Sorry for being absent for so long. I took a summer class that kind of ate up all of my time for the last month. Anyway, I have a few projects I’ve been working on, including a new weekly webcomic, which should be online within the next few weeks (I’m working on the website now).
In other news, I just downloaded the album “This is an Adventure!” by Uncle Monsterface. The band has been offering the album for free via their website as long as listeners promise to review the album in return for the free music. I thought it was a fantastic idea, so I decided to give the album a shot. The following is the review I submitted to itunes for the album:
Let’s start with the details. The lead singer’s voice reminds me a bit of Danielson with the heavy use of falsetto and his peculiar inflection. The lyrics are mostly surreal and humorous, featuring lots of nerdy references to old school text-based adventure games, superheroes, robots, and Gary Gygax. The production is pretty tight, with instrumentation ranging from spare electronic beats, tunes, and noises to thickly layered guitar and brass orchestration. None of it comes across as unplanned or improvised. Genre-wise, I’d class this album as electro-punk (a la Atom & His Package) with some indie pop, rock, and a little bit of ska influence. Overall, this album is a fun listen – the music is good and the humor isn’t too overdone. So far I’ve given all but one of the songs a 4 star rating in itunes, which basically means I like them, but none of them really stand out as a favorite. I’ll definitely be paying more attention to this band in the future!
Trent Reznor will not stay out of the free culture spotlight! remix.nin.com takes a sizable portion of Nine Inch Nails’ back catolog and allows registered users to download original multi tracks, which they can then remix however they want. The only “rules” are that users share their creations on the site and that they not include any copyrighted material (unless they own the copyright). According to the FAQs on the site, users may include any Nine Inch Nails song (which I’m assuming includes songs not included on the site) in their remixes.
The band has done this on a smaller scale in the past – the release of “The Hand that Feeds” in Garageband format was something of a first, although they experimented with a flash-based music editing system on a previous project (according to the note from Trent included with the download of “The Hand that Feeds”).
The band is also collecting geographical statistics from users (not required, but encouraged) for future “visualizations” that they claim will be “really cool.” We’ll see what that means. I’m hoping they’re planning on showing the record industry just how many people are willing to be a part of culture when they’re allowed to participate, instead of being treated like slaves and criminals.
Anyway, here’s a band who is not only giving away their music for free, but letting people remix and share it. I’ll be paying close attention to how well “The Slip” does when they finally release the physical CD… I’m going to propose, as a hypothesis, that it’s going to do really well, in spite of the millions of people who will have already downloaded it for free. We’ll see how the RIAA feels about that.
Trent Reznor deserves some sort of reward. I don’t know what kind of reward. It should somehow communicate both how ridiculously productive and embarrassingly generous he’s been so far this year.
For anyone here who doesn’t know a lot about marketing, there’s a concept called “reciprocity” (or something like that). It basically means that if you give someone something for free and they like it, they’ll generally want to give you something back. Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails both used this concept (to great success) when they released their last respective albums. In this case, if you download “The Slip,” you’re given the opportunity to “pass it on,” emailing a download link to friends. So not only are they taking advantage of reciprocity (letting people know that they’ll still be able to buy the CD in a few months), but they’re also taking advantage of the Internet’s “viral” capability – spreading the word about their album the same way people send out those stupid emails with pictures of cats and pointless petitions and stories about Jesus (send this to 10 friends in 10 minutes or a puppy will die).
I think we’re finally seeing a band trying to take full advantage of what the internet does best… and I love it!
I saw Cursive tonight. Great show. They totally did not fit the stereotypical “look” of most bands in their genre, which was refreshing. Granted, Cursive has been playing for a lot longer than any of the trendy emo-pop bands you hear these days; in fact, they’re probably somewhat to blame for that whole musical blight! As much as I should hate them for that, I can’t… their music is just too damn good. I can’t deny that I have a soft spot for older emo (i.e. before the clusterfuck) – bands like Cursive, (older) Jimmy Eat World, Sunny Day Real Estate, and Texas Is the Reason.
In other news, I decided this week (on a whim) to try my hand at designing skateboard decks. You would think that I don’t have papers to write, assignments to grade, a film to finish, and plenty of other work to keep me busy… Actually, I think this could be an interesting design exercise, since it will force me to work with a very specific size and format and still be creative. Also, I’ve been wanting to try to do stencil art for quite awhile, and this seemed like an easier (more legitimate) option than vandalism.
Here are the first few I’ve done:
This one is based on my redesigned cover for Magnetic North. I decided to start out using designs I’ve already made just to see how they would translate into this medium.
This one is based on one of the t-shirts I designed for the Pelican Pub in St. Petersburg, FL, at the beginning of last year (which they still haven’t printed…).
This design is primarily based on some of the visuals from Cory Arcangel’s Data Diaries.
…and finally, my favorite one. I know this makes me kind of a pretentious fuck, but I couldn’t help myself! I call it the “existential deck.” Can you name everyone here? I’m still trying to figure out how to fit Dostoevsky in there without his face getting covered up by the trucks
I found this op-ed piece by Billy Bragg (musician) today while perusing the intarwebs. I think that he makes several very interesting but contradictory points regarding free culture that I would like to contextualize with my own previously stated ideas.
First off, I want to assert that when I talk about “free culture” I don’t mean free in a monetary sense – I mean freedom from corporate control and regulation. Corporations use the laws of supply and demand to attempt to determine the maximum amount of money anyone would be willing to pay for a specific item, then charge the same price for all similar items. The problem is that cultural objects (art, music, etc.) do not have intrinsic value – their value is determined by the response of the culture in which they are created. The value of an object is established by how much people are willing to sacrifice in order to enjoy it. That value can also be perpetuated by the opinions of well-respected people (we generally call them critics) who share those opinions with the public. In the end, the value of a particular cultural object is determined on an individual level: if you are not willing to pay $18 for the newest album by Mr. Bragg, then you don’t have to. Your refusal to buy something indicates your opinion on the value of that object. Perhaps several months later you find the same album in a used CD bin for $5, and you buy it. Once again, your decision has communicated your personal opinion on the value of that cultural object.
As Bragg points out in his op-ed, technology is not just something that has the capacity to free culture, it also has the capacity to be exploited by corporations who are smart enough not to fight it (I’m looking at you RIAA and MPAA!). The point at which I disagree with him is in regards to his comparison between radio and a band’s music appearing on a social networking site. Radio is an inherently selective medium, but social networking sites are not. If a band’s music is played regularly on the radio, it can be almost guaranteed that their song will be heard by a relatively large number of people. If a band starts a Myspace page, there’s no guarantee anyone will even look at it!
The fact is, a large part of the Internet economy works on a sort of networking “barter system.” In other words, if someone has a social networking site that has x number of users in its network, the value of that site is based on the network. Individuals and artists have the opportunity to take advantage of that network by adding themselves to it, thereby increasing the value of the network for everyone and allowing the owner of the site to rake in more ad revenue and potentially sell the site for an exorbitant amount of money. Essentially, by being part of a social network, you make use of a particular service that someone else (advertisers) pay for. I think this formula becomes problematic when people let the sites fall into corporate control (it’s like local store owners happily selling their businesses to Wal-mart so that a new “superstore” can be built), but on the other hand, I can’t really blame someone for accepting millions of dollars for something that probably didn’t take them that long to make in the first place (relatively speaking)! Based on the article, it seems that this is more the problem that Bragg is decrying, and I agree with him ideologically; however, I disagree with his statement that the owner of the networking site he mentions owes the artists a cut of what he made off of the site. It’s a nice thought, but the problem is that every user of a social networking site is like a customer. Even bands (I should probably clarify by saying “good” bands) are customers who are making use of the site’s network. If someone sells their business in the physical world (vs. online), do their customers get a cut of the profit?
I respect Billy Bragg as a musician and gladly support his art, but there’s an inherent contradiction in his statements: he plays the morality card in reference to Bebo.com sharing profits with musicians on the site (a blatantly socialist statement), while taking a very capitalist stance regarding music. He fails to consider the fact that Bebo.com is someone else’s “intellectual property.” If it is morally right for the owners of Bebo.com to share the wealth when they capitalize on their intellectual property, then shouldn’t the same be true for artists? If, as I stated before, the value of art is external and culturally-based, don’t popular musicians owe their critics, their fans, and anyone else who supports them for helping establish the value of their art?
There’s a lot to think about here, and I’d of course be interested in hearing how Mr. Bragg would respond. In the meantime, I will side with him in encouraging people to spend some money and support independent artists. Go to an art show, go to a local performance (play, concert, dance), go to an art theater, buy an independently published album or film, donate to the open-source movement, etc. Remember that your decision to consume these things helps to establish their cultural value.
ADDENDUM: I just wanted to add one more quick thought. If you consider the nature of new media, royalties are actually extremely difficult to assess. The idea of paying an artist royalties every time her/his music is played publicly worked well because media was difficult to duplicate. Now, not only is media infinitely duplicable, but it is also possible to have thousands of people streaming the same audio file at once. This makes the whole idea of royalty-based pay more and more implausible. This is part of the problem with the current state of the music industry – their entire economic system has been undercut by the technological advances over the last decade. Rather than fighting to maintain the viability of a pay system that has become outdated, artists should be striving for something new to match the needs of the culture. As I’ve stated before, artists like Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Chuck D, etc. have all made positive moves in this direction. This is what the industry needs to focus on; and by industry, I don’t mean conglomerate corporations – I mean the artists.
Yes, I do now know things about urine. Cool things. Over the last couple of days I’ve had a blog comment “discussion” about how urine is both popular among chemists and people who dye fabric by hand due to its various wonderful chemical properties as well as its low cost and availability.
Apparently, it’s also drinkable, if you’re in a truly desperate situation.
Oh, and you most likely drank some the last time you went swimming. A wonderful thought, considering I just came back from the pool!
Speaking of the pool, I made it to 850 yds in 30 min today, beating my previous record. I also got up to a grand total of 1000 yds in only 35 min. I’m going to have to push for 1200 yds next time.
On another note, Nine Inch Nails has released a new instrumental album via the intarwebs: Ghosts I-IV. The full album (about 2 hrs of musick) is available for paid download on their website with CDs available for pre-order; however, the big news is that they also officially released Ghosts I (the first quarter of the album) as a torrent download on The Pirate Bay. For anyone familiar with the ongoing media war being waged on the digital frontier, The Pirate Bay has long been one of the biggest thorns in the side of conglomerate pigs like the RIAA and the MPAA. Currently, The Pirate Bay is under investigation due to pressure by these organizations, but the site hasn’t been shut down yet.
By officially releasing an album on a website like The Pirate Bay, NIN is making a pretty clear statement about where they stand on this front. A few years back, Trent Reznor also released the song “The Hand that Feeds” from “With Teeth” in multi-track Garageband format, allowing the public to remix his song however they saw fit. For this release, he’s going to make mixable versions of all of the tracks available (for a fee, according to his website). As far as I know, this hasn’t caused Trent to lose any money – quite the opposite, I’m sure, since cutting out the record labels (who usually take an exorbitant cut of album profits) allows him to pocket a higher percentage per album/download sold.
Personally, I have tons of respect for this kind of DIY ethic. Radiohead got a lot of positive media for releasing “In Rainbows” last year on a “pay whatever you feel like” basis. A couple of years back, Wired Magazine released an album featuring several artists who were releasing their music using the Creative Commons copyright (including The Rapture, Le Tigre, Thievery Corporation, Spoon, and others). Other artists who have previously showed similar foresight include The Smashing Pumpkins (who released their last album before their breakup as a free download) and Chuck D (who has vocally supported the file sharing movement since the late 90s through media appearances, court testimony, and his website Rapstation.com).
As I’ve mentioned before, I believe that our culture needs to discard old-fashioned ideas about “intellectual property.” Personally, I think that we could be on the verge of a sort of renaissance in which collaboration and group authorship become the norm. Open source software is probably one of the biggest pieces of evidence that I can point to in support of this claim, but I think that the same sort of thing can happen in the arts and in entertainment. People are starting to discover that they don’t need bloated corporations to help them create and distribute their work. The ready availability of production software and access to the Internet now serve those needs.
Of course, the conglomerates still have power – they have lots of politicians in their pockets, and they’re trying to enact laws to stave off their inevitable obsolescence. A couple of things to pay attention to in the political arena are the federal “pirate” laws, that would make downloading and distributing copyrighted material a federal offense, and the current debate over ISPs being allowed to limit bandwidth allocation to P2P file sharing services.
Show your support for the file sharing revolution and go download Ghosts I from The Pirate Bay – I’ve been listening to it as I’ve been typing, and it’s a solid bit of electronica. If you want II-IV, you may have to wait awhile as NIN had to temporarily disable the download site due to overwhelming amounts of traffic, but based on what I’ve heard so far it’ll be worth the wait (and $5).
[UPDATE: I finally was able to download Ghosts I-IV in its entirety. It's basically an electronic/instrumental concept album with each track corresponding to an image. I've been a fan of NIN for awhile, but this is some amazing work right here!]
I wanted to write a few thoughts about the Six Organs of Admittance concert I attended Tuesday night at The Canopy Club in Urbana. It’s taken me a few days to fully absorb the experience, and I finally feel up to the task of relating it.
First, to give some context: I was exposed to Six Organs of Admittance about a year-and-a-half ago by my friend, Kenny Jensen. The album he gave me was folk-inflected, mostly instrumental, semi-experimental, and entirely acoustic. The tunes were slow, intricate, and methodical and focused on melodic themes and variations. The instrumentation was fairly simple: intricate acoustic guitar melodies, overlaid on drumset rythms, with the occasional inclusion of bass, banjo, melodica, and (rarely) quietly sung vocals. This was my understanding of the band prior to the show. I had labelled them “folk” music.
I hadn’t heard the band’s most recent album yet. Their last album I listened to was “The Sun Awakens” from 2006.
I invited my friend, Alaina, to the show, which is important, because it affected my perception of the experience. I have a tendency to be very self-conscious when sharing music with other people, or rather, I have a tendency to be very conscious of what I imagine the other person may be thinking about the music. This created a strangely layered experience for me; on a purely sensory level, I was absorbing the concert experience as usual, but I kept processing the music through my imagination of Alaina’s possible reactions.
Now to address the show itself. Only one member of the band took the stage initially: singer/songwriter/guitarist Ben Chasny. I was confused at first, partially because he didn’t introduce himself, I didn’t recognize the song, and I expected more band members on stage. I had to ask someone to make sure that this was actually the band and not another opening act. Once I had surmounted that obstacle, I was able to fully appreciate the music. The first several songs were beautiful, complex, solo acoustic guitar pieces. Occasionally Chasny sang, but for the most part he just played. It was hypnotic and extremely intimate – I felt like the music was drawing me out of myself in a strange way… almost as if I was floating half out of my body.
Eventually, another band member joined him onstage, picked up a second guitar and began singing with him. They played a prerecorded transitional guitar track and continued singing while Chasny changed guitars. Eventually a drummer joined them as well. In this second stage of the concert, their music began to feel very different – more straightforward and rock-based.
The second guitarist that joined him didn’t actually play her guitar, but just held it and continued to sing along. When she finally did begin to play, she ushered in the third, incredibly jarring segment of the show with the addition of a heavily distorted, dischordant, and overpowering guitar track. It was at this point that I became hyper-conscious of what I assumed Alaina’s reaction might be, considering the fact that I had described them as folk music, and this was decidedly not-folk.
The second guitarist continued for their last several songs, and I became increasingly uncomfortable, occasionally leaning over to voice my confusion to Alaina. I began to wish that the show would end quickly.
When it finally did end, we left. I didn’t wait for an encore as I normally would have – I didn’t really want an encore.
In retrospect, I can’t really give the show an overall rating. Initially it seemed like it was going to be an incredible experience, but as the show progressed, I tried to distance myself more and more from the music, partially because it seriously jarred my expectations, and partially because I was hyper-conscious of Alaina’s reaction. The best I can say is that it was a mixed experience, but one I still appreciated.
For a long time I’ve held that the concept of intellectual property is a primitive belief that is being manipulated by corporations to control technological and artistic progress and to steal money from artists and other creators. Creative individuals have survived for millennia without huge multinational corporations “protecting” their interests; the ready availability of creative technology and the means to distribute work via the Internet have made these corporations mostly obsolete. Organizations like the RIAA and the MPAA have been pursuing frivolous lawsuits, lobbying governments, and distributing ridiculous propaganda in an attempt to maintain control of their industries.
Ok. I’m going to step down from my soapbox. Here’s a video produced by some creative folks over in Europe as a response to some of the aforementioned propaganda.
