Live from Austin!

Well, at the weekend I had my first SXSW experience, and it was a good one. Last year I managed to miss John Watts, but this year I was prepared. We went to The Hideout downtown about an hour early, and waited in line. The rule was SXSW badges first, then wristband holders, then if there was still space in the venue proletarians could pay $8 each to get in.

The band before Watts was Asakusa Jinta, a kind of psychedelic heavy metal marching band from Japan. They apparently had a lot of buzz, as the venue was full to capacity and there were 20 or 30 people lined up in the hope of getting in. From what we could hear from the corridor, Asakusa Jinta are indeed pretty awesome, but not necessarily a band you want to share an enclosed space with, even if you have earplugs.

Eventually the band stopped, and lots of people left. John Watts wandered past with his promoter handing out flyers. The line thinned out, and we were left standing with some Germans, and two local girls who were apparently hosting Mr Watts during his stay, but were unacquainted with his music.

Back in the late 1970s, John Watts founded Fischer-Z. At the time they were compared to Talking Heads and XTC, but for some reason they never had the commercial success of those bands. The original band broke up after 3 albums, but Watts then reformed Fischer-Z with a new lineup.

The style of music is the usual pop/rock range, but sprinkled with the musical twists that keep my interest. The lyrics are sometimes melancholy, occasionally angry, but there’s always humor there that prevents things slipping into punk (or Depeche Mode) territory.

It all strikes me as very English, but for some reason their biggest fans were in Germany. If you want to hear some Fischer-Z right now, your best bet is either to switch the iTunes music store to think you’re German (using the drop-down at the bottom of the front page), or to head to FineTunes Music Shop, a German MP3 vendor. [Update: Fischer-Z albums also available from Audio Lunchbox.]

Anyhow, John Watts has now moved into solo performance, and seems to have taken on a kind of “wandering troubadour” role. For his latest album, he bought a 30 day railcard and traveled around Europe talking to random people—and then wrote songs about their stories.

His SXSW performance was just him with an amplified acoustic guitar. I particularly appreciated that he was picky about the sound, and insisted on getting it to a loud-but-comfortable level, with the vocals clearly audible. If only all artists were prepared to argue with venue sound guys.

So all in all, one of the simplest—yet also, one of the best—live music experiences I’ve had. Hopefully he’ll be back next year.

I’ll keep this brief, as you’re a busy man.

You recently wrote that you would drop DRM from the iTunes music store “in a heartbeat” if you could.

Well, as you’ll see if you check the iTunes purchase logs, I bought quite a few tunes from the iTunes music store. You’ll notice that I stopped as soon as you fixed the flaw that allowed Hymn to remove the DRM. Since then I’ve bought music from places like bleep.com that sell DRM-free music. I still use the iTunes music store, but only as an easy way to preview tracks that I then buy elsewhere.

Clearly, there are plenty of music labels (such as most indie labels) that are willing to license their music DRM-free. Clearly there are people like me who won’t buy music if it has DRM they can’t remove. So, here’s a proposal:

Allow record companies and artists who elect to do so, to sell their music DRM-free on the iTunes music store. Indicate the DRM status with a small icon in the download views in iTunes, like you indicate explicit lyrics. I’ve put together a quick mock-up. As you can see, the padlock icon is very discreet and unobjectionable. I don’t think it would cause user confusion; the people who don’t care about DRM will probably never notice it.

Once you’ve offered DRM-free music on the iTunes store, you just sit back and watch. If I’m right, the non-DRM music sales will surge. Then you’ll have some real ammo with which to approach the major labels. Because frankly, they don’t listen to consumers like me. I know, because this year I wrote to EMI listing a bunch of CDs I didn’t buy because they had DRM warnings on the packaging. I didn’t even get a reply.

Yours sincerely,

mathew

A recent Slashdot thread about the death of the CD lead to the usual postings from various people over the age of 30:

“Well of course music nowadays is rubbish, not like it was when I was in college, those were real songs, now it’s all boy bands and disposable pop, bring back prog rock, I miss vinyl…”

I happen to believe that’s a load of cobblers. There’s interesting music to be found in any year, it’s just that most people stop seeking out anything new and interesting, and allow their tastes to ossify.

It occurred to me that I had a source of data to test my belief. I’ve got my CD collection ripped and tagged on our MP3 server. So, I wrote a quick Ruby program to run through every MP3 file and total up the number of tracks released in each year.

The result is quite interesting, and the first few decades fit my expectations:

• Nothing much of interest happened until the late 1950s.
• There was an explosion of good music in the mid 1960s.
• Taste died a rapid death around 1970, and the 70s basically sucked until punk arrived and kicked things up in 1977.
• Music got progressively more interesting during the 1980s as the technology became more affordable.

I applied some simple averaging, and got a second graph. This one allows me to draw some tentative conclusions about more recent years.

It appears that interestingness peaked in 1994, and there has been a reasonably steady descent since then. The rapid drop after 2004 is most likely due to two major factors:

1. It takes me a while to hear about good new music, as I don’t listen to much that might ever be played on the radio.
2. I’m a cheap bastard, and don’t buy CDs until I can get them for less than $12.

Some of the outlying data points deserve closer attention. It seems 1982 was an incredibly bad year by 80s standards, and 1998 and 2000 were both unexpectedly bad also. No obvious explanation springs to mind.

Tower Records holds a special place in my heart. The store in Piccadilly Circus was one of the places I would try to visit every time I traveled to London. Back in the early 80s the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street was the place for obscure music, but by 1990 they had jacked up the prices and cleared out the unpopular stuff. Tower kept the prices reasonable and had an unrivaled selection of imports and obscurities. It was there that I discovered DEVO, and later completed my collection. It was there that I found Holger Hiller.

When I visited the US, Tower in Boston was second only to Newbury Comics. But another ten years went by, and Tower started to go downhill. Prices rose to HMV-like levels, and some idiot decided it was a good idea to file every disc by genre, a decision made worse by splitting electronica into ambient, house, techno, acid, dub, trance, and so on. Quick, where’s the Aphex Twin? Err…

So I wasn’t surprised when the company filed for bankruptcy in 2004. And I’m not surprised that they’re filing for bankruptcy again now, this time for good. A quick browse reveals only 2 Tangerine Dream albums, both priced at $38 (yeah right). There are practically no CDs priced below $18. Thom Yorke’s solo album isn’t listed (who he?), and if I didn’t already have Hail to the Thief I wouldn’t buy it from Tower for $34.

So it goes. Music sales is an unforgiving business. Stores seem to go through a golden age of awesomeness, but at some point the prices get too high or the selection gets too poor and they slide into irrelevance. Newbury Comics was heading that way when we left Massachusetts, sad to say.

So where do I get CDs now? Mostly from half.com and Amazon marketplace; stores typically break the $12 limit.

A few weeks ago I read on bOING bOING about a music industry royalties collection agency responsible for webcasting and satellite radio. After much reluctance they had finally put up a list of artists they owed money to, but said they had found it impossible to track down.

I decided to take a look at the list. Sure enough, there were a bunch of artists I’m a fan of. Of those, there were several I knew it would be trivial to track down on the web. People like Scanner, The Orb, μ-Ziq, Stephan Remmler, Westbam, Komputer, Georg Kajanus and a bunch of Warp Records artists. Oh, and RuPaul!

Although my normal policy is not to risk dialog with famous artists whose work I like, I felt that if some big corporate agency is claiming the right to collectpayments on artists’ behalf, it is important to make sure the artists actually see the money. So I wrote the various artists (or their agents or official webmasters) some brief e-mails pointing them at the web site of the collections agency, so they would at least know about it, and could make contact with said organization if they liked. I figured the worst case was that some folks would get a dozen fan e-mails telling them, which was better than no e-mail at all.

I can now reveal that in spite of my fears I got an almost complete lack of response. Except from Thrash (formerly of The Orb), who says they’re owed $50.

Meanwhile, the music industry execs are probably snorting lines of coke off of hookers and wondering if anyone’s heard of some guy named Chris DeBurgh who they owe money to.

Once it was decided that we were going to Hamburg, I decided to do some research and see if there were any of the famous Germans I knew of were from Hamburg. In particular, I wanted to know if any of the musicians or bands I’m a fan of happened to be from the area. The answer, unsurprisingly, was yes.

Holger Hiller was born in Hamburg. He played in various local bands, founded a band called Palais Schaumberg, then went on to a solo career in which he created the first album to be constructed entirely of samples from other albums—and a length of plastic drainpipe. He moved to Berlin in 2003.

Also from Hamburg were Xmal Deutschland, all-female Gothic/new wave band signed to 4AD records in the 1980s. Vocalist Anja Huwe has gone on to be a serious artist, and still lives in Hamburg.

TRIO aren’t from Hamburg; they’re from Großenkneten, which is about 150km south west, the other side of Bremen. You can tell because they printed their home address on the front of their first album. Like the Beatles, they played sleazy Hamburg clubs in their early days. They’re best known outside Germany for their one international hit, Da da da ich lieb dich nicht du liebst mich nicht aha aha aha. The concept of the band was to strip down popular music as far as possible; the drummer had a ‘kit’ comprised of one bass drum, one snare drum and a cymbal, musical accompaniment was largely provided by a single guitar, and the vocalist (Stephan Remmler) also played Casio toy keyboards on some tracks.

Stephan Remmler has gone on to have a solo career, and I discovered that he released a new album with a very electronic and TRIO-like sound earlier this year.

I’m not entirely sure if Eloy are from Hamburg, but their first album was recorded there. They’re a kind of prog rock/heavy metal mix with Buddhist influences.

KMFDM started out in Hamburg. I don’t think I need to say anything more about them, they’re well enough known worldwide.

And that’s about it, as far as I know. Most of the other German bands I’ve heard of are from Düsseldorf (Die Krupps, Kraftwerk, Westbam, NEU!, Die Toten Hosen, Mouse on Mars) or Berlin (Tangerine Dream, Nina Hagen, Rammstein, Stereo Total).

Other famous Hamburgers include Heinrich Hertz (first to demonstrate electromagnetic radiation), and fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld. Oh, and Telemann and Brahms.

Only now do I discover that John Watts was at SXSW this March.

When Boards of Canada started achieving prominence, it was common for people to post on the Internet about how much they were like Autechre. Even today, they’re often spoken of in the same breath. Yet I’ve come to see Boards of Canada as the opposite of Autechre.

Autechre’s driving force—and crippling problem—has always been their perpetual desire for novelty. Their first album was fairly conventional, at least by the standards of electronica; perhaps because it was really a compilation of unrelated tracks, perhaps because they were extremely limited in the equipment available to them. (Their sampler at the time was a Casio SK-1.) The second album, Amber, had a completely different lush and ambient sound.

But according to interviews I’ve read, Autechre almost gave up music after Amber, because for a long time they couldn’t come up with anything different enough that they felt it was worth doing. When they eventually released tri repetae, it was completely different in style; spare and mechanical. The next album, Chiastic Slide, was yet another complete change, in favor of textures made up of densely packed fragments of digital sound.

The problem is, at some point the quest for intellectual novelty collides with the desire to create something someone might actually want to listen to. In my view, Chiastic Slide was their last uniformly great release. Since then, there have been moments where experimental and listenable have meshed (the title track of Gantz_graf for example), but they’ve been lamentably rare.

So I see Boards of Canada are the anti-Autechre, in that they’ve released the same album five or six times now. If you like anything they’ve released since 1994, then I can confidently predict you’ll like everything else they’ve released since 1994.

Yes, there has been some gentle stylistic progression and variation; The Campfire Headphase had more guitar, and the latest EP is a bit darker. But like Vini Reilly, they know what they do well, and they pretty much keep on doing it.

The new Trans Canada Highway EP is available from bleep.com. They’re selling it as unprotected MP3 files, or as full quality lossless audio in FLAC format.

Also, as a reminder of Autechre’s earlier listenable albums, the Gescom EP The Sounds of Machines Our Parents Used is available as an MP3 or FLAC download. This one is particularly good value, because it’s widely regarded as one of their best, and copies of the hard-to-find original 1995 vinyl release regularly list for over $100. Now for a mere $5.49 you can have lossless uncompressed audio, with no vinyl clicks or pops—just intentional electronic ones.

And if you’re a goldenears type you can buy a Vestax VRX-2000, cut the FLAC files into vinyl, spread a little dust on it, and hear the tracks as originally intended.

It must have been late 1979 or early 1980 when it happened. I was flipping through the box of “Under £1″ 7″ singles in my local record shop when I found one in a bright yellow and orange sleeve. It was labeled Moskow Diskow on one side, Rock Around The Clock on the other. The artist name was TELEX. I’ve always liked bizarre cover versions, so I decided to risk 50p.

What I had discovered was a radically different vision of pop music—all electronic, stripped down, deadpan funny. These days I can say that it’s as if Kraftwerk met Pet Shop Boys in a café in Brussels, but back in 1980 there was nothing like it. (Sure, Kraftwerk used similar noises back then, but the attitude was completely different.)

In April 1980, I watched the Eurovision Song Contest. I expected to hate all the music; that was part of the train wreck appeal of the thing. To my surprise, TELEX turned up as Belgium’s entry. They played their song, an archly self-referential song about singing in the Eurovision Song Contest.

When it was over, the stunned audience sat in dead silence. One of the members of the band stepped out from behind a synth and took a photograph. There was more awkward silence, then a little nervous clapping broke out here and there.

It wasn’t until 1992 that I’d see a better performance at an awards show. That was the year that the KLF treated the Brit Awards audience to an unexpected duet with Extreme Noise Terror, followed by a round of blanks fired from an automatic rifle.

I spent years trying to find more TELEX releases. I even tried record stores in Brussels. I scored a vinyl album, and friends who had had more luck made me some tapes. Finally, in 1993 the entire back catalog was released on CD, and thanks to the wonder of the Internet I was able to order a copy from Belgium.

Now it’s 2006, and TELEX are back. Check out the podcasts for a glimpse of what you’ve been missing. These guys were electroclash 20 years before electroclash was invented.

If James Brown is the hardest working man in showbiz, Richard H. Kirk must surely be the hardest working man in electronica. He seems to be able to effortlessly drop an album or two every year without the quality suffering. I noticed the other day that most of his back catalog is now available from the iTunes music store, generally priced way below what you can find the limited release CDs for.

Meanwhile, Leningrad Cowboys Go America is finally available on DVD…in Finland. Or from an online store in Denmark, which wants $32 plus shipping. Ouch.

TELEX have a new album out later this month, How Do You Dance? (answer: badly). No sign of it appearing in the US. There’s also a single and a video, can’t find any trace of those either. $19 for the CD, plus shipping from France, equals ouch again.

I suppose I should be grateful that Kraftwerk’s complete remastered box set hasn’t appeared yet.