I was tickled to find this morning that my friend Jim Hanas chose to upgrade a quip of mine to a coinage on Google+. (Need an invite? Send me an email: james AT workbenchrecordings DOT com.) I’m sure the artists in the audience will relate to what Jim’s talking about here.
What Matters in Art
…the enjoyment, both in Pickwick and in Huckleberry Finn, consists essentially in the anecdotal episodes. Both are great works of art: unplanned, rambling, artistically irresponsible, and chaotic. They work, and work superbly, because of the authors’ inventive genius and sheer creativity. … In the end, creativity is what matters in art.
– Paul Johnson, Creators (Harper Perennial, 2007)
I mentioned Mr. Johnson’s book in an earlier post — at that time I found some of his opining to be a bit much. But I’ve come to appreciate the author’s investment in his subjects and to like the book quite a bit.
The quote above offers an explanation of why some records can be great even though they lack qualities that we might think of as being essential to successful art. Like Devendra Banhart’s first record. Or The Faust Tapes. Or K-Space’s Coming Up. Or Derek Bailey’s records. Or Bill Fay’s songs. Or On the Corner.
Paul is Smug, Phil is Insufferable, Todd is Self-Sufficient
Readers of this blog will know that I take an interest in “one-man-band” recordings. So I was pleased to get my hackles stirred when I saw the genre (should we call it that?) addressed in a review of Ariel Pink’s The Doldrums and House Arrest albums written by Nick Southgate in WIRE 328.
The first of the review’s three paragraphs:
Ariel Pink sits in a hinterland between the rock auteur struggling to express a unique and personal musical vision (Syd Barrett or Skip Spence) and the self-sufficient multi-instrumentalist, a pantheon that includes Todd Rundgren, but strays to the self-indulgently smug (Paul McCartney) and the insufferable (Phil Collins). The talent that leads an artist to proceed alone takes them down a perilous road, one with no guarantee of results.
A perilous road. Yes, it does feel rather perilous. Wait a second. Paul McCartney is “self-indulgently smug” but Todd Rundgren is what… a self-effacing minimalist? I think that requires a bit of backing up, don’t you? After all, Todd is the guy with the side-long prog suites (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and the double DIY album.
And Phil Collins? Come on, give the guy a break! I’m so tired of seeing Phil Collins bashed. Yes, he produced more than his share of vapid pop. Was his stuff so much worse than Clapton’s or Winwood’s? Anyway, I wasn’t even aware that the antichrist — er, Mr. Collins — had done any one-man-band albums — and after looking at the credits on his first few solo albums (when presumably this might have happened) I’m still not aware that he did.
Oh, the Ariel Pink albums? I haven’t heard them. But Nick’s case for them is that you can’t tell whether they present “a triumph of energy over technique” or “innocence faked in a cynical and joyless gesture.” Hm, not exactly going to run out to weigh in on that one.
Blow by Blow: 12 July 2011
I’ve only managed to square away an hour a day lately for my music work — not enough time, but it’s better than nothing. Even one hour a day allows some momentum to build.
This morning, as in the past seven or so mornings, that hour has been spent half on blues-rock patterns I haven’t concentrated on for 20 years, and brushing up on some of my Jimmy Page too. The other half was given to reviewing old work cassettes for forgotten ideas.
The blues-rock focus is preparation for the solo I need to record for my track “Eris” — I’ve been working with a metronome to get comfortable with the solo section, which notches up to double-time and is pretty fleet.
The cassette trawling is probably a mix of procrastination and something actually useful: I’ll soon be starting on the fifth track for Album IV, and the more material I have to light a spark off of, the better. It’s pretty exciting when I’m able to add something totally forgotten to my current list of “random ideas.”
I’ll also be glad to put some order to my box of cassettes — my filing/storage habits are not great and I think I’ll feel good about having things better cataloged.
On Recording, Part 5: Now
As engineer Andy Wilson mentions in this article at the Masterdisk blog, some artists have been choosing to bypass the complex music recording process that has become de rigueur over the past 40 years by recording live, in a room, together, with minimal miking. On the other hand, there are bands who embrace the strangeness of musicians-recording-separately-but-together, mining the process for new creative potential, like Battles.
For the recording of Gloss Drop, each musician occupied a separate room annexed to the main studio, recorded their parts individually and then handed the results over to [Keith] Souza and [Seth] Manchester for recombination. “There was more of a factory effect,” says [Dave] Konopka, “like creating it on an assembly line.”
…[T]heir self imposed segregation had some fractious effects on the trio’s working relationship. “Because we would be in different rooms, there would be different versions of the same song floating around,” says [Ian] Williams. “So then we end up inevitably having conflicts over how different pieces fit together, so we would have to resolve the conflicts — and that would lead to arguments — but somehow out of those arguments came the final record.”
– Daniel Spicer, “Crunching the numbers” in WIRE No. 328 (covering the new Battles album Gloss Drop).
The rest of the “On Recording” posts touch on developments in recording technology, and how they separated musicians from each other in the recording studio.
Is “Pay What You Want” Worth It?
In one study, researchers from Caltech and Stanford asked novice wine drinkers to sample and rate five different wines that ranged in price from $5 to $90 per bottle. In blind taste tests they enjoyed all of the wines about equally, but when shown the prices they preferred the more expensive ones. What the volunteers didn’t realize didn’t realize was that they were actually drinking the same wine with a different price tag — and rating it as better-tasting when it was marked with a higher price.
- Sheena Iyengar from The Art of Choosing.
This is perhaps not terribly shocking, but it made me think of a recent post at guitarist Matt Stevens’s blog (which spilled over into Twitter and Facebook) about whether or not music is perceived as less valuable when sold on the “pay what you want” model.
Album IV Tally: 5 July 2011
An update on the Album IV demos. (Have I mentioned that I’m only working on demos? More about that later this week.) There are now four tracks in various states of completion.
“Aunt Nancy” is still unfinished. Needs at least a lead guitar part. Haven’t worked on this one since February.
“Brer Rabbit:” the recording is complete — needs to be mixed. Lots of moving parts — I’m apparently not looking forward to mixing this one, because it’s been done since mid-May.
“Urhixidur:” Yeah, this one is now part of the demos for Album IV. (It wasn’t originally meant for it — see this post and this one for background.) I like this one a lot, though it doesn’t really fit the style I had in mind for IV. It is performable though (I think), which is why it squeaks by into the group of demos. Plus, it has a really challenging chord sequence to solo over, which would be great for keeping a set fresh.
“Eris:” Finally gained some ground on this one, though I remain ambivalent about it. This track fits very squarely into the plan for the album: it’s a sort of boogie/riff/shuffle kind of thing — very “rock guitar instrumental.” I had Jeff Beck and Led Zeppelin in mind (it will be very clear which Zep tune when you hear it), though I think in the execution it became closer to Deep Purple (mid-70s) or Rainbow or something. This track caused — I don’t want to be too dramatic, but I’ll call it what it is — a musical crisis over the last week or so; really testing my resolve to continue with the “rock instrumental” project at all.
The background on “Eris:” I wrote about my early struggle with it on May 10 and May 15. On May 24 I wrote “Might have gotten the “scratch” guitar track recorded for third track “Eris” today. This will be the track that all the other instruments are layered on. I’ll see tomorrow if the take was solid enough.” on Facebook. (It wasn’t.) I wrote about the first try at recording it on June 9. On June 27 I wrote on Twitter “May have to resort to a click track on this third piece “Eris” after all.” I did — the basic tracks were re-recorded to a click on June 28 and I was able to progress from there. It’s not done: it needs a guitar solo and I’m not sure what else — but four electric guitars, live drums, drum machine, and bass guitar are complete.
Winging It
It was only two weeks ago that I noted that I was updating this site more frequently. I said, “I just think blogs are more effective when they’re daily. And by effective, I mean that they are more successful in drawing, and maintaining, a readership. And hopefully some of that readership is converted to a listenership.”
Well, I still think that blogs are more effective when they’re daily, but I’ve found that I don’t have the time to do it myself. Actually, the time is there, but it’s at the expense of something else. In this case, it was participation in Twitter and Facebook that suffered. Over the course of the two weeks or so that I was posting daily, my Twitter and Facebook accounts were reduced to bulletin boards for the blog posts: the blog took an average of over an hour a day to maintain; time that I might normally have spent reading, commenting, and reposting on Twitter and FB.
What I might have gained in a steady flow of readers, I lost in making connections via social media. And I felt like I was missing out on my news — about events in the music world, the larger world, and the Tweeters I follow.
So the new plan is the old plan: a posting schedule of a few times weekly. It’s all a big experiment — not only finding out what works on the web for connecting with people and promoting my music — but what works for my schedule, and what I find I value — and even what the music is, exactly, that I’m trying to promote. More on that next week.
Honeyboy’s Case for Musical Thrift
Honeyboy Edwards (Photo: Maurício Saldanha)
I’ll tell you, some guys can make so many chords it don’t sound good. They’re making too many to put into one place — you know what I mean? You take another guy with one chord — only one chord. He just hold one chord, and everybody looking at him all day. One chord can kill a man dead. One chord and hold it there, you can kill a man dead.
– David Honeyboy Edwards quoted in David Hajdu’s Heroes and Villains.
Simon Reynolds in WIRE on the Digital Glut
In the topsy-turvy world of digiculture, the scarcity economy of music has entirely gone… replaced by a scarcity of consumers and spectators. Momus’s celebrated maxim that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 people might have been over-optimistic.
– Simon Reynolds in WIRE magazine No. 328 “Excess all areas”
