Fakesensations

November Playlist

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:29:11 +0000

This month’s playlist, without me intending it to, turned out to be heavy with heartbreak tunes. I promise to make next month’s a bit cheerier.

November Playlist (Spotify link)

50 Best Albums of the '00s

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:55:00 +0000

Everyone’s at it, so I thought I’d pitch in. I make no claims for this list beyond the fact that it represents the albums I actually enjoyed the most this decade. No hipster posturing for me, oh no.

So, resisting the urge to put my album at number one, and in very particular order, here we go…

1. Daft Punk - Discovery

I played this every day for a year when it came out. This is a nostalgic choice for number one really - but I stand by it. No other album gave me as much joy this decade.

2. N.E.R.D. - In Search Of…

I refer specifically to the original version of this album, before Pharrell decided to delete the CD and rope in Spymob to make a rockier - and far inferior imo - version.

3. LCD Soundsystem - The Sound Of Silver

I don’t know how James Murphy does it. Really I don’t.

4. Lambchop - Nixon

I am baffled why this isn’t in everyone’s top 10. It is, quite clearly, one of the most beautiful albums ever made, in any decade.

5. Joanna Newsom - Ys

I heard nothing else like this in the ’00s. She deserves our undying love just for being so wilfully different.

6. The Streets - Original Pirate Material

When I was a teenager, I didn’t have a band, my band, like you’re supposed to - didn’t like Nirvana, didn’t care either way when it came to Oasis or Blur. Then I reached my 20s, and Mike Skinner came along. He is the ’00s to me, and even though he went downhill creatively after A Grand Don’t Come For Free, I still respect him like no other British artist of the last 10 years. He’s our Jay-Z.

7. Beck - Sea Change

Perfect songwriting, basically.

8. Midlake - The Trials Of Van Occupanther

Perfect songwriting, basically (part 2).

9. Aaliyah - Aaliyah

Yes, actually. The high watermark of those glorious few years when US r’n’b producers like Timbaland were creating futurehits practically every week, before they got crunked up and lazy.

10. Coldplay - A Rush Of Blood To The Head

I don’t care what you think. This is a fantastic album. Fuck off.

11. Phoenix - It’s Never Been Like That

What is it about the French and their ability to make music that makes me so happy?

13. Metro Area - Metro Area

I don’t think I listened to house again after this. It never got better (note: I know nothing about contemporary dance music anymore, so please take that with a pinch of salt).

14. Broadcast - The Noise Made By People

Perfect music from a perfect band who haven’t, as far as I’m concerned, made a duff record all decade.

15. Richard Hawley - Truelove’s Gutter

This year’s classic, and one that, I think, will last.

And the rest…

16. Kanye West - College Dropout

17. The Strokes - Is This It

18. Avalanches - Since I Left You

19. Outkast - Speakerboxxx/The Love Below

20. Peter, Bjorn and John - Writer’s Block

21. Clipse - Hell Hath No Fury

22. PJ Harvey - Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea

23. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes

24. Spiritualized - Let It Come Down

25. Mumford & Sons - Sigh No More

26. Alicia Keys - Songs In A Minor

27. Bjork - Vespertine

28. Jill Scott - Who Is Jill Scott?

29. Burial - Untrue

30. Royksopp - Melody AM

31. Justin Timberlake - Justified

32. Feist - Let It Die

33. Zoot Woman - Living In A Magazine

34. Belle & Sebastian - The Life Pursuit

35. Air - Talkie Walkie

36. The Micronauts - Bleep To Bleep

37. Luke Slater - Alright On Top

38. Eminem - The Marshall Mathers LP

39. M83 - Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts

40. Destiny’s Child - Survivor

41. Amy Winehouse - Back To Black

42. The Rapture - Echoes

43. Von Südenfed - Tromatic Reflexxions

44. Turin Brakes - The Optimist LP

45. Jay-Z - The Black Album

46. MIA - Arular

47. Kanye West - Late Registration

48. The Streets - A Grand Don’t Come For Free

49. Franz Ferdinand - Franz Ferdinand

50. The Last Shadow Puppets - The Age Of The Understatement.

And finally…

Worst Album Of The Decade: Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend

My ideal beat maker

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 23:10:05 +0000

Note: if this already exists please let me know!

The limitations of all drum machines/sequencers is that they rely on individual samples, or loops, or sliced loops. This means you spend forever auditioning samples before you can even start making a beat. Ableton make it easier than most by allowing you to import audio to midi (as does Logic 10 I believe), but still, you need to have the right sampled loop to begin with. And even worse, you’re generally relying on the same sample sets everyone else has got, unless you’re sampling and remixing your own sounds - and quite frankly who can be bothered to do that? (Lots of people, I realise, but as someone who wants to get beats down quickly to build songs around, I usually don’t have the motivation for this).

Imagine instead if you made a beat this way. Start with a kick sound. Now manipulate that one sound - and I’m imagining this on the iPhone, so think of using hand gestures, taps, or moving the iPhone itself - like a piece of putty. Squeeze it to make the kick more condensed and 909-like; stretch it out to make it fatter; press into it to make it bitcrushed; pull it in all all different directions to make crazy noises. When you’ve got the perfect sound, tap out the rhythm. Done. Now move on to the snare, hats, percussion etc, and work them the same way.

By the end you’ve manipulated maybe five or six individual starter sounds and created something ‘unique’ - much better than wading through tons of samples to get the same effect.

I’ve no idea if this is possible. It would, I assume (and I’m so far from an expert it’s laughable), require the software to be streaming a huge amount of samples all at once to make it work - like BFD but even more intensive. Because it wouldn’t be about taking one sound and just adding effects, it would be about manipulating a sound so that all possible sonic directions are at your disposal. You could shift from a realistic Ludwig-sounding snare to an 808 handclap to a Neptunes crunch to some crazy sci-fi thing just by gesturing with your hands.

Is this idiotic? People who know about this sort of thing, please let me know :)

Nick Garrie - Little Bird. From today’s lost ’60s...

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 12:14:13 +0100

Nick Garrie - Little Bird. From today’s lost ’60s psychfolkpop gem, The Nightmare Of J. B. Stanislas.

‘She’s Having A Baby Now’ by The Tages,...

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 23:55:17 +0100

‘She’s Having A Baby Now’ by The Tages, obscure Swedish ’60s psych-popsters (who appeared to have been signed by Parlophone - certainly their key album ‘Studio’ was recorded at Abbey Road). I could listen to this kind of stuff forever.

Don’t Stay Up Too Late.

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:59:32 +0100

Don’t Stay Up Too Late. :

Superb music blog.

Songs the Beatles ripped off

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:41:05 +0100

There’s been a lot of stuff written about the Beatles in the wake of the release of their remastered catalogue. A lot of it - even stuff trying to demythologise them, like The Word’s spread from last month - still reinforces the idea that Lennon & McCartney’s talent dropped out of the clear blue sky, as if they were songwriting visionaries without precedent.

I love the Beatles (I even have the haircut), but this “they were untouchable geniuses” narrative actually obscures the more interesting story: that much of their talent lay in taking bits of other peoples’ songs they liked and transforming them, in the process creating what we think of as the ‘unique’ Beatles sound. Their gift for melody was, perhaps, unmatched - but it was married to a keen magpie eye (ear?), and a very pragmatic approach to songwriting. Here’s the evidence (much indebted to the best book ever written about the band, Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head).

1. Watch Your Step - Bobby Parker (ripped off for I Feel Fine)

This one is obvious for anyone who bought the John Lennon’s Jukebox CD a few years back. Parker ripped off Ray Charles, The Beatles (and tons of others) ripped off Parker.

2. The Bells of Rhymney - The Byrds (ripped off for If I Needed Someone)

Self-explanatory, I would think.

3. It’s The Same Old Song - Four Tops (ripped off for You Won’t See Me)

As MacDonald points out, ironically the Four Tops were ripping off themselves here.

4. Sorrow - The Merseys (ripped off for And Your Bird Can Sing)

MacDonald suggests the influence of this in an aside, but it sounds more deliberate to me, don’t you think?

5. Daydream - The Lovin’ Spoonful (ripped off for Good Day Sunshine)

Everyone was writing songs about the sun in summer ‘66, so this is not such a surprising comparison (see also The Kinks’ Sunny Afternoon).

6. Bad Penny Blues - Humphrey Lyttleton (ripped off for Lady Madonna)

But you knew that already, right?

7. True Love - Cole Porter (ripped off for Goodnight)

More proof that the Beatles may have ushered in a musical revolution, but they did so with a huge set of old skool standards as their foundation.

8. Highway 61 Revisited - Bob Dylan (ripped off for Old Brown Shoe)

Harrison’s love of Dylan actually rarely shone through in his work (beyond ripping off the chords to Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands for Long Long Long), but this one is undeniable.

9. To Keep My Love Alive - Ella Fitzgerald (ripped off for Maxwell’s Silver Hammer)

This is just my personal theory, but I’m sure you can hear the parallels.

10. You Can’t Catch Me - Chuck Berry (ripped off for Come Together)

…and this rip-off cost Lennon dearly ;)

File-sharing

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:06:00 +0100

My position on the practice of file-sharing shifts on a daily basis. Much like Lily Allen’s, I imagine. This makes neither of us hypocrites.

What doesn’t alter, however, is my belief that denying repeat ‘offenders’ access to the internet is a deeply unhealthy approach to the problem. There are three main reasons for this:

1. One particular industry - and let’s be more specific, one particular division of one particular industry - dithered for 10 years in the face of a digital music revolution happening right in front of their faces. I refuse to get righteous about this: sorting out a workable model from the blueprint of Napster would have been an incredibly difficult task, and a minority of clear-headed music industry honchos did try. But they failed, and afterwards no major label had a good word to say about MP3s for half a decade.

So the agenda was led by technology companies, first Apple and then more significantly by the likes of Imeem, Pandora, Last.fm and Spotify. The latter websites’ message that music was free had considerable impact, in a sense legitimizing the actions of a generation now used to music blogs offering a plethora of pre-release MP3s every day at zero cost - blogs which at first had been angrily targeted with takedown notices from labels, and then slowly embraced by them, ultimately finding themselves the recipients of legit promos direct from the label if they were deemed to be influential enough.

It’s easy to see why a 14 year old kid these days quite genuinely believes the ‘music is free’ message applies across the board.

Now, for that particular division of that one particular industry suddenly to turn to this kid, who for all intents and purposes believes recorded music is now generally accepted to be free - however wrongheaded that may technically be - and say: “we’re shutting down your access to the most important communication and information service in history”… well, it’s plainly ludicrous.

2. Which leads to my second point: why are you attacking the consumer in the first place? Even if you’re a major label exec who snortingly dismisses everything I’ve just said, you still have so many untried options at your disposal before you call in the lawyers. If there was a concerted re-education campaign from the industry even half as well-promoted as the Home Taping Is Killing Music scheme from the ’80s, I didn’t see it. Nor did I see Simon Cowell devote a portion of last Saturday’s X-Factor to explaining exactly how much money Alexandra Burke is making from the sales of her music, how much work she (and the label) have put in, and how - especially this - the vast majority of bands don’t have Syco-sized resources at their disposal and rely on record sales, at least partially, to keep them alive.

All I’ve seen is millions wasted on suing music fans, while record stores, cheap music venues, decent studios and rehearsal spaces close from lack of funding. Even if you stubbornly blame file-sharing as the root cause of all those closures (which it isn’t), you must admit that a lot of your money was still flowing in the opposite direction.

3. I won’t linger on my final point too long, as I can’t back it up with hard facts (no one can right now), even though I believe it to be true. It’s this: make file-sharing disappear tomorrow and the industry’s issues won’t suddenly be solved. Consuming recorded music as a recreational pursuit is now much less a priority for most people compared with, say, downloading games from the App Store. It simply isn’t making people reach for their wallets any more. That would be the case even if file-sharing had never existed.

Those millions of ‘illegal’ downloads do not equal lost sales. Some of them do, and kill file-sharing and you’ll start to get that cash back. But it won’t save the industry. Offering an attractive alternative is surely (and I can’t believe I’m still saying this 10 years after Napster) the more logical solution, isn’t it?

If TMZ and Perez Hilton can make money putting crappy ads next to photos of celebrities falling out of taxis, then surely the music industry - 50 years old, such a master of the universe that it feels justified in extorting hard cash from teenagers - can figure out how to offer its product in a way that makes sense for the consumer, and still pulls in the dollars.

To finish: I am both a music fan and a musician, so I don’t favour the arguments of one over the other. And I also believe I - and Ms. Allen - have the right to express a viewpoint on this subject without getting abuse from blinkered trolls on either side.

I’m currently obsessed with Duncan Browne’s Give Me...

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:52:51 +0100

I’m currently obsessed with Duncan Browne’s Give Me Take You. If you like Nick Drake/Zombies/Belle & Sebastian etc, it’s highly recommended.

Mercury Music Prize 1966

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:31:15 +0100

Nominations:

1. The Beatles - Revolver

2. The Yardbirds - Roger The Engineer

3. The Who - A Quick One

4. Bert Jansch - Jack Orion

5. The Rolling Stones - Aftermath

6. Cream - Fresh Cream

7. John Mayall - Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton

8. The Incredible String Band - The Incredible String Band

9. The Kinks - Face To Face

10. Cilla Black - Cilla Sings A Rainbow

11. Malcolm Arnold - Severn Bridge Variations

12. Joe Harriott - Indo-Jazz Fusions

Controversially, it was won by The Who. McCartney was not happy. It was even worse the following year when Pepper was beaten by Tom Jones’ Green Green Grass Of Home.

Them’s were the days eh?

Beatles Xmas fanclub single from ‘67. Don’t suppose...

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 10:50:12 +0100

Beatles Xmas fanclub single from ‘67. Don’t suppose this is going to get remastered :)

How to get 200 new fans a week | Music Industry Blog

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 23:18:12 +0100

How to get 200 new fans a week | Music Industry Blog

Following the example of The Lion’s clientele, who put...

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:10:45 +0100

Following the example of The Lion’s clientele, who put this on the jukebox a couple of hours back: sometimes you just have to give in.

A great Sunday morning song from Shelagh McDonald’s first...

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 10:43:00 +0100

A great Sunday morning song from Shelagh McDonald’s first album, called, er, Album. A classic of English folk rock, check it out if you don’t know it.

Convincing certain cynics that Big Star are one of the greatest...

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:57:09 +0100

Convincing certain cynics that Big Star are one of the greatest bands ever.

Ten Years After Napster, Musicians Are Still Getting Screwed

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:30:48 +0100

Ten Years After Napster, Musicians Are Still Getting Screwed

The TT Dynamic Range Meter: Avoid over-compressing your mix - Mastering Media Blog

Mon, 18 May 2009 12:42:00 +0100

The TT Dynamic Range Meter: Avoid over-compressing your mix - Mastering Media Blog

mokele.co.uk | Blog - Please stop creating your own brand that artists and labels need to participate in and contribute to unless it's outrageously exceptional

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:53:00 +0100

mokele.co.uk | Blog - Please stop creating your own brand that artists and labels need to participate in and contribute to unless it's outrageously exceptional

Someone needs to cover this. A lost classic.

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 20:33:42 +0100

Someone needs to cover this. A lost classic.

A Production Analysis of “Kids” by MGMT | FIX YOUR MIX .com » BLOG

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 22:20:42 +0100

A Production Analysis of “Kids” by MGMT | FIX YOUR MIX .com » BLOG