Ben Walker

Last week I wrote a post about Dogs Running Free, a collaborative musical project that I’m doing next weekend with Nick and Spence. Since then I’ve recorded demos of a few song ideas and thought about how best to present the project online.

Part of the idea is to finish as much as possible within the 3-day recording session, and not to spend weeks afterwards editing video and mixing tunes. But I don’t think it’s going to lend itself to a live broadcast (most of the time we’ll probably be plugging things in and thinking). What we need is a curated archive of video and audio footage, without having to do too much curation…

Associative vernacular whuh?!

It just so happens that I was reading a blog post by Andrew Dubber the other day called Music and associative vernacular media, in which he describes an event at which he did exactly this. A bunch of musicians were brought together to write, rehearse and perform some music over a few days, and it was all documented online by giving the performers Flip cameras and asking them to “point them at whatever they thought was interesting”. Their short video clips (between 30 seconds and 3 minutes each) were uploaded to a blog throughout the day, given a title and tagged with roughly predefined keywords. In this way you can build a simple video archive that the audience can explore:

Because what’s interesting is not the video itself, but the way in which that video potentially links to other, related videos from within the same context – and makes connections from which narrative meaning can be constructed.

Call it associative vernacular mediation.

So you might see a short video of me talking about an idea for a Hammond riff, and when it’s finished you could follow a number of links – to other videos of me talking, other videos featuring the Hammond, or other videos related to that song. There’s no fixed way of exploring, you just watch whatever catches your eye. Like Dubber says, it’s an interesting way of “making internet”.

Rather than make a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the project, or subject the musicians to a Big Brother-style reality show production, the aim was to use the more conversational, rough-and-ready ‘vernacular’ attributes of the world wide web – and, for that matter, allow them to select what should and shouldn’t be filmed.

Wait a minute – who’s dream are we in?

I’m using Dubber’s idea to solve a practical problem, but it’s very interesting to think about it from a higher, more academic, level. If you’re at all interested in this sort of conversation, you should definitely follow Dubber. He’s a clever dude:

This project is, in part, intended as a provocation and exploration toward what a natively ‘read-write’ form of music mediation might be in the digital environment. And while it could be argued (and often is) that this sort of technological intervention ‘devalues’ music, or that the deprioritisation of a controlled, ordered, finished and idealised definitive product constitutes a form of cultural net loss, that proposition does have an air of nostalgia to it, and also asserts an ideal form of mediation that is always problematic and conservative.

I would argue, as a form of media communication itself, rather than simply something that requires mediation, music (and the activity of making music) is not simply a fixed artistic expression, but a very human activity – a set of practices, shared symbolic meanings and discourses that connect people: the people making the music as well as the people for whom the music is performed.

I’m getting excited about this project now (can you tell? ;), and it’s going to be great fun seeing how (and if) Nick and Spence get into the online side of things. Xander is coming along in his usual role as genius behind-the-scenes producer, which should ease the pressure. After all, we are there to make music!

There will be a Tumblr to collect all the videos, and follow me, Nick and Spence for the inside scoop. I imagine we’ll be hashtagging everything #dogsrunningfree too.

I think it must be the curse of my generation¹ that we were promised outlets for our creativity and not given them. God knows why we think we are so entitled, but the curse is evident in the growing number of my friends who have some sort of creative skill, urge or passion, and struggle to find the outlet or audience for it.

Unmarried

Previous generations seem to have been satisfied with THE HOBBY. That’s no good for us. We’re all about THE ART. We demand to earn our living and make our mark as creators. But we are the Peter Pan Generation that doesn’t really dig business, so we’re crap at useful things like self-promotion and networking.

I have friends who are happy with normal jobs. They tend to be the ones who are also married, because marriage is a sign of GIVING UP ON THE DREAM. It’s OK to be with someone for ever, as long as you don’t get married. Because you couldn’t possibly get married until you’ve figured it all out (ie. next year).

So we’re all floating along. We hoped turning 30 might bring a flash of enlightenment. It didn’t. We’ve created a wonderful and free digital world where everyone can have everything and we’ve turned down every opportunity to do things ‘the old way’, because we knew things were going to change.

Revolutionary trinket

And things have changed. Instead of making a trinket for fun, giving it as a gift, being surprised when people want more trinkets, making a few more, maybe setting up a little stall somewhere (always as a hobby – never seriously), selling more, making more and selling more, we think of an idea for a revolutionary trinket design, we register revolutionarytrinket.com, we make a business plan that has a huge question mark by the word FUNDING, we build revolutionarytrinket.com/shop, we set up a hosted Gmail account to deal with the inevitable flood of orders and to streamline team calendaring (there has to be a team), we post a couple of mysterious tweets and we wait.

Nothing happens. We never even get round to making stuff any more. We ignore the voices of THE DRAGONS that float over from the TV: “Malcolm, the best thing you can do is to LET IT GO. This is NOT A BUSINESS, and it will NEVER BE A BUSINESS.” What do they know? They’re old and successful. They didn’t create stuff. They did it the boring way. Little by little. With ice cream trucks and leisure centres and shrink-wrapped toys. What is this? 1982? We’re MAKING ART HERE, PEOPLE. Did you even hear Duncan Banatyne on Desert Island Discs? Worst. Taste. Ever.

What’s the answer?

Crowdsourcing. Crowdfunding. Fundcrowding. Micropatronage. Begging. It’s the new way! It worked for Coming & Crying and, um… there are others. We don’t even need to think about money any more. There are people out there who will just give. We think of a clever name for the second-from-bottom-price-point package² and throw in a personal appearance (OMG! Seriously? You’ll turn up at my house and actually clamp a trinket to my mantelpiece? For only £599?), and the money will come rolling in.

Or not. I think there’s another way. In fact, I know there is because Xander has already thought of it. He just hasn’t built it yet. And while he’s away directing a play in Edinburgh, Miranda and I had a secret meeting (with tea and Co-op Truly Irresistible Stem Ginger Cookies), and planned it all out. When Xander gets back he’ll tell you all about it. It’s going to be amazing. ;)

The Myspace Gig Scraper is a new tool to publish your Myspace gig listings on your website.

I’ve been struggling for quite a while with the problem of synchronising gig listings between websites, and Myspace has always been a sticking point – they don’t provide any easy way of getting the listings in or out of their system.

So I’ve created a small set of scripts that scrapes your Myspace gig listings and displays them on your site (you can see it working on the Little Fish site). You still have to input the gigs on Myspace, but at least you don’t have to duplicate your efforts.

The Myspace Gig Scraper is hosted on GitHub, which means that other muso-geeks can take it and improve it. It’s free for anyone to install on their server and tinker with, but you’ll need a little bit of technical knowledge to get it up and running. I’m hoping to make it easier in the future.

Dogs Running Free is the musical project that Nick Gill, Spencer Walker and I are launching next month. We’re going to spend three days at my parents’ house to write and record some music. Part of the process will be to figure out how to release it. Do we live stream some of it? Maybe make videos instead of just audio tracks. I like the idea of capturing the live performances on video, Pomplamoose style.

The session is happening in September, but I want to put this out there in case any of you musos have done similar projects and might have some cool ideas. Let me explain roughly what we have planned, and then we can talk about it.

Nick, Spence and Ben

Nick, Spence and I have been playing music together on and off since the mid nineties, but in the last five years our musical tastes and styles have diverged. Gone are the days when the three of us would obsess over Queen scores and Ben Folds Five bootlegs, or jam BareNakedLadies tunes before hopping in the Volkswagen camper van and blasting Deep Purple’s Burn out of the tinny speakers. We’ve all grown and matured, and we’ve all been playing music separately for a while now.

Nick has recently been described as “the William Morris of Peckham”. This is probably mostly to do with his love of letterpress printing and bookbinding, but his music reflects the same values of careful hand-crafting, building things from scratch and being intentionally awkward and specialised. Nick’s band The Monroe Transfer, whose latest album was sealed in hand-stitched cloth bags, is a 7-piece instrumental group that creates beautiful, brooding tunes that seem like the soundtrack to a really long, bad day. I mean that in the best possible way. Nick also plays guitar (and more) in Fireworks Night, releases occasional recordings of twinkly noise as Lights and writes music for weird and wonderful plays.

Spence is the drummer in A Silent Film, an epic indie pop/rock group from Oxford who are unexpectedly huge in Portugal and edging onto the alternative charts in the USA. He’s a loud drummer, but also comes up with consistently interesting and difficult beats. He also occasionally plays (in quite a different style) in Jont‘s band, where he’s known as The General because he has a habit of taking charge of rehearsals when tensions are running high. Spence ended up with the good voice in the Walker family genetic lottery of musical talents (along with the double bass skills), and our voices sound otherwise eerily similar.

Since we last played together (on the ill-fated Groove On album, 2000) I’ve been doing a bizarre combination of geek pop comedy songs, tiny songs, 60s covers, Hammond and piano as a sideman and a Beatles cover.

We’re three musicians who know each other very well, but have wildly different musical experiences, taste and ambitions. I think that’s going to make for a very interesting session.

The Project

We don’t want to give ourselves too many boundaries before we start, but I can’t help thinking of interesting ways we can approach the recording and creative boundaries we can use to keep it on track and get it all finished in three days. Here are a few ideas:

1. Limit the recordings to what we can play live: no overdubs.
2. Do the whole session with the same line-up, eg. drums, piano, guitar, vocals
3. Make all the tracks 3 minutes long
4. Make one track for each of the words Dogs Running Free
5. Record short musical ideas instead of long tracks

We’ve been batting ideas back and forth for a couple of months now. We have a collaborative playlist set up on Spotify where we can throw reference tracks so that we don’t have to spend the whole time playing each other new music during the writing process. Nick recorded an insane guitar riff through a home-made fuzz pedal. I sped it up, changed the key and wrote a song on it. Spence spent a 36-hour van trip to Portugal writing an epic track in his head. I wrote half a song called Dogs Running Free. We may not use any of these things, but at least we can hit the ground running.

I would also love to release Dogs Running Free as a series of live videos like this, but I’m not sure I’ll get that idea past the others. Except maybe the sheepskin coat. ;)

I’m quite a technical songwriter. I have methods of writing. I can justify my choices of rhyme, structure and language. I studied songwriting. When I hear songs I analyse them. I see songwriting as a craft (ie. something you can learn and improve with practice).

A lot of songwriters I know don’t see it this way at all. They see songwriting as a pure form of artistic expression that can be ruined by overthinking. They see justification of musical choices as a weakness, as if you’re bowing to the demands of the imagined audience instead of being authentic and true to the soul or emotional message of the song.

It’s difficult to think about this objectively. The fact that I’m even writing this puts me firmly in the thinking camp. A feeling songwriter wouldn’t write about songwriting. They would just write songs. I’m sure a carefully balanced approach is best, but I can’t do that.

So I’m going to be entirely subjective and tell you why I think songwriting needs to be approached as a craft. I hope some of you feelers might be able to help me see your side of the argument.

Songwriting is a craft, not an art

There’s no such thing as a conceptual songwriter. As an artist you are free to choose from all sorts of funky media and part of the game is to work outside the box and provoke thought and criticism. Songwriting isn’t like that. Composition is like that, but songwriting isn’t. As a songwriter you’ve signed up to write songs, and the popular song isn’t a very flexible form. It’s not quite as restrictive as being a sonnetwriter, but it’s closer to that than, say, a novelwriter.

There’s nothing to stop you exploding the confines of the form and writing 15-minute one-chord freeform poetry, but that’s not a song. You could argue that it is, but you’d be wrong (the word song refers to a pretty specific musical form, and let’s assume we’re talking about popular song, even late 20th Century popular song to keep things simple).

Given that you’ve chosen to write in such a specific musical and lyrical form, it makes sense to understand that form as deeply as possible. To study the greats. To analyse and practise and learn, until you can write so fluently that the form becomes transparent to the listener and the message, the emotion, the feeling is transmitted as purely as possible.

As a listener, there are lots of things that can make you aware of the form, and distract you from the message:

• boring bits, where a song goes on too long, repeats too much or is too formless to follow easily
• uncomfortably dissonant moments
• surprising and unprepared musical moves
• embarrassing lyrics, cheesy rhymes and empty clichés
• unnatural turns of phrase
• words wrongly stressed

Any feeling songwriter can point out a bad song. If you can recognise a bad song from a good one, you must know on some level what makes the bad songs bad. And once you know that you can avoid the bad things in your own writing and do more of whatever makes the good songs good. All feeling songwriters do this more or less consciously. So how is there still this idea that thinking about the technicalities of songwriting can ruin the feel of a song?

Are thinker and feeler songs different?

At this point, I imagine a feeler would point out that we’re talking about different kinds of song. I’m talking about heartless, muso, technically brilliant Nashville-style thinker songs, they would say, while they are talking about good, authentic, passionate songs. They may even raise an eyebrow and mention Steely Dan or drop in a quick Beatles/Stones comment.

While it’s true that I’m partial to some ‘classic’ songwriters like Ben Folds, Carole King, even occasionally Neil Diamond, most of the music I listen to and love is good, authentic, passionate music – The Band, Janis Joplin, Hendrix, The Small Faces and all that. And all of this real, true, passionate music is played over carefully crafted song forms.

Songs and recordings are not the same thing

If I were a feeler reading this, I’d probably start listing great tracks that have almost no song structure. There are loads. So I think it’s important to remember that we’re talking about songs here, not recordings. There’s a track on the Ben Folds Five demos and outtakes album Naked Baby Photos called For Those Of Ya’ll Who Wear Fannie Packs that’s just a recording of them jamming Rage Against the Machine in soundcheck. It’s a great recording, and I used to listen to it all the time, but it’s not a good song. At all.

Maybe that’s the answer. Good songs require thinking, and good recordings are about feeling. Does that ring true to any of you feelers? Or am I overthinking the whole issue? ;)

The Internet is all about writing. Writing that inspires and excites, writing that informs and educates, writing in tags that make the web work, writing in 140 characters. Whatever you do in real life, it’s going to be represented on the web in writing. Yes, images and videos are important too, but they’re the cheese slice and gherkin on the Internet burger.

Coming and Crying

Today I woke up to find an email from Meaghan in my inbox. It wasn’t just to me – it was an update to all the supporters of Coming and Crying, one of the most amazing webby/creative projects around.

Meaghan works at Tumblr and I met her on the Man (hat on) tour, when I played the Tumblr office in New York. She and Melissa, both writers, have put together a book of short stories about sex. They have funded it through Kickstarter and have been documenting the whole process in blogs, on Twitter and in emails. They have had live events like the intimate readings and the latest listening session, where authors and supporters gathered to listen to studio recordings of the stories.

The update email is only for supporters (we paid for the inbox love ;), so I won’t reprint it all (there are plenty of public updates too), but here are a couple of excerpts to give you a taste:

I’m not gonna lie to you guys, because you are my safe space: writing a story that is in a BOOK with your name on it, while managing the production of a book, while working fulltime and trying to find a place to live is A RECIPE FOR CRYING TO YOUR MOTHER.

Having the book back meant one very specific, wonderful thing, and that is that while I was moving (I strongly advise anyone who is considering making a book and moving into an apartment at the same time to RECONSIDER), Melissa printed the whole thing out in a fancy Kinko’s way that costs more than an actual book. Which means that for the past 10 days or so I have been walking around town, hugging an actual physical object to my body, flipping through it, reading little pieces of it, and realizing just how goddamn good this thing we all decided to fucking go for really is.

When I first read about the C&C project on Meaghan’s blog, I signed up and handed over my money almost immediately. I hadn’t read the stories yet. Many of them hadn’t been written. They hadn’t started to make the actual book. They didn’t even know how. None of this mattered. I wanted it to succeed, and I wanted to be a part of it. And I wasn’t the only one. They raised about $5,000 in three days, completely smashing their Kickstarter target. The total donations are now $17,243.

Writing

The success of the venture rests on Meaghan’s writing. Coming and Crying is very cool, but the idea isn’t unique. There are loads of worthwhile and interesting art projects going on around the Internet, and Kickstarter is packed full of ideas. Meaghan’s Tumblr blog was popular way before she starting working for Tumblr (back when she was Jonathan Coulton‘s Scarface) because it’s such a satisfying read. She comes across as honest, funny and likeable (which she is). When she writes an email to the mailing list of supporters they are inspired and excited.

We managed a tiny version of this with the Little Fish Paper Club last week. We made something personal and handmade and sent it out in handwritten envelopes to 100 people. It was beautifully designed by Bekim Mala and it arrived in the post like a present, but at its core was a piece of writing by Juju that was inspiring and exciting. When the Fishy Paper Squares arrived on Monday people were posting thank you messages and pictures on Facebook and Twitter, and thirty more people signed up for the next edition.

Juju’s story was based around the song Am I Crazy?, but that’s not what made it work. People want to connect with Juju. They can do it through the music, but on the web it’s through writing that the connections are really made. The constant conversations on Twitter and Facebook, the blog posts, the emails, the comments. It doesn’t always have to be about the music.

Band newsletters

I unsubscribed from most band newsletters ages ago because they tend to be SERIOUSLY DULL. Now I mostly just get updates from the bands I play with. But I had a dig through the email archive for some examples of good and bad writing and came up with a few. I’ve vaguely anonymised the quotes. Let’s see if any of them are as inspiring as Meaghan’s C&C email:

Keen for something completely different?

XXX and I have collaborated on a new album, Odd Frost, downloadable at this link…

And if you’re around XXX on XXX, we’ll be launching at XXX with a performance bash. Please see the ‘Nightvisions’ section of the theatre’s newsletter below.

Thanks much for your time and consideration!

Hmm… How about this?:

Goodevening everyone, i do hope that this finds you all keeping warm and well.

I am very happy to say that we will be mastering our second album in the very near future after which we will reveal plans for its release…. exciting times indeed… and there is more good news as well in the form of a very talented keyboard player who will be joining us for our show this sunday evening. So do try and make it down to the XXX for the XXX. It promises to be great evening.

I don’t mean to be mean. I’m just as bad sometimes. But you get the idea, right? Not very inspiring.

Musicians, get writing!

If you’re a musician, you need to write for the Internet all the time. Not only blogs, Myspace updates and Facebook messages, but also meta information for MP3s, Bandcamp track descriptions, Twitter biographies, interviews and endless ‘about the band’ copy. So aspire to make it great. Not just interesting, but inspiring and exciting. Don’t make people sit through any more ‘Hi, it’s me. I played a gig. Buy my album.’ emails. Brighten up their day with some great writing. And it’s not compulsory, but ending a sentence in uppercase can often make it AWESOME. ;)

I’m still trying to solve the problem of online gig listings, and I’m using the new Little Fish site as a guinea pig. The problem isn’t that the listings are bad, it’s that there are lots of them, and musicians don’t want to spend much time filling in forms on the web.

I’m going with ArtistData, which promises a solution to exactly this problem, but I have to say it’s not running quite as smoothly as planned. I need to get decent gig listings up onto these sites:

• Myspace
• Facebook
• Last.fm
• littlefishmusic.com

The idea is that I put the gig info into ArtistData once, and it spews it out to the rest. Turns out it’s not so easy…

Facebook

Let’s start with the good news. It works for Facebook. The listing isn’t fancy but it uses the image I uploaded and gets the date right, which is fine for now.

Myspace

Myspace/ArtistData sync is not working at the moment, because Myspace just updated their event system. This is annoying but understandable. What’s more annoying is that Myspace’s new event editing interface is a fucking nightmare. They’ve managed to improve bits of it while making the rest impossible. Imagine having mandatory address and postcode fields and a picky band name autocomplete on a sluggish form and trying to enter data for ten gigs in a row. Not fun. At all. Can’t wait for ArtistData to catch up on this one…

Last.fm

Last.fm syncing died sometime last year and hasn’t been reinstated. A quick glance at the API suggests that it doesn’t support adding events, and it seems that the issue has been dropped on ArtistData’s end.

littlefishmusic.com

ArtistData supplies an <iframe>-based gig calendar widget to embed on your site. You can change some colours, but ultimately the layout is ugly. And it’s an <iframe>. So I’ve stumped up the extra $3.99/month for XML access to the listings (this also includes RSS feeds for gigs, blogs and news but I’m not planning on using them). When I get round to it I’ll be able to pull in the XML and display it on the site how I like. I’ll probably do it in straight Javascript to start with, then implement some sort of cache later so it’s not relying on the ArtistData site being up (they had some serious downtime today).

So far, so mediocre

At the moment, ArtistData is saving me precisely zero keystrokes. I know some of it the crap is temporary, and they do generally seem like nice people. But I do seem to be paying for very little at the moment.

I’m going to stick it out for a few months while the Myspace thing gets sorted and I get the Tumblr site working well. Hopefully I’ll be able to feed into the process at ArtistData and let them know how it feels from the ground. I’ve been signed up since beta, so I guess it’s time I gave them some useful feedback, eh?

I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, I’m thankful for all the downtime in the van. There’s nothing like a bit of rock’n'roll data entry to liven up a 5 hour drive.

Jagger did an interesting little interview for the Beeb the other day. I heard a clip on the car radio and hunted it out when I got home. He surprised people with his informed take on the big picture of the music industry, prompting Gruber to stand up, hand on heart and proudly proclaim “A keener business mind in the music industry you will not find.” This is the bit that’s caused a stir, when Jagger is asked if he’s relaxed about the internet and downloading music:

I am quite relaxed about it. But, you know, it is a massive change and it does alter the fact that people don’t make as much money out of records.

But I have a take on that – people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone!

Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone.

So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.

Dubber was there first

I like Jagger’s take, but I reckon I know exactly where he got it from. In August 2009 the New York Times published an article called Swan Songs? that said the music industry had ten years to live. Information Is Beautiful, a website that creates and reblogs great examples of data visualisations, picked up on the graphic from the article and posted The death of the music industry. That post did the rounds, and everyone reminisced about 8-track, cassette and the CDs they bought in 1999 (the height of the CD craze).

Well, not exactly everyone. Andrew Dubber wrote a piece for his site New Music Strategies called You’re looking at it wrong:

The trailing tail to the right of the graph seems to indicate the death of music business. But look to the left. This graph does not start at the beginning of the music business. And nor does it start only a short while after the beginning of the music business.

It starts in 1973.

I don’t know about you, but I was around in 1973. I wasn’t very old, but I was old enough to be aware of music. It had been around long before I had. And even though the graph would have been tiny – at least in comparison to the uncharacteristically massive spike in CD sales around 1999 – there was no crisis in the music business then.

He goes on to say that it’s actually the thin parts of the graph where the interesting stuff happened:

New and innovative kinds of music flourished in the margins. Funk, disco, punk, psychedelic, metal, and reggae all started to emerge as significant forces from that decade. Lots of tiny labels did amazing and sometimes incredibly profitable things. Risk-takers were sometimes massively rewarded. Those who kicked at the edges often flourished.

And that the music being sold in The Golden Age Of CD Sales was mostly not worth getting nostalgic over:

Skip forward to 1999 – ten years ago now – and you witness the height of corporatism in the recorded music business. A world of a few stars selling millions of copies of safe and frequently dull music. But most importantly, the business people who were teens in 1973 were able to take the music they loved from their youth and turn it into a multi-billion dollar industry.

And while the interesting new genres have been created in the margins all through that history, it’s the forms (and their often watered-down derivatives) loved by those execs that have massively prospered through the recorded music boom era.

You should read the rest of the article.

Not really

I’m not suggesting that Jagger reads New Music Strategies. He probably has the internet meticulously transcribed onto an endless scroll woven from badger pubes and read aloud (only the good bits, naturally) by a room full of 17-year old virgins. And Dubber’s not the only person to have ever said something like this (although he said it earlier and more often than most).

I’m just saying, isn’t it interesting that the conversations that happen in the blogs and tweets and Unconventions and pub sessions of the new information age are starting to trickle up quicker and quicker into the higher echelons of the old music industry. I think it is.

I played piano on Jont‘s new album, and All My Life is one of the songs we’ve really enjoyed rocking live with the band (we all seem to find a common musical ground in the upbeat rockabilly kind of vibe). He just sent me a link to the video for the song, and it’s amazing:

Here is the incredible new music video made by my friend, the director Simon Ratigan for the song “All My Life”, from my new album “Set It Free” (Released on my label Unlit Records and available now from www.jontnet.com). It is made from 100,000 photos taken of people Simon met wandering through the desert and in the Los Angeles area and then rendered together to make a moving image. The use of a stills camera means it was incredibly painstaking to make but the visual result is quite extraordinary. Hope you like it.

Watch it full screen and in HD if you can. The effect of full quality stills in motion is very cool:

That’s the subject line of an email I just sent to my MP (Andrew Smith, Labour, East Oxford) urging him not to allow the bill to be rushed through Parliament on Tuesday, when the election is likely to be announced.

The Digital Economy Bill gives government the power to cut off internet connections (from homes, schools, libraries) if they suspect anyone there of copyright infringement. That’s insane, and its only possible use is for major record labels to inflict or threaten disconnection in an effort to weigh down their trousers with as much gold as possible as they sink into the quicksand.

If you’re at all interested, go and read Ben Werdmuller’s post about the Digital Economy Bill. He makes some smart points.

Here’s the rest of the email:

Dear Andrew,

I am a musician and a web professional. I use the internet to publish my music, to share it and to sell it. I use file sharing services and sites legitimately and legally to distribute and download music that is produced and consumed outside of what the government sees as “the music industry”.

Threatening to disconnect citizens from the Internet for copyright infringement is a ham-fisted approach to regulation that benefits nobody except the major record labels and publishers, and completely ignores the subtleties of our online interactions and behaviour.

I am amazed that the Digital Economy Bill has got this far with a huge majority of both the music and the tech communities vocally disagreeing with it, and I believe that if it is allowed to be rushed through on April 6th it will strike a crippling blow to our digital society and economy which we will be unable to reverse for years to come.

This is why, as your constituent, I will not be voting for you or for your party if the Bill is passed.

People like me, who are concerned about this issue, will be looking to see who has done everything they can to make sure this Bill is not crashed through on the last day before an election.

I would very much appreciate it if you could do everything you can to raise this issue with ministers and party managers to make sure that these provisions receive proper debate and scrutiny in a new Parliament.

Ben Walker

This is me playing Hammond with Little Fish at Reading festival. We headlined the BBC Introducing stage, and the videos are awesome! Innuendo is probably the most obviously Hammond-featuring song we play.

I’m in love with Cherry Wainer. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a freaky performance. She rocks the Hammond, and delivers these weird grins every once in a while. Amazing.

eternautismos:

Cherry Wainer & Don Storer - Peter Gunn

I’d never heard of Cherry Wainer before, so I did a bit of research. There’s not much to go on (no Wikipedia page!), but there are a couple of other YouTube videos (from the same show by the look of it). One of them has Cherry playing a super-swung version of A Taste Of Honey. I know the Beatles version of the song from Please Please Me, because my brother and I used to think it was hilarious when we were kids and played it all the time. If you don’t know the Beatles version, listen to it first:

Then check out Cherry’s magic version. It may well blow your mind. And if you can’t hear the bass, get some headphones on. She’s playing that with her feet.

I need to find out more about this Cherry character. And I need to figure out how she gets that Hammond sound. Beautiful. ;)

Introducing the Hammond to Leeds festival. Little Fish headlined the BBC Introducing stage and we had a great gig, mostly because of the super-friendly crowd. ;)

BBC Hammond Organ 70th Birthday special (via analoghell)

A 10-minute documentary the BBC showed to celebrate 70 years of the Hammond. If you’re really into your organs, this is probably a bit lightweight for you, but I can’t get enough of Jon Lord talking about his Hammond sound.

What organ? ;)

Backstage at the Little Fish in-store gig at Rapture in Witney. Remember CDs?!

Juju had a new song she wanted to record, and all my amps and stuff were on loan to a friend, so I played the Hammond on my iPad. It’s not too difficult, and sounds pretty cool in this sort of recording setup. It’s also extremely convenient.

The app is called C3B3 Pocket Organ, and is the best thing ever. I’ll post some screenshots of the settings I used later for the geeks. ;)

Little Fish - You’d Better Tell God (acoustic kitchen version) (via JujuNez)

I was reading Danny Barnes’ great blog post How To Make A Living Playing Music (which I recommend you read at least once a month if you’re serious about being a musician) and I picked up on the part where he talks about hiring sidemen:

you may not want to hire sidemen that get too worked up about money, it can be hard to make these folks happy. also when it comes to hiring musicians, you may have to live with them at arm’s length for a long time and be involved with them about emotional issues like money and life problems and stuff. you may want a person that’s easy to get along with even if they are a little less sharp musically. of course getting both is best, but if you have to take one or the other, take the one you get along with a little better.

It’s good advice, certainly, but that’s not what struck me. It was his use of the word sideman. Not session musician or band member. Sideman. I stopped and thought, “That’s me. I’m a sideman.”

A sideman sounds like someone who takes a certain pride in their job. A craftsperson who combines technical skill and musicianship with a willingness to play the supporting rôle, an enabler, a catalyst, a facilitator. I like the sound of that. As a Hammondista, that’s pretty much what I do musically too. I play parts that support and enhance the performance of the star players.

On the way to a recording session with Jont a couple of weeks ago, we were talking about how it’s important to accept yourself for what you are instead of always comparing yourself to others. I’m always thinking about how relatively crap I am as an artist (I can barely sing, I write silly songs, I rarely push myself to get gigs or record anything) and I ignore my ability to walk into a studio and create technically accomplished, sensitive and original piano and Hammond parts for a dozen songs I’ve barely heard before without blinking. I need to remember that I’m actually a pretty good sideman, and that it doesn’t matter that I’m not a good singer or violinist or astronaut or whatever.

Little Fish Hammond poses - Juju, me, Chris and Mitch. It takes a lot of practice to achieve the perfect Hammond face. ;)

Focus - Focus 2 (Moving Waves) (via stevedr)

You’ll know Focus for their one bizarre novelty rock yodelling hit, Hocus Pocus. The rest of their stuff was more jazz-rock, but they were an insanely good live band. Thijs van Leer plays organ like a legend (you’ll also spot his flute sitting on top of the organ, just waiting for a solo…).

I want to make a video like this. It’s perfect. ;)

Ready to rock with Little Fish at Y NOT Festival in Derbyshire.