#they were very involved in the local scene of the niche music i liked

[faderifter]

i know this point has been made exhaustively but being fuck zoned hurts SO BAD. thinking you make a friend only for them to distance themselves when they realise they can’t have sex with you, for that to happen over and over, to feel like the only way you can make some kind of connection is to be sexually available…it’s crushing and extremely isolating. This is an experience I think most people perceived as female can relate to, doubly so for those who are in male dominated spaces and/or autistic

[riusugoi]

Protocols: Duty, Despair and Decentralisation transcript - Matt Dryhurst

https://medium.com/@matdryhurst/protocols-duty-despair-and-decentralisation-transcript-69acac62c8ea  No-one is going to pay for music anymore sufficient to keep scenes as we know them going. At least not in the ways many have been used to. So while some artists might make petty change from digital sales through Bandcamp, my assumption is that those figures will dwindle over time as streaming establishes greater supremacy. My assumption is also that whichever streaming platform wins (as all roads lead to monopoly in this current paradigm), the artists that benefit from that streaming platform will be those that most dutifully satisfy the requirements of the streaming platform, which I think is a very different aspiration than satisfying the requirements of feeding healthy international and local music scenes. When Daniel Ek says he wants “one million artists to live from their work”, I think of one million musicians, sitting in flat shares, stocking playlists for people to shower to. Music from nowhere, for no-one in particular. A far cry from a healthy, or interesting, music community that people in attendance today might care about.  My other assumption is that Spotify won’t succeed. If I were Google, or Apple, or Amazon, I would look at Spotify’s immense burn rate: “they posted an operating loss of $461 million on revenue of nearly $5 billion last year”, and bide my time. From where I stand, Spotify is spending immense amounts of money to reorder the way music works as we know it. They might well eradicate the traditional label and publishing model, by finding new ways for artists to post directly to their platform, locking them into new forms of agreements over their work that also indemnifies them, or any prospective parent company, from legal action over copyright infringing material that might be hosted on their servers. Soundcloud is trying to do something similar with their new agreements, and in lieu of a viable business model appearing, all I read from that is that these are moves to leave the door open to potential acquisition by a bigger fish I don’t think there will be a streaming competitor to Spotify, or whoever might acquire them. Our best bet is to drastically reconsider the value proposition of music. What do people value and what are they prepared to support? the club music economy is resilient in ways that other scene economies are not. Club music, on the contrary, is very much based on location and loyalty, and is more generalised and functional. People go to dance, and are often less concerned with who is playing than what they are playing. The functional underpinnings of most club music are also compatible with the functional expectations of streaming, as both require a fast and steady stream of somewhat anonymous compositions that transition seamlessly into one another. Music to work to. Music to play to. Seamless. This is all well and good, but again we are left asking, what about those musicians who don’t want to tailor their output to a predetermined function?

One of the significant battles we face at the moment is a war between music from nowhere, and music from somewhere. Music designed for instantaneous engagement, and instantaneous dismissal, and music that communicates with an archive. The role of the critic has been under threat some for time, and will continue to lose influence to algorithmic populism, and the kindof process-hack algorithmic manipulation that makes stars on Instagram and Youtube. Spotify and Apple are already hiring journalists to cover the work they promote on their platform, so we will see more hagiographical journalism feeding that system, and the traditional idea of the critic as arbiter of taste, and gatekeeper of the archive, will continue to be eroded. Other gatekeepers, such as labels and niche festivals, will continue to lose prominence over time unless they radically reconsider their value propositions. The end of history? Nope, but the end of an era for sure. The recent announcement that Conde Nast intends to paywall all of it’s publications, presumably including Pitchfork, by 2020 is interesting news. Exclusivity like this might work for the cream of publications, and also might perhaps trigger a snow ball of similar subscription plays by smaller publications. I like it when people pay for things, and we will see how that experiment plays out, but once paywalled, what we understand as the archive might well end up being housed behind those walls. Better that than disappearing altogether, perhaps. RBMA and Boiler Room have been busy creating maps of culture. Maps are valuable, as they allow for the establishment of trade routes. On the one hand, RBMA and Boiler Room are doing a great job, as their models are predicated on the primacy of the kind of cultures that are under threat by the algorithmic populism of say, a Spotify or a Youtube. Contrary to the hackneyed divisions that linger from the past, there really is no “mainstream” or “underground” in this new economy. Under ad-driven platform capitalism, there are either fertile pathways to sell people stuff, or barren and quantified pathways to sell people stuff. It’s a map. I’ve said a million times, in this economy, unique niches (or unexplored corners) are highly valuable. If you are an artist whose practice speaks to a unique intersection, say based on genre, identity, or personal narrative, then you are an interesting proposition to advertisers, as you are prospectively establishing new territory to sell people stuff. Brands, as patrons, want you to establish new territory on their behalf, and be first to that party. So, for example, if now millions of people have the tools to create good-enough-Jeff-Mills-derivative techno tracks, it only makes sense that the distinguishing logic that someone might use to opt to support producer X over producer Y would heavily focus on tangential narrative elements. So much so that these narrative elements become the main source of value when competing with art of similar formal characteristics. Those tangential elements are perhaps better understood as metadata; equally optimal for growing new audiences and courting the interest of brands looking to achieve visibility in new niche markets. The original indie pioneers did a great service to music, but let’s be real, have left us all an impossible legacy to continue. Record sales = money in the bank = options. Period. Options to say no. Options to do wild, and risky things. Who has those options today? Where would the money come from?     So the original indies, as far as I can tell, were predicated on two firm principles: 1.The majors were corrupt, strong armed bad music into the popular spotlight, and ignored radical new developments in music creation and localised scenes that needed to be represented. 2.On the other hand, being independent meant doing what you wanted, however you wanted it, with no-one above you influencing your creative decisions. Self sufficiency basically. People who colluded with brands were considered sell-outs as they had to tame their vision to appeal to a wider audience and secure that funding. I know of more people who cite concerns about the gentrifying effects of transnational cultural institutions spending money across the globe, but lets be honest, indie music scenes of socially mobile young artists were doing just fine at gentrifying neighbourhoods before brand money got involved. So, in the vast vast majority of cases, what is the inconsistency here? Warp, or Dischord, or 4AD, or whatever, aren’t communist enterprises. They aren’t radical free culture enterprises. No. They are and were, for better or worse, entities that made great strides to support the individual visions of unique artists, and helped them to gain prominence in the market for music, and for a period of time symbiotically reaped the rewards from sales of that work. I think that in many ways, the foundational logic of independent music won. Now large portions of the economy are predicated on the promise of individualist independence. Everyone is free to self publish their unique perspective, and hypothetically find an audience for it online. That being said, we hardly live in a utopia as a result. 

It is no secret that many of the original indies were founded by the wealthy, or in many cases by middle class entrepreneurs who could afford to dedicate their 20s to a speculative cultural business. Equal ability to publish something means nothing when only those with the ability to fund promotion of the work are discovered. I’ve said it before, there will be an abundance of free culture, and free time, in the slums. Amazon can produce your product cheaper than you can, and strong arm you out of business unless you work with them. Facebook can acquire any competitor before they become dangerous. Pop music can appropriate and spit out your micro-scene before it has any ability to generate its own momentum, or it’s own funds.

In 2019 we all work for Kanye, only some of us figured out how to get paid for it.

So in the absence of the ability to accrue a foundation of wealth and stability for new music, independent artists who gained prominence via the centralised media channels of the 80s and 90s will reign supreme over the long tail of precarious younger artists until the day they choose to call it quits. The gravitational pull of those artists who established the categories by which playlists, and festival line ups, must orient themselves to reach enough people, dictates that most new music emerging needs to flatter the formal and conceptual foundations of those pioneers.

There is going to be a whole lot more music that flatters the impressive legacies of Aphex Twin, Bjork, Timbaland, Missy Elliott, Aaliyah, Jeff Mills etc as those are the kind of petrified shapes of envelope-pushing music from just before when the volcano of Web 2.0 went off 🌋 .Radical musical culture circa-1996 preserved forever, like the ruins of Pompeii - or as I believe Mark Fisher (or Simon Reynolds, or both??) referred to it, a kind of permanent 1990s.

Well on the one hand, the platform monopolies like Spotify and Youtube are going to continually erode your influence with every new person that comes online. Their algorithms will direct traffic away from your priorities, and towards theirs, and to survive in that ecosystem you will need to satisfy their agenda. Doesn’t sound too independent does it? Journalists will have to write more about what Spotify prioritises. Artists will have to make work to satisfy the debased formal requirements of those platforms. Labels will be shoo-ed off like annoying pests that are messing with the platforms long term vision. Really bad, and a great reason to be really angry at that particular logic of culture.

If your previous raison d’être was to support marginal communities, and weird music, you are probably going to end up being out competed by their models. Models that manage to leverage brand money to support those communities will grow and grow in prominence. The thing is, if you are playing exactly the same game, and one entity found a model to support exactly the same thing that you have supported traditionally, but more effectively, then you are probably going to lose that game. It sucks, but that’s what is likely going to happen.

I think the ‘cultural cartography’ model discussed before is quite precarious, as of course they too need for new and diverse things to actually be happening on the ground in order to maintain the model that they have built. Companies dependent on brand money are always a few emails away from being out of favour. State supported festivals are very fragile to that possibility too. As the popular narrative that Spotify is ‘solving the problem’ of music proliferates further, it is going to become increasingly difficult for people to convince brands, or an increasingly conservative state, that these niche pockets of music we might care about are worth the investment. Stat-supported music, if unimpeded, will come into direct conflict with state supported music.

So I actually think it is in everyone’s interests for new models to emerge.

I think some of those models can be complimentary to the institutions we have today, and some can be wholly antagonistic, and ideally we would see both come to prominence in the next few years for the health of scene development across the board.

As I said before, one reason I see things going south for competitors to the brand-aligned organisations is that they are competitive. You solve this problem quite easily by becoming uncompetitive, and doing something they can’t or won’t do.

One thing brands or their intermediaries can’t do, for example, is distribute ownership under a cooperative model. They literally can’t. But there are all kinds of reasons why that might make sense for various different cultural scenes or organisations.

Co-operativising creates loyalty and an alignment of interests between an organisation, festival, artists and audience.

Co-operativising allows for collective strategising towards common objectives. Rather than funds being ingested to the benefit of one artist, in competition with another, those same funds can be channeled into infrastructure that helps everybody and keeps the culture afloat.

So what of decentralization? To explain what decentralisation is, I’m going to borrow from Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin’s model, which is focussed on technical infrastructure but has application beyond that.

He breaks decentralisation into 3 groups:

Architectural (de)centralization — how many physical computers is a system made up of? How many of those computers can it tolerate breaking down at any single time?

Political (de)centralization — how many individuals or organizations ultimately control the computers that the system is made up of?

Logical (de)centralization — do the interfaces and data structures that the system presents and maintains look more like a single monolithic object, or an amorphous swarm? One simple heuristic is: if you cut the system in half, including both providers and users, will both halves continue to fully operate as independent units?

Benefits of decentralisation in the context of music:

1) the network/archive is hard to take down. If Soundcloud fails, what happens to all that music, and the activity around it? If a magazine goes down, what happens to all of that history?

Decentralised, nodal systems like blockchains, or torrent networks, are resilient both architecturally and logically. You can’t cut the head off them. It took the state to take down What.cd for example, such was its resiliency.

Projects like IPFS propose a peer-to-peer immutable web, a web that can never be taken down, fortified by a nodal structure not dissimilar to torrent seeding.

2) regarding political decentralisation, this can be approached by entertaining ideas of common ownership. Rather than a centralised team at Spotify, or Youtube, making decisions that determine how your artwork is distributed, or the logics by which some work is made more visible, and prioritised over other work, politically decentralised networks entertain the possibility of pluralistic and democratic decision making.

3) Decentralised networks, when dealing with an open source code base, also allow for forking. If you don’t the way things work, you are encouraged to take the code and build something that disagrees with it. Over time what this mechanism creates is a healthy competition of ideas, and participant choice.

[weneverlearn]

GARAGE PUNK DOC IN THE WORKS! 

Wherein Italian trash rock lifers dust off their old VHS concert tapes and pick up a new camera to document the 1990s garage rock scene.

About the last week of November, a trailer of sorts (above) was making the trash rock rounds. It’s cool clips and odd editing of some of the best garage bands of the 1990s piqued lots of interest and fevered sharings, garnering excited queries of “What?” “When?” “Who?” Gaaaaaggghh!!”

Well it turns out I had a clue, as this in-the-works documentary of the end-of-the-century garage rock scene (ala the one covered in my book) is being scrummed up by Italian uber-fans, Massimo Scocca and Gisella Albertini. They not only started booking great bands from all over the wold in their town of Torino and beyond northern Italy back in the early ‘90s, but they had their own great trash trio, Two Bo’s Maniacs. And yes, @newbombturks have been pals with them since they first booked us in 1993, and are one of many interview subjects planned for the film.

Since the chances of 20th Century Fox coming along to bankroll a doc on the 1990s garage punk scene is probably out of the realm of possibility, here’s hoping Massimo and Gisella get all the help and funding they need to finish the project.

We Never Learn checked in with Gisella for some more details on the project.

So, what is the name of the documentary, and why is it named that?

We needed a working title that could pretty much summarize what it is about, and not just cool sounding: Live The Life You Sing About - Tales of Low Budget and Desperate Rock’n’Roll.  

We started wondering how bands that sound so different from one another are often perceived as part of the same category or “genre.” When someone asks us to define it, we end up with a long series of terms: garage, punk, rock’n’roll; sometimes with an extra “sixties” or “lo-fi” or “low-budget” in all possible combinations because they’re not not necessarily all true at the same time. Maybe the one thing they have in common is attitude. Something like: play, sing, do what you think is right, no matter what other people think or say. This often comes along with struggle, frustration, and the feeling of being on a different planet, so we threw in an extra “desperate.” It also happens to be the title of an old song that a band brought back to the present, which is another common theme here. However, it might still change, if we come up with a better idea.

Who started the idea to do the documentary, and why?

We came across a box of Video 8 and cassette tapes, forgotten in a closet for years, and something clicked: “We should do something with this!”

From time to time we happen to meet kids who were just babies or very young children in the 90’s, but are very much into this kind of music. Usually when they hear the names of the bands we saw play live, they look at us with amazement and envy. That reminds us of when we talked to people who had seen maybe like Bo Diddley and the Rolling Stones in the ‘60s in just one night. Ok, it means that we’re getting older, but at the same time, we feel lucky and grateful that someone worked hard to allow all that to happen. Now, it’s our chance to save someone “from the misery of being a Taylor Swift fan and do something good for the world” ( - Tim Warren). Ha ha ha!!!

Gisella (far right); Massimo (middle) - Photographer unknown

Is there a kind of timeframe to the bands in the movie?

I guess you know exactly what it means having to choose what to include and what to cut. So many stories that should be told, so little pages...or minutes. It’s just an impossible task. So, we somehow arbitrarily put some boundaries. We decided to focus on whatever happened between 1990 and 1999. Last decade of the millennium. Pretty epic, you know. The era of transition towards new technologies that deeply changed the way of doing many things, but at the same time, at least in this kind of music, strongly rooted in the previous decades of the century.

Oh sure, it’s not that a flying saucer with all these bands landed on Earth on January 1, 1990 and left on December, 1999. We will have flashbacks and references to the present as well. But since the documentary is mostly based on our own archive, it’s also necessarily influenced by the fact that we met some people and not others, and we saw, filmed, and photographed some bands more than others.

Tell me about what your backgrounds are -- in music or life in general.

Oh well, the main people [working on the doc] currently is the two of us -- with the precious help of a few people who could not devote themselves to the project until it’s completed, but worked with us and supported us in many ways.

When we came up with the idea, we had two main options: putting together a professional-looking proposal, sending it around and just wait, hoping some producer would notice its great potential and decide to invest thousands of dollars on it. Or, just jump in and start somehow and figure everything else out in the process. We chose the latter -- it’s more punk! There’s no fame and fortune guaranteed with this project. You do it just because you want to and no matter what.

I mean, we expected a bunch of dedicated fans and collectors would love to see a documentary like this. But being realistic, that’s a relatively small niche. We tried to figure what people know about this. in Italy, the closest they can usually get to this kind of music is what here is called the  “Po-po-po-po-po-po-poo World Cup chant.” Real title: “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes. Not even something we plan to mention. 

Next, a bunch of bands of the late 90’s-early 2000s, still quite a bit out of our range. Then numbers get lower and lower, down to the most obscure ones that only few geeks have ever heard of.

Anyway, if all goes well, we’ve finally found a stable technical crew. Also, we’re working on a few ways of funding the project, besides our own bank account, and including crowdfunding later. Plus a few other ideas, but nothing defined yet so I prefer not to say more, until we’re settled.

1995 7″

Torino newspaper clipping, 10/93. - “Shitty local bands get the main title, while they (A-Bones) only appear to deserve a "tough (?) garage rockers from NY.” - Gisella

How far along are you in finishing it, and when do you think it will be done?

We already did a lot of work on the archive and the structure that will help speed up the editing process. However, we still have quite a few interviews to make, presumably in the summer, and post-production that will involve quite a lot of work on sound especially. Sorry guys, sit down and relax, at least until late 2018. But we’ll keep everybody updated on our page.

Who have you talked to so far, and who do you hope to talk to when you come to the States?

We did long interviews with Tim Warren and Ben Wallers at their homes. Then we have eleven more, collected at gigs of the bands that happened to be touring Europe: opportunities that we couldn’t waste. Many interviews were between sound check and dinner, or even after the gig, and we might decide -- with the interviewees -- to use only part of them, or not at all, then do more while we’re in the U.S.A. Oh, I almost forgot to mention 30 audio-only interviews we had made for our zine in the ‘90’s that will be partially edited in as well. Who do we hope to talk to in the States? Hey, we’re Italian and superstitious, we don’t reveal names in advance!

Torino newspaper clipping, 1994.

Tell us about when you first started seeing these kind of garage punk bands. And what was an early show you saw that really made you get into this music?

Gisella: Sixties music has been my favorite since I was 4 or 5, when I found my mom’s Beatles records -- two 45’s -- in a cupboard. From there, you know, Kinks, Them, Animals, Pretty Things, and then Pebbles, Back From the Grave, and the bands more or less inspired by that. So when my friends and I heard that the guy from the Prisoners would play in town with his new band the Prime Movers, we all went, of course. There, we discovered the opening band would be the Wylde Mammoths. Great night, and a first glimpse of things to come. But it was really the Gories and Thee Headcoats records I came across at a local record store that blew my mind and had me say “Oh THIS is what I really want to hear!.” Everything else followed.

Massimo: Well I’m older than Gisella you know, and I saw some awesome bands during the ‘80s like Suicide, Gun Club, etc. I used to collect a lot of garage compilations, early blues records, r&b, soul, and all the good stuff. But the event that attracted me strongly into this music happened in 1990. I was in NYC, checking the Village Voice and saw that the Gories and the Raunch Hands would play that night. So I went there, and man, that gig was unbelievable! Totally different from anything you could hear at that time, and so shocking that it definitely changed my life forever.

I guess there will be a lot of old film footage in the movie. Can you tell us about one or two old videos you have that you are particularly excited about putting in the movie?

The first one we ever shot. it’s 1995, Micha [Warren, Crypt Records] tells us the Oblivians will be touring Europe. The 10” on Sympathy was awesome and the Country Teasers will be playing too, so we decide to follow them around for a week. Right before leaving, I remember a friend of mine had a Video 8 camera from the late 80s, ask him if we can borrow it, and he says yes. Great, off we go in our ‘70s orange, rusty Ford Transit that we can also sleep in. We get to Stuttgart, Germany. The venue is a sort of long narrow basement, really packed, hot wild atmosphere. Camera battery is fully charged, everything ready, we’re thrilled at the idea of filming such an event. Except... five minutes later, the camera’s dead! The battery was fucked up. What do we do? We can’t miss something like this. Between the sets, we ask if I can keep the camera plugged to the only socket around, at the back of the stage, and they say ok. So for the whole gig I’m there in a corner, trying not to pull my 3′ cord too much, horrified at the thought of blacking out amps and P.A., making the band and the crowd mad at me forever. Luckily, I didn’t. And we came home with some real crazy footage!

Was there any band so far that said NO to an interview for the film?

Considering that in most cases we basically popped up at sound-check asking for an interview for a basically nonexistent documentary, we’re really grateful that they all said yes in that moment, despite the often dire circumstances. It gave us the confidence to persist.

As for the future, we haven’t contacted 100% of those we’d like to interview yet. Until now there was only one who said, “Maybe, it depends.” But I already sort of expected this could happen, and in fact I contacted him way before all the others, in order to have time to figure out my countermoves. Not all hope is lost, ha!

Tell us anything else you want about the movie.

We want our documentary to reflect what we think was the feel of that era -- no bullshit, fun, crazy, and not too high tech!

Follow the film’s progress here!!

[doomedandstoned]

Doomed & Stoned in Russia with Neuropolis

~By Billy Goate~

Photographs by Darja Fetisova

I like to keep my finger on the pulse of scenes around the world, especially those that are lesser known in the light of the mainstream. For the past three or four years, for instance, we've been covering events like the Sludge Convention and Tune Low, Play Slow in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Russia has a thriving heavy underground that trends towards dark, dank sludgy doom, much of it with a hardcore or southern rock twist.

Support for local gigs is robust compared to what most bands experience in the States. Alice in Chains just played their first gig ever in Moscow and it was incredible to see the fast crowd singing along with every song (yes, even the new ones). Bands in the doom-stoner scene such as Acid King, Eyehategod, and Elder have, in recent years, taken the long trek into what was once forbidden territory to perform before a most grateful (and highly involved) audience.

The homegrown scene is no less impressive, though much of it is tragically unknown outside of local circles. Some have broken free from obscurity, like The Grand Astoria, and more and more people are sharing the likes of The Re-Stoned, Dekonstruktor (formerly The Moon Mistress), Pressor, Stoner Train, Tsygun, Without God, Lord of Doubts, ИЛ, Illegal Ones, C.X., Phantomass, 609, and Fuzzthrone on the socials.

This is the point at which we're introduced to a fresh face in the doom scene, a six-member crew called NEUROPOLIS. I happened upon them while browsing a Russian-language metal forum one afternoon, which led me to a YouTube video for the EP, 'Temptation' (2019), which itself was quite the unexpected emotional odyssey of peaks and valleys. Take a listen for yourself:

Temptation (Искушение) by NEUROPOLIS

Perhaps the band got lucky their first go around and composed a masterpiece of doom with deft touches of death. Perhaps there is more greatness awaiting in the creative well of these young musicians. Regardless, the time is ripe to get to know them all better. In the process, we're afforded a rare window into the St. Petersburg heavy underground and the cultural distinctives that are shaping the Russian doomers of today.

Doom resonates with our worldview and perception.

It has already become an integral part of us

Take us underneath the soil, into the roots of Neuropolis. How did it all begin for you as a band?

Now it is difficult to note any one of the band's stages of existence as an absolute foundation point. Every one of us has been creative, mostly in music, before we became a band. The first crew, from which our band slowly began to develop, was formed approximately five years ago. It was a naive time of experiments and searching for sound. Kim, Freakedelic, and Dmitry (the former vocalist of the group, whom we jokingly call Maestro), arranged jam sessions together, tried and eventually learned to play instruments, and worked on their first songs ("Heaven in Hell," "Secret Paradise," "Killing Machine"). Then the guys gave their first concert in a bar called ZIS and got a couple of whiskey shots for their fee.

After this, due to internal contradictions and uncertain life circumstances, Freakedelic left the band, devoting himself to spiritual practices and psychedelic experiments. Our band hasn’t got him back for a very long time. In those days, the number of session musicians, bassists, and drummers has changed and two concerts were given in clubs Ulitsa and Money Honey. None of the invited musicians, however, could find their place in the group.

In 2017, Freakedelic, who achieved enlightenment, returned to the band together with his wife, Miroslava Antonova (aka DegraDante), who began to play keys, and Maestro brought in a new bass guitarist, Sergey Berezhansky (aka Sotona, aka Diversant). In such a composition, the band recorded its first single in mid-2018: "Surf (Priboy)." This was an important stage in the history of the band, which can be considered the moment of foundation.

By that time, the name of the band had already existed -- Neuropolis. After the release of "Surf" online, a concert was held in the club Banka and one was planned in the club ROUTE148, but difficulties arose. Maestro was fired from our band for his inappropriate behavior and his personal ambitions based on nothing. A week before our concert, the band was left without a vocalist. Sotona invited his old friend Vladimir Alekseev (aka "V") to scream into the microphone at the rep and he immediately made an impression on us with his pitch, and especially the frail, deep lyrics that he immediately wrote for three old versions of songs. We decided that V would perform at ROUTE148 with Neuropolis.

In just a week, a new song was written and the old material was reworked. It was the beginning of the modern history of Neuropolis, which lasts to this day. At the end of 2018, rhythm guitarist Valentin Rebrov (aka "Verghil Alighieri") joined our band. He was invited to our concert by the keyboardist, having just moved from Sakhalin (almost from the other side of the world). He had few friends, so he was interested and offered to write an Intro to one of our songs. Then he decided to become our rhythm guitarist and contributed a lot of good stuff to our band and music. Given the crew we work with today -- and the release our debut EP, 'Temptation' (2019) with V’s lyrics -- there isn’t any reason to for us to break up the band.

This is our sad six-person party in the basement

What was you goal in creating new music together? Did you specifically choose to play music in the doom genre?

We do not think that each of us himself has chosen doom as a genre. Many of us like heavy music: someone is fond of black metal, someone of thrash, someone of death, and someone likes specifically doom. You may like different music, but when you start to create it, it is so-so -- like it comes out of you and if there isn’t one person in the band, the result depends on the preferences of each, so it is a kind of the general mood quintessence. We made doom that sounds quite old-school.

In the end, each of us has his own interests and motivations: for one it is a hobby and profit, for another a leisure time with an instrument in his hands, for the third it is an opportunity to work in a certain genre niche, the opportunity to improve his composing talent. For still others of us it is an opportunity to express emotions in a musical and poetic form. The atmosphere of the genre, its emotional component, is sometimes striking, and in some forms of this genre -- from the smallest detail to the greatest effort -- is worth it to do.

The musicians who love all of these different styles have met and have made doom, therefore it must be fate. The most interesting thing is that doom never bothers us, it resonates with our worldview and perception, it has already become an integral part of us -- minor viscous riffs, powerful drums, texts permeated with doom. This is our sad six-person party in the basement.

Air here is saturated with the fall of several empires and thousands of crippled destinies of young people.

'Temptation' has some very sad and moving moments, indeed. What inspired you to write this pair of songs?

Our first EP is imbued with the spirit of the city we live in, the spirit of St. Petersburg. Life here leaves a certain imprint on perception. We live in a rather shitty climate between the Gulf of Finland and Ladoga Lake. It is cloudy and rainy here, with sunny days in the year limited to about 50. This northern city is considered one of the most depressing in Russia, while it bears the title of the cultural capital of the country. This explosive combination -- depression and creativity -- such mood is close to Scandinavians (Swedes, Norwegians, Danes). But, in addition to the weather, we have a huge area decorated with monuments, cathedrals, buildings, and grotesque mythical figures of granite, which lie on a huge variety of islands, canals, and stone waterfronts.

The air here is saturated with the spirit of the fall -- the fall of several empires, thousands of crippled destinies of young people. The soul of this location is impossible to express through the textbooks. It penetrates inside of us throughout life. Through our creativity we broadcast it.

In addition, if we exclude the influence on our music of recognized masters of doom metal (and their influence is undeniable), such as Candlemass, Saturnus, Katatonia, Saint Vitus, and Black Sabbath, there is something else that inspires us. Here is just the question of whether we will draw inspiration from life. Yes, we draw it from the experience of our own lives. It happened so that each participant of Neuropolis has had quite a difficult fate -- alcohol, drugs, hospitals, wars, suicide, loss. We have seen some shit. Almost every living inhabitant of the planet Earth is faced with these things. This, of course, could not but affect our music and our lyrics. The lyrics of our songs are always permeated with references to both religious texts and masterpieces of classical literature. It's not as easy as it might seem. We're working on every word. And Kim and Verghil sometimes just write good riffs.

This seems like a good time to introduce us to the individual members of the band and tell us what instruments, gear, and amps you all use.

Vladimir Alekseev (aka V) -- vocals, lyrics. Before meeting the musicians, Neuropolis wrote sad lyrics and worked on a solo album in the genre of psychedelic rock. Suddenly, he felt a desire to experiment with extreme vocals and to play old-school doom metal. Microphones: Oktava MK-319, Shure Beta 58A.

Valentin Rebrov (aka Vergil Alighieri) -- guitar, arrangements. Arrived from the other end of the world and joined Neuropolis in late-2018, proving himself as a good sound engineer, reliable guitarist, and talented arranger. Guitar: Schecter Omen-7 Walnut with stock pickups. Pedals: AMT Heater + AMT B2 + AMT Pangaea CP-100

Alexey Antonov (aka Freakedelic Anvy) -- drums. Our drummer is also one of the band's founders. This guy really has seen some shit and in some shit had to play. His custom-crafted drum kit was used to record our Temptation EP, with its iron ED Cymbals Legat and Pearl Eliminator Redline pedal. In everyday life and for gigs he uses a hi-hat Paiste 303, 201 Paiste ride, crash Sabian El Sabor, and Pearl Eliminator. "There was some experience using Axis," he says, "but the chain drive was closer to me."

Dmitriy Kim (aka Kim) -- guitar. One of the founding fathers of Neuropolis. The most beautiful riffs are his job. Guitar: Epiphone Les Paul Custom with prophecy Pickups - EMG 81/85. Guitar processor: Zoom G5n.

Sergey Berezhansky (aka Sotona, aka Diversant) -- bassist, millionaire, playboy, philanthropist. He has two bass-guitars -- the first very strange ESP The Surveyor (there are doubts in originality) and Fender Precision Bass'82 -- plus a rather unique "craft" guitar. Despite its mystique, the ESP sounds pretty good for its price. "Well, Fender just made me happy with a single touch to the strings," he remarks. "In general, this is the very case when playing the guitar, is the great pleasure of the instrument. I use processor Boss GT-1B. It satisfies me completely. I used the delay pedal, but with the help of the processor, this no need to use a separate pedal. And the presence of preamp removed some inconveniences with connecting to different guitar speakers in different rehearsal rooms."

Miroslava Antonova (aka Degradante) -- vocals, lyrics, keyboards. Originally from Ukraine, she met Freakadelic in a chat and moved to St. Petersburg. Instruments: Diapason (mezzo soprano), Akai MPC mkII MIDI keyboard, PC, and reaper. Microphones: Oktava MK-319, Shure Beta 58A.

Some delicate ears do not stand up and bleed a bit from what they hear.

Well, you are certainly loaded for bear! Have you turned your attention to composing new material for an upcoming record?

Good question. We don't want to work on anything else, but it seems to be necessary, because it is stronger than drugs. (laughs) At the moment, we are working on a new EP, Golem, which we plan to release in the fall. This release will be different from EP Temptation, with a sharper, heavier sound. Presumably the Golem will be four new killer songs in the genre of death-doom. We have already recorded some demo tracks for the new EP. Some songs have lyrics, but there is no music and vice versa. Some are completely ready for studio recording. We hope to surprise those who liked our first release.

We want to bring doom metal out of the underground.

What is life like for a heavy music artist in Saint Petersburg? Do people understand your music or is the heavy music scene more of an "underground" phenomenon?

The life of a musician playing heavy music in St. Petersburg is like trying to give people vitamins, while everyone wants to eat a triple burger with sauce. Some delicate ears do not stand up and bleed a bit from what they hear. It's not bad, we love blood -- it's beautiful.

Music takes a lot of time and money, especially when you do something ideological and conceptual, not mainstream. The genre in which we play is not common here. Our music can really be called underground. This is the trend of our time: there is more in fashion pop music and light indie rock, which is convenient to play in bars and clubs. Such music helps the owner of the clubs to sell more alcohol. But we are still a young band, we hope to find like-minded people and organize concerts together. After the release of the second EP we will pay a lot of attention to concert activity. We want to bring doom metal out of the underground and are ready to make a lot of effort, not only in terms of sound, but also in terms of visual performance.

They come to us after the concerts to thank, praise, and even scold us.

Take is into your scene and tell us about some bands you play with that you might recommend to our listeners.

Freakadelic recommends cool Moscow guys Kamni. They play great stoner metal, although in recent years they trend more and more towards psychedelic rock. V recommends Arkona. This is a well-known Russian band. We haven’t not played on the same stage with them, but maybe someday we will be lucky to do it. Arkona's guitarist helped us with the EP Temptation, as we are close to his vision of heavy music. Degradante recommends a wonderful St. Petersburg band Theodor Bastard. Although it is not metal, the guys are original, with a gorgeous sound and interesting vocals. And also black metal collective Second To Sun.

We played with different bands, but we have never met anyone like us. Sometimes we saw a lack of understanding in the eyes of the listeners who came to have a rest after a hard day, but sometimes we saw interest in their eyes. There are all kinds of feedback: they come to us after the concerts to thank, praise, and even scold us, so we are doing something right. This world needs us.

Follow The Band

Get Their Music

[markwatkinsconsumerguide]

Consumer Guide / No.88 / author of the UK’s First Bubbling Under Book, ‘Hits That Missed’, Michael Hows (aka Colin Driscoll) with Mark Watkins.

MW : Your new book, ‘Hits That Missed’, was 15 years in the making. Why did you set out on this journey, and what were some of the steps (and obstacles overcome) along the way?

MH : When I retired from a job that involved writing I decided to set myself a project which still involved writing. I had always been interested in 1950’s music and I recall Record Mirror published individual dealer returns from which they compiled the Top 20, but there were many other records that were in these returns that didn’t make the charts, so I set out to log these. I didn’t realise how long it would take and what a difficult journey I would embark on.

MW : Why did it take so long?

MH : I first bought up as many of the pre-1961 Record Mirror’s from ebay as I could costing thousands of pounds to lighten the load, as the only place in the UK where these magazines are located en masse was at The British Newspaper Library at Colindale, London (now at The British Library King’s Cross, London).

Record Mirror, which came out weekly, was published from June 1954 and stopped its published dealer returns in March 1961 (the time span of my book). So there are about 350 magazines to carefully trawl through and log the relevant details and put them on a spreadsheet. I could generally get through about ten Record Mirrors per visit to Colindale, but it was not a quiet library and there were lots of distractions so it was tiring maintaining my concentration at times, often meaning I had to double-check the results. I hate to think how many journeys I made to London using the Northern Line to Colindale tube station. I suppose this labour of love did not make economic sense, but it was a project I was determined to complete - although I did not think it would take 15 years!

MW : What type of support have you received along the way from your publisher?

MH : I was lucky that I quickly found an online publisher called Music Mentor with a fantastic back catalogue of 1950’s & 1960’s music books - and was as committed as myself to the project. Without this support I would not have been able to complete the task, particularly in relation to some of the more obscure entries like Jazz & Irish genres and the biographies of long forgotten artists like Nash Lorraine.

It was decided from the outset that we would include all the information from dealer returns - including Classical, Show, Jazz & World Music - not just the pop stuff which became more dominant post-1955. This was a mammoth (i.e elephant!) task and the mammoth took a lot of nibbling away over many often frustrating months - what we hope we have produced is a historical time capsule of the development of post-war music in the 1950’s and the early days of Rock & Roll in UK which so influenced the Beatles & the Rolling Stones - besides being the first ‘UK Bubbling Under’ (the charts as archived by the Official Charts Company) book. We would have loved to have had the support of the Official Charts Company but all they seem interested in was financial return so in the end we did not include their information.

MW : Tell me about the chosen format of the book…

MH : The experience of Music Mentor was key to the book’s layout and the requirement to condense all the information into a reasonable, understandable and affordable number of pages (428 including copious illustrations).

We followed the ‘US Bubbling Under Format’ and UK chart publications of previous decades but keeping our own individual way of presentation.

MW : How has the book been received so far?

MH : If this Book had been published before the Millennium it would have been great - but the music scene has changed completely over recent decades, so much so that artists like Jerry Lee Lewis, Marty Wilde, Chuck Berry & Little Richard - still household names up to the 1990’s - are now forgotten.

So it is a struggle in what now is perceived as a niche market - it means working harder on marketing and this will take time. I am sure there are still an audience out there both in the UK and abroad for this book as it’s entertaining, educational and nostalgic. It is getting across the fact that HITS THAT MISSED is out there. Every little bit of publicity helps, of course.

Online sites like Twitter and YouTube help to spread the message, but some of the “target audience” (probably post-55) may not have wide internet access. There is targeting magazines like Record Collector & Vintage Rock but advertising in these can be very expensive, unlike in the past these mags like the Official Charts are run as businesses with profit margins clearly in mind. There is no such thing as a free lunch these days and when a book (no matter how important or interesting it might be) will not be a big seller it does not make economic sense to market it via this route

MW : Where can we buy it?

MH : The ISBN for HITS THAT MISSED is 978-0-9562679-9-3 so using this number you can order it through any bookshop or on-line. It is also available from the publisher http://musicmentor0.tripod.com/catalogue.html or from Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hits-That-Missed-Bubbling-1954-1961/dp/0956267998/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=hits+that+missed&qid=1559723063&s=gateway&sr=8-1

MW : Tell me about your interest in music in general?

MH : My teenage hero was Buddy Holly and I have seen the Buddy Show many times - but as time goes by I have widened my musical interests to include Folk/World/Classical but Rock 'n Roll will always be my passion - and name any rock ‘n roller and I probably have had a record or compilation of his/hers at some time. Nowadays, I rely on Radio, YouTube & Spotify to connect with music, although I still collect obscure UK artists that have not been compiled. My latest search is for Cuddly Dudley ‘Too Pooped To Pop’ - is there a copy or mp3 out there?

MW : What’s your all-time favorite single and LP?

MH : Very difficult -it does change from year to year - but I suppose for single the combination of ‘Raining In My Heart’ c/w ‘It Doesn’t Matter Anymore’ must take top spot - so nostalgic - the posthumous release after Buddy Holly’s death February 1959. LP must be Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ - not a naff track on this superbly crafted album - which is somewhat dismissed now but in 1970 was WOW.

MW : What newspapers do you read and why?

MH: I am embarrassed to say that my wife buys the Daily Mail for the puzzles etc. and I have been known to skip through the pages - particularly the sport - I am an avid and often nervous Southampton football club supporter - so a sympathetic sports’ columnist gets me interested. Otherwise I pinch a Metro from the local bus station or get my news off the TV or internet.

MW: …favourite news presenters?

MH : My favourite news reporter is Norman Smith. My favourite news anchor is Louise Minchin & my favourite weather presenter is Carol Kirkwood. Actually, the only one to wind me up is Piers Morgan (he’s like marmite, I guess).

MW : How do you relax?

MH : I have been forced to relax after a health issue this year. I am concentrating more on walking my ten thousand steps per day and eating at least my 5 portions of rabbit food per day! Besides that, I am still chart-compiling but this work is unlikely to be published. Then there’s surfing the internet, listening to music in the background, holiday planning, tending the garden, and my family to keep up with.

MW : Now you’re in retirement, any regrets looking back? What are you now looking forward to?

MH: I never look back (other than my music) but not in my life - I am a great believer in Doris Day ‘Que Sera Sera - Whatever Will Be Will Be. The only regret is that my book was not published in the heyday of chart archive publications - not really for me, because all I ever wanted was to complete my project, which I have done, and I now have my book on my bookshelf to prove it, but for my publisher, George Groom-White at Music Mentor, who put so much faith, energy, patience and kindness into the project, as well as time and money - he deserves success with this book and I look forward with help from the buying public to deliver it to him.

© Mark Watkins / June 2019

[sometimesalwaysmusic]

KALEIGH WATTS

Kaleigh Watts (KW) is a singer-songwriter whose experiences in Ottawa informed large parts of her recent release, Hung Me Dry. The album illustrates her longing for relief amid the solitude and darkness of the city. We caught up with her to discuss her influences, her recent gig at the City of Om festival, and her aspirations for the upcoming Fall season.

VITALS

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kaleighwatts/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/kaleighwatts?lang=en

Web: http://www.kaleighwatts.com/

Latest Release: Hung Me Dry (EP, May 2017)

Upcoming shows: Stay tuned!

SA: How did you get your start in music? KW: Music has always been an essential part of my life. I come from a very artistic family who has always encouraged the arts and supported my innate love for music and performing. My Mum claims I came out at birth singing. Throughout my early life, live music was a huge inspiration and crucial component of my music education, and my parents seized every opportunity to take me to concerts and expose me to a variety of music genres. It wasn’t until I was eighteen when I met one of my music hero’s Elvis Costello, that I seriously considered music as a career. August 28th, 2009 at Massey Hall was my first time seeing Elvis perform live. I’ll never forget how I felt in that gold seated theatre, while my ears soaked in his sound that echoed from the arches of the ceiling. There was something so inspiring about that performance that made me want to sing, and have my own voice echo from those arches. After the performance I had the opportunity to meet Elvis, and I remember telling him that I was a budding musician considering music beyond a passion. He told me to go for it, to follow my dream. A few months later I enrolled in the Bachelor of Music performance program at Carleton University, which brought me to Ottawa. Since that Elvis Costello concert in 2009, the shiver that I felt that evening has never gone away. I still feel it when I perform now; that certainty and absolute love for the craft. It’s a feeling beyond words.

 SA: What bands, musicians or artists would you cite as the biggest influences on your sound? KW: By far the biggest influences on my sound have been Elvis Costello and Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall. I have so much respect for their musicianship and ability to shape shift in genre. Elvis has influenced my sound more so from a songwriting perspective. He is very wordy and descriptive in his writing, and his lyrics are often a hint Shakespearean. They depict stories in detail without giving it all away. My songs have a similar theme, and I often use untypical words that allow me to play with the phrasing. I love having the voice and story at the forefront, with the instrumentation as a texture and support, which Elvis does as well. KT Tunstall is also a metaphoric songwriter who has inspired my words, and I find her arrangements to be brilliant. Her music has very much affected my singing; I found my vocal sound singing along to her records. KT’s folk album ‘Invisible Empire / Crescent Moon’ was the main inspiration behind my new album ‘Hung Me Dry’. During the recording process, I was listening to her on repeat.

  SA: Thus far in your career, what has been your biggest success? KW: I would have to say my biggest success thus far would be my 2015 performance at RBC Ottawa Bluesfest. It was my first time playing a festival, and my first time playing a show with a bassist. I absolutely love the sound of the double bass, and it really brought the song arrangements to another level. Also, at the time I had just graduated from Carleton University, so that performance marked the end of a really significant chapter and the beginning of a new one.

  SA: On the other hand, what is the biggest challenge you have faced, and how have you dealt with it? KW: My biggest challenge when it comes to music definitely has to do with the connection I have to the content in some my songs. I am a very emotional songwriter, and I often write from my own gut and experience. I inject everything I’m feeling, and during the writing process this works well for the sake of the song, but I find it difficult sometimes to detach myself from the emotion of a song once it’s been written. Especially in live performance, it’s a challenge not to re-live the ache from a song’s inspiration. Over time it has become easier to separate myself from their meanings. I have a different perspective and relationship with each one, but there are still songs that get me from time to time.

 SA: How do you approach the song-writing process (lyrically, musically, etc)? KW: The songwriting process is always very different for each song. There are songs like ‘Smoke Lake’ that come quickly, and pour out of me uncontrollably that are finished in minutes, and others like ‘Grieve’ that take months to find the right words, and require time to simmer. Sometimes I schedule songwriting sessions to encourage creative flow, and other times I get hit with an idea wave while I’m in the middle of something, usually grocery shopping or while in transit. Most often my songs have come from sessions of impulse to sit down with my guitar or würiltzer. It’s important for me to have the raw of the moment influence my writing. I don’t really have a set formula when it comes to writing lyrics or music; however, I tend to use words and metaphors relating to nature. Inadvertently many of my songs have the word ‘water’ in it, which is funny because I have the word ‘water’ as a tattoo. Musically, I love the sound of fingerpicking on guitar and the vintage warble of my würiltzer, so I often give moments of silence in my songs to feature their resonance, while keeping their parts simple throughout to still feature the voice. 

 SA: What are your thoughts on the Ottawa music scene? KW : I have so much gratitude for Ottawa and the music community. There are so many opportunities for local musicians like myself, and I feel so privileged to have had so much support from this city. Ottawa is such a beautiful place to live, and the perfect base to find your voice as an artist.

 SA: Between your two releases thus far, Smoke Lake (2014) and Hung Me Dry (2017), it seems that both your influences and environment for recording were very different. On your new record, what are some examples of the things that influenced you, via living in Ottawa? KW : My music has always been very inspired by my location. ‘Smoke Lake’ was a minimalist project that was recorded in my family’s cabin and along portage trails, and was very much inspired by the natural atmosphere of Algonquin Park. My new record ‘Hung Me Dry’ isn’t so directly inspired by the city of Ottawa itself, but more so my time in the city and the connections I made while there. More specific to Ottawa as it’s location, ‘Hung Me Dry’ features field recordings of the city’s soundscape: the sound of the O-Train, and the buzz of traffic and people on the corner of Bank and Somerset Street. Both of these were a part of my everyday Ottawa while I attended school. All of the songs on the record were also written during my schooling period in Ottawa. ‘Hung Me Dry’ is really a preserved memory, and a longing for relief amid the solitude and darkness of a city.

  SA: You recently played Ottawa's City of Om Festival. What was that experience like, and how did it differ from more of your traditional venue style shows? KW : The City of Om Yoga Festival was such a beautifully intimate and spiritual experience. Most of my performances at traditional venues are quite intimate to begin with, but there was something extremely special about being in a room with a few hundred people who were all in sync with one another. There was such an amazing energy in that room. It was also the perfect opportunity to perform more of my instrumental compositions, which I don’t usually play at traditional venue shows. I really loved performing at City of Om, and hope to become more involved in the Ottawa yoga community.  

  SA: If you could have dinner with any three musicians, dead or alive, who would they be and why? KW : It’s so hard to pick just three. If I could I would have a massive dinner party and invite all of my favourites, but to choose three I’d have to say Elvis Costello; that’s a given, freak folk harpist and singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom, and 1930’s ukulele sensation George Formby. Elvis and I would have so much to talk about: songwriting, Canadian lakes, our British roots. I’d have dinner with Joanna to pick her brain on being a successful niche artist in the industry. Also, I would hope she’d bring her husband Andy Samberg along because he’s cool cool cool cool cool. George Formby is one of my all time favourites, and I can’t even begin to express how amazing it would be to have a conversation with him. His music is so charming and clever. He makes me feel like I was born in the wrong time.

  SA: What comes next for you in 2017? We wish you the best, and good luck! KW : Thank you Sometimes Always; it’s been such a pleasure! 2017 has already been a big year for me. I recorded, released, and toured my new record ‘Hung Me Dry’ before July, so I am taking the summer to relax with family and friends and spend some much needed time at my cottage on Smoke Lake. I am also really looking forward to the Fall. It’s my favourite time of year, and I always feel creatively fuelled and in tune. I have the next album in the works, so it will be nice to have some time to myself to write and reconnect. 

[vileart]

God Dramaturgy: The University of Manchester Musical Theatre Society @ Edfringe 2017

The University of Manchester Musical Theatre Society presents

Godspell

By John-Michael Tebelak

Godspell ascends to the Fringe as a festival-themed musical extravaganza that follows the Gospel of Matthew.

The Sanctuary, Paradise in Augustines (Venue 152)

George IV Bridge, Edinburgh, EH1 1EL

21st-27th August, 15:05 – 16:50 (105 minutes)

Tickets: £8, £5 concessions

Link: http://ift.tt/2u6ffzh / 0131 226 0000

Godspell is composed of various musical parables from the Gospel of Matthew and contains the hits Bless the Lord, Day by Day and Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord. This reimagining of Godspell is set in a festival tent, where bread and wine are exchanged for LSD and Jesus is a rock star. 

The eleven cast members, hand picked from Manchester’s considerable pool of musical theatre talent, take the audience on a journey of hilarity to tragedy and back again, accompanied by infectiously catchy and heartbreakingly beautiful music. Audience members leave uplifted, and with considerably more glitter than when they entered. 

What was the inspiration for this performance?

I can’t remember exactly what gave me the idea to do a version of Godspell at a festival.  I pitched the idea to the society committee during summer and I think I’d just bought a ticket to a festival and it just seemed like the perfect way of updating the original hippy/clown theme to make it relevant to audiences my age, but having Jesus as a rock star and having the band on stage dressed as a typical Indie band just seemed like such a fun way of performing a rock musical!  

It was also partly because the venue for the society is this tiny room in the top of the SU which could be transformed so easily into a festival tent with just some fairylights and glitter.

The musical is loosely based on Matthew’s gospel.  I have taken inspiration from Peter Sellars’ unique setting of Bach’s St Matthew Passion as well as Pasolini’s film.  For example, one of Seller’s most effective Chorale settings was having the singers simply hug each other, and a lot of my direction was just telling the cast to do things like ‘dance around and hug each other’ which they did very well.

Is performance still a good space for the public discussion of ideas?

Yes definitely. My setting Godspell in a festival tent, having Jesus dressed as a rock star etc. is a metaphor for modern day idols: we still worship gods as fanatically as ever, just different gods; electronic dance music is the new religious sound track.   A lot of people dislike Godspell, and those that don’t know it are sort of taken aback when I just say ‘it’s a musical about Jesus’.  It’s not satire but quite earnest in its message, it’s very fashionable to be a complete atheist and be quite anti-religion at the moment, especially amongst students.  

There are these huge religious communities at Manchester University, for example the Christian Union, but there isn’t much conversation between people of different religions and beliefs.   In fact I don’t think our version is particularly religious with the setting, what I think it beautiful about Godspell is that it’s not preachy, but simply tells stories from the bible, and in the second half the story of the crucifixion, in a funny, light-hearted way, and I think whatever your beliefs it is worth watching because these are moral stories, and although nowadays the general consensus among a lot of students is that religion is more negative and is often linked to war and violence, this is taking a step back and looking at some of the actual teachings or goodness and morality.

On the other hand, Godspell is also about love and joy and forming a community.  You cannot help but be swept up by energy of this cast and uplifted by the infectious music.  I think that there is something special about performance which involves music in contrast to a straight play, because so much of what you take away is the emotions you feel because of the music, and this is perhaps much more raw than the themes and ideas you get in a play.   For example instead of Judas having a long monologue about his mixed emotions about betraying Jesus you simply have the heart-breaking song ‘On the Willows’ which says it all.

How did you become interested in making performance?

I’ve performed on stage pretty much all my life, from operas and ballets to musicals, and plays, and I had never taken an interest in the behind-the-scenes side of things until I pitched Godspell as an idea to the society committee.  I am a music student but I’m a violinist rather than a singer, so the only way to really combine my love of acting and music professionally would be through directing, although this is something I’ve only really come to within the last year.   Although I firmly went down the music rather than theatre route during A Levels and applying to University, my mum used to be a drama teacher and I spent a lot of my childhood just doing improv in her after-school classes, so I think some of that quick way of creating performance has resurfaced in me now!  The hardest thing I’ve found about directing rather than performing myself is that you get just as nervous before the shows but there’s no way of relieving the tension with the actual physical performance, so I was a bit of a wreck for the original show week.

Is there any particular approach to the making of the show?

It was mostly just messing about in rehearsals.  For most of the numbers such as the opening, and things like the last supper I would come with ideas of what exactly I wanted, but I had absolutely no idea how most of the scenes were going to be set before I turned up to rehearsals, it was a mixture of me throwing out random silly suggestions and seeing what happened and the cast suggesting things themselves.  The book of Godspell must be one of the weirdest of all musicals. There is no actual story, the first half is just a string of parables, linked by musical numbers (one of the biggest challenges for the cast is remembering what order things go in as its pretty mad, just jumping from one random thing to the next). Its extremely bare and quite strange, and so many of the jokes in it are completely dated (just watch the 70s film version to see how weird it is) so beginning the process armed with this weird libretto was extremely daunting, and there are some very bad versions out there on YouTube.   However the pro to this is its malleability as a show.  You can completely make it your own and I really relished this and found it quite rewarding.  Without a doubt all the funniest moments in the show are things the cast came up with themselves, and I think they all really enjoyed working on something that they had a say in and helped create.  Talking of the cast – as well as being some of the most gifted singers I have ever met some of them have extreme amounts of comic talent, and so it was an absolute pleasure to give them free reign with something as blank-canvas as Godspell. As a director, what I love about it is the lack of boring practical details you have to think about with other shows in terms of props and entrances/exits because there are almost no props and the entire cast are on stage the whole time, which makes it a joy to direct - because its just about them. We basically just had a lot of fun!  I know the cast has a huge amount of fun performing it and I think the audience can’t help but be caught up in it too!

Does the show fit with your usual productions?

Well the only other thing I’ve directed is a medley of the first and last numbers from the musical Hair, which is basically Godspell for adults, so I guess at the moment I seem to be attracted to rock musicals with a hippy vibe, a little niche maybe.  I am not really your average musical theatre fan - I am more drawn to the idea of directing opera, and I hope that I get the opportunity to do some of that next year.  Opera gives you quite a clean slate in terms of how to creatively set say something by Montiverdi from hundreds of years ago, bringing the music to life in a modern and refreshing way.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

I hope that they will find the show funny. Previously, most of the jokes were aimed towards our peers at university, so it will be a challenge to adapt it for the different fringe audience.  I hope that the audience will be moved by the more emotive parts of the show, but most of all I hope they will be uplifted.  Godspell is one of the most joyous musicals I know and the most important thing is that the music created by the cast and (an incredibly talented and funky) band, are enjoyed by the audience. I hope they are caught in the moment and also provoked to think about the subject matter that is explored within the show.

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?

For the show in November we used glow sticks instead of tickets and glittered people’s faces as they walked in, and surprisingly, people found this simple effect very exciting!

The costumes are entirely created by the cast themselves – I told them to just wear an extreme version of what they would wear to a festival (bum bags and all), and the set was literally 4 beer crates which we borrowed from behind the Student Union bar, and a stepladder.  I think the only thing we actually spent money on was the glitter and glow sticks. Don’t forget it is easier for a camel to get through a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven… 

The University of Manchester Musical Theatre Society (UMMTS) is thrilled to be taking their first show up to the Edinburgh Fringe this year. UMMTS is an exciting, experimental and collaborative student society that aims to create spectacle and professionalism with every show it produces. The Godspell team is made up of over twenty young, experienced theatre and music makers who have been working on this project for over ten months. After experiencing a sell-out run in November, Godspell was also nominated for four National Operatic and Dramatic Association Awards (Best Ensemble Number, Best Supporting Actress, Best Poster (w), Best Programme). 

Mark Dee (North West End):  ‘This was easily the most competent, confident, complete and mature    production I have thus seen from this society…one of the most enjoyable, fresh and alive productions I have seen’ 

Rhiannon Symonds (NODA North West): ‘There was not a dry eye in the house…’

Director - Madeleine Brooks is an experienced musical theatre performer, taking lead roles in the NODA award-winning production of Grand Hotel and most recently in A Chorus Line. She made her directing debut with Godspell in UMMTS’ sell-out run of Godspell in November 2017. 

Musical Director - Matthew Quinn directed the National Stage School of Ireland’s 2017 production of Les Misérables and played also played Valjean in the Belfast Opera House’s production. He is a UoM Music Society conductor under Mark Heron and has taken lead roles in UMMTS productions, such as Baron Von Gagern in Grand Hotel. 

Producers - Méabh Kennedy was President of UMMTS 2016/17 and has extensive experience in producing musicals, such as the NODA award-winning Songs of a New World, Godspell and The 25th Putnam County Spelling Bee. Marina Jenkins is President of the UoM Drama Society 2017/18 and whilst Godspell is her first producing role, she has experience in writing, directing, stage and technically managing plays part of the UoM Drama Society. 

from the vileblog http://ift.tt/2u5rP1M

[joemuggs]

IT’S ALL ABOUT ME

Last week, I was asked by Rory O’Sullivan to contribute to his Raw Edge newsletter - so here’s me talking about myself and my reliably boojy tastes. It’s a really good newsletter, so SUBSCRIBE!

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This week we've been speaking with Music Journalist and Author Joe Muggs. Joe has written for major newspapers, magazines and websites including Mixmag, FACT and Boiler Room and is currently working on a secret book that will be announced soon.

Joe lets us into some of the things that are important to him and gives us a short insight into his life before dishing out his recommendations. Let's dive right in!

Joe, thanks for joining us, what is it you are working on at the moment?

JM: I wish I could plug the book I'm working on currently but it won't be announced for a little while yet, so you'll just have to imagine the brilliance... My other big thing at the moment is tracing the current rise in popularity of ambient music and finding new ways of blending it with spoken word and discussion. I've done a couple of events experimenting with this recently, plus there's the LOVE DRAIN series of mixes I did for NTS Radio last year.

What's your background as a journalist what did you do before that?

I got into professional journalism quite late: in my late 20s, around the turn of the millennium. For most of the 90s, I was knocking about Brighton, doing the things one does in Brighton: DJing, being in bands, running cabaret shows, dancing on the hillsides, getting into trouble.

What is your morning routine like?

Woken by cat at 6, swear at cat, go back to sleep, woken by children at 7, put on Radio 3, faff about with Weetabix and sandwiches for lunchboxes, grimace at the news, hurriedly edit whatever the last thing I was working on the previous day, take one or other child to school/nursery, start work either at home or in local cafe/Wetherspoons.

What's the one thing you can’t leave the house without?

Sennheiser HD-25s

Who do you draw inspiration from?

Mostly from the glorious nonsense and wisdom that comes from music-lovers gathering together in any scenario: when I was in my teens and early 20s it was gibbering in after parties and the backrooms of techno clubs, but I came to realise that there's a grand tradition of subcultural gibberish that constantly refreshes our language. Whether it's The Cocteau Twins or Taliban Trim, The Goon Show or Devo, Young Thug or Krazy Kat, I love language that makes little sense but leaves you reeling.

What got you started out on the path you have taken, and what's the most difficult thing you’ve had to overcome?

I always wrote - was involved in the spoken word scene, wrote for student mags and local entertainment mags etc to get free guestlist and tickets etc – and I was always around the music scene, so after a long while of titting about it ended up being all I was really qualified to do. Even after I decided to make a go of it and started getting work for national publications, there were quite a few years of waiting tables, working in low-level NHS admin etc before writing really became my bread and butter. I really got going, though, after a series of unfortunate incidents involving Will Young forced me to do a bit of soul-searching and decide to focus on the particular kinds of music and culture I was most interested in rather than trying to be a generalist, after which I managed to carve out a niche for myself.

How do you see your profession changing in the next 10 years?

Wouldn't like to say. The decline in ad revenue across all media may continue, and it may just be a steady decline – but there are a few glimmers that make me suspect that people are still hungry for good writing and (that much-abused word) curation, so it may be that people find new ways to make it pay. There'll certainly always be exciting new trends in music to talk about, regardless.

What’s the one piece of advice you could give to someone heading out in your field of work?

You'd better love what you do. The chances of making a living, let alone a good one, out of writing about culture, are slim – and just to add to the frustrations, there'll always be people less talented but more privileged and/or more self-assured than you blithely leapfrogging ahead. But writing, and immersion in the culture you love, has a value all of its own, and if you remind yourself of that again and again, eventually you can persuade other people too.

And here are Joe’s recommendations:

READ

McMafia McMafia by Misha Glenny – I was obsessed with this book by a former BBC journalist about the illegal 20% of the global economy when it came out, and nowadays its narrative of the convergence of governments and gangsterism looks all the more terrifyingly relevant.

Doubt Kind of ironically,  Doubt: A History has become my bible. Ostensibly a history of disbelief and atheism from the beginning of history until now, it's far more: a catalogue of the greatest inquiring and dissenting human minds. Doubt on Amazon

The Outrun Amy Liptrot and I started as professional writers together in the chaotic final days of The Face magazine, and I'm now furiously jealous of her huge talent, how far she's come and the acclaim she's had for the gripping The Outrun – though obviously not so jealous of the hard times and addiction the memoir describes. 

WATCH This Country This Country on BBC3 iPlayer – what People Just Do Nothing / Kurupt FM is to the inner city, this is to the countryside; if you grew up in a rural town like I did you will wince with recognition all the way through, but aside from that it's a brilliantly written and played piece.

The Circus is in Town The definition of cult viewing, Carnivàle is a flawed but deliriously dark and atmospheric occult HBO drama about a travelling circus in the depression-era USA which ran for a season and a half before abrupt cancellation in 2005 forced its rushed conclusion.

Cooking Down Under Masterchef Australia makes the UK version look small and shabby in comparison – the cooking, the Aussie camaraderie, the chefs' “journeys” and “food dreams”, the quality of presenters and guests: everything is super-sized, dramatic and gripping. The new season starts any day now, and I cannot wait.

LISTEN Underground House Talaboman – The Night Land – John Talabot from Barcelona and Axel Boman from Stockholm were already well-loved DJ/producers in underground house, but together they've produced an absolutely beautiful album more for home listening than the club, which I've had on repeat for months now (read my interview with them here)

Joni's Lawns Joni Mitchell – The Seeding of Summer Lawns – I was only ever a casual Joni fan until I discovered these leaked demos of The Hissing of Summer Lawns; suddenly everything fell into place – not just the perfection of her songwriting but her genius as a producer and arranger – and an unquenchable obsession began.

P Money P Money – Live & Direct – unfairly eclipsed by higher-profile releases from fellow grime veteran Skepta and young upstart Stormzy, this from Southeast London stalwart P Money deserves to be heard widely: it's as belligerent and problematic as can be, but also razor sharp and full of hard-won wisdom.

BUY Body Bass SubPac – a bodily bass speaker that you wear or lean on, that combines with headphones to give you the experience of being up close to a soundsystem or orchestra without upsetting the neighbours; incredible for deep ambient voyaging!

Animation Studio from Hue The Hue Animation Studio – a brilliantly simple bit of kit – a webcam on a flexible arm, plus super-intuitive software interface – for making stop-motion animation. Bought it for my son, but he has to fight to stop me monopolising it.

Human after all A FMLY 'HUMAN' sweatshirt – yes I do a lodda great work for charidee mate - stylish AND philanthropic, buying this also gets £10 to the Refugee Council. 

EAT & DRINK Salad - No, really. God this is poncey but I'm obsessed with Ottolenghi salads, like this fennel, pear and pecorino one. I think I could face being vegetarian if all veggie food tasted this good.

Meat! I am very much not a vegetarian though, and I love the short rib at  Zelman Meats in Soho – it specialises in less pricey cuts, but the quality of meat and cooking mean the eating experience rivals places WAY more expensive.

Everyone loves their local I have to shout out to my South London local 161 Food & Drink – whether for coffee and cake or lock-ins until god-knows-what-o-clock with a string quartet, Al is the consummate host and the food, wine and beer are reliably A1 quality. 

LEARN Learn Coding Learn the Essentials of coding with Makeblock robots – so easy to get started with, and massively fun, but quickly draws both kids and adults into really complex programming and logic concepts.

Snow Geysers There has been an amazing discovery of snow geysers and the possibilities of life on Enceladus, Saturn's snowball moon with an internal ocean full of warm currents and organic molecules.

Contribute! How, without having to be a massive hippy, to make small positive contributions to the world, courtesy of the Draw The Line collective of comics writers and artists.

DO Down House Go to Down House – Charles Darwin's house for many years, the downstairs is preserved exactly as it was when he lived and worked there, as are the gardens and the outbuildings where he experimented, and it's kind of magical.

Pink Trombone Drive yourself quietly mad with the (deliberately) unfortunately named Pink Trombone – an online tool that mimics the shape and movements of the human mouth to generate sounds: try and find the Kenneth Williams settings!

Rave in London Go raving at Printworks London – I thought I was way past dancing in giant rave barns, but the extraordinary post-apocalyptic industrial setting of Printworks has changed my mind and then some: extraordinary production values, some of the greatest names in techno, and even daytime opening for those of us too old and tired to stay out all night!

[apexart-journal]

Stephanie Lawal, Day #20

Today I went to Open Café in St. Leonards.  St. Leonards is the westernmost part of Hastings along the sea (I did not travel inland in Hastings).  I should add that Hastings had been described to me as a kind of edgier version of Brighton.  I could understand this description in the community vibe I felt here.  The Open Cafe is a kind of refuge space for immigrants and asylum seekers.  Maybe that is not quite the right way to term it, as it is not at all a residence.  It is a literal café in a minor sense, in that coffee and tea are served there (also the best baklava ever - I promise.), but this is only for a donation, which I can’t imagine generates much revenue.  Rather, the space itself is used for all kinds of community events and exhibitions.  There is even a hair dresser located on the premises.  I believe that the night before there was a film showing of Knock Down the House - the U.S. documentary following four female political candidate campaigns.  The space is volunteer run, and the person I spoke to was sitting in for the regular manager.  It was a very quiet morning, and I didn’t feel like asking a bunch of nosy questions.  However, this person did inquire about my being there.  She was friendly, and looking to give me some info about the place.  I don’t think I digested many specifics as I felt a bit uncomfortable not speaking to the people who seemed to be the immigrants for whom the space was to benefit.  I had just barely nodded and thanked the woman behind the counter who served me, and again to Abdul, who I was introduced to later as being the person who made the baklava.  I praised him but refused another piece, as at that point in my trip I was feeling very conscious about all the things I was consuming that I shouldn’t have been.  I then perused the hanging exhibit.  This featured portraits and statements from young adults in Afghanistan, about the political process and needing to be able to contribute in a process that corruptly excludes them - especially, but not solely the women. 

From there I walked back eastward to the Hastings Herring Festival.  While fish is really not my thing, I am a sucker for festival, especially niche things as such.  This part of Hastings (Old Town) clearly takes great pride in its fishing heritage, and there were several food vendors and a music tent.  Once I decided to partake, I chewed on an antihistamine and found something that I could enjoy - a Colombian recipe chowder with local herring, cod, and mussels in a coconut milk base.  I also got a mulled wine ( Did I mention that it was cold and spitting...again?) and I went to the tent to listen to Carol Prior (I think that was her name) sing.  At first I wasn’t sure what to think of the performance.  It seemed a bit rough.  Her songs felt like storytelling to music - kind of just singing aloud her thoughts on the topics.  She grew on me though.  This was storytelling as it should be.  She sang songs about women.  First acapella and then she pulled out her guitar.  I actually wish that I could remember some of the lyrics now.  She sang about Virginia Woolf and how we all women should get rid of the stones in our pockets.  She sang about a woman buried in Brighton, whose gravestone inspired Carol to do some research.  She sang about Molly Malone - presumably a composite of women from that time and place (late 19th century, English seafront), and though I didn’t have a clue as to what a cockle or a whelk was, I sang along with everyone else.  Then she sang the theme song to a show called Gentleman Jack.  I haven’t seen the show, but apparently Jack was a dyke in a time and place where that was (more so) frowned upon.  Lastly, she sang about Harriet Tubman.  This surprised me, but was nice to hear in this audience, though she seemed to speak about the Underground Railroad as having actual trains.  I was tempted to talk with her about this after the performance, but I just let it go.  I left the festival and hopped on a cliffside “elevator” trolley car, up to what I believe was national parkland.  The views were ridiculous.  Again, I was so impressed at the expanse of green, far beyond my sight and the sight of the ocean - all just literal steps (200+ without the elevator) from town.  I am in absolute awe of this landscape.

From there, even though I wanted to relax at the hotel and possibly take a bath, AND I had absolutely no intention of shopping... I stopped in a shop with what turns out to be clothing from Thailand.  Somehow I would up in an hours long? conversation with Lisa, who (of course) was on my wavelength about all things political and humane.  What a lovely (though somewhat depressing - just because of the way of the world these days) conversation and connection.  I am just so thrilled when that happens.  The night continued to be a treat with a “new moon sister soul circle.”  I am pretty sure that I’ve added to the title of this event, but I think it all applies.  This was the second very purposefully women oriented group participation gathering I had taken part in on this trip.  In each, our discussions were quite personal and our interactions healing.  It brought to mind the question of whether or not men ever do this kind of healing work with each other.  I personally can’t imagine this scene, but I would welcome it.  In any case, in this session the intent was to be conscious of our own life cycle’s alignment with that of the moon.  With the upcoming new moon, the idea was to set intentions for the next couple of weeks.  The first activity though was one that incorporated touch.  We were partnered and applied to shiatsu techniques to each other - one that involved support and holding of sorts, and another where we applied comforting pressure.  Each of these actions was held for 5 minutes in silence.  Again,  I thought about the power of touch and the willingness or unwillingness of men to be affectionate towards each other, but also all our willingness or unwillingness to touch each other, let alone strangers.  This exercise brought back parts of the conversation I had had with Lisa earlier in the day about all the people who are solitary (we were speaking specifically of older people who live alone and don’t or are unable to leave their houses often), and how often they interact with another human being.  I also wonder this about homeless people often.  I try not to treat anyone as invisible, but sometimes as I am going about my daily life, it is really hard to take that time to acknowledge everyone who might need acknowledgement.  Also, it’s just not my everyday personality.  All the exercises we did were moving and felt relevant.  One other that I think most people would find hard was to listen to our partners speak for five minutes without interjection.  It was hard even to begin speaking in that moment, but I think powerful to be listened to uninterrupted.  I know that this is a skill I need to practice more on.  An aside to this was that the person who spoke to me described a kind of racial dysmorphia.  I think that is the correct term.  She has always felt that she was/should be black, and had always pictured herself having biracial children.  I really did not know what to do with this information, and was glad that I did not have to respond.  That is such a strange desire? for me.  It does make me think about how I feel about transgenderism and the like.  In what ways can we feel that we are in the wrong selves, and how far can we/should we go to repair this?

As another aside - just on observations of Brightoners - they have a slightly closer personal space distance than New Yorkers.  It is not at all uncomfortable, but noticeable.

[noiseartists]

BLANKENBERGE: The sound of infinite space from Russia

"Shoegaze itself is described generally as music with a large dream-like wall of sound. Something that feels like a cosmic wave of noise that you can ride and float along with, carrying you through nostalgia and memories of life both good and bad. It’s always felt like a dynamic balance between happiness and sadness. The group Blankenberge seems to have mastered this craft of striking those tonal emotions. Hailing from Russia, they have spread their sound throughout the airwaves of the world. It brims with so much life that it can’t help but traverse across the lands. Guitars shimmer and seem to sparkle like a star shooting out of the ocean, while vocals soar like a bird gliding between the cusps of clouds, and a solid beat that helps carry and keep the dream grounded into a direction nothing but beauty. Drawing from multiple sources of inspiration such as drone, ambient, and shoegaze, they seem to have perfectly melded all of them into one cohesive sound. Their EP Radiogaze, which was released in 2017, is one of the most endearing sonic journey’s that ones ear ultimately will seem destined to have heard. There is something that can be said about Radiogaze in terms of how pure it feels. Each track drips with a love for what is being reflected. The passion is undeniably audible and immediately pulls the listener in without a question. If there were ever a sound of music that makes me picture myself flying through a pink sky with a smile and tears flowing like a river of happiness, it would be Blankenberge’s. Blankenberge have solidified themselves into the scene immediately and have made it obvious that their future is bright, loud, and beautiful. It’s bands like this that are helping keep the scene alive in such brilliant and refreshing ways. As much as they wear their influence on their sleeves, their sound is carved into their own niche and gives them a shining light that is begging for the worlds eyes to see. Below you can read about how their recording process works and a little bit of background into who they are in this big old world. We’re lucky and honored to have them on Noise Artists. Do yourself a favor: lay down in bed, turn out the lights, put on Blankenberge’s Radiogaze, and maximize the volume. You will find yourself falling in love like when you were in high school for the first time. Also, I think they and Pinkshinyultrablast need to tour together, but that’s just my opinion. "  -- Corey Philpot - Outward

But Before anything else, a little taster:

BIOGRAPHY (by Peter Pires, Elusive Sound Records)

Blankenberge is a Shoegaze/Dream Pop band based in Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation. The band consisting of Yana Guselnikova (vocals), Daniil Levshin (guitar, synth), Dmitriy Marakov (bass), Daian Aiziatov (guitar) and Sergey Vorontsov (drums), came together in 2015 to create dream-weaving and warm reverb-drenched, drone raging songs that swell into soaring ethereal harmonies.

The story of Blankenberge started in early 2015 in Barnaul, a small city in the south of Siberia. Daniil and Yana having returned from an inspiring trip around Europe, started composing several songs with some local friends some of which were later released on their first EP. They decided to name their band Blankenberge, in honour of a little town on the North Sea coast of Belgium which had really impressed them.

That very same year, Daniil and Yana decided to move to Saint Petersburg in search of more opportunities to develop their music. They not only found a beautiful and inspiring city but also the other three members of the band – Dmitriy, Daian and Sergey – who would help them evolve and refine their sound. Blankenberge performed regularly in Saint Petersburg and released their first self-titled EP on 12 March, 2016. The EP’s free-formed post-rock compositions with intensely melodic passages, heavy droning and a pure shoegaze sound, immediately drew in very enthusiastic reviews from shoegaze blogs from all around the world.

In July 2016, they were involved in a cover project «The Cure in other voices» where they presented a dark and noisy shoegaze version of «Pictures of you». Shows in Saint Petersburg and Moscow followed and the band immediately started composing new songs. The writing and recording process would take another year and a half. After unveiling a first single “We” on 12 March, 2017, Blankenberge finally released their debut full-length album “Radiogaze” digitally on 30 June, 2017. The album instantly won over the ears of shoegaze listeners worldwide with Yana’s swooning, soft vocals serenely ascending and sweeping the skies, unveiling an afterglow, lacing emotion through a blazing, hazy swirl of loud droning guitars that swell and subside in an all-embracing ocean of sound.

On july 18, 2017, Blankenberge officially signed to Elusive Sound. “Blankenberge create warm reverb-drenched, drone-raging songs that swell into soaring ethereal harmonies. We are thrilled to announce that we will be releasing their wondrous full-length debut album “Radiogaze” on vinyl in 2018”.

On September 10, 2017, Blankenberge were invited to film and record Radiogaze Live in session at a converted Lutheran church called Melody Studio.

On March 14, 2018 Blankenberge announced a Spring Tour of 2018 which will see them play nine shows in nine different countries. The tour will kick off in their hometown of Saint-Petersburg and then cover most of Eastern Europe with an additional show in Vienna. This Spring Tour will end in Minsk on 20 April.

On April 10, 2019 the band released their sophomore album, ‘More’ a more gritty music, while staying into their pristine soundscapes.

In the summer 2019, they toured in Europe with one of Noise Artists’ favorite band, Life on Venus.

MUSIC WORK

Here are some of the songs we love to discover the band:

The band’s music work to date, released on the always tasteful Elusive Sound Records, is:

2016: Blankenberge, EP; Picture of you (Cure cover), single

2017: We, single; Radiogaze, LP

2019: Right now (single); More, LP

INTERVIEW

Where are you from? Where are you living now?

All our members come from different cities of Russia, but we all live now in St. Petersburg.

What did you study?

We all have technical educations. Only Yana has a music education.

What is your day job at present if any?

Daniil is an Engineer. Dima, Yana and Vova are working in programming and computers. Sergey works in the marketing sector.

Do you dream to live from your music or is it a passion you do not want to spend your full time on?

Daniil: I do music whenever I want and how much I want, and that's enough to make me happy.

Could you tell us more about your beginning?

Daniil: Our story began in 2015, when Yana and Daniil gathered a group in a small city in Siberia. After several months, the group moved to St. Petersburg and started again. Back in Barnaul, Yana and I recorded the demo songs “Seagulls” and “Feel alive” on iPAD and began searching for musicians in St. Petersburg.

Could you tell me how the band meet and decided to do music together?

Daniil: After moving to St. Petersburg in September 2015, I began searching for muses and quickly found guitarist Dayan and bass player Dima. We got to know each other around a common hobby: collecting guitar effects.

I met with Dayan at the concert of The Fall of Troy.

We held the first rehearsal in an old wagon. I did not know the city and therefore I found only this shady rehearsal place. As I remember, it was very cold and rainwater was dripping from the ceiling. But we had a good time. After the rehearsal, we did not want to pay as it was so bad.

The first time we played with electronic drums, as it was difficult to find a drummer. But about a month, we managed to find Sergey. This is a great step for us.

I had material for EP and we began to prepare for the record.

Sergey: When Danya invited me to the project, I first answered that I already have several bands. But then I listened to the recordings that he sent me, and thought it was good music and agreed to join.

Can you tell me the inspiration behind your band? You can detect the influences of shoegaze and indie rock. You took all these influences to make your own music, your own sound, which is not easy. Could you tell more?

I was influenced a lot by the Post-Rock scene from 1997 to 2005 with bands like Mogwai, This will destroy you, Sigur Ros and many others. I always liked the noise component and the approach to the structure of tracks and melodies. Later I got acquainted with Shoegaze and bands like MBV. I also discovered ambient and drone bands such as Nadja, Angellic Process, Star of the Lid. I liked to find melodies in the noise of the guitar that actually aren't necesarily there. These melodies were created by distortions. And I realized that this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to create musical canvases out of noise.

I composed the first track of Seagulls inspired by listening to EP Jesu - Silver.

Was there a vision of sorts or did you know what you wanted to do when you started up?

Daniil: Yes, there was a vision. Without it, it is difficult to start working on the tracks. But sometimes it turns out differently that what was planned.

I tried to compose energetic Dream Pop, but I always got only post-rock :-D

Do you have any other musical side projects apart from this band?

Daniil: I had several projects that I have abandoned. Currently Blankenberge is my main project. But I also have the project to put together a minimal duet with Vova. We play 40 minutes tracks over a drum machine.

Dima: In addition to Blankenberge, I play in a project called "Knight of Wild Apples". The genre is something between Twee Pop and Post-Punk.

Could you tell me more on the band composition? Do you have plans to add new members, or is there possible departure scheduled from existing band members?

Yana: This year our line-up has changed. Dayan, our guitarist moved to another country and we were forced to look for another guitarist. Our good friend,Vladimir Luchansky, joined us.

Daniil: We have known him for a long time as he is also from Siberia. He performed with us in Barnaul and Novosibirsk. He is a multi-instrumentalist and it is possible that new instruments will be in our new album.

I am not a fan of changing the group. Several years ago I played in a band where we had 17 bass players! This is very bad for the morale. And in the end, we froze the project. It was my main group at that time. Soon after I created Blankenberge.

Can you tell us more how you came to have the band’s name?

Yana: We don't like to make up names. We thought on how to name the group. The first option was Blankenberge, as it was a place we have very warm memories of, and then they tried to find something else without success . But in the end came back to this name.

Daniil: Some options were «Youth.Loud», «Spring Youth». But I thought that it was too snobbish. Blankenberge really makes our heart beat harder.

Who writes the song and the music and how do you get to the final song? Is it a community process, do you have leaders in composing or arranging music?

Daniil: I write most of the music at home improvising or during rehearsals. Often we record the improvisations on a dictaphone, and then I listen at home everything we played. I build on some parts, I cut some out or can add it. back later in a rehearsal. Everyone also add something of their own it turns into a new track!

Do you listen to the advice of your band mates? What would you do if they said a song was shit but you liked it?

Daniil: Yes, we are discussing the tracks. But I do not remember any songs that someone would strongly dislike. There was a track, ‘Out Loud’, that Yana didn’t like, but we managed to make it attractive.

Talking about the lyrics: who write them? Is there a common thread in them, a theme?

Daniil: All lyrics and vocal melodies are written by Yana. Yana can turn lifeless music into a live and aerial song. Often, after a vocal melody is created, something new appears in the music.

Yana: Texts about nature, dreams and freedom. I am very inspired by nature.

Do you have a message that you want to get across in your music? If so, what are some of the messages you want to spread?

Yana: No, we only create sounds.

Daniil: I don’t try to convey an idea through music. The best music will help convey someone else's idea, for example, as just a soundtrack. The only common idea in my music that I can think of is love. If I listen to my track and feel love, that means the track is ready. Love for everything, like Bolkonsky in ‘War and Peace’.

How is your recognition going in the US and Abroad? Is it growing? Are you happy with it?

Yana: We are very happy to have listeners all over the world. It really means a lot to us.

Daniil: When I go to the post office to send tapes or discs to another country - it is like a holiday for me. For me, this is still a fantastic story. I imagine how someone, for example, in New Zealand, picks up a package from the box office, and our music creates vibrations there - this is wonderful!.

Is it easy to find producers and studios where you lived for indie-rock?

Is it about Barnaul? There are several studios in Barnaul and there is no need to choose, just go and record in any, because nowhere better to do it.

In St. Petersburg, a lot of studios and the choice was difficult. But for RadioGaze, we quickly chose the studio Melody, because we had heard about it before and were impressed by its halls.

Your recorded sound is very good, which is not easy. Did you engineer the sound yourself, or did you have a sound engineer with you? If yes could you tell us more about him/her?

We do not have a sound engineer. Usually we ask for help in recording with people those recommended by our friends.

On the last album we worked with Mikhail Kurochkin - the recording and the mixing will remain with him, we unconditionally trust him with this process. Misha listened to all our previous works and also loves noisy music (even louder than ours), so the recording process goes very fast with him. He doesn't need to be explained anything, he knows everything.

We also had the pleasure worked with Vladimir Nosyrev, who previously did some work with Pinkshauliultrablast. Vladimir has a lot of experience recording musicians of various levels. When we were recording at his studio, we felt like we were on Ebi Road.

Daniil: I was completely easygoing about the quality of the recording. For me, the main task was to get the sound I needed from the guitar dynamics.

Was it a community work to try to have the best sounding music possible or mainly driven by the sound engineer or by the band?

During the recording, Vladimir Nosyrev was completely in charge of the recording process, and I can say that I really liked it. He did the feedback for all the guitar speakers.

Can you tell us how the recording process was?

The process of recording Radiogaze was quite complicated and lengthy. We started recording the album in November 2016. We recorded drums for half the tracks.

Then the process slowed down due to personal problems. We went back recording after the new year, in January.

In February I had to leave for work in Moscow and the recording process stopped again. When I returned to St. Petersburg, we had big sessions. Then I left again, and there was a other pause in the record. We managed to record all the material only in April.

Then there was a very difficult stage of mixing. Every evening for two months I listened to the results of the recording. Overall, the recording of the album was very difficult. But I was pleased with the result.

Dima: We unfortunately do not have any cool stories related to the recording of the album. Everything was pretty standard. At the studio where we recorded, there was a good guitar and bass equipment, but the guys still dragged something of their own and this is very cool.

Could you let us know some important technical tricks you learnt during the process that could help other musicians not as experienced?

I am not an expert in this matter, but I discovered some things.

There is not too much reverb, delay, fuzz, or length on some part, and it is never too loud or quiet. If the heart requires you to make it louder or something, then you need to do it and not think about anything else.

If there is a track ready and you can hear that there is a place in which it seems to be possible to do better, no need to redo it. It is better to write a new track in which there will be a similar place, which will be changed, as needed. If you go back on the past all the time, development stops. You need to see the finished result to move on.

Any interesting anecdotes on some recording session you would like to share?

Dayan: Several times, when we recorded a song, we accidentally turned on two rovers simultaneously - Cosmos and the Big Sky. We did not immediately notice that something was wrong. In the end, a few doubles recorded with a huge amount of reverb. We liked it and in some places we left these doubles.

Did getting the live experience across on record create any pressure for your selves in the recording process?

Each new concert gives us more of experience.

Instruments: are you mainly a Fender band? Could you tell me what inspire you to use fenders rather than other brands?

Dima: I have four basses at the moment. It is not necessary, but this is kind of my hobby.

Oddly enough, but for the records, I dreamed about the Rickenbacker 4003 sound for a very long time and this was my first serious bass,. I went on tour with the Fender AVRI 62 Jazz Bass, for several reasons. It is lighter, it is less whimsical in maintenance, and it always fits perfectly into the mix, so we could really be called the "Fender band", considering that Daniil played on the Fender Telecaster, and Dayan on the Fender Jazzmaster Thurston Moore. Now it's completely different, I play with a Gibson RD Artist bass, and Daniil got himself a Gibson Midtown Custom, so now we have a little Gibson band.

Daniil: For a long time I played on the television broadcaster, which my great-grandmother gave me. I will never part with it. Now I got a Gibson Midtown bush and I, too, am satisfied.

A question for a future paper I have in mind: if you use often a Fender Jaguar, could you tell me more about what makes it good to play (sound, neck, …). I find there are lot of noise artists that are using this guitar and I am interested to know why.

Dima: I was the owner of the Fender AVRI 62 Jaguar for a long time and I can say that it was a lead guitar. First of all, I would like to say that the Jaguar / Jazzmaster Floating tremolo is the best tremolo that you could think of. Yes, it is capricious for setting, but it performs its function with 10/10. The Jaguar is very convenient due to its size 24.75 and I am madly in love with its sound, especially on some pickup setupa.

Daniil: I once had a Japanese Jaguar. It was one of the best guitars.

Do you have one favorite instrument or do you change often?

Dima: I do not have a favorite instrument. All the instruments that I have at this moment are cool in their own way, I can not give someone preference. This is both bad and good at the same time.

Daniil: Telecaster is my favorite tool. Was, is and will be.

Tell us what you are looking when trying to achieve your sounds? Do you experiment a lot or have a clear idea of what you want?

As I said, I love to create canvases of sounds. I like to keep rehearsals on a recorder. My voice recorder has a sound of poor quality and basically I hear only noise. But this noise helps me create tracks. Also, often I hear sounds on the street or in the subway from the ambient noise that give me ideas for a new track.

Who is the more knowledgeable with pedals? You use them a lot, to great effect.

Dima: I'm even afraid to imagine how many pedals we had through the years. Dayan one time led the list, I remember that the count has long passed for 100, then I no longer followed this list. Daney and I met, exchanging pedals. As I remember, we exchanged the Boss RE-20 with a Supa Puss.

Daniil: we all love new devices. But I have the same pedals - the boss dd20 and bigskay.

How many concerts a year would you do on average and what would be the size of the venue?

Last year we gave a few concerts. The spring tour was a serious test for us, and we did loads of performances.

Daniil: Each performance is a release of energy and often I experience a lot of stress, after which the body requires recovery. Therefore, now we are planning concerts only if we have prepared new material and want to show it to the audience.

Would you mind sharing some good anecdotes from your concerts/touring?

Dima: One case comes to mind, it was at a concert in Vienna. We played with very cool guys from the Snow Crystal band. And here in the dressing room one guy talked to me, already quite cheerfully, because we had a beer fridge in the dressing room and asked: "Dmitry, what style do you play?"

Of course, I quite seriously answer him: “We are playing Shoegaze".

And here he is: "Uuuuuuuu, is it not supposed to be such garbage?"

I knew from his expression that it was necessary to find an easier description.

And I say: "Rock, we play Rock!".

He immediately rejoiced, patted me on the shoulder and said: "Daaaaaa, Dmitry rock is cool. ROCK!"

Then we often recalled this funny story with the band, parodying that guy a little.

What are some places around the world that you hope to take your band? Do you have any plans at present to tour in other countries?

Dima: I dream to go and play in Japan one day.

Daniil: I dream to perform in Iceland.

Is there any reason in particular that you want to go to these places? Is there something about dream pop/shoegaze in those places that makes you want to go there?

Dima: First of all, I am very attracted to the culture of Japan and its dissimilarity to everything that we are used to in Russia or Europe.

Daniil: Iceland was for me one of the inspiring countries. Our music is inspired by the Northern seas and the atmosphere of the North inspires me.

Russian Shoegazing is not very well known internationally. Could you tell us more about it?

Dima: In Russia, this genre is not very popular, although now more and more musicians try Shoegaze and I must say quite successfully.

Of course, everyone knows Pinkshinyultrablast and Aerofall. Besides them, there are still a lot of cool bands, of my favorites, probably Life on Venus and My friends Polymers (Editor’s: our favourtie too with Blankenberge. See our collaborations with the bands in the links and also our Russian Shoegaze, Dream & Noise pop guide volume 1 and volume 2).

Is it easy for a Russian indie bands to be known internationally? Do you have any example?

Dima: I think that now with this as it is easier. Streaming platforms, Spotify, etc., which make selections based on your tastes, are very developed. I used to use LastFM a lot to find out about some unknown groups that are similar to my current idols.

Although the persistence and hard work for becoming famous is the equally true for a band from any country.

From the example I do not think that Pinkshinyultrablast, woke up one day already famous.

Has the scene changed since you began, and if so how?

Dima: Yes, it has changed and definitely for the better. I like that now we have no problems with the fact that a new band can make their first concert easily, I think this is very important in order not to lose heart and not spend all their time in rehearsals playing by ourselves.

What is the next album due?

In the new album, we tried to do what we didn’t have time to do in Radiogaze, developed things that we wanted to do before.

Any other project (ie movies soundtrack, …) or plans

Dima: I play the Twee Pop / Post-Punk project “Knight of the Wild Apples”, these are simple, kind and naive songs.

Do you plan to continue music for a long time or are you tired of it?

We plan to continue the music while there are ideas. In any case, we can always play music in the form of pedal trading and become sofa musicians: D

THE BAND IN THE (SOCIAL) MEDIA

Some good videos

There some nice video on the web in addition the one posted on the band’s YouTube Channel.

First from the Radiogaze session (on their channel). It was recorded and filmed in a large empty classic building. It is a perfect fit with their sound, vast and pristine. There are other songs from the same session on YouTube.

A 30 minutes live session

From their 2019 summer tour

And an outdoor acoustic session

Where to find their music

Bandcamp

Elusive Sound Records

Spotify

Their social media:

Facebook

Instagram

VK

OUTRO

A big thank you to Corey Philpot from Outward (Somewherecold Records) for the interview and Peter from Elusive Sound Records for his help all the way. And of course a million thank you to the band for their kindness confidence and patience.

[rephemera]

Label · 21st Circuitry

20 November 2018

For the last major type of posts (the other two being "Concept" and "Store"), the "Label" posts are going to introduce ephemera specific to record labels.  This will mostly be limited to CD inserts and, unlike price tags, not be an exhaustive collection—if I have five identical instances of a specific reply card, I'm going to detail the first I come across, and I photographed these going through the collection alphabetically, with compilations coming toward the end.  Any of these which show up as compilations is a demonstration that I don't have anything from the label outside compilations, soundtracks, tribute albums, and related material.

Typically, as I mentioned in a previous post, I don't want to get into "record reviews" of a 20-year-old label compilation.  These are going to be nearly impossible to find in a physical record store, and the only real market is the second-hand market.  The "support the artist" argument for actually buying a record like this in 2018 is utterly facile—the label ceased to exist in 1998, the same year of this release, releasing only two more albums after this album, artists typically stop getting paid when a label goes under, and the ugly truth is that retail sales of albums isn't how most artists are paid in the first place, now, in 1998, or in 1958.  Most artists are paid by touring, and merch at tours.  Even under the best record deals, artists are typically paid $0.10-$0.25 per sale of their own album.  But more on that later under "The CD as Tour Souvenir".  Appearances on compilations are not lucrative for artists, to say the least.

As far as the difficulty of obtaining something like this on streaming services, this is a great example of why solutions like that aren't complete solutions for many people.  The Luxt track is there, but that's it.  Spotify would have to hunt down whoever owns the rights to 21st Circuitry's catalogue to even bother with something like this; label compilations are a frequent casualty of streaming economics, this is common when the label is small, as 21st Circuitry was, and particularly unfortunate when the compilation is actually good, as Newer Wave and Newer Wave 2.0 were.  The return on investment for Spotify for doing that much legwork is incredibly low, and really only works in reverse–some company acquires 21st Circuitry's catalogue, probably with the intent to re-press key albums, and an eye to target feeding the back catalogue to streaming services like Spotify to pull in some relatively low-effort residual cash to fund future projects.

There are, of course, other methods of obtaining albums like this that often have very little to do with the economics of buying a CD or a streaming service, and they're treated quite differently for reasons which are often quite hypocritical—the first is YouTube, where the listener is fairly given a free pass on the supposed moral ramifications of listening to a song that literally nobody is able to legally "monetize" under a label-dominated intellectual property structure, and the second is file sharing.  File sharing is treated as a moral outrage despite the fact that the artists will literally receive as much money from it as they did from my walking into a Harmony House and paying the princely sum of $4.88 since I almost certainly purchased it after 1998.  The same would have been true had I bought it as a cut-out (more on that later), or at a second-hand music store, or today via Amazon or eBay.  Rather than take a rational look at whether any particular aspect of intellectual property law makes sense, however, we shroud it in meaningless phrases like "support the artists" without examining whether any particular act actually does.  Make no mistake, there are many ways to spend money on an album which either do not "support the artist" either in any meaningful way or in any way at all, and there are many ways to get music for free which are entirely legal which are different from other ways of getting music for free which are entirely illegal whose differences to the end listener are mostly matters of delivery mechanism, convenience, legal fictions, or which website or software one uses.  This is not a matter of agenda, as I am not advocating any particular agenda here, it is an easily documentable fact.  Whew.  What agenda I will reveal, however, is that this and its predecessor album, with wider exposure, might have been good enough on their own to justify this label by themselves.  They're very fun:  exclusive (I believe) industrial dance covers of 1980s New Wave hits, which is a spot-on combination in terms of influences and audience.  It may not have been tenable for the long-term unless 21st Circuitry had a stable of artists under its own imprint, but Cleopatra could easily have taken this formula and ran with it as well.  They came close to it, but usually focused on single-artist tributes of wildly varying quality.

There's some delicious tangents out of the way.  On to the regular staple of Label posts:  the reply card.  I've got a lot of these because if I've ever turned any of them in, I simply don't recall ever doing it.  Maybe I did send one or two in for a favorite band early on and stopped since I never got much out of it, or maybe I stopped since I never got anything out of it, I'm not sure.  I never quite grasped the value proposition.  By the time the CD era kicked in and I was buying them with my own money, I was toward the end of high school and they were still quite expensive.  By the time I was buying them frequently, I was in the military, and while I signed up for six years and was almost positive I wasn't going to re-enlist after those six years (and didn't), and even though that only covered two different assignments, it still involves a considerable amount of address instability:  Basic Training, Technical School, an AE zip code where you're overseas but you have what is effectively a US PO Box zip code for most purposes, then in the US, a series of apartments, and eventually a townhouse.  I'm not entirely sure what a person was expected to receive:  more little catalogues of the sort that CDs already came with, US Letter or European A4 printed sheets of new label releases, swag?  I'm sure if it was swag, someone would have clued me in and I would have actually bothered.  The concept of new releases is helpful enough, as this period I'm mostly talking about—1990 to 1999—largely either predates the internet or is concurrent with the internet.

Be sure that by "the internet" I mean the public internet, not the military, university, and contractor internet which is the predecessor to which it owes everything but bears almost no relationship to in terms of culture—the dividing line for culture is quite simple, on that early internet, the closest thing you could be to a normal person and be on it was a university student in particular universities in particular computer labs, and the culture was hemmed in by the requirement that no commercial activity was allowed over the NSFNET, making it a culturally separate creature from the public internet post 1995.  This makes the internet before May 1995 and after quite distinct.  For all real intents, we can talk about April 1995 as "pre-internet" in terms of what we actually use the internet for today, who uses it, and how many people use it.

In that pre-internet era, getting information about new releases wasn't exactly handy compared to today, that much I can admit.  But if you were an active consumer of music, even the increasingly niche corners of musical interest I was getting into at the time, it wasn't exactly obscure gnostic mysticism (unless it was Current 93, then it may have literally been that, but I wasn't interested in David Tibet yet).  I found out about new music and "new to me music" that wasn't new the same way my friends with the best taste did:  by raiding the collections of my friends to find out what was worth borrowing and then buying, scouring record stores relentlessly, some of the few good music shows (120 Minutes Europe on MTV Europe was much better than the US version when someone would either buy a subscription to Sky TV or more likely ... ahem ... hook it up illegally involving a weird proprietary wrench), and most importantly, the best music magazines.

The best music magazines for what I was into at the time included Spin (which wasn't great, but often included short reviews about better albums), AP (which was better), NME (which covered a very broad range of music, but was printed frequently and was huge at the time, both in terms of pages and reach—this was a British magazine which was printed in tabloid newspaper form), and to a slightly lesser extent, Melody Maker (NME's rival which was, at the time, physically similar and a bit more interested in pop music than NME).

Unlike many people, the public internet wasn't a revelation for me, it was an improvement of an older idea.  That older idea wasn't the science-and-military pre-public internet, however.  That older idea was BBS culture typified in the 8-bit and 16-bit consumer computer era, mostly the Commodore 64.  When I'd left the BBS scene in September 1990 to start military training, I didn't have the opportunity to have any actual leisure time until my first assignment in the UK in January 1991.  While I had my C64 there, and purchased my Amiga 500 there from a fellow American (getting a UK PAL system instead of a US NTSC machine would have introduced a lot of unnecessary complications once I had the system back in the US that any retrocomputer YouTuber will happily nod at), what I didn't have running is my handy Volks6480 1200 baud modem—using a US modem in the UK wasn't just a bad idea, it wasn't possible for local systems, and for long distance calls, it would have been some combination of incredibly difficult, incredibly expensive, and incredibly illegal—there was no possible way to do it that would not have actually covered some of all of those grounds.  Getting a new UK modem and exploring the UK BBS scene would have still been incredibly difficult and incredibly expensive, due to technical considerations not entirely worth getting into involving electricity, device compatibility, and the considerable expense of getting a private line into the dorms in the early 1990s.  The dorms had both UK and US power, but that only solves one part of one of the problems.  When my second assignment brought me to the US in January 1993, I re-connected to the BBS scene at the height of its power shortly before its death due to the public internet.

This BBS scene—particularly the version of it which I encountered upon my return to the US—was quite good for having discussions about music, including new releases.  Part of this had to do with the venue—the DC-Baltimore corridor rather than a disappointing rural Michigan bedroom community—but a lot of it had to do with technology, most notably FidoNet, which allowed for distributed conversations.  With FidoNet, it didn't matter if nobody else in your county knew about an artist like T.H.C. (Total Harmonic Distortion, not the other acronym), they could be in Alaska or even Finland since FidoNet was a distributed conversation.  Imagine if Reddit was distributed by a peer-to-peer network where you logged onto a local host instead of a central server, and those local hosts exchanged packets of posts, usually every night.  Some of you might immediately be thinking of Usenet, and that's a good comparison.  The conversations took on a more freewheeling nature since they were slightly asynchronous.  But it was better than talking on the local exurban BBS in the mid 1980s where there were ten regulars on the BBS total, and the only people you shared any music in common were your other two friends who were computer enthusiasts, probably listened to similar music, and who had the same equally good-or-bad information as you did because we were all at the ass-end of the music information food chain as high schoolers in a rural midwestern hellhole safely insulated from challenging trends.

Moving back to the early 1990s, the best approach for a label to get their releases into my hands was to get them into record stores.  With the exception of must-have albums by favourite artists, if I was in a record store, I was more often than not looking to spend money on something interesting to listen to, I wasn't merely looking for a specific record.  If your new release wasn't there, I'd probably find something else.  If I was looking for something specific, and it wasn't there, I'd be annoyed, but if it was one of those stores where the store could "special order it for you", they might as well have asked me if I'd like to order it from China and ship it by sailboat and it would take two months.  "No, I don't want you to special order it for me and take forever, I want you to have it right now and I leave with it and listen to it when I get home, that's what I want.  Figure it out."  Barring that, what I want to do is find another record store that has it.  It should be pretty obvious that I enjoyed being in record stores, so this wasn't exactly a high bar, so that wasn't an infrequent internal response.

What I didn't see the value of was a mailer being sent to wherever I lived when I originally returned the reply card.  I do some work with statistics and music, so I completely understand how the questions on this reply card have value in getting a handle on the demographics of the listeners, particularly in the pre-internet era (putting aside for the fact that this particular album is from 1998, the practice was constant throughout the era where the CD was a primary delivery media).  You couldn't just link it with data from Facebook or Google or Spotify or Apple.  This reply card is replete with questions that smack of this sort of thinking.  It screams "please give us data points" to the point where it sounds like a database asking the questions.  There's no voice of a human in it, much less of a human talking to another human who is interested in the sort of music their record label is actually known for.

Given that there were only two albums released after this, it seems very likely that few, if any, of these cards were ever dealt with in any way—meaningful or otherwise.  What happens to mail sent to a company that goes out of business?  In 1998, and even today, it's very easy for a record label to go out of business and someone to fill out a return card and not realize they're effectively sending a dead letter.  What usually happens in the case of a PO Box, it's just put in the PO Box regardless of who's currently renting it.  Today, that PO Box is owned by an unrelated company, which is unsurprising since the San Francisco Post Office is kind of a big deal.

[newssplashy]

NEW YORK — Sarah Saltzberg knew from an early age that she wanted to be an actor and a writer, too, because she loved concocting improvisations.

Then again, as a teenager, she did have a nice little business designing, making and selling macramé bracelets, which made her think about an entrepreneurial career.

But never during her childhood did Saltzberg fantasize about a life in real estate.

This is not one of those stories with a surprise ending, so the cards are going on the table right now: Saltzberg, 42, who made good and continues to make good in the theater, is also a founder, with Jon Goodell, of Bohemia Realty Group, a 6-year-old niche company that specializes in rentals and sales, river to river from 96th Street to the top of Inwood, plus a bit of the Bronx.

Saltzberg’s staff shares her creative inclinations. The majority of Bohemia’s 120 agents have degrees in the performing arts. The roster includes actors, dancers, burlesque performers, an opera singer and a professional clown. The head of training at the company is a folk/rock singer and songwriter. The uncertainty that is part and parcel of a real estate agent’s life (where, oh where, is that next commission coming from?) is familiar to actors who routinely deal with similar anxiety (where, oh where, is the next role coming from?).

“Real estate is constantly shifting. You have to hustle to be successful, which is the same as being an artist,” said Emily Ackerman, a Bohemia sales agent who is also an actor and playwright. “We’re comfortable with instability. In fact, a lot of us thrive on it.”

Prospective sales agents will undoubtedly be relieved to learn that no audition is required and that the culture of the agency’s two offices — in West Harlem and Washington Heights — is decidedly un-corporate. Employees bring dogs and babies to work, and have been known to break into song — with perfect pitch, of course.

“I’ve worked at traditional real estate companies, and agents didn’t speak to each other,” Ackerman said. “But the vibe here is very different.”

She added: “So many of us have collaborative experiences working in the arts, and we’ve translated that directly to our real estate business. We work together on deals.”

Some Bohemia staff members will work on a Broadway show for several months, then come back to Bohemia. “The door is always open,” said Brian Letendre, a sales agent for high-end properties and an actor whose credits include featured and principal roles in the musicals “Urban Cowboy,” “Movin’ Out” and “Mary Poppins.”

“Working in real estate has allowed me choice,” he continued. “I can be more selective about what I want to audition for and the roles I want to take.”

And, Letendre insisted, he is relentless on both fronts. “I go after the property a client wants just the way I go after an acting job,” he said.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, a number of Bohemia clients are also in the arts. Among them are Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Benj Pasek, who helped write the Tony Award-winning score for “Dear Evan Hansen,” Laura Benanti, a Tony Award-winning actor who has a standing gig as Melania Trump on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” and Celia Keenan-Bolger, who plays Scout in the forthcoming Broadway adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” as well as stage managers and ensemble members of musicals.

And who would know better than Saltzberg and her Bohemia colleagues how tough it is for a theater person to get approved by a bank or a co-op board?

“I’ll say to landlords, ‘Hey, I know that on paper this person looks like a risk, but let me explain what this means: This guy just got a job in ‘Hamilton.’ That show is not closing. He’s going to be in that show for a while,'” Saltzberg said. She is also able to tell potential clients which buildings have flexible management companies and board presidents.

“This is a relationship business the same as other businesses,” she said. “And when you specialize in a geographic area the way we do, and you really have an understanding of the people in the neighborhood and the people who are running things, you can get things done in a way that maybe you couldn’t do otherwise.”

Saltzberg got into the business in 2002 while helping to develop and raise money for a fledgling show that would grow up to become the Broadway musical comedy hit “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.”

She had a featured role in the show as the lisping, pigtailed Logainne Schwartzandgrubenierre, “the daughter of two gay dads,” a character that she created (and that continues to provide her a few thousand dollars in royalty payments every year).

“A friend was like, ‘You should do real estate. Just do it for a little bit. It takes 40 hours to get your license. Make a bunch of money. Put it in your show, and then you can stop doing it,'” Saltzberg recalled. “And I was like, ‘That sounds pretty good.'”

Wendy Wasserstein, the playwright for whom Saltzberg was then working as a weekend nanny, urged her on as well.

Three weeks after becoming a sales agent, Saltzberg, who was living on Central Park West and 108th Street at the time, took note of the vacancies in her building. She phoned the landlord about showing them. He hung up. She dialed again. He hung up again.

“I kept calling until he finally listened to me,” Saltzberg said. “I was like, ‘I’m what you want: I’m young, I’m energetic, I’m an artist. Artists are OK with living in these parts of the city that are not fully developed yet, and I have tons of friends who would want to move into the vacant apartments.'”

It was a Thursday. The landlord gave Saltzberg the weekend to make good. By Monday, she had applications on all the available units.

Something clicked. “I found that it was all a lot like being an actor,” she said. “It was persistence and using improvisation to solve problems.”

Since then, she has seen the neighborhood evolve. “When I first started doing this, I walked through drug deals with clients all the time,” she recalled. “We’d get to the apartment, and I’d have to think fast, so I’d say things like, ‘Well, at least you know you don’t have to go very far.'”

Within months, she said, the formerly skeptical landlord opened his expansive portfolio of buildings in Upper Manhattan to her.

All the while, “Spelling Bee” was moving on a fast track to Broadway. “Once we opened, I was thinking, ‘I don’t need to do real estate anymore because I’m making a living wage with the show,'” said Saltzberg, who worked at several other agencies before starting Bohemia. “But I realized I loved it. I loved that what you put into it was what you got out of it. I loved the art of the deal, and I loved the neighborhoods I was working in. It was very exciting to be part of them.”

Between performances on matinee days, she showed properties, frequently to other actors, frequently in the company of “Spelling Bee” castmate Jose Llana, a future star of the David Byrne operetta “Here Lies Love,” who had gotten his real estate license, too.

“We were in Upper Manhattan, where a lot of Broadway people would be looking,” Saltzberg said. “And sometimes they would be like, ‘You look so familiar.’ And we’d say, ‘Well, have you seen “Spelling Bee”?’ There was so much trust because clients knew us from this other thing.”

Ferguson took due note as Saltzberg sized up the agents on the other side of the deal when he was looking for a pied-à-terre in Chelsea. “I watched Sarah figure out how to work with them based on what they brought into the room. She has this great ‘Yes and —’ skill.”

“As an actor, Sarah puts herself into other people’s shoes, and I think that makes her more attuned to her clients’ needs,” said Benanti, who turned to Saltzberg for assistance in finding a two-bedroom, two-bathroom co-op in Upper Manhattan.

If Saltzberg’s theater training has been a help in her real estate career, her real estate training has proved equally useful in the theater.

“I have learned things about business that I had never learned as an actor,” she said. “I could do a great Irish accent, but I couldn’t look at a contract and think, ‘This doesn’t make sense. I have to negotiate on this and this point’ and fight for what I want. And that’s a huge pitch we make to agents with an arts background who come into the firm.”

As both an actor/writer and a real estate broker, Saltzberg knows the importance of setting a scene. Shrewdly, she has made Bohemia’s offices a celebration of the neighborhoods they serve. Vintage photos of subway cars hang in the Bohemia outpost on Frederick Douglass Boulevard and 113th Street. The centerpiece of the reception area is a map of legendary Harlem nightspots. In the agency’s Washington Heights office, work by local artists is displayed.

By way of strengthening its community ties, Bohemia contributes money and time to the Harlem Children’s Zone and Morningside Park, and does adoption events for Bideawee.

“Sarah lives in Harlem and loves Harlem, and it comes across,” said Avi Feldman, a partner in Omek Capital, which develops rental buildings, mostly in the 125th Street corridor, and retains Bohemia as its exclusive rental broker. “She involves herself in neighborhood activities and is an integral part of the community.”

Saltzberg can be forgiven if she seems a little distracted at the moment. She is working on marketing for the Ammann, a condominium that has just opened in Hudson Heights; Bohemia is the exclusive agent for the development.

And come Monday, there will be another opening, this one on Broadway, for the musical “Gettin’ the Band Back Together.” Saltzberg is credited with providing “additional material” (and is pleased to report that two former Bohemia sales agents, Ryan Duncan and Tad Wilson, are members of the show’s ensemble).

“We’re offering discounts on tickets to friends and business associates in Harlem,” she said. “And to my son’s preschool.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Joanne Kaufman © 2018 The New York Times

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[thepermanentrainpress]

THE PERMANENT RAIN PRESS INTERVIEW WITH SCREAMING AT TRAFFIC

Winnipeg’s Screaming at Traffic is known in their local music scene for their energetic and chaotic live shows. We covered their debut EP S.A.T., released in June, a bold four-track that fuses punk rock, grunge and hardcore notes. Comprised of vocalists and guitarists Jacques Richer and Duncan Murta, bassist Paul Colman and drummer Stefan St. Godard, the band of longtime friends are poised for a big year.

You released your EP, S.A.T., in June. For those who haven’t heard it yet, what is your pitch to potential listeners?

S.A.T. is a collection of the first songs we wrote as Screaming at Traffic. It’s lo-fi emo punk through and through. We wanted to get something out right away, so we teamed up with a friend of ours, Stefan Smith, and recorded it in our house over a weekend. We really wanted to capture our energy and I think Stefan did a great job of getting that out of us.

Is your sound still evolving?

I would say it has evolved since the EP, but a lot of the same elements are still there. Our newer content is still fast and loud, but is maybe a bit more refined? Or at least more focused at this point. Most bands evolve their sound as they progress and I don’t think we’re an exception.

What’s the songwriting process like for your band? Is it very collaborative?

It is. Duncan and I are the primary song writers for the band, so one of us will bring a sort of bare bones structure and lyrics for a song to the band, and from there everyone builds their parts. Paul (bassist) and Stefan (drummer) do a lot of producing after we nail down our parts. They add dynamics to the songs that Duncan and I bring to the table. We’re also always looking for each others’ opinions on whether or not each one of us is playing something that fits the song well, or if maybe something one of us is doing is a bit too flashy for a certain part. We’re definitely very open with each other during the process.

S.A.T. by Screaming at Traffic

The high energy in your music transitions well to your live shows. What do you enjoy most about performing in front of people? What’s your favourite concert you’ve played to-date?

I’ll answer the concert question first. I think to-date one of my favourite shows was a local one in Winnipeg. I had set it up with two other fantastic local bands - Fox Lake and Sit Calm - and I was really looking forward to playing it. We showed up for it and before the first band had even played the bar had almost entirely filled up. By the time the end of the night rolled around, about 200 hundred people had been through the doors. Now this venue we were playing is a 100, maybe 120 cap? So everyone is just shoulder to shoulder, and the second we started playing the crowd just erupted. It had been one of our like, first ten local shows, and it was crazy to see how many people showed up, and wanted to check us out alongside these two great bands. It was very humbling to say the least.

As for my favourite part about performing, I just love putting on a high energy show. I’ve always been a huge fan of bands going crazy on stage. I remember seeing live videos when I was younger of bands like Moneen, Black Flag, and Bad Brains (the list goes on), and they’re all just going bonkers. I’ve always thought the band should be enjoying it at least as much as a spectator, if not more. Energy is contagious, and you can definitely see it in the crowd when you’re jumping around having a ball.

You just kicked off your Western Canadian Tour. What are you looking forward to on this run of dates?

An easy answer to this question is absolutely everything. For some specifics, it’ll be the first time we’ve ever played the west coast, so I’m excited to be in Vancouver and Victoria, and all the rest of the BC dates. In Victoria, we’re actually teaming up with local college station CFUV to do a live on-air performance for their Pledge Drive on Thursday March 22nd. We’ve done stuff like that here at home and it’s always a blast. I’m also excited to see/play with a bunch of bands we met on our last tour in October. We got to be pretty good buds with a lot of them, so it’ll also be sweet to see them as well. Oh, and of course our St. Patrick's Day show in Calgary should be insane.

You performed at Timfest, a benefit show for Tim Tkachyk, in February. How important was it for you to play and show your support for Tim?

It was really important for all of us to be involved. We actually didn’t know Tim super well prior to the benefit, but the people putting the show together contacted us and told us that he and his wife would love to have us on the bill. I think it’s important to give back to your community, and give back to people who support you as a band or musician. I mean, we have a unique opportunity as a band to use our (very minimal) influence to help people and/or the community. I think to a certain extent it’s kind of our responsibility to use that in a productive and positive way. In this case it was being able to perform and bring a couple people out to raise money for a great guy in our scene. For a fun fact, Tim works at a music store in Winnipeg, and he was actually the one who sold me my current guitar.

You chart on CKUW and CJSR. Community radio is so important to build a local (and Canadian!) music scene, how much has their support meant to you?

Man, if it wasn’t for community radio, I don’t know where we’d be. They’re so committed to giving local, smaller, and more niche bands a public platform and it’s honestly just awesome. It’s amazing to have the support of the stations. I know a number of us have been involved in pledge drives in other projects as well as in Screaming at Traffic.

Aside from being band members, you are long-time friends. What are your favourite activities to do outside of music?

We pretty much do everything together, honestly. We all have the same group of friends, so we see each other all the time. We try and get together to play DnD whenever our schedules allow it. We also try and make it to some music festivals. Most years Duncan, Paul, and I camp together at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. Honestly, most weekends you can find at least three out of the four us together, hanging out, listening to music, having a couple drinks, and going to shows.

Do you ever face challenges working together musically? If so, how do you overcome them?

We don’t ever really run into a ton of challenges working together. We’re usually on the same page, and when we’re not we’re pretty diplomatic about it. We give everything a chance and decide as a group whether something is the right musical choice for a song. The only issue we ever seem to run into is communication between members sometimes when trying to describe what we’re looking for, but all of us are pretty good at “translating” at least one other member’s thoughts to the rest of the band.

For someone that has not visited Winnipeg before, what are your go-to places for tourists?

Honestly the best thing someone coming to Winnipeg can do is look up the local music scene and see what’s happening. There are a TON of great bands coming out of Winnipeg, and every weekend there is a ton of shows. I’d list some names of bands to look for, but there’s almost too many to count and I wouldn’t wanna risk leaving anyone out. The Forks also has a pretty sweet skatepark if it’s nice out.

What are your plans for the rest of 2018?

Well, we haven’t officially announced anything yet, but we have been working on a bunch of new material that we’re gonna be debuting on tour. When we get back to Winnipeg, we’re gonna be starting pre-production for an album that we’re super excited about. We’re also gonna continue playing shows locally, and gonna try and make it out of the province for a few more shows before we release the new album. We’ve got a couple exciting gigs that we’re gonna be announcing in the coming months so keep an eye out for it!

______________________________________________________________

Thanks to Jacques of Screaming at Traffic for taking the time to answer our questions! Visit https://www.facebook.com/screamingattraffic/ to stay updated with their new music, tour dates, and fun shenanigans. Catch Screaming at Traffic live in Vancouver on Friday, March 23rd at Stylus Records with The Jins, The Rambling Derelicts, Young Lovers, and Wander. 

Find details and RSVP on Facebook.

Photo credit to: Mike Sudoma

[porcupineinajacuzzi]

An Introduction to Pied Piper Inc.

Originally published February 16th, 2016

Earlier today, fans all over North America let out a collective squee of delight as it was revealed that Pied Piper Inc. has licensed the anime series Skip Beat! for DVD and Blu-ray. Who is this new magical, wish granting company though? Well, allow me to fill you in as earlier this week I had the chance to sit down with the president of the company, Ann Yamamoto, and ask her some questions about Pied Piper Inc. and their plans for the future.

- Pied Piper seemed to come out of nowhere. Earlier this decade the company ran a very successful Kickstarter and distributed the Time of Eve movie but now you’ve decided to venture into licensing anime yourselves. What was the decision making process behind this new direction?

The decision making process was very organic. When I launched the Time of EVE Kickstarter, I saw it as a small experiment. Never in my wildest dreams did I think it would be a 2-year journey involving music licensing, book publishing, and collaboration with fans around the world.

I came out with three crystal clear realizations.

First, the Kickstarter was the single most challenging and satisfying experience in my professional life. I knew with absolute certitude that I wanted to do anime crowdfunding again.

And, as the final rewards were shipping, I was over-the-top delighted to get messages from backers asking me to do another campaign.

Finally, I didn’t make a single cent. OK, I’ll just go out and say it. I lost money. Toward the end, I was paying my accountant, bookkeeper and outside vendors, but not myself. But, I also realized that the project had been my greatest teacher. Sure, a lot of these lessons were kind of jack-of-all-trades skills, like uploading 1,300 addresses into Amazon’s shipping interface or packaging ceramics for shipment to Russia. However, there were other more meta lessons. For example, being able to think through the full ramifications of a spec change, or knowing how to approach licensing for music, books, bonus videos and merchandise.

So, I decided to think of the financial loss as business school tuition. I decided, you know what, I’d be a fool not to use that knowledge toward something that I love to do, and toward solving problems that matter to anime fans.

- With so many companies in the United States already competing against each other, what makes your company stand out against the rest? Is there a particular niche that you’re aiming to fill?

Honestly, I don’t see myself in competition with other distributors/localization companies. First of all, I am a tiny operation! I don’t see myself going head-to-head for licenses. I find the gems that somehow have fallen through the cracks.

And, I think what I do is a little bit different from other distributors, with the exception of Robert Woodhead at AnimEigo. It is true that I’m after the same bundle of rights (merch, videogram). But, I am not primarily in the business of selling products. Other companies do that much better than I could ever do. My focus is offering the opportunity to join something like a barn raising. To me, the reward tiers are like tickets to an experience, and the goody bag at the end is the fruition of our collective effort. My dream is that fans come away from the experience somehow changed – such as having a greater appreciation of the title, or of anime as a whole.

Like other distributors, my roles are gaining the trust of the rightsholder and taking on the risk of getting the license. But then, after that, my role is to bring the backers into the localization process as much as possible. This might be quality checking of subtitles or voting on packaging designs, or sharing very detailed and transparent “behind-the-scenes” updates about the localization process.

I am not wedded to crowdfunding per say. Technology is creating new ways for people to collaborate, and I think ecommerce is playing catch up. I think we will see more models and platforms emerge in the next few years, and I want to be part of that.

- Over the last few years, anime fans have been turning to streaming sites more and more in order to get their fix. Does Pied Piper have any plans to join the streaming/simulcast market or will you be sticking to home video releases?

At this point, I don’t see how I can bring more value to streaming/simulcast.

In fact, streaming creates a new set of problems, namely backlog and overwhelming choice. I see myself as counter-programming, if that makes sense.

- Another thing fans have seen over the last few years is the market split sharply behind the high-end “boutique” distributors and the mass-market providers. Where does Pied Piper see itself fitting in the current landscape?

I am all about boutique, bespoke!

- In an ideal situation, how active would Pied Piper like to be this year? To put it another way, can fans potentially look forward to many license announcements over the next twelve months or is the company more interested in a slow and steady approach to potential licenses?

The biggest challenge to my business model is that it isn’t really scalable. I love the process of negotiating with backers and the Japan-side creators, and I’m not interested in handing that off. So we’ll see. Last year I wrote up a business plan that calls for 4 projects and 8,000 total backers each year. *If* this Skip Beat campaign is successful, I’ll have a war chest that I can use toward licensing new titles. And, I’ll have more credibility when I approach rightsholders.

- Let’s talk about Pied Piper’s first license announcement, Skip Beat. You’re making a lot of shojo fans in North America very happy by releasing it to home video for the first time ever. Is there anything in particular that made this series such an attractive title for your first license?

After I had the realization that I wanted to turn crowdfunding into a sustainable business, the first challenge was to get new titles. In an ideal world, Directions (producer of Time of EVE) or dir. Yoshiura would have the perfect crowdfunding project in the pipeline. But no, that would be too easy!

How to identify and evaluate unlicensed titles? I’d been having conversations with Time of EVE backers and talked with several of them about my predicament. Five of them joined me as Project Curators to scout out new titles, and so they sent me a stream of ideas. My next step was to contact the rightsholders. I got many, many rejections, which gave me the chance to refine my pitch. So I was in a much better position when I met with TV Tokyo. I saw “Skip Beat!” in their catalog, and my jaw dropped.

To be honest, it wasn’t my ideal title simply because 25 episodes increases the costs on all fronts – licensing, dub, authoring, and manufacturing. It is a huge risk. I was looking for a smaller-scale title. But, Kyoko is all about guts. I love the title, and decided to go for it.

The TV Tokyo licensing team was open to letting me use crowdfunding, and I am profoundly grateful that the production committee allowed me to license the title.

I’d like to also give more background into my decision making process for the “Skip Beat!” license. Sorry, this is going to be long…

Once I’ve decided that a title has potential for crowdfunding, the next step is to make an educated guess of the minimum support I can expect from the core fan base. I try to be as empirical as possible. In the case of Time of EVE, I knew 350 or so overseas fans had purchased Direction’s Blu-ray release of the ONA version at $55, so I felt like it was reasonable to expect that at least 300 fans outside of Japan would join an international crowdfunding campaign. So I didn’t want the goal to be much higher than $16,000. Then, I got vendor quotes for the bare minimum release with a tiny production run, and managed to whittle the budget down to $18,000. So that’s how I set the initial goal (which was met within the first 24 hours of the campaign!).

For “Skip Beat!,” I looked at viewer ratings on MyAnimeList, ANN and Crunchyroll, and compared those with the other crowdfunded projects to date. I felt like I could count on 3,000 fans in North America to join the campaign at an average of $70 per pledge (the Time of EVE average was $79) for a total of $210,000. I refuse to set the initial goal above this amount, as I feel that would be unfair to fans and to the title. So, before I licensed the title, I had to ask myself: Can I deliver a quality release with English dub within that budget?

The rational answer is, absolutely not. The dub itself could easily exceed that sum. So, I was stumped. Fate stepped in, however, and one of Pied PIper’s Project Curators introduced me to Mela Lee, an incredibly talented voiceover actress with producerial smarts and the crazy heart of a die-hard fan. She proposed that we could deliver a quality dub within the $210,000 total budget, and then set stretch goals to scale up the dub with backer support. She brought onboard a truly amazing production team with Cristina Vee, Jason Charles Miller and Alexander Burke. It still feels like a miracle to have their talent on board this passion project, and I’m constantly having to pinch myself!

With their participation, I had the confidence to go ahead with the licensing agreement. So, you can think of the five of us as the first group of backers to the project. We are bonded by our love of “Skip Beat!,” and I hope that comes through in the campaign.

- Is there anything in particular you’re looking for in potential future anime licenses?

It boils down to two factors. First, I am looking for unlicensed titles that have a special quality that inspires passion from fans. Each case is different. I ask myself how I feel about the title, consult with the Project Curators who are helping me, read reviews and look at metrics like MyAnimeList. Second, the rightsholder needs to be open to crowdfunding. They need to be willing to let me open up the localization process to backers.

That being said, I absolutely think my business model is going to evolve. Three years ago, even a year ago, I would never have imagined myself taking “Skip Beat!” to fans through crowdfunding. I will continue to experiment with new ideas as I go along. It goes without saying that some of these won’t work out. It is terrifying, and exhilarating!

- Are there any plans to hit any conventions in the United States this year in order to better introduce yourself to fans?

I would love that opportunity!

- If there were one thing that you wanted our readers to know about you, one single thing that stands out about all others, what would it be?

What an amazing and difficult question! This isn’t unique to me, at all, but I’ll write it anyway. I’d like readers to know that I am continually inspired by anime, and I feel like it is such a privilege to be part of this industry.

[thatfestivallife]

Magnetic Fields reverberated its way on to my radar back when I was in India last year as a load of people I met through working on GOAT festival had been and come back to Goa raving about it… A weekend music festival set not just in a palace, but in a palace in a desert in India, sounded like something I needed to tick off my list and after reading a feature about it in the Transform: Festival Journal this year I decided to work it into my travel plans….

Parties in a Palace & Doofs in the Desert

Magnetic Fields is a three day festival set in a 17th century palace in the middle of the desert in Rajasthan. Now in its fifth year it attracts 3000 revellers and world-class artists from around the globe to Alsisar Mahal, a beautiful palace turned five star hotel, and the desert area that surrounds it. It was started by by Wild City co-founders Sarah and Munbir Chawla but, integrally, exists with the full backing and co-operation of the Prince of the palace himself Abhimanyu Alsisar… who, by the way, is such a dude! He got seriously involved all weekend, we spotted him deep in the rave at 8am on Monday!

Check out an interview with the Rajput of Alsisar here.

That sunrise though…

Magnetic Fields Festival 2017…

I was excited for the festival but pretty jet-lagged still and a little skeptical, as always (turns out I’m a massive festival snob!) It was the first time in longer than I care to admit that I’d been to a festival as a fully paying punter and after a bit of a rocky start – a taxi drive twice as long as we thought it would be, getting lost in the desert and only arriving at 10pm to be told our tent came with no bedding – I was feeling a little worried! Obviously as soon as we were through the gates, in sight of the wristband exchange and feeling the buzz of the festival crowd we soon got over it and got stuck in…

In the desert area glittering up a new pal, wearing Dulcie’s Feathers recycled silk sari kimono.

In many ways Magnetic Fields was exactly as I had imagined… It was very trendy with the crowd being predominantly made up of chic Indian music heads who had travelled from the cities, Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, and a smattering of other travellers in the know like ourselves. The stages and site were very slickly produced with a lot of obvious brand partnerships and sponsors which, though I understand the necessity of, is something I usually hate. However within the setting it was surprisingly unobtrusive. Each stage had a brand sponsor, Red Bull, Bira 91, Renault… but props to the Magnetic Fields team because it was done super classily.

With its sponsors, hipster crowd and the fact that the price tag is out of the range of most Indians (we paid the equivalent of about £200 for our final release tickets and the most basic tent package… cheap by European standards but pricy in India) Magnetic Fields could be seen as pretty elitist… However, one of the main things that struck me was how aware and conscious the festival was of its context and setting.

I felt like everything had been curated so that modern and historical, global and local could slot alongside each other harmoniously.  Notably there was a photography exhibition from ‘Photographing the Female‘ on display around one of the pool areas that had involved many women from the local area. Additionally there were traditional Rajasthani musicians playing impromptu acoustic sets on the rooftops and around the palace. A special one-off audiovisual show ‘Different Trains 1947‘ was performed on the main stage on Sunday night – it was produced by both Indian and UK artists and historians as part of this year’s UK-India year of culture and dealt with the events of Indian independence in 1947 in this, the 60th anniversary year.

Wrapped up with my gal Nandini & checking out some installations

When it came to the line-up and music programming there was a palpable feeling of excitement surrounding upcoming sets all weekend – acts like Four Tet and Ben UFO that we’ve been able to catch several times in the UK are a treat to a niche crowd in India for whom this is a much rarer opportunity. I wouldn’t say I was headsy in the slightest but I’ve always felt (in a weirdly hypocritical way) that events where people’s reason for coming because they are genuinely madly passionate about the music and a certain scene make for the best vibe and this was very true of Magnetic Fields.

Ben UFO

Reach for the lasers!

Jayda G by Georgiana Clark

Jayda G ft lasers & projection mapping on the palace!

I was there with my festival partner in crime Georgie and musical highlights were plentiful for both of us:

Jayda G was the first set we saw on Friday night and it was great to get warmed up to some disco watched from up on one of the palace balconies – that woman has so much ENERGY! 

The wonderful Sanddunes played a live set on the a rooftop as the sun was setting on Saturday night which was pretty magical, doubly special as I missed her at GOAT due to technical difficulties.

I had a some kind of semi-spiritual moment at Ben UFO‘s set on Saturday night which may have been down to a few too many GnTs but I can’t be sure.

Delhi Sultanate with a bit of reggae in the sunshine at the Desert Oasis stage on Sunday afternoon was perfect and in my opinion the only kinda music that should have been played down there (no-one wants belting techno whilst having their breakfast thanks)

We’d been waiting all weekend for Khruangbin and as one of the only proper live acts I saw, they didn’t disappoint… perfect chilled vibes for a Sunday night.

Khruangbin with some delicious Sunday surfy funky feelings

Number one musical moment for me was 100 % the ‘secret set’ on Monday morning… rolling out of the tent in the sunrise after a little half an hour disco nap to Ben UFO back to back Four Tet shelling out the jungle I’d been waiting all weekend for was probably my biggest festival highlight of the entire year!

As well as music there were other activities to round out that festival experience. There was a wellness area including free activities such as massage workshops and yoga… we probably could have benefited a lot from a bit of this soul nourishing but we didn’t partake in that area this year! There was art, installations and live painting all over the site… not quite the immersive level that we’re spoilt with at festivals in the UK but enough to add some interest when exploring the site and to compliment the gorgeous setting perfectly.

The setting was definitely my favourite aspect of the festival.  The palace was completely free to roam around as we desired, with balconies we could watch the main musical areas from and beds on the roof tops you could laze around in the sun on. From a mosaic tiled restaurant on the top floor where you could chill on sofas and have some dinner to a four floors down in the dungeon where you could sit in a padded out cell and a reasonable priced cocktail bar!

In all Magnetic Fields in succeeded in a few things… stealthily making me enjoy techno (a feat which has only been managed a few times), giving me a great tan, depriving me of sleep, introducing me to some pretty great people from all over the world… and making me want to come back next year!

Read on for my ultimate Magnetic Fields survival guide and top tips if you’re thinking about making the trip yourself… 

Sunday hangovers & a sneaky preview of the new Dulcie’s Feathers reversible silk tie back crop top!

Everything you need to know before going to Magnetic Fields; advice on what to pack, where to stay, how to get there and more…

 Those Festival Facts

Where? Alsisar Mahal, Alsisar, Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan, India. When? Friday afternoon to Monday morning on the second weekend of December. How much? Prices start at 8,500 rs (£100). How many people? 3000 attendees. What’s on? ‘A festival of contemporary music and arts’: 3 days of live and electronic music (electronic dance music, yes but definitely not EDM !) spread across 5 stages in a palace and a desert with a smattering of art, wellness and other attractions.

Top Tips for first time Magnetic Fielders

First time in India? Do your research!

Number one: If you’re coming to India especially for the festival and it’s your first time… do yo research!  One does not simply walk into India…! Magnetic Fields is a little festival bubble so the same Indian cultural norms don’t quite apply there (if there are such things as cultural norms in such a vast and changeable country) but you’re still in a 17th century palace in the middle of a desert in India so I’d definitely reccomend doing a bit of reading up!

You can read my India posts here or for in depth India advice my go to blogs are Hippie in Heels & Global Gallivanting.

The palace as viewed from the Desert Oasis

Get your Magnetic Fields travel plans sorted…

Don’t assume it’s a 3 hour taxi drive from Pushkar just cause the guy in the travel agents says it is. Also don’t assume he actually knows where you’re going just cause he wobbles his head when you tell him. Also don’t follow Google Maps. Don’t worry though, after 7 hours, a large proportion of which is spent in the desert with no signage and no lighting, you will eventually get there…

Basically make some travel plans. The Magnetic Fields website is not hugely helpful on the subject but getting the train from Delhi as they recommend is probably the easiest option!

Luckily when we finally got there the camp site reception was just a short walk from the taxi and checking in was a breeze even though it was quite late.

Where can you stay?

As we all know… camping is intense.. in tents (geddit?) If you can afford it make sure that tent is one of the bedouin variety… unfortunately we opted for the slightly cheaper ‘classic tent’ package.

The ‘classic tent’ area was sneakily hidden away in a cramped shanty town in the corner of the desert site so as to not ruin the aesthetics of the bedouin area and facilities included some awful toilet facilities in stand up nylon tents and bedding consisting of rock hard mats and sleeping bags… that no one told us we could rent until the second day!

In contrast, the bedouin tents (which come in fancy and slightly less fancy varieties) are lussssh! They have real bedding, proper full on bathrooms, the works!

You can bring your own tent and gear too but for us as backpackers that wasn’t that practical & the pitch your own tent price wasn’t that much cheaper either. If you’re feeling extra fancy you can also book your own room in the palace… but that’s kinda cheating so come on.

Cheesy sunrise grins and a lil glimpse at the bedouin tents in the background

Be prepared to face the elements

It’s not exactly Burning Man level of desert survival – but be prepared. It gets COLD, at night and I mean cold – we luckily bought some huge scarves in Pushkar which were lifesavers for us but even those plus a huge hoodie, leather jacket, leggings, boots and a lot of dancing wasn’t enough on those chilly dark mornings! Luckily we didn’t ever really sleep until it was already getting light (or much at all) so we didn’t freeze too much.

We never received the advice newsletter that was sent the day before the festival and only found a link to it when we were already in the taxi so the advice to bring extra warm bedding etc was sadly missed!

In the day time it is hot and gorgeous as always so bring your suncream and shades. Being in the desert also means that it is obviously very dry –  bring plenty of moisturiser for your face and body and carrying lip balm with you is an essential.

What to wear?

There wasn’t a huge amount of exuberant festival fashion about but there were a smattering of quirky characters around. One of my favourite was a gentleman with a large moustache who wore totally pink every single day. Mainly everyone looked very desert chic in monochrome and linen… there was a ‘souk’ with designer clothes stalls so you could buy the look yourself!

My main recommendation would just be layers & layers to take you from the hot sunny days to the cold night or just plenty of costume changes… My Blundstones were indispensable as always, I wore sandals in the day time but there were lots of little spiky burrs in the sand which we kept getting stuck in our feet so boots were better.

This sequin jumpsuit delight was whipped up the day before I flew out by my talented pal Rosie aka Winifred Rose, pom pom earrings as always from Zoe Zedhead! 

No Money No Honey

You have to get your money for drinks and food as special Magnetic Fields currency, this is really easy to do from the various ‘treasuries’ they have dotted around the site. You can swap normal rupees or use your card.

Make sure you don’t leave any boogie bucks in random pockets though cause you will be annoyed when you leave the festival! I’ve got about 500 still, oops…  Also make sure you bring enough real cash as we couldn’t find an ATM that dispensed this and you’ll need it for the taxi back and other things.

New #1 Hangover Cure

Crack open a coconut as soon as you get up in the morning, best way to beat that groggy head. Even better – stick some rum in that coconut for a good old tropical take on hair of the dog 😉

Still would have murdered a bloody Mary had that been an option at the bar!

Eating & drinking in the desert

The food and drink selection was surprisingly excellent – pricey by Indian standards (well my cheapskate backpacker standards) but a little bit cheaper than the UK. A meal was between 300-500 rupees and a spirit and mixer was 300 whilst cocktails in the dungeon were 400 rupees which is only £5.

We ate traditional south Indian dosas at breakfast with tasty iced coffees and re-energised  ourselves with lovely bottled slow juices. In the evenings we gorged on stone-baked pizzas and lush creamy pastas! The only think i would say was missing was anything light – little snacks and salads would have been much appreciated. There are areas to eat within the desert/bedouin tent area and well as in the palace grounds and both have the same stalls.

Water was 100 rupees a bottle rather than the normal 20 which was annoying as it was pretty important to stay hydrated. Also note – the website said minimum drinking age was 25 (!) but I never got asked for I.D and never saw it happen…

Pizza in the palace

Hearing protection is sexy

Ear plugs are always a recommendation of mine but especially at Magnetic Fields… a plus point of having a festival in a desert is a distinct lack of sound restrictions but the downside of this is that tinnitus is for life y’all. Until I finally get round to getting some proper moulded ones I swear by my EarPeace ones – they’re comfy and have filters in so you can hear people talking to you.

I also brought some spare foam ones which it turns out are indispensable for when your tent neighbour decides to start playing psytrance all morning… or the desert stage (handily situated right next to the tent area) decides to do a sound check at half 9 – ouch.

Full power 24 hour!

There is round the clock programming but the chilly nights make you want to retreat back to the fireside or your bed at some point… the only morning I watched the sunrise properly was on the Sunday from the palace rooftop and I’m so glad I stuck it out through the cold and industrial techno because it was breathtaking!

Me and Georgie snugglin in the sunrise, complete with magical bindi sun spot!

Post festival planning for a stress free Monday

If you come with 0 travel plans like us and also 0 desire to sit on a hideous cross country train or bus get a taxi to nearby Jhunjhunu which shouldn’t be more than 1000 rupees and check yourself into a hotel. No one wants a Monday morning festival escape of that proportion…

Have you ever been to Magnetic Fields or any festivals in India? I’d love to know about your experiences or if you have any recommendations!

Read more of my festival posts here.

I must thank my travelling companion Georgiana for taking 80% of these photos – how great are they!?  My camera didn’t come out much, oops!

Desert Magic at Magnetic Fields Festival ’17, Rajasthan, India Magnetic Fields reverberated its way on to my radar back when I was in India last year…

[sociologyontherock]

Work for Play and Play for Work: Professional Musicians in St. John’s, Newfoundland

By David Chafe

When I was 19, I was a university flunk-out working four part-time jobs: stocking shelves at a liquor store, serving customers at a shoe store, building a house, and playing piano at a restaurant. It was the music gig that appealed to me the most. I had studied piano intensively since I was eight. But not yet brave enough to pursue a music career, I eventually finished my commerce degree, worked several years in one dissatisfying accounting job after another, while longing for making music and what might have been.

At age 32, with my wife’s unqualified endorsement, I quit my accounting career and auditioned for the MUN School of Music. Two music degrees later, I was working prolifically, making less money than as an accountant, but loving self-employment in work that made me happier than I had been in years. But I soon discovered the challenges of carving out a niche in an occupation in which anyone with or without formal music training can enter, exit and return to the field freely at anytime, at any age, and where fees vary from one musician to another based not only on how much a particular audience feels they are worth but also on how much musicians feel their own work is worth. I have made great friends and still love making music. But there is a perpetual ebb and flow to my commitment to a music career, as intrinsically rewarding performances are often countered by strong undercurrents of competition, inconsistent pay, unpredictable employment, and fluctuating industry and audience support.

 The purpose of the research related to my PhD thesis was to show how the life and work experiences of local musicians intersect over time and affect their commitment to music as a source of income and employment. In so doing, readers can gain a detailed understanding of (1) the role of family, music educators, and peers over the course of a music career; (2) the conditions that lead musicians to commit further to or withdraw from their work in music; and (3) how musicians navigate countless personalities and work objectives on the local music scene, some that can support and advance their efforts, and others that may be in conflict.

 Pierre Bourdieu theorized that “cultural capital” is derived from economic privilege, parents’ educational attainment, or early access to the fine arts. It is Howard Becker’s assertion that works of art are the product of collective action and cooperation among all actors in artist networks. The extent to which different forms of capital relate to one another as articulated by Bourdieu; and Becker’s invitation to consider the full art world in the work of artists, collectively serve as the theoretical backdrop to my research.

 This is a qualitative study tracing the entire career arc of 54 St. John’s-based rock, classical and traditional musicians who seek and depend on income from performance for at least part of their income. Forty-five are currently active in professional music-making, and 9 have left the career. Twenty-one scripted open-ended questions ranged from earliest childhood recollections to present day experience. The mean age of participants is 36 years, but few are older than 45. To make sure that I had not excluded older musicians, I asked my oldest participants about this, and they all said that to their knowledge most or all of the colleagues of their age had long ago quit the music profession. This is an occupation with a very early “retirement” age.

 I asked participants for recollections of the first time music meant something to them. Nearly three-quarters recalled instances that involved their parents, and more than two-thirds went back to before they were 9 years old. While some earliest recollections of music were quite specific, others were described as an emergent, organic process. Many participants used expressions like “It’s all I know” or “What else is there?” or “It’s who I am.” For most, engaging in music from an early age was not their choice, but rather that of their parents. Several participants described their initiation into music as being “forced” or “shuffled into” or “made” to take music lessons. Many participants as children were immersed into an activity demanding a great deal of their parents’ money and time and much of the musicians’ time, concentration and patience. Beyond lessons, participants also engaged throughout their childhood in music competitions, bands with friends, playing or singing for family gatherings, and performing in school concerts. They were primed for gigging before they were teenagers.

Most participants spoke fondly of their private and classroom music educators through childhood and adolescence. Fifty-two out of 54 participants had at least some university education, with 30 earning at least one degree in music, most from Memorial University’s School of Music. Though most participants with university music degrees spoke appreciatively of their overall university music experience, some were uncomplimentary of their professors, or showed indifference. A 20-year-old university music performance student may have already been gigging on the side and received between 10 and 15 years of training by this time. It could be that they are eager to get their careers underway, impatient with being adults instructed by adults who themselves, secure in their salaried tenured positions, are not participating in the local music scene in the ways that their students might want to be. Also, most participants entered university music training believing that a degree would enhance their employment and income prospects.  Some found the fairly narrow genre focus of a classical university music school not entirely relevant to their eventual career genre.

 Furthermore, income from performance does not seem to increase with higher education, and it is not long before most participants who are music school graduates seek additional sources of income. Many take up private music teaching, for which a university degree is not required and where fees charged to clients are arbitrary and vary widely. Several were quick to point out that their university music education did little to equip them with essential skills for self-employment. Translating talent into income is vital information that they seem to be expected to learn on their own, after they graduate.

 Nearly all participants thought themselves successful, mostly in intangible terms: feeling worthy of music work, or feeling like it is not work, and feeling as if there is always a next higher point to strive for artistically. But two-thirds of active musicians estimated their annual performance income at under $30,000, with almost a third earning less than $10,000. Even though university music schools guide their students towards presumably professional performance caliber, most graduates take on other employment at least in the short term to make ends meet, trying to stay as close to music as possible, but many finding themselves in part-time occupations outside of music. Nearly two-thirds have jobs outside of performance. Only nine participants earned their entire income from performance alone, and only three in a single ensemble full-time. Of the nine participants who left the music career altogether, eight exited before they were 35, six of them before they were 30.

 Once participants’ music careers are underway, they soon find that the agencies and sponsors that are designed to support their work expect musicians to possess viable artistic prowess as well as business acumen. But knowing how to translate their passion into livable employment had not been taught to them, and the families of many participants generally knew very little about music as something other than a pastime. Professional musicians are also in an occupation that invites community and amateur musicians to participate together. Participants were careful not to denigrate their fellow non-professional musicians who they acknowledge as contributing to a diverse and lively scene. But it does make it difficult for wage-dependent professionals to command a fee for services others are willing to do for free. Not to mention that professionals themselves are frequently in positions of playing for free. The line between amateur and professional is therefore quite hazy. Not to mention that professionals thinking about exiting might want to return to the scene in a casual capacity, as is the experience of most ex-professional musicians in this research.

 Many emerging musicians I interviewed told of how difficult it is to break into the music scene, describing a contradiction between a public perception of a mutually supportive music “community” and the reality of a profession made of tight cliques protecting their own markets. Tensions thus arise in a community where most downtown venues are in close proximity and where many musicians frequently run into each other. Competition in St. John’s is less overt than in bigger cities but it is still quite present, having more to do with strategizing the most beneficial relationships.

 The local music industry is mostly supported by provincial agencies that purport to endorse musicians’ work with funding and other support. In the case of MusicNL, musicians pay a membership fee and compete with musicians for funding and recognition. Some participants suspect that there is bias built into its funding system, attributed to the size of St. John’s, the density of its music scene, and questionable decisions based on who is best known. With respect to interpersonal conflict, participants who spoke about difficult relationships in their work said that the best way to keep the peace is to avoid fellow musicians with whom they might not get along, and to not speak unkindly of each other in public.

 From the start of their careers, most participants seem to accept and adapt to portfolio employment. An array of revenue sources allows them to offset some of their costs and lends time to concentrate on music making. Precarious employment is therefore relative, depending on one’s own career objectives and personal relationships. But for many others, the relative stability that goes along with their other work causes them to reevaluate how far they’ve come in music and how much further they are willing and able to go. Eight of the nine musicians I interviewed who had left professional music returned as community players without need for remuneration from music. Of the 45 participants who are professionally active, 27 say that they have frequent thoughts of leaving the music profession. But if they do, perhaps they can take comfort in the freedom to return to a field without stipulations on entry, departure or re-entry, shed of the weight that comes with the career.

 What I have found among the more venerable career musicians is a strong presence of all of the forms of capital. But it is social capital that appears to most shore up chances for career longevity. The loss of support from any element of one’s social network – parents, spouses/partners, educators, friends, industry professionals – clearly undermines a musician’s place in the music labour market. The evidence is also clear that cultivating one’s social network appears to be the key for success for the few outliers with the highest performance income and years of continuous performance-related employment. Through this detailed examination of how music careers in St. John’s are begun, sustained or ended, we see how knowing the right people with the right motivating powers is essential to long-term commitment to the career. Consistent across all participants is how much pride they take in their talents and contribution to local culture and how much they genuinely love making music, frustration only borne in not being able to consistently translate their passion into meaningful revenue.