Tag: Music

I thought it was easy to sell vintage records on eBay. Evidently no one wants a 1985 Run DMC 12″, a White Vinyl Dollar single or a 1982 Grandmaster Flash 12″. What’s going on?

Another great big muscular 20th Century prom last night, with exceptional music from the old Austro-Hungary. I’m a sucker for this kind of ambitious, cerebral and passionate music: something dark and vital about it. Something to do with its origin slap bang in the middle of Europe during its most turbulent century too.

These works are like the mirror twins of the big-hearted, optimistic, melodic American music I blogged last week. Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta is particularly awesome and mysterious and the Ligeti is the most gripping, claustrophobic sound you’ll hear this week (both pieces were used by Kubrick in movie soundtracks, by the way). Listen again here (at least until next Tuesday).

The story: Russell and his friends from the Electro Plankton Quartet played for ten minutes on their Nintendo DSs at Interesting 2007. The music was recorded, of course. I twittered an amazing video from the launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis and Garret Keogh twittered back that I ought to pair the music and the video. So I did. Result: masterpiece.

At yesterday’s Beyond The Soundbytes music biz conference I ran into Paul Sanders, a major blast from the past (like it says on his web site: “since 1994”) and the man behind State51 and all sorts of other music-related online thingies. Anyway, he was with Paul Hitchman, his partner in Playlouder, a clever broadband ‘Music Service Provider’ that really ought to be vast by now but has found progress difficult since their model depends on striking licensing deals with stupid record labels.

Playlouder‘s model is simple and persuasive. I’ve always liked it and will certainly sign up like a shot once they’ve got better coverage with the labels (Currently Sony/BMG and the indies are covered). You pay a monthly subscription for your broadband including an approximately £10 per month additional charge which entitles you to download all the music you want. Playlouder passes a sensible proportion of this levy onto the labels – and therefore to the artists – thus magically ‘decriminalising’ your hideous file sharing naughtiness. Additional benefit to you the shameless music thief: no DRM.

Benefit to the labels, artists, collection societies et al:

• a predictable annuity return on their investment in new music
• recognition for the value of the music that’s already circulating in the file sharing networks
• some measure of control over what appears there (they could start to seed the networks with good quality, properly marked-up copies of their music instead of the rubbish that’s out there now)
• a business model that’s actually in line with what their customers want

I could go on…

I guess the encouraging thing about the conference for the Playlouder boys ought to be that the various music biz types present enthusiastically backed the idea of a shift to a subscription model (or at least an experiment in that area). If the industry’s devotion to ‘unit sales’ is finally fading, then a business like Playlouder ought be well-positioned to help them make it happen.

Fly in ointment: as Jeremy Silver, another old-timer, pointed out in one of the panels, only one of the four majors is a UK-based company so the owners of the majority of the world’s recorded music couldn’t give a damn what happens here.

So what is it about this nearly thirty year-old video that makes my spine tingle. Bloody hell…

So, I’ve always been suspicious of orchestral music. I’m no musician (no kidding) but I love music and a long time ago I decided that orchestral music was all together too bourgeois for me, too big and industrial in scale. Orchestral music in the nineteenth century mold – hierarchical, formal, un-ironic (capitalist, black tie music, I used to call it) – made me uncomfortable and I took refuge in much more direct and emotional chamber music from the same era (Schubert, Beethoven, Haydn, Mendelsohn…). But, obviously, you can’t ignore the orchestras and their repertoire. They’re a presence, an unarguable cultural force, even in these difficult times for classical music.

So I tuned in to tonight’s big prom: The Philadelphia Orchestra’s epic double header attempt at the fifth symphonies of both Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. First of all, watching it on the TV, the Beethoven was so awesome and so honest and the whole orchestra so committed that I was totally won over. Then, in the interval, Christoph Eschenbach, the orchestra’s super-charismatic conductor (the kind of guy you’d really want as a boss) was interviewed and he was so fascinating and his involvement with the music so complete that I decided I’m now definitely over my aversion to orchestral music.

The second half was the convincer. I’ve never liked Tchaikovsky, a composer from the wrong (flabby, pre-modernist) end of the 19th Century, lacking the rigour and intensity and broody, Middle European grit of the early classical stuff that I love and the scary atonal stuff that followed. Yes – obviously, I suppose – the Tchaikovsky was amazing. I don’t have the wit to describe this quite amazing, muscular, emotional material but you can listen to the performance (and, I hope, Eschenbach’s terrific interval interview) at the Radio 3 web site for a week after tonight. Do so.

So Paul sent me a link to a track by The Au Pairs, awesome feminist guitar-funk post-punks whose prickly, jumpy-up-and-downy sort of agit-pop animated our (Paul’s and mine) late teens nicely while he was in Birmingham – The Au Pairs’ home town – and I was in Stevenage – the singer’s home town (and before we knew each other).

Listening to the Au Pairs brought on a short burst of nostalgia (short because I was supposed to be preparing for a big, trans-Atlantic video conference, which is the kind of thing you do approximately 25 years after your last major pop obsession) and a bit of clicking here and there, including, of course, Wikipedia for more Au Pairs stuff (Paul insists Lesley is not a lesbian and I don’t know why he hasn’t just corrected the entry himself, since it’s a Wiki and all that).

While I was clicking I came across Philippe Carly’s absolutely awesome archive of ‘new wave photos‘ (44 pics of Young Marble Giants, 189 of OMD, 27 of Delta Five… It goes on and on). Philippe’s doing all this for love, of course, so you should click over there right now and leave a few quid in his Paypal tip jar, especially if you too spent the end of the Seventies and the start of the eighties watching floppy-haired soon-to-be accountants and school teachers jangling and jouncing and swaying around the stage at The Hammersmith Palais or The Lyceum (do you remember those Sunday afternoon mega-gigs with a half-a-dozen bands one-after-the-other and bring your own sandwiches? Pigbag, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Thompson Twins, The Raincoats, The Passions, The Pop Group…)

Philippe tells me he’s got some pics of The Ramones in a show at Proud Galleries in London opening on 26th April – I think I’ll go.