Thomas Truax – Twelve Months/ Twelve Tracks
One of the very best things about the digital revolution is that the actual format of music has been very much freed by the perfunctory termination of the dominance of the CD.
I’ve long believed that one of the biggest reasons behind the rise of vinyl has been the fact that simply accumulating music no longer requires a physical medium for it to be stored upon, so if you are going to collect physical objects you are doing so for the specific pleasure of accumulating physical objects – for the enjoyment of the object itself.
This, generally, seems to have lead people to split into two camps: the accumulators of data for whom the physical object that was no more than a hindrance, and the physical collector. The physical collector seems to have taken a look at themselves and decided that, no thank you, if I am going to bother gathering all this tat, then a CD in a shitey jewel case just isn’t enough, thank you.
I find myself thinking along similar lines when people decry the ‘death of the album’ – that it should be seen as a liberating force in music, not one to be mourned. Generally, I think it’s a pile of shit, frankly. I know not one music fan who would ever say anything so ridiculous as ‘that’s the concept of the album finished then, good riddance’, and every band we work with at Song, by Toad Records wants to work towards an album almost as soon as we suggest working together, so the format is hardly being abandoned.
Quite simply, many major label albums were two or three pop hits, fluffed out with forty minutes of filler, which deserve not to be bought anymore, and a great many customers were forced into buying albums they might not otherwise have bought because they were forced to by the narrow range of available formats. So to a degree, the rise of digital music has put enormous pressure on the concept of ‘filler’, because you simply can’t force people to buy it these days. This, I must stress, is a good thing.
Despite my indignation at talk of the album as a format being over, I have to confess I always loved mini-albums and EPs. They tend to be more focussed and more complete than a lot of albums, and a lot less likely to suffer from attention span failure two-thirds of the way through. With the digital revolution I think one of the great benefits is that there really is no need to stick to the old formats, you can simply release as many songs as you think are finished and which go together, and I am surprised by how few bands have effectively embraced this fact so far.
So, I finally find myself getting to the point: Thomas Truax has a new project called Twelve Months/Twelve Tracks, which I think looks really promising. The concept is pretty self-explanatory, and there have been a few similar ones recently where people have attempted to write and record songs in the space of a day, and they haven’t tended to be all that successful, in my view.
From what I have seen of such projects, they tend to be a little bit incoherent and the songs themselves inevitably end up suffering from being a bit slapped together, and perhaps not really all that selectively pruned. I am hoping that with a full month to work on each song, the quality control on this will be far superior, hopefully at last putting one of these projects, which I like in principle, properly on the musical map.
Truax is an innovator in the first place, as a glance around his website will show you, and he is intending to work the span of time into the songwriting, allowing himself to be influenced by the many facets of the changing seasons as the project progresses. Below is his January song, and I really like it; I hope the rest are as good.
