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 tuning 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

 

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!

Huzzah, finally! A documentary about German instrumental progressive rock between 1970-1979. And about time too.

Tonight: BBC4 Krautrock: rebirth of Germany
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nf10k
(tons of great krautrock youtubes on there too)

Following on from last week’s Synth Britannia (which was really only about early 80’s pop music and the bands who we are all overfamiliar with these days), I’m really looking to learning some new things tonight.

Despite my claims that my new band On Rails is inspired by Krautrock, I’m not actually a massive obsessive of the genre. I used to listen to Can and Faust a bit, but I don’t know that much about them. And I only heard Neu! for the first time a few years back. (At which point I realised  that Stereolab weren’t quite the sonic pioneers I’d previously thought…)

Thinking about it, I was more on the electronic side (surprise!), so was far more obsessive about Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Klaus Schulze, Manuel Gottlieb etc. I expect those guys will get a mention too, but I think the programme will concentrate more on the ‘rockier’ and more experimental bands.

Anyway, am looking forward it.

One caveat: I notice on the programme’s press release they cite Kasabian as influenced by Krautrock. Surely some mistake? They may ’say’ that to get a bit of credibility, but they pump out the same dreary indie-rock as anybody else – and are about as related to interesting music as Robbie Williams. Fuck off Kasabian. And Franz Ferdinand, while we’re at it.

If you want to hear a proper modern band influence by krautrock, listen to On Rails. Can you see that getting to #1? EXACTLY!

British Na[z]tional Party

Oh man, that was awesome, poor old stupid Nick Griffin. Not very bright is he? Manipulative, obviously, for getting elected to the European Parliament, but not actually very clever.

Here he is in the olden days, not being racist:

The Mirror

What was all that stuff about the only true English people are those descended from ‘indigenous people 17,000 years ago’? When actually the only people on the European continent were the now extinct Neandathals (as Bonnie Greer pointed out). What a very peculiar man.

Luckily in Britain, we tend to resist strong ideologies, I think we find anyone that earnest about a mere idea somewhat laughable. At least, that’s my theory for why the 20th century European movements of communism, fascism, anarchism, futurism, etc, never really got a foothold here.

But, really, and this is my perspective as a musician, can you imagine what life would be like without  being allowed to listen to music from ‘other’ cultures? Thicko thicky Nick Griffin must literally only listen to northern brass bands and watch Morris Dancers if he follows his thicko thicky creed to it’s logical conclusion.

It would mean he wouldn’t be able to listen to:

• GF Handel (German, non British), JS Bach (German, non British), Mozart (Autrian, non-British), Ravel, Beethoven, Mendelsohn, Satie, …in fact I assume he refuses to hear the entire European Western classical cannon.
  He would be allowed to listen to the few British born ones who are considered to be any good: William Byrd, Purcell, Vaughn, er, Gustav Holst (well, he was born in England, but his grandfather was Swiss, so actually we should probably exclude him)
• Ragtime, Blues, Jazz, Rock. All derived from varying blends of African, European and American Indigneous music. Better not turn on Classic Rock FM eh, Nick, nothing for you there.
• Soul, RnB, Swing. Well, no need to explain these – definitely off the musical menu.
• Pop. All derived from the above categories – and with other things like Bhangra thrown in for good measure – thus abhorrent and are ‘weakened’ versions of the true genetic strain of True English Music.
• Any World music, whether my beloved maracatu, or the life affirming pop of Ghana or Mali, the extraordinary sounds of Tuvan throat singing, etc, etc. There’s a lot of music out there in the world, but Nick Griffin mustn’t allow one note of it to enter his mind. Just in case, you know, er, he finds he likes it. And then he might need to admit that people are just people at the end of the day.
• Dance music. Well, it’s the machine descedant of the hypnotic drumming of Burundi. Forget about it Nick – this isn’t for you either.

As Sir Thomas Beecham said, ‘There would be life without music, but it wouldn’t be worth living’. And similarly, there would be life in the UK without the cultures of the world to experience, but it probably wouldn’t be worth living it.

Synth Britannia

Damn, my private obsession going public! How annoying…bugger off, everyone else, synths are my thing.

Still, it should be fun and I’m looking forward to it.

Here are my predictions:

[ ] It will be mainly talking heads reminiscing about the early 80s. Only some of these will actually be musicians. One of them will be Paul Morley (who I dig, actually)

Most were musicians, actually and instead of music journalist Paul Morley like I’d thought, they had music journalist Simon Reynolds.

[ ] Rick Wakeman gives an amusing anecdote about how he bought a MiniMoog from another musician who thought it was broken cos it only played ‘one note at a time’ (it’s a monophonic synth)

No Rick Wakeman.

[ ] Amused, but ultimately disparaging references to the dinosaur prog-rockers who used massive modular synths in the mid 70’s and made music that ‘wasn’t popular’ (though it actually was at the time.)

Yes. A couple of shots of Keith Emerson in ‘King Arthur’ regalia in front of a wall of synth. making the point that synths at this point were too expensive for mere mortals to buy. Which was true enough.

[ ] How the pop-charts were turned ‘upside down’ by Depeche Mode using synths (also: Gary Numan, Human League, OMD (hopefully!, Yazoo (urgh), Soft Cell) The whole programme will actually just focus on these types of groups as if that’s the only music ever made with synthesizers.

Yes. This was the entire thrust of the programme. But it was done well, with lots of the actual people who were there using the first synths, etc.

[ ] How synths are more punk than punk (‘easier’ to play)

Ha, yes! I must have remembered this point from Simon Reynolds’ excellent book: Rip it up and start again.

[ ] There will be no mention of the synth heroes of the late 70s and early 80s who inspired me when I was 8 and who are now tragically unhip: Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis, Tomita, Wendy/Walter Carlos, Marek Bilinski, et al.

I thought I was going to be wrong on this one as they started with Wendy Carlos’ music for A Clockwork Orange and I got quite excited, but no mention of any of the above for the rest of it. I’m sure all those Depeche Mode and OMD guys listened to this stuff, and they’re just pretending they didn’t cos it sounds unfashionable to say anything other than Kraftwerk these days. Tangerine Dream got the briefest of mentions.

[ ] There will be no interesting history of electronic instruments: ondes martenot (unless they get Radiohead’s Greenwood on), theremin, musique concrete

Yup, no history.

[ ] Beatles might get a mention. Nope.

[ ] KRAFTWERK BETTER GET A MENTION. How awesome if they actually got an interview with Ralf or Florian. Doubt it though.

Bloody hell, an actual interview with Florian! Well done!

[ ] There will be no mentions of: VCA, VCF, LFOs, Modulation, Filter, Resonance, Oscillators, keyboard tracking, sample rate, digital vs analogue.

True.

[ ] There will be amused references to how the early synths were ‘supposed to sound like real instruments’ – cue rubbish trumpet sound, and how realistic they are today

Not really.

Bring on the (synthesized) noise!

Yeeah, it was a fun programme, but too much about bands we are too familiar with. Would have been interesting to go beyond the obvious big bands – the League, Kraftwerk, Mode, OMD, etc and see what else was going on at the time. I would have liked it a bit geekier as well, more interviews with synth designers talking about filters and stuff.

The Venn of Doubt

You may doubt it, but I am able to deploy the following Venn to describe some facts about the bar I popped into late last night to hear DJ Adamix play out one of our latest remixes:

Notes

• Kevin Spacey was dressed all in black with a black woolly hat (or ‘beanie’ as he might refer to it)
• Gary Davies was the Chris Moyles of the 1980’s.
• A band called JLS were also there, but as someone had to explain what a ‘JLS’ was, I have not included them on the Venn of Doubt.
• Bar Music Hall is in London’s trendy Shoreditch.
• John Venn was born in 1823 and was educated in Highgate, London. He graduated from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1857. He was ordained a priest in 1859 and wrote the splendid Symbolic Logic in 1881.

Caucasian Chalk Circle – reviews

Some reviews of the play I’ll be appearing in next week. (These reviews are for the Leeds production, with a chorus drawn from that area; our is the London production with a different chorus)

Guardian – 3/5

The Stage
British Theatre Guide
Online Reviews
John Baker’s Blog
Stage Beauty

Times Online – 3/5
Trust my paper to criticise the  bit I’m involved with:  “And the 30-piece choir is a big distraction.” Well, if Dominic Maxwell  knew the first thing about Brecht, he’d know that one of Brecht’s interests was revealing the artifice of a play – characters step out of character and talk directly to the audience, etc. So the choir on stage both reflects the audience and reminds them that they are watching a play at all times.

Silly Dominic! (Mind you, he watched the Leeds production so goodness knows what they were getting up to on stage)

Anyway, all pretty good reviews, I’m pleased to say. I look forward to actually seeing the thing, as so far I’ve only been in rehearsal learnin’ the songs. I’ve not seen a scrap of actin’ yet!

Roll up, roll up, get your tickets here – it’ll have nearly as much acting in as a Premier League footballer rolling around for a penalty..

Richmond Theatre, 20-24th October
Unicorn Theatre, 24-29th November

Q3 Round-up

Some stuff I didn’t get round to mentioning that I need to remember that I once did:

Moon - I enjoyed this. A pretty good story pretty well told. Didn’t think they quite everything right (some dodgy CGI and some of the emotional stuff didn’t work), but liked the pay-off at the end. Interesting sound track, great set design and model making. I liked the reverse-HAL concept and managed to be a unique take on the ‘What is identity’, though less philosophical than Solaris, Bladerunner, etc)

Hamlet, with Jude Law: good. To my shame, it was the first time I’d ever seen Hamlet. Thought it was a good play, but slightly surprised at the comedic mix-up of poisons in the last scene. After all the heavyweight pyschodrama that preceded, to end on a typical farce set up of accidentally swapped drinks seemed odd.  But who am I to criticise the great bard?

Futurism at the Tate. Can’t believe I haven’t mentioned this yet. I love the Futurists and their wild mixture of splendid enthusiasm for the modern and worrying tendencies towards fascism and war. Unfortunately I don’t think the exhibition really did it justice. It didn’t manage to capture the contradictions and absurdities of Futurism and their manifestos (pasta should be banned, orchestras should be scrapped and replaced by pnuematic devices, anything modern should be embraced – especially war, and anything old should be destroyed – especially art)

It also basically needed better pictures. I believe the exhibition only contained pictures and sculpures from the 1912 Futurist exhibition which is why it was kinda patchy quality-wise – it was early days of the movement.  (But it was interesting to see how the British Fauvists couldn’t really match the boldness of the Italians – we were too twee, even then)

The best part of the exhibition was actually just outside the main gallery space where they had many amusing quotes which were much better at summing up the general vibe of the Futurists, including the immortal ‘The Futurists got into an argument with their opponents – many hats were rendered useless’