I like Brian Eno

I hope we all watched the Brian Eno documentaries last night?

This bit particularly struck me:

“Kids now, they seem to have very little of the snobbery about music I had, and the downside of that is that it doesn’t play a kind of ideological part in their lives. It is slightly surprising to realise that something that had enormous meaning for you doesn’t have so much meaning for them. It’s just that the currency is devalued in some way. So what I look out for is: what does that for them now? Because I assume there’s always  a currency through which people are communicating with one another. So they do pass music around and they appear to love music, but what they really seem to like is the communal experiences that music can give rise to. So what they really like is going to festivals, what they really like is exchanging music on Facebook, not for the music, but for the fact of exchange, the communication.”

Spot on. It’s obvious when he puts it like that – people don’t care about the art of music, they just love swapping the tokens of culture. Rather brilliantly, they showed crowds of sheep people worshipping Coldplay at a festival as the above quote was spoken.

In fact, I can only think Eno producing Coldlay’s last album was some kind of arch joke, cos as we all know Chris Martin is a knob

Cassette gig next Friday: Purple Turtle, Camden

Friday 29th January, Purple Turtle

(yes, they spelt our name wrong…)

Doors open at 7pm, and we’re on second so I guess we might be on around 8:30…better get there at 8pm to be on the safe side!

KAREL FIALKA
MECHANICAL CABARET
THE MODERN
CULT WITH NO NAME

Karel Fialka had hits in the 80’s with songs like ‘Hey Matthew’, and this is his first UK gig for  a long time. Should be interesting.

More details from the Flag Promotions site

Advance tickets from us for £6 – send an email to info@cassette-electrik.net and reserve them with us (pay us on the day!)

Look forward to seeing you there!

A tiny musical gift

The tiniest I could find.

You know when you write a little song that you were quite pleased with once, recorded onto a cassette tape multi-track (yep that’s 2 stereo tracks or 4 of mono) and were rather fond of?

But the recording is long lost – last seen floating around on a C90 near the end of the last century. A shame, but that’s the way it is sometimes….music is a transitory experience and wasn’t meant to be frozen in time on wax cylinders and vinyl and kept on magnetised bits of chrome or magnesium.

Anyway, given all the above, imagine how pleasant is to find this very same song right at the end of a very long mp3 of the soundtrack to Orfeo Negro, which in itself was a recording of a scratchy record onto cassette that I for some reason recorded into the computer at some point.

The song which I’m going on about = and which is no longer hypothetical, but a real and actual song thing called ‘Honeymoon’ – well, it must have been on that original cassette and luckily didn’t get recorded over by the awesome samba of that film.

It was so nice to find, I thought I’d stick up on the internet where it could be ignored by up to 100 billion people!

So, without any further tremendous dollops of ado, here is ‘Honeymoon’ by Subset:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2782285/SUBSET_Honeymoon.mp3

Vocals: Mina
Gorgeous chorused guitar: Des (yes the very same current bassist of Cassette Electrik)
Wonky Moog: Oli
Wonky arhythmic drum programming: Oli
Partial and frequently wandering attention to standard western tuning and harmony: yep – that was Oli.
‘you were curious’ vocal sample: Some chick sampled off Star Trek given to me in 1991 by massive Star Trek fan Looptron.

You know, I think there’s a good song in there somewhere (and I may just have been listening to Stereolab at the time…)

Fluid Piano

Interesting micro-tunable piano – would love to have a play with this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/video/2009/nov/22/fluid-piano-classical-music

Weirdly they keep referring to it as a piano, but it sounds much more like a harpshichord to me. Oh well.

Art

Item 1

Did you see Matthew Collings’ programme about Beauty in Art last week? It was really good. Watch it on iPlayer if you haven’t yet. I luv Mr Collings’ droll yet insightful delivery. I once sat at the next table to him in the Kentish Town Pizza Express, but I resisted the urge to explain how splendid I thought he was.

Here’s the ten things all great (and therefore beautful) art requires in varying proportions:

Nature
Simplicity
Unity
Transformation
The Surroundings
Animation
Surprise
Pattern
Selection
Spontaneity

He makes a persuasive argument. Read his article here about it, if you’d care to know more.

Item 2

By coincidence I then went to see Anish Kapoor at The Royal Academy. It has all of the above elements in abundance, plus a big dose of humour in the form of  pneumatic gun firing great lumps of blood red wax into an adjacent gallery.

I highly recommend it; Anish Kapoor has to be one of the great artists of our time.
http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/anish-kapoor/

Another of Kapoor’s humorous, blood red wax things:

p.s. (aka item 3):

I wish Collings’ had written the essays in the catalogue for the exhibition – check this example of some of the guff in there:

“Kapoor’s work has often been treated to a kind of critical atavism that constrains the originality of his inventions by framing them in a pre-fabricated metaphuysics of transcendance”

Art-wank of the highest order.

If you write something that is essentially meaningless then I don’t really think you know what you’re talking about, ‘Homi K. Bahba’. Or to put it another way, if you can’t express yourself in normal language, you are in fact, a cock.

Love art: hate art-wank

Bell du jour

Today’s bell is to be found in the lovely village of Cropedy, Warwickshire, in the church of St Mary the Virgin. There are eight bells ranging from treble to tenor, covering the notes C#, B, A, G#, F#, E.  They were cast between 1686 – 1690 and were last turned in 1913 – and they are indeed due another turning as they are thinning now.

Here is one of the two new bells of 2007 being raised to the steeple:

Obviously I can’t end this post without explaining why I have now decided to reveal my identity as the infamous Bell de Jour blogger. It’s not been an easy six years, despite the enormous wealth this ancient profession has earnt me. If it wasn’t for a rival bell blogger, I would probably retain my anonymity. Fortunately my friends and colleagues have been hugely supportive and for that I am grateful.

At least I can come clean now, and am pleased to be able to refute those hurtful comments about the whole thing being a fake. I can now honestly say that I enjoy my work, and what’s wrong with earning money at something you enjoy!

However, I won’t be able to continue with the bell blog for obvious reasons, so I thank all my loyal readers and hope you consider this humble offering a worthy – and not too lengthy! – bell end.

Will Spotify save the UK music industry?

Spotify is cool, but i think we need some back of envelope calculations to determine whether its business model can sustain a music industry of the sort we’ve been used to in the UK over the last 50 years. Otherwise all the hype is a bit meaningless…

Headline – the music industry is making less money

Prove it…

Record sales are declining:

2005                 2006                 2007                 2008
£1,856m          £1,623m          £1,379m           £1,289m     (1)

Sales are declining:

2005                  2006                 2007                 2008
179                      177                   159                     156

(in millions of units – ‘album equivalents’ (1))

The causes?

I‘ll save that for another post!

 

What can Spotify contribute?

a) How many subscribers would Spotify need to save the UK music industry?

How many subscribers at the current £10 per month rate would Spotify need to make the equivalent amount of UK record sales in 2008?

-> £1,289m / £120  per subscriber per year = 10.7 million subscribers

Hmm that sounds like quite a lot considering that the BBC have 25m licence fee payers (enforced by law!) And doesn’t even take into acount that Spotify might want to take a cut themselves to make a profit, and may just possibly need to pay for all that bandwidth.

b) How about just the difference between the 2006 & 2008 totals, which is £300m?

£300m / £120 = 2.5 million subscribers

Not such an absurd number, but still quite high. Considering Spotify has 4 million UK  users in total though…that’s kind of interesting.

For comparison, Sky have 9 million subscribers.

So how close are Spotify to either of these totals?

Spotify curently have 4m UK subscribers, and ‘less than 10%’ are paying (2).

If we guess 5% are premium subscribers, that makes 200,000 subscribers raising £24m.
Quite a lot of money, but only 1.8% of the big number, (£1.3bn), and 8% of the £300m.

Oh, that sounds bad then

Well, it is if we want to rescue the UK music industry entirely, but it could make some contribution and certainly be able to sustain itself as a business.

(If it’s received $50m in funding from the Asian billionaire La Ka-shing, then my estimate of subscriber turnover of £24m even at the current numbers sort of makes sense. Not that I know much about investing in start ups..)

Note: I’ve discounted revenue from ads as I assume that to be negligible.

Royalties – the unknown

I wonder if Spotify pay royalties to composers, song-writers and artists at the same rate as other digital services? As an artist I make 56p on an iTunes song sale, but only 0.01p on a Rhapsody stream of the same song. I would expect Spotify, as a streaming music service to pay out on the Rhapsody type rate. Which is actually quite a small number and not great for the industry on the face of it..

Still, like anything, it’s all about the volume so the trick is to have millions of songs streamed or bought to generate the proper cash for the artist/label, so the normal method of buying popularity through marketing will need to continue.

Summary

What have I shown? At the very least that Spotify isn’t (yet) the complete solution to the music industry’s declining revenue, but could be a useful part of the mix. The only question is whether low-royalty paying streamed music cannabilises other music sales to such a degree that artists decide it’s not worth their while to be included on such services and the available library goes down.

On a slightly separate note, I can’t help think that the future of music distribution must eventually disappear properly into the cloud so that any piece of recorded music made in the last 100 years is available to listen to on a whim. Millions of people carrying around their own duplicate of the exact same file is really lame.

 

Oh, and I’ve got two invites for Spotify accounts, if anyone needs em.

 

(1) http://www.eraltd.org/_attachments/Resources/yearbook.pdf / http://www.bardltd.org/content/stats.asp

(2) http://mobile.reuters.com/mobile/m/FullArticle/CTECH/ntechnologyNews_uUSTRE5A10YD20091102

 

RANDOM PICTOGRAMS

Some pics that don’t really justify an entire post of my waffling…but collected together as one post…well, they still don’t really cut the mustard.

Des (bass player in Cassette Electrik) looking cool in rehearsal. Gig next Saturday @ 333 Club. Be there! (Especially you, Des)

Stage and set for Causcasian Chalk Circle

The tech before the first performance:

Splendid angle of the arch at Richmond theatre. I took this picture. Me!!!

Have you noticed this recent trend for young men (or ‘nincompoops’ as I like to think of them) wandering around the transport system in their football gear in the late evening time? Yes, me too.

Nice Hollywood style theatre lights. Nary a footballer in sight.

It’s not often you get to stroll around taking pictures on the Old Kent Road flyover just south of Elephant and Castle. But when the road is shut, it’s possible to sneak up on a road bicycle without being spotted by the police and outraged citizens. I can now exclusively reveal what a road looks like with no cars on it:

(Perez Hilton – cos I know you read this blog -  eat out your heart with a tiny golden spoon: this is my scoop)

–

So I went into HMV the other week for the first time in ages. Racks of CDs…just seems so…old fasioned now?

Extraordinary and dilapidated, but functioning, Wilton Hall on Cable Street, Wapping. Really want to see a performance here of something – the atmosphere would be incredible. They’ve got a great bar there too – profits go towards the restoration of the building and theatre.

London Lite’s out – Maybe?

We can only hope.

“”Despite reaching a large audience with an excellent editorial format, we are concerned about the commercial viability in this highly competitive area.” said  Steve auckland, MD of AN Free Division

Interesting re-definition of the word ‘excellent’ to mean ‘focussed entirely on minor celebrities falling out of clubs late at night’. I suppose it did excell at that. Well done LL for so relentlessly  purpetuating the crap end of culture. Good bye!

 

 

 

Samba-reggae is funkier than funk

I may have mentioned this before, but when playing samba-reggae it often occurs to me than it’s almost literally funkier than funk itself.

Just came across a clip of the group I play with captured at Notting Hill.

Check it out – it’s funky!