This is the new mantra. It replaces the previous one: 'the only point in building an audience is so that you can lose it'. I came across the new one here in a piece by Berlin DJ and Macro record label-meister Stefan Goldmann. I don't know his work or that of the label, but I agree with every word in his article. It's nice to see such intelligence and considered writing applied to something (pop music) that used to be so important to so many of us. Stefan's contention is that rather than liberating musician and audience alike, the computer revolution in music making has been far more problemmatic for both: it's given audiences a glut of mediocre music and simultaneously made it virtually impossible for any but those already established artists to make any money out of the game. His proposed solution is music to the ears of someone like me: stand out from the wall of samey noise; go against the grain; go to the margins and you will find an audience. I hope he's right. I certainly feel more energised than I think I ever have about the possibilities of making exciting music and moving into interesting new imaginative areas through making noises. But then, I have no expectation anyway of ever making any money from it, so it won't exactly be a sacrifice if I were to not only fail to do that but still never find an audience (or, ho ho ho, lose what little of one I may already have.)
I guess I'm a good illustration of Stefan's thesis. It's taken me about 7 years of not particularly dilligent application to learn enough about modern music production to get - admittedly with quite a bit of help from some far more talented colleagues - pretty close to mainstream release quality. With the freedom and energy of youth, you could, I suppose - with a little judicious web-surfing and a copy of the 'Sound on Sound' special issue on music production techniques and a few late nights and early mornings - be up and running in six months. All the bands I was in were ultimately stymied by the inaccessibility of (to coin a phrase) the means of production. In those days, you had to have either a lot of your own time and money or be signed to a record label if you were serious about a career in music. Nowadays, you need a laptop. But the downside is that just as on every corner the factory gates swing open for the on-rushing revolutionaries, the market stalls collapse under the sheer weight of useless and unwanted tat that they are churning out. 'We never got it off on that revolution stuff....'
I suppose the biggest problem for artists nowadays is the extreme fragmentation of one's potential audience. When I was growing up, there were two music shows on TV - TOTP and the Old Grey Whistle Test. John Peel's radio show was pretty much the only place you'd be lucky enough to hear stuff that was what you could call 'under the radar' of the chart-obsessed record industry. Nowadays, that state of affairs has been pretty much inverted; even the BBC has had to divvy up what was once a stand alone pop station into at least three distinct offshoots, that's before you even start on the internet radio. Then there's Spotify, i-Tunes.... The old binary system - you either had a record deal, or you didn't - has been replacedby the classic Marxian pyramid: you have a small 'ruling elite' of globally renowned superstars. Jostling below them is a 'bourgeoisie' of well-meaning and hard working bands who with gigs and a heck of a lot t-shirt sales and a couple of plays on 'Made in Chelsea' can just about scratch a living. And then there's the rest of us: the lumpen proletariat of mini-midi keyboarders, farting about on our laptops, making bleeping modern symphonies of warp and decay that no one will ever hear. We're the billion droplets in the SoundCloud. We're not so much under the radar. It's just that there are so many of us, the grey-green screen turns white.
Trying to master the 'Urbane' mixes last night, putting the final touches to the finished songs, I find that on one track I can hear all the breathing between the words, only now exaggerated to sound like a bison grunting and smacking its lips together. It's the compression - you use it to make the overall sound a little bigger by reducing the loudest parts - and it can sometimes expose stuff you thought you could get away without tidying up. It's no biggy - you just need to go back to the multi track and time consumingly remove the gaps so that only the singing parts you want to be heard get treated with the effect. The ironies. My stuff has probably never sounded so good since we used to use proper recording facilities, but here I am, quite literally, cutting the life out of it.
L.U.V. on y'all,
xxx
Eloquent and interesting, oh yes.
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