Don’t worry, I’m not going to be tackling anything quite so ambitious in the space of a mere handful of paragraphs, so don’t worry. You can read on without fear of impending pomposity.
Basically, I was reading this little piece in the Guardian about the future of digital media, and it got me to thinking about music on television and stuff like that. Basically, there isn’t any decent music on television, is there? Jools is okay, I guess, although I find him personally annoying and don’t like many of the bands he features. There’s the kiddie ones on weekend mornings too, I think – T4 or something like that must have one. There’s also some Jo Whiley thing or other, but I can never sit through more than a few minutes of that without feeling compelled to swear at the screen and throw crisps around the place. MTV and VH1 are music-based, but don’t seem to be actually about music, so to speak, as far as I am aware.
So there are things out there, but I find myself thinking about something genuinely ‘about’ music. Something with a bit of actual content beyond music videos and trying to reflect the whims of Teh Kidz(TM). Something, I suppose, like a blog – a vlog, I think they’re rather clumsily called. Something with some chatter, some new stuff, some old stuff, a bit of news, some thinking – stuff like that. Something, I suppose I am rather self-indulgently saying, that I would want to watch. Something for actual music fans, which is where a lot of the current stuff seems to be missing the mark just slightly. Read the rest of this entry »
Moshi Moshi Records do indeed seem to be Record Label du Jour in the UK at the moment, which is no bad thing. This month’s Welcome to Our TV Show is a Moshi Moshi special, with Slow Club, Hot Club de Paris and the superlative Wave Pictures turning up to play some stuff and do some interviews and such like.
I love the Our TV Show project – the production values are easily good enough, the music is phenomenally good and the atmosphere of the whole thing is excellent. It just feels like the right way to go about music. You can watch the whole lot on their YouTube page here, if you like, and here are a couple of mp3s as well:
The Wave Pictures – Now You Are Pregnant (Live on WtOTVS)
Hot Club de Paris – This Thing Forever (Live on WtOTVS)
Slow Club – When I Go (Live on WtOTVS)
This is neither as serious nor, actually, as facetious a statement as it seems. Song, by Toad? The future of music? Ah hah hah haaa, what vainglorious hubris! Well actually I’m not being serious, but it’s not completely silly. In the world of music 2.0 what we’re doing here, especially as we move into session podcasts, with added video and pictures and mp3s of session tracks, and again as we start to release collectors’ 7″ vinyl and as we form links with the local music community, may be an insignificant part, but it is a part nonetheless of what is happening to the music industry.
Now, I am obviously not talking about replacing Sony BMG or MTV or anything so silly. I am saying that music is turning from a one-dimensional – i.e. just a tune and a story – into a multi-dimensional enterprise. Old music existed just as a song. Then it added particular recordings by particular artists. And now what appears to be happening is what I am talking about here: it’s adding everything.
You can experience this blog in numerous ways: you can stream the mp3s via The Hype Machine; you can listen to the podcasts; you can read and interact on the posts; you can be part of it by being involved in the Edinburgh music scene; you can be part of the interactive cluster of people who participate in each other’s stuff, like the Contrast Podcast, the series of soundtrack posts, or the ‘cultural’ exchange that’s about to happen between myself and The Waiting Room (DC, to regular commenters). Soon there will be live sessions with interviews, exclusive session mp3s, Dylan – one of my regular readers – is pencilled in to do some really good photos of the sessions and I may even start filming them, once I’m up and running. It’s called vertical integration, if you can stomach such terms, and it means I will be providing everything – editorial and review on one hand, social forum on another, local community node on another, record production and release on another, and then multimedia content on another. This may be a small and insignificant embodiment of this phenomenon but it is squarely ‘Music 2.0′.
They may not thank me for saying it, but Fence Records are a sterling example. They’re a record label, a community and, to an extent, gig promoters. People feel part of what they do, and they can get everything from Fence: they can play, attend gigs, make artwork, buy and listen to music, take part in the demo process through the Picket Fence series or just exchange obscure smart-arsery on the message boards.
Now to the point of this post: Jeremy Warmsley. I must apologise to him actually, because he emailed me ages ago wondering if I’d be interested in writing about Welcome to Our TV Show and I ended up unintentionally ignoring it because I didn’t have an easy box to fit it into, which was lazy of me. Welcome.. is a project whereby Jeremy and his mates invite a bunch of musicians round to the house and put together a kind of live recording session where they play songs, try out new stuff, collaborate, and generally just enjoy themselves with music. They film the whole enterprise, they release the session mp3s, they photograph it to bits and what you have at the end is ramshackle and slightly amateurish, but such a massively important antidote to XFM-friendly stadium indie that it fills me with joy to see it happening.
So, for their second episode they had Lightspeed Champion, Emmy the Great and Laura Groves – a really superb mix – and the videos are up on their MySpace page. They also have a presence on YouTube, Facebook and are currently working on their own website. The major labels won’t innovate, so the musicians have had to. Ultimately I assume that The Future of Music is going to end up being owned by a small handful of massive corporations because, well that’s just life isn’t it. But the turmoil at the moment is giving real opportunity for grass-roots innovation, and it is the approaches being pioneered by the likes of these guys that shows us where this industry is ultimately going, if you ask me.
Emmy the Great – 24
Laura Groves – I Wish I
Lightspeed Champion – Hooker Song
Jeremy Warmsley & Emmy the Great – The Boat Song
