We musicians often have the hardest time trying to get our music out there. There are so many independent, unsigned acts producing music that it’s simply a case of having the loudest voice (figuratively). One way of getting paid for making music is by having it “delivered” to radio stations and film and television opportunities. With this model there is no gaurantee that your work will be used, but there is no middle-man to go through. Your music is put right into the hands of the people who decide what gets played and what doesn’t.

An industry friend of mine recently made me aware of Broadjam.com. It’s one of a number of sites that provide a deliveries mechanism. For $5 you can send a track to an opportunity, and there have been a good many cases where music has been used in a variety of locations, such as movies, radio, and even in the Dance Dance Revolutiuon video game. What’s more, the licensing is such that you retain your publishing rights and can still use any song or track as you see fit.

This kind of service differs from CD Baby (who recently rolled out a redesigned site) and similar sites in that you are not selling a CD as such. Fans of your music can buy individual songs from the Broadjam site if they like something enough. Each track costs (industry standard) $.99, and you get to keep $.80 of that. How cool?

Disclaimer: of course the music has to be of a high standard, and of broadcast quality. That says nothing of the suitability of a particular tune in a specific setting. If the tune doesn’t fit the situation then it simply doesn’t fit! But you won’t know until you try, will you?

Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadjam

One of the more unusual names in contemporary music, Boards of Canada, derived their identity from the 1970’s documentary films of the National Film Board of Canada, and comprise Scottish brothers Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin. Originally, they masked their sibling relationship for over ten years, claiming to be “just childhood friends” until Pitchfork Media outed them. They were unduly concerned with comparisons to the brothers Hartnoll previously of Orbital fame.

Boards of Canada make music with a genuine love for their art. They have only performed live a handful of times, and not in public for over 5 years. By way of explanation they say that they make their music firstly for themselves rather than commercial release. Their albums, each an individual project, separate from what went before and what will happen afterwards, are the result of selecting complimentary pieces from a vast arsenal of current work; the 23 tracks that make up Geogaddi (2002) were chosen from around 400 song fragments and 64 complete songs. The last track on the album, Magic Window (which is something of a pun) comprises complete silence throughout. Geogaddi premiered with performances in six churches around the world.

The Boards of Canada sound is reminiscent at times of the warm, slightly scratchy, artificial sounds of 1970’s television, and often features samples of children. Stylistically, it would correctly be categorised as ambient, but with a unique, nostalgic yearning for childhood’s happier days. As Michael Sandison describes the group’s music: “We’ve touched upon the theme of lost childhood a few times because it’s something personal to me that gives me real inspiration through its sadness. I think sometimes the best way to get inspiration is to face up to the things that make you very sad in your life, and use them.”

Often described as an electronic act, which is misleading given their use of non-electronic instruments and non-digital processing, they credit most of their influences as non-electronic with the stand-out being The Incredible String Band:

“There’s a sort of purity of sound that they have, and I guess we are striving for that ourselves, in our own way. We actually record a fair bit of music that is in that direction, though it’s not been released yet. Most of our musical influences are things like this, not electronic music.”

They also claim the Beatles as an influence, although mostly during their psychedelic phase, and also the enigmatic, infrequently recording My Bloody Valentine—last sighted in the Lost in Translation movie soundtrack—whom many critics claim single-handedly influenced almost every British band of the 1990’s.

Marcus Eoin:

“The idea of the perfect album is this amorphous thing that we’re always aiming at. For us it can mean something that’s full of imperfection, because part of our aim has always been to destroy the sound in a beautiful way. It doesn’t mean that we expect everyone would like it. I’m not sure that we will ever get there, to make the perfect record. But the whole point of making music is at least to aim at your own idea of perfection.”

A sound which can only be described as uniquely their own is the product of a strong use of analogue sounds, a mix of instruments real and synthetic, and often unrecognisably distorted samples, all layered and blended together into new forms:

“A lot of the synthetic-sounding things you hear are actually recordings of us playing other instruments, pianos, flutes or twanging guitar strings…”

Amateur sound-engineers with tape-recorders since childhood, they continue the same ethos, securing “found sounds” with portable tape recorders, like electronic door chimes found in stores or from vehicle alarms, which are then distorted beyond recognition. They also build songs around vocals lent by friends.

Despite the abundance of sounds available to the contemporary electronic composer, Boards of Canada seem to intuitively grasp the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi (sad-beauty), their music an example of a belief that less is more, in minimalism, and leaving a space for implicit meaning to emerge:

“It’s important to leave a certain space there for the listener’s imagination.”

In a Beautiful Place in the Countryside (2000) is possibly one of the most beautiful, haunting examples of modern music, a profound depth, and space, evoked through their intelligent use of reverberation, subtle changes of volume and intensity, and silence. One finds the laughter of children mixed in with a somewhat askew, vocoder distorted vocal. The combination adds an air of disquiet to a song whose only lyric is a phrase from a religious flyer: “Come out, and live with a religious community in a beautiful place out in the country.” For a pair of musicians living in self-imposed isolation in rural Scotland, one suspects if anything their sentiments are sympathetic.

Their music is full of subliminal messages and cryptic messages, deliberately; the sources or meanings are seldom acknowledged by the group themselves, yet references have been found by listeners to religious groups, electrical pioneer Nicolai Tesla and the occult. Boards of Canada deny the accusation by some that they are Pagans, Christians or even Satanists—rather than being alarming, their intention is simply to be inspiring:

“We just put symbols into our music sometimes, depending on what we’re interested in at the time. We do care about people and the state of the world, and if we’re spiritual at all it’s purely in the sense of caring about art and inspiring people with ideas.”

This is an excellent video that shows Delia Derbyshire cut up with various other pieces of footage, including a clip from George Lucas’ THX 1138.

I made a trip to a major chain bookstore yesterday. I drove in the ice and snow to pre-order a book that will be released on February 1st. I was told that the computer listed it as ‘out of print’, and I would not be able to order it. Apparently, this means that the book is considered too niche-y to be stocked in the store or the web site! By a major national chain book store?

Well, this reminded me an awful lot about the way the music industry conducts business. Music stores tend to be better than my example, but consider that there is limited space in stores, there is also limited airplay on the radio. Even XM with its several dozen channels doesn’t explore the full range of musical genres.

But I came to the conclusion that the Top 40 notion is a self-limiting system. Only the popular artists get the honor of being included. But consider how they got to be popular in the first place. The disastrous situation in which we find ourselves in the early part of the 21st century is that we are reaping decades worth of marginalization and narrowing of the field, purely as a result of this system. Major labels are no longer interested in innovation or anything remotely different and interesting. But consider your favorite niche artist. Would they do well if they found themselves being played regularly in the same space as so-called contemporary popular music? The simple answer is that we may never know, because the system is rigged to promote carbon copies of what is already ‘popular’. But popular music is digested mostly by those who have no time, or inclination to seek out other music they might like. They simply consume what is presented by the system I am describing.

When I was 16 or 17, my father said on many occasions that the new music he heard on the radio, “all sounds the same.” I think (I hope) he was just a victim of the generation gap, but he may have been onto something.

As a result of decades of this marginalization, the major labels have honed their business model to exclude any artist that may take extra time and money to develop. They are no longer prepared to conduct the A&R that was responsible for some of the best moments in music history, Punk, New Wave, etc. Instead they see one artist (Nirvana comes to mind) and proceed to make a grab for anything remotely similar to that artist (Soundgarden because they were also from Seattle, NOT because they were similar at all). Sure, it’s all about money. After all, money is a necessary evil in any business equation. The real irony is that the music industry is imploding because of and in spite of their practices. They continue to blame peer to peer and BitTorrent for the death of sales, but we have now seen plenty of examples (In Rainbows - Radiohead) that disprove this theory.

Last.fm is an island of hope in a sea of despair (and one of many). The future of music may lie with the Internet as people keep telling us. It may not. One thing is clear though: the music industry needs to widen its net in order to bolster the lagging industry it is currently destroying. Otherwise, those in society who rely on the radio and media to tell them what to listen to and purchase will find that there is no music for them at all. At the very worst, they will find the music they hear to be so homogenous that they will no longer hear anything new. It will all sound the same.

White Noise An Electric Storm

It’s funny what you find when you haven’t been paying attention for five or six years. I was just trolling Google, looking up Andy McClusky, wanting mainly to understand why he got involved with the dreadfully trite Atomic Kitten. After my initial foray, I start reading about the remastered works of Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark which are must-have-but-have-to-wait products. I then looked up Paul Humphries and found to my delight that he’s been working with Claudia Brücken (formerly of Propaganda) of all people! They produced an EP under the name OneTwo, which curiously contains a song co-written by Claudia and Martin Gore of Depeche Mode.

Well, it’s obvious that I have to get out of the house more! I’ve mostly been spending my time drinking in Music Thing because as a self-confessed music geek and electronics fetishist I just have to read about the people and machines of early synthdom (and earlier).

Delia Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop

Apart from spending more time in my humble studio, working on something that has a long way to go, I’ve been listening to an ancient album called An Electric Storm by White Noise. The album is primarily the work of David Vorhaus, but is notable for featuring Delia Derbyshire. Now you’re probably wondering who on Earth that could be, but I guarantee that you have heard her work before. She was instrumental in realizing Ron Grainer’s Doctor Who theme way back in 1963. Having no synthesizers to work with, she used an array of signal generators in combination with tape machines, tape splicing, and all manner of ingenious sound generation techniques. No version of the theme has ever quite managed to capture the essence of Grainer’s theme better than the original. Many have tried… and failed.

Here’s part of the review for An Electric Storm over at Head Heritage:

…one of the freakiest, most frightening, far out and forward thinking albums you may ever get to hear. This is no ordinary album. An Electric Storm will take you to outer space, into the future, tear your brain apart and then give it back; stimulants should be taken with caution guys. It’s electronic and psychedelic yet stills slots in nicely into any psyche, kraut or space rock fans collection. This gorgeous heavy black hunk of celluloid is 35 years old and it still sounds totally far out. I don’t know a whole lot about electronic music, but I know it started here, there was nothing like it at the time, it was ahead of it’s time. This could be why this record never gets mentioned and is in severe danger of being lost, save for a few champions. It’s one of those you’ll never hear about it until someone lets you in on the secret, and once you’ve been initiated, there is no return. I guarantee once you hear this record you will never forget it.

This article originally appeared on sugarfish.

Raymond Scott, the electronic music pioneer with a tendency for being slightly paranoid, also had an illustrious career as a traditional composer and performer before he went solo. This is a clip from the movie Happy Landings (1938) which features Raymond and his Quintette (sic) playing War Dance of the Wooden Indians.

2008 marks the 100th Year since Raymond Scott’s birth. Born Harry Warnow in 1908, he never grew up and was thus able to revolutionize the audible world. Known best for his Looney Tunes soundtracks, complete with bonks, brrrrrrps, whooowhooowhooops and more, Raymond Scott mastered the radio jingle that became iconic of the 1950’s and made electronic music like no one had ever heard before.

Philip Glass is a man of many contradictions.

He is the recipient of an Academy Award for The Hours (2002) and a Golden Globe for The Truman Show (1999), and has been nominated a number of times for his soundtrack work (Kundun, Notes on a Scandal), yet never wanted to compose film music.

Glass is described as being a minimalist composer, though he has distanced himself from the label as he feels it’s not accurate. Instead, he describes his work as being “music with repetitive structures”.

Philip Glass became involved with film when Godfrey Reggio asked him to compose the soundtrack for Koyaanisqatsi (1982). Glass eventually agreed to do this, partly because the work was no ordinary narrative movie, and instead presented something of a challenge. The sound in the film is comprised of nothing but music. There is no dialog and no background noise: a documentary with no obvious point of view.

Glass has been described as one of the most influential composers of the 20th Century. Many contemporary musicians have cited his work as being influential in their own. The list is impressive, including innovative composers in their own right: Bowie, Eno, Byrne.

It was probably this unintended relationship with ‘ordinary’ music that led to his many collaborations starting with Songs from Liquid Days (Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega, Laurie Anderson), and the orchestration of Aphex Twin’s Icct Hedral in 1995.

In later articles we’ll be discussing some of Philip Glass’s output, particularly the different versions of the soundtrack to Koyaanisqatsi, but for now here are some of his best known works.

In a twist for the music industry’s digital revolution, In Rainbows, the new Radiohead album that attracted wide attention when it was made available three months ago as a digital download for whatever price fans chose to pay, ranked as the top-selling album in the country this week after the CD version hit record shops and other retailers.

The album, the first in four years from the closely watched British rock act, sold 122,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. That represents a mixed result for the band. It’s a sharp drop compared with the debut of Radiohead’s previous album, 2003’s Hail to the Thief, but it’s far from a flop, considering the steep decline in music sales in the last four years and the typically weak sales in the post-Christmas period. “Thief” sold about 300,000 in its first week in 2003.

In any case the figures challenge the conventional wisdom that music fans no longer have an affinity for plastic. The sales of the album, which also snagged the top spot on the British weekly music chart, came despite the fact that “In Rainbows” — in the form of digital files — had been acquired by many fans after the band offered it in an unconventional pay-what-you-want offering through a Web site, inrainbows.com. The album was released on plastic CDs and vinyl LP’s on January 1st, with the CD priced at $13.98, though it could be found for as little as $7.99 at outlets like Amazon.com.

Some retailers viewed the Radiohead figures as a sign of the continuing market for so-called physical products in the music business, where the popularity of iTunes, music blogs and other sites have made the digital file appear to be the coin of the realm. In particular they said even fans who received the digital files distributed by Radiohead may have decided to pay for the better audio quality versions on CD or LP.

“Having a physical, archival high-fidelity master recording that you can side-load into your MP3 player of choice for a similar price is significantly better than just purchasing zeros and ones,” said Eric Levin, owner of the independent record shop Criminal Records in Atlanta and founder of an 18-member alliance of independent retailers. “I feel like that’s what 75 percent of the people are saying.”

Mr. Levin said that at his store vinyl copies of In Rainbows outsold the CD by a wide margin. Demand for the album was such that some record shops put it on sale before the label’s planned “street date,” resulting in sales of about 9,000 copies the previous week.

But sales of the CD and vinyl versions of the album also received a boost from digital services like iTunes, where the album sold about 28,000 copies. The iTunes service, which sells individual songs for 99 cents and albums typically for $9.99, had not carried any of the band’s previous albums, owing in part to Radiohead’s demand that its recordings be sold only as complete works.

But Bryce Edge, one of Radiohead’s managers, said the band decided to sell In Rainbows on iTunes because it expects that EMI, the British music giant that released the band’s first six albums, will soon post them for sale on the service, and it would be strange for the new album to be excluded. An EMI representative declined to comment.

The decision to release the music as a digital file so far in advance of the CD also allowed time for the music to circulate on free, unlicensed file-swapping networks. Big Champagne, a tracking service that studies file-sharing, estimates that the album was downloaded more than 100,000 times on free networks in the first 24 hours after Radiohead delivered it to fans who had preordered it from its Web site. But Eric Garland, chief executive of Big Champagne, said that by offering the music for as little as zero from their own site, Radiohead “stole market share” from pirate networks.

Mr. Edge said that sales of 100,000 copies of the album this week would be “almost certainly less than the number we would have achieved if we hadn’t” offered it as a digital download. But the band still came out ahead, he said, in part because it attracted so many fans to Radiohead’s Web site, where it collected e-mail addresses from fans looking to acquire the album.

The band has not said how many copies it distributed. Now that the CD is in shops, some fans who paid for the initial downloads may have been tempted to buy the album, in effect, for a second time. But Steve Gottlieb, chief of the independent label TVT Records, said he believed the sales mainly reflected fans who were acquiring the music for the first time.

“Radiohead is one of those really big groups that appeals to people outside the intensely pirating demographic of 16 to 29,” he said. “To the extent Radiohead still has a significant audience in its 30’s and 40’s, there’s a bigger audience of those people who will still pick up something at Best Buy or don’t want to bother with figuring out how to go to a Radiohead Web site and track it down.”

Still, Mr. Gottlieb said, the sales suggested that the band’s name-your-price offering, and fans’ subsequent free sharing of files, had taken a toll. “Clearly we can’t give it all away and expect to sell CD’s,” he said.

But Radiohead will have yet more opportunities to gain fans. The band said yesterday that it planned to perform in more than 20 North American cities this year.

Composer-pianist Philip Glass has postponed his February 8th Lied Center concert until next season, the center said Tuesday. The pioneer of musical minimalism was to have performed a program of his own solo piano works on the series, of which he is a frequent guest.

Over the holidays Philip sustained an injury to his hand and will be unable to play the piano for some time. The concert has been postponed until the 2008-09 season.

“I’m very sorry to postpone my upcoming performance at the Lied Center,” says Phillip Glass. “I look forward to visiting next year.”

The Lied Center has not yet announced a replacement date. Those holding tickets may exchange them for another Lied Center presentation this season or have the center hold credit for the rescheduled concert next season, or receive a refund.

History buffs who spend too much time reading and not enough time hunting for weird audio artifacts might not realize this, but the fabled coincidences between the lives and deaths of Presidents Kennedy and Lincoln have been documented for the ages on vinyl records.Though it’s unclear, at least to me, exactly who started spreading the word about some of the odd parallels connecting Lincoln and Kennedy, one thing is certain. Buddy Starcher, a journeyman country singer from West Virginia whose only previous charting record dated all the way back to 1949, cooked up the idea of reciting a long series of these coincidences and setting it to the tune of the Battle Hymn Of The Republic. The name of his song was History Repeats Itself and it went all the way to #2 on Billboard’s Country chart in the spring of 1966 and #39 on the Pop chart. Originally released as a 45 on the Boone label, the record’s success prompted a phone call from Decca and soon Starcher was back in the studio cutting enough additional material to fill up an LP. Lucky for us, one of those tunes was History Repeats Itself Pt. 2. According to Starcher’s obituary, Red Sovine counted Buddy as a big influence.

In a move that still has people scratching their heads and wondering what the hell’s going on, Cab Calloway recorded a cover version for the Boom label. The fact that Calloway and Starcher were on the same page is further established by the b-side of Calloway’s record, a tune called After Taxes which closely mirrored A Taxpayer’s Letter from Starcher’s Decca LP. Both tunes cataloged the frustration of paying a seemingly endless parade of taxes.

The last word goes to Homer & Jethro, who recorded a brilliant Batman-inspired parody.