sci-fi author, beatmaker

Category: Electronic Music Page 3 of 9

Switching to Self-Publishing Was Probably a Mistake

looq_red_blackborder_700

Writers: This post is about music self-publishing, but also IĀ get intoĀ the implications for writing self-publishing towards the end of the article.

I recently put together my Discography page, which gave me an opportunity to reflect on my music career to date. I’ve released original music on almost every kind of label, including a major (SONY/BMG), a barely-organized collective (Trip ‘n Spin Recordings), small imprints (SOG, NuRepublic, Kubist, Spundae, Dorigen, POD, Mechanism), my own label (Loƶq Records), “big independents” in dance music culture (Global Underground, Armada, Bedrock, Renaissance), and distribution/A&R deals (3 Beat, Silent Records).

My most active period of writing and releasing music was in my late twenties/early thirties. Creating dance music (house, techno, breaks) was my singular, obsessive focus. That period was also the heyday of Qoƶl, the weekly event I threw with DJ Spesh at 111 Minna for over a decade (hugely popular, with a packed dance floor and lines around the block), so I also had a deep sense of musical community, and also a great testing audience for new tracks.

At some point, around 2005, we (myself and my primary music collaborators, Spesh and Mark Musselman, the other halves of Jondi & Spesh, and Momu, respectively) stopped sending out demos to other labels, and started releasing music almost exclusively on Loƶq Records. This wasn’t a conscious strategic career decision — it was just easier. I was co-running a respected, profitable label, so why not release my music on it? Benefits of self-publishing (or at least “own label” publishing) include:

Kleidosty – Strange Skin (and choosing the creative life)

LQ-1189_800I was up at the Echo Lake Berkeley Family Camp with my family and Jason Kleidosty’s family. Jason had brought his laptop and headphones and worked on his ambient music in the evenings, drinking a beer and watching the post-sunset glow from a cliff-top bench. I left my computer at home but did my fiction scribblings each morning in my notebook, drinking high-octane coffee from the bottomless cafeteria urns. Early mornings and late evenings were the quiet times of the day — family waking hours were filled with the sounds of screaming children (some joyful, some tantrums). Children love to scream.

Nobody was making us work. The rewards? Who knows. Is anyone besides Boards of Canada making a living from ambient music? Some science fiction writers I idolize, and who have tens of thousands of fans (or at least Twitter followers) toil away at day jobs. Creative efforts, even from the most talented and hardworking, don’t always make ends meet. I make most of my money solving database problems. Sometimes I fantasize about alternatives. I suppose I could write and sell a hair-regrowth eBook, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I’d rather write a long treatise on medieval polearms and sell it on dmsguild.com. I’ll bet I could make dozens of dollars. But I need an illustrator.

The reason we create, and keep creating, is because the reward is immediate. The process is the payoff. If it isn’t, find something else to do. If you succeed at the activity, the reward is doing more of that activity. Are you okay with that? Spend time doing things you enjoy, period.

Why would someone write a sixteen minute instrumental track with no hummable melody? Well, I’m glad he did. I get lost in the track. I can’t stop listening to And/Or. Just pop off the top of my skull and wire up my brain with the intergalactic quantum orchestral strings.

Which is to say, Strange Skin, the new album from Kleidosty, is out today. Please rate if you purchase, and leave a review if you like.

30-Day Experiment: How To Double Your Current Music Knowledge in a Month

WWLlogoBack in May Marc Kate (a good friend and host of the Why We Listen podcast) emailed me with some thoughts about current music and his own relationship to music:

Iā€™m finding that the trap of Retromania, the ubiquity of nostalgia, the lazy, daily choices we increasingly make in our playlists are contributing to musicā€™s stagnation.

I mostly feel like some of the most exciting music Iā€™ve ever heard is happening right now, but I also canā€™t rightly defend any of it as particularly new. Iā€™ve always prioritized music that is cutting edge, but I canā€™t say Iā€™ve really heard any in decades.

He followed this up with a proposed experiment and invitation:

So, I want to see what happens, what I learn if I eschew music that is even slightly old. Even if it means Iā€™m actually just listening to wholly historically derivative music that was made last month.

Instantly I was in. Even though I disagreed that music was stagnating in any way, and I’d been finding plenty of new music I loved, I wanted to take the new new music experience to the extreme. For the month of June, Marc and I agreed we would ONLY listen to music released no more than one year ago (and this could not include re-releases or new releases of old music). There would be exceptions only for listening experiences out of our control (like music piped into grocery stores, public spaces, etc.).

Listen to the JD Moyer episode of Why We Listen.

Music Search

The first problem I confronted: how would I find this new music? Some I could find by browsing sales charts on sites like Beatport, which have a high turnover rate and rarely include music more than a few months old. But this would only lead me to new electronic music, and part of the idea of the experiment was to expand my musical taste (or at least exposure) into genres I might not otherwise consider.

I hit upon a solution about a week in. While preparing a giant playlist for my birthday party (with a new music theme), I hit up friends and acquaintances on Twitter for their favorite album of the year. I got a 100% response rate — it turns out people love to recommend music. I love to discover and recommend music as well (it’s one reason I co-founded Loƶq Records) … it may be a near-universal desire to want to share music that has touched and inspired us.

There are three main ways you can discover new music in this internet age:

  1. You can rely on algorithms (such as Pandora’s) to lead you to new music based on music you already like.
  2. You can be a “Knight of the New” (to borrow a phrase from reddit) and actively research new bands and releases (at the record store, on youtube, on music sales sites).
  3. You can rely on your friends.

Option 1 is the laziest. Option 2 requires time and dedication, and also listening to lots of bad music in order to find the good stuff (not being in love with this process was one reason I gave up DJing). Option 3 is probably still dominant among the <30 crowd, but in my circles and at my age (forty-six) there are more conversations about kids and schools than there are about new tracks and music videos. But I found it wasn’t hard to steer the conversation back in that direction. With a little prompting I received a flood of recommendations — more than I had time to listen to.

Thoughts on Streaming

First digital downloads replaced physical media, and now streaming is replacing a large percentage of downloads. Each wave cut music industry revenues by half or more. Piracy has of course played a role, but the replication/sharing revolution is the main factor.

Nimble players, like my own label, can survive by cutting costs. Vinyl production and shipping were huge expenses, and when we dropped vinyl our profits-per-release shot up. Even though revenue is low, we can keep releasing music we love and make a little money in the process. But I do miss vinyl …

What about the consumer side? Previous to this experiment, my preferred mode of listening to music was still removing a slab of vinyl from its cardboard sleeve, placing it on the Technics 1200, and dropping the needle on the record. Music just sounds best this way. But none of my favorite albums (like Tycho – Awake) had been released in the past year. So I signed up for a 3-month free Spotify trial and jumped into the world of consumer streaming.

It’s amazing what you get for the price of an internet connection and a few cups of coffee. I was able to find 100% of the music recommended to me. It was easy to set up as many playlists as I wanted. Obviously Spotify isn’t the only streaming service but they have a great interface and a huge library. While they may not pay artists as generously as they claim, Spotify is a great deal for the music consumer.

Effects of Only New Music

I listened to so much new music in June that is was overwhelming. I didn’t get to know any of it very well. Of the many recommendations I received, only a few stuck. It’s good that there’s a huge, highly diverse universe of new music, because tastes diverge just as much.

A few albums that will stay in my playlists:

  • Fort Romeau – Insides
  • D’Angelo – Black Messiah
  • Jooris Voorn – Nobody Knows
  • Galantis – Pharmacy
  • Dan Sherman – Places EP

(The last one is a Loƶq Records release, but it earned its place on the short list.)

How does this compare to the amount of new music I usually add to my active playlists (not just my library)? At the most I really fall in love with no more than one new album a month, so it was a big increase. I’m still getting to know the albums above, but they’re all keepers.

Since there wasn’t any discomfort involved in listening to only new music, the month went by quickly. Marc had a similar experience. One month might have been too short of a time for this experiment to feel the full effects.

Overall the experiment was a good kick-in-the-pants to expand my listening horizons.

Enter Marc Kate …

WWL30smAs I mentioned above Marc is the host and producer of the Why We Listen podcast. While the typical format is Marc asking the guest to choose three songs ā€“ any three songs, for any reason they like ā€“ to share and discuss with him, our episode featured a broader discussion about music centering around the June listening experiment. You can listen to our discussion here, or as soon as it posts on iTunes.

Here’s Marc’s take on New Music June:

We live in a world that is changing rapidly, and music isnā€™t keeping up. It seems to be content with aping the Beach Boys or combining Afro-Beat with post-punk, or looping Italo-Disco album cuts, or discovering faux genres (Yacht Rock) or any other strategy that has been mined for decades. If Iā€™m sounding cynical, itā€™s because I am. Iā€™m deeply excited about a lot of music Iā€™m hearing, but deeply disappointed in how conservative it all sounds. Complaining that all new music sounds the same is a tired position to take, but it it has never been truer in my lifetime as it is now. If you disagree, I challenge you to point me to five minutes of music that wasnā€™t possible or is indistinguishable from music that we could have heard 15 or more years ago.

I was raised believing what Jacques Attali said: that ā€œMusic is prophecy.ā€ Music is the weather vane, the barometer and the compass. Through it we can know where we are and where we are going. However, for the past few decades, it seems that music mostly reminds us of where weā€™ve been.

I started my podcast Why We Listen as an excuse to meet with interesting people to learn about their listening habits and learn how music functions for them relative to how I understand music to function for me.

What I discovered, as I spent so much time immersed in this kind of research, is that music really has stagnated. And Iā€™ve been complicit. My listening habits had stagnated too. Iā€™d become lazy and undemanding, settling for middlebrow delights and not asking to be challenged. Technology has made it easy for us to be collectively conservative. Weā€™re surrounded by the music of our grandparents. Public space is more likely to play music that is 30 years old than anything contemporary, and contemporary music is more likely to sound like music that is 30 years old.

This doesnā€™t sound like prophecy. It sounds like a history lesson, like weā€™re trying to describe this chaotic new world with dead languages.

So, inspired by JD Moyerā€™s ā€˜lifestyle experimentsā€™ as I think of them, I thought to detoxify for a month. I wanted to do my best to purge vintage sounds from my personal soundtrack and see what that would do to my attitude.

What I discovered is what I already knew:
That there is a lot of really fun new music being made with very traditional goals.
That there are some people out there pushing at the edges of whatā€™s possible. Just little nudges. Nothing revolutionary, but promising gestures of discovery.
That there doesnā€™t seem to be much evidence that some sort of sonic revolt is waiting around the corner.

But Iā€™m patient. And Iā€™m listening.

ā€”

I’m more optimistic about the current state of music production than Marc, and we have some good back-and-forth in the podcast (as of writing this I haven’t yet heard it, but Marc promised he’d edit out the bits where I sounded like a complete idiot). If they made the cut, I also shared some of my own experiences and frustrations writing and releasing music that inspires me, but isn’t necessarily targeted at any particular audience or market segment. How does your music find its people? And what if those people don’t exist? Should you change your style, chasing what’s popular? Or just do your own weird thing and hope a few other people will like it? Twenty years writing music music and running a record label and I still can’t give you a good answer to this question. I guess it depends on what your goals are, as an artist.

Marc Kate’s most recent album, mentioned on the podcoast, is File: #08, now available from Computer Tapes. His forthcoming album Failing Forms will be released in November.

Personal Update, Track Download, Upcoming Posts

Momu-vs-U2

Happy 4th of July! For you international readers, here’s a handy guide to the holiday and other Americanisms. I will be celebrating the holiday by participating in a secret tournament, the results of which I shall report upon later.

I have exactly ten minutes to write this post, so I’m going with bullet points:

  • Momu is rereleasing a bootleg we did a few years back. Click on the picture above to direct link to the mp3, or go to the Momu Download page. Momu’s new album The Mission is available on iTunes (and everywhere else), with our track “Google Bus” being the clear favorite. The “Dub Pack” remixes of “Sixth & Mission” can be previewed here. Please take a second to Like us if you want to keep up with Momu releases.
  • June was “Only New Music Month” — an experiment I did with Never Knows aka Marc Kate of the Why We Listen podcast. I’ll write a post about the experiment soon — in short it was not that difficult and fantastically rewarding. I would recommend it for everyone, especially if you feel in a musical rut.
  • Some progress in fiction writing. Finished 4th draft of my science fiction novel The Sky Woman and 2nd draft of its sequel The Guardian. I’ll be writing and submitting short fiction for the remainder of the year. If you know (or are personally) an agent or publisher who appreciates science fiction, I would love to send you my work.
  • Future posts will include a hair regrowth update, how to invest a lump sum (following up on this post), and more about refining systems for creative work.

Stay hydrated, unburnt, and very much alive this weekend, my friends and readers!

Momu Mobile Studio Setup (MOMU-MSS): Making Electronic Music on the Road

Momu's Mayakoba mobile studio setup.

Momu’s Mayakoba mobile studio setup.

I recently had the opportunity to enjoy an all-expenses-paid resort trip to Playa del Carmen, Mexico with Mark Musselman (the other half of Momu). While I’d written plenty of music on the road with an ultra-minimal laptop + headphones setup, this was the first time attempting to travel with a “mini-studio” that would make collaborative beat-making easy and fun and not involve additional checked luggage. The vacation (or “creative sabbatical”) happened to coincide with the release of Momu’s new album The Mission (now available on Beatport, also presale until April 8 on iTunes and Amazon).

When planning our gear we knew we needed the following:

Page 3 of 9

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén