was interviewed and he was so fascinating and his involvement with the music so complete that I decided I'm now definitely over my aversion to orchestral music.
The second half was the convincer. I've never liked Tchaikovsky, a composer from the wrong (flabby, pre-modernist) end of the 19th Century, lacking the rigour and intensity and broody, Middle European grit of the early classical stuff that I love and the scary atonal stuff that followed. Yes – obviously, I suppose – the Tchaikovsky was amazing. I don't have the wit to describe this quite amazing, muscular, emotional material but you can listen to the performance (and, I hope, Eschenbach's terrific interval interview) at the Radio 3 web site for a week after tonight. Do so.
June 15, 2006
While I've been away...
I'm sorry, I've not been concentrating properly lately. Also, I'm not 100% sure you can even see these entries since I got Robin to upgrade me to MT 3.2 the other day. From my house I can't see anything more recent than the Eurovision Song Contest. Anyway, here are some great things: Elvis Costello's collaboration with Allen Toussaint. Juliet hates Costello so I'm winding her up something rotten by leaving the album playing in the car whenever I switch off. It's quite awesome. About ten absolutely brilliant songs that I can't stop singing (the kids shout at me to shut up on the school run – I have become an embarrassing Dad). Toussaint and Costello are men in their prime: driving, soulful, humane, er... tromboney (also, this year's best lyric: "What happened to that Liberty Bell I heard so much about?/Did it really ding dong?/It must have dinged wrong/It didn't ding long.").
Obviously I'm a regular listener to 'On Your Farm', the BBC's weekly farming show that goes out at the crack of dawn on a Sunday. Last week it came from a dairy farm in Somerset run by a friendly sounding geezer called Michael Eavis (of course, no one at the Beeb thinks it worthwhile keeping stuff like this available for longer than a week so here's an MP3).
It's sort of rambling and not, perhaps, the toughest critique the author will see but I am an absolute junkie for Freeman Dyson in any context and his review of Daniel Dennett's anti-religion book in the NYRB is readable and clever and full of good anecdotes (my own view is that scientists don't serve the scientific cause as well as they think they do when they wade in to demolish religion. In fact, I think they almost always wind up making a series of category errors that make them look obsessive and pedantic and not lofty and disinterested as they no doubt intend).
April 13, 2006
On getting old
So Paul sent me a link to a track by The Au Pairs, awesome feminist guitar-funk post-punks whose prickly, jumpy-up-and-downy sort of agit-pop animated our (Paul's and mine) late teens nicely while he was in Birmingham – The Au Pairs' home town – and I was in Stevenage – the singer's home town (and before we knew each other).
Listening to the Au Pairs brought on a short burst of nostalgia (short because I was supposed to be preparing for a big, trans-Atlantic video conference, which is the kind of thing you do approximately 25 years after your last major pop obsession) and a bit of clicking here and there, including, of course, Wikipedia for more Au Pairs stuff (Paul insists Lesley is not a lesbian and I don't know why he hasn't just corrected the entry himself, since it's a Wiki and all that).
While I was clicking I came across Philippe Carly's absolutely awesome archive of 'new wave photos' (44 pics of Young Marble Giants, 189 of OMD, 27 of Delta Five... It goes on and on). Philippe's doing all this for love, of course, so you should click over there right now and leave a few quid in his Paypal tip jar, especially if you too spent the end of the Seventies and the start of the eighties watching floppy-haired soon-to-be accountants and school teachers jangling and jouncing and swaying around the stage at The Hammersmith Palais or The Lyceum (do you remember those Sunday afternoon mega-gigs with a half-a-dozen bands one-after-the-other and bring your own sandwiches? Pigbag, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Thompson Twins, The Raincoats, The Passions, The Pop Group...)
Philippe tells me he's got some pics of The Ramones in a show at Proud Galleries in London opening on 26th April – I think I'll go.
January 15, 2006
Cuddly musical genius in town
About ten years ago, I met Elliot Carter. When I say 'met', I mean I stood next to him outside the cloakroom at The Museum of Modern Art in New York while someone fetched his coat. At the time I thought this was pretty cool (cooler still because earlier that day I'd stood next to another cuddly modernist – Allen Ginsberg – in a lift. I said "hello", he said "yeh". Or it might have been "yh").
Carter was mobbed by adoring fans approximately one-fifth his age – students, I guess – all pressing scores and books and albums on him for his autograph. The man was 87, smiley and cute. This year he's 97 and everybody still loves him, of course. In fact, I think he must be the world's best-loved difficult atonal composer.
I'd love to be at The Barbican tomorrow for the last day of the big Carter weekend but my kids won't let me – his may be the most accessible scary post-war music you can get but they're not buying it. We might make it to the ridiculously friendly and cheery Children's Classic Concert at the same venue in May but I'm pretty sure they won't be doing any Carter (no. I checked. They're not doing any Carter).
January 10, 2006
Old music
A couple of years after the giant sucking sound coming from Cupertino was first heard in even the quieter parts of the record industry there can't be much music released that isn't available for download straight away somewhere or other and, for you cheapskates, the file sharing networks are bigger and more useful than ever. What I've been wondering, though, is "where is all the out-of-copyright stuff?"
Recordings made in the first half of the last century – hundreds of thousands of them presumably, from just about every nation and musical style on earth – are now out-of-copyright. Bunk Johnson, Caruso, Sophie Tucker, Mistinguett, The Carter Family, Toscanini, Big Bill Broonzy, George Formby: hundreds of artists should by now be available for download but it's way too patchy.
Archive.org provides a lot of this material (especially 78s) but there don't seem to be any dedicated out-of-copyright archives. Archiving and indexing this culturally important and hard-to-find material (as well as the movies and radio programmes and comic books and posters and magazines and theatre programmes and...) looks like a very useful (and entirely legal) job for the file sharing networks to tackle.
As an obvious public service, it might also insulate the P2P networks from further vandalism by the labels. It would certainly be harder for a witless Judge to switch off a network the majority of whose content was recorded before he was born than one pointlessly stuffed with already ubiquitous contemporary top 40 material.
June 26, 2005
Being there without being there
Flickr's Glastonbury tag (and the RSS feed).
January 25, 2005
More divas
Now I feel bad. I forgot to mention that, in the last few weeks we lost two of the most important Old School opera goddesses of all time: Victoria de los Angeles and Renata Tebaldi. In their native countries (Spain and Italy respectively) they were practically worshiped. They were contemporaries of Callas and of comparable stature. They're both in my record collection – de los Angeles on several super-cheap CDs probably given to me by my friend Paul who used to buy that sort of thing from a stall on Whitechapel Waste when he worked over the road at Eastside Books (her lovely Catalan songs seem to be unavailable but you can still get this fat collection of traditional Spanish song at amazon.co.uk) and Tebaldi on heavy vintage vinyl probably bought from the quite amazing and precious Harold Moore's Records in Great Marlborough Street when I worked next door at Marks and Spencer. Opera divas are no longer glamorous, remote figures, loved by millions from a distance – they're struggling to retain their relevance, losing a lot of weight (well, most of them), doing Reality TV shows and charity concerts. They should be a protected species.
September 26, 2004
Classical music's mess
Twenty years ago, when I started listening to classical music, things looked pretty good for the form. A small revival was under way – lots of gorgeous new music, influential movie soundtracks and superstar ensembles seemed to promise some kind of renaissance. The subsidised concert halls were full and radio deregulation promised a wave of new classical stations. Now, things are much gloomier.
Classical music is a basket case, in fact. The generation that was supposed to save it has moved on – either to revitalised 'serious' rock or to some point on the huge and groovy spectrum of dance music. Classical album sales have collapsed, the labels can't fund the big budget recordings any more and even the major orchestras are struggling. A decade of wasted investment in witless crossover acts and overpaid has-beens hasn't helped. Worst of all, no one knows what to do – there's no evidence that the industry has a response up its sleeve – either to the disastrous loss of audience or to the promise of new technology.
Meanwhile, Radio 3 and a bunch of top orchestras have got together to make classical performance available to people who wouldn't normally see it. Disabled people are invited to call 0800 033 033 and book a free performance from some of the best musicians in the land in their own home. Marvelous: a really brave initiative – but it got me thinking. What classical music needs, I think, is something bigger, something much more ambitious.
The subsidised ensembles ought to launch the biggest outreach programme in their history. It's quite simple (and it's really just the disabled scheme on a bigger scale): for a year, anyone who can promise an audience of more than, say, twenty, should be able to call a single number and book an orchestra, a chamber group, a choir or a soloist for a free performance anywhere. I'd like to see a year of frenetic activity from the musicians and administrators, composers and conductors – a really serious effort to convert thousands, tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of new listeners, a really serious effort to rescue classical music from the heartbreaking spiral of irrelevance it's caught in now.
Speaking of classical outreach, every programme in Radio 3's brilliant Discovering Music series is worth listening to and they have a proper archive.
August 20, 2004
Old punks
Jamie Reid's cover art was the ultimate 'fuck off' to our parents' generation and all that fuss about the Queen and EMI was intoxicating if your last album purchase was Tales from Topographic Oceans. So now all that perfectly ephemeral stuff is perfectly collectable – and, I'll tell you, I'd like one... (does that make me hopelessly middle-aged?).
May 21, 2003
Why I love chamber music more than orchestral music
I don't think that anything so tender, tragic or complete as Schubert's String Quintet in C exists in the orchestral repertoire. And nowhere else will you find such passion, love and involvement as among the musicians who play it. An (unidentified) musician from a Radio 4 documentary about the Quintet:
“The expression also comes, I suppose, from loving the music and loving to play with those particular players enough to give away your personality to what they want to do at any given time. So, if you imagine, in the quintet, all five players have the leading voice at different points and you have to be confident enough and love the other four enough to trust them to take you where they want. You need imagination in the players – something that's not routine, something that's not "we've done this before. We know this piece". And yet you have to have done it before, you have to know this piece. And yet you have to have a free mind...”
This is brilliant radio (which will presumably have been overwritten by the next programme in the series by now. How annoying is that?). Update: Sure enough, the Schubert programme has been replaced by a George Formby programme.