This Sunday is the Mark Sandman Memorial Concert, commemorating the 10th anniversary of the passing of the legendary Morphine frontman. The event takes place at Pacific Park in Cambridge from 1 to 7 pm. Performers include Orchestra Morphine, Elastic Waste Band, Faces on Film and more. There’ll be opportunities to play Harmonix‘s new Beatles Rock Band, as well as an on-site raffle, charity auction, and more. The concert is part of the larger Mark Sandman Music Project, which honors Sandman’s life by supporting music opportunities for youth.
[Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, The Indie Label That Got Big and Stayed Small, by John Cook with Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance]
Author John Cook has assembled a history of Merge Records‘ two decades, from the early days of hand-screening record sleeves in bedrooms to its current status as home to mega-indie bands like Spoon and Arcade Fire. The book is definitely all about the primary sources and the historical record—while Cook’s writing provides excellent context, much of the text is in the form of direct quotes with artists, colleagues, and friends of the label. The book also highlights the unusually close links between the label and its artists by interleaving chapters on the bands, particularly Superchunk, of course (it’s the band of Merge founders Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance).
The picture that emerges from the text and interviews is that Merge did everything right (which is why they’re around get books written about them, admittedly). To begin with, it’s a label that was started by musicians, for musicians. But even artist-run labels die off like fruit flies, except that fruit flies are unlikely to disappear with any of your money. Merge’s no-contract, we’re-all-friends philosophy was coupled with an unstinting focus on the bottom line (the individuals quoted in Our Noise almost unanimously attribute this to Ballance’s influence). Despite that, Merge took a certain number of risks—most notably, the release of Magnetic Fields’ magnum opus, 69 Love Songs, a three-CD box set with an expensive insert booklet. That a massive collection of love songs, in a comprehensive range of musical styles, could sell more than 150,000 copies is wildly improbable—except for one minor detail, which is that the music is brilliant. Finally, Merge benefited (and is continuing to benefit) enormously from the way the world changed around them. The mainstreaming of indie music has helped the label, of course. But more significantly, the rise of digital distribution has flattened the landscape, allowing Merge to compete effectively with the majors, not least because the big players can no longer offer anything useful that Merge can’t, since the value of promotional tools like payola-greased radio play and premium placement in record stores has plummeted.
Appropriately enough, given Merge’s philosophy, the book is inexpensive (the first edition is a sub-$20 paperback) but beautifully designed and crafted, from the matte-finish cover to flyleaves illustrated with a grid of Merge album covers. It’s also lavishly illustrated with ephemera—photographs, notes, postcards and more—culled from the closets of the interviewees.
Want to win a free copy?E-mail us or DM debcha before 5 pm Eastern on Monday, September 28th. We’ll pick a respondent at random to receive a free copy from Algonquin Books (and extra-special thanks to them for being willing to mail it anywhere).
Jim Anderson, the sound engineer at Seattle’s legendary (and recently re-opened) live music venue The Crocodile, has donated five years worth of live show recordings (2002-2007) to the University of Washington’s Ethnomusicology Archives – nearly 3000 hours of music. Artists include z=z faves the Dresden Dolls, the Mountain Goats, the National, and oodles more – you can take a look at the huge list and find your own favorites. The good news? They’re all available to the public. The catch: In order to obviate licensing issues and piracy concerns, you have to go in person, to the ‘listening stations’ at UW’s Odegaard Library. I think it’d be great if artists could agree to put their recordings in the public domain or otherwise agree to let them out on the Internet – I sincerely hope the University is looking into the possibility.
Since I spent most of the last year on the University of Washington campus, I’m kicking myself that I only found out about this collection after I returned to the East Coast. On the other hand, it’s probably just as well – I can’t imagine that spending all my time in the library, headphones on, would have really helped my productivity.
Colbert Report to stream albums. The Flaming Lips were on the The Colbert Report on Wednesday night, and the Mountain Goats (whoo!) are scheduled to be guests in a couple of weeks. More interesting, though, is that both artists will be streaming their albums, before the official release dates, on the Colbert website. Here’s hoping it leads to new fans and bigger sales. [via Underwire]
Canadian music wiki. Journalism student and CBC Radio 3 intern Amanda Ash is working on putting together a Wikipedia-style database of Canadian music as her thesis project, tapping into CanCon-loving music fans (whence the awesome illo, above). She’s soliciting ideas – go help her out.
Another fun online musical toy. In the same vein as the online Tenori-On, there’s a web-based musical instrument, Nudge, with a range of sounds and tempos. If you come up with something you like, you can embed it in your blog or share it with your friends. Warning: making pretty melodies is quite the timesuck. [via Indie Music Tech].
What does filesharing mean for composers? Lyricist and composer Björn Ulvaeus (sound familiar?) argues that musicians can ‘sing for their supper,’ but songwriters can’t, and they might end up the big losers with declining music sales. This probably explain why composers and songwriters are trying to get a cut from 30-second song previews on iTunes.
Spiders from Mars Madagascar: That beauty above? That’s a Heteropoda davidbowie, newly discovered spider named after David Bowie (in honor of his Spiders from Mars). You can read the whole story here.
Sound quality in music:Sasha Frere-Jones has started a new series in the New Yorker called “Dithering: The Sound of Sound” which explores sound quality in music. The first and second posts are up. If you haven’t yet, you can test yourself to see if you can hear the difference between MP3s at 128 and 320 kbps.
Monkeys find Metallica calming: Primatologist Charles Snowdon at UW-Madison showed that the affective state of tamarind monkeys can be changed by ‘monkey music’ (music based on their calls) but it largely unaltered by human music, with the exception of Metallica, oddly enough. This is interesting because music affects the emotional state of humans in a similar way across cultures, but it these effects don’t seem to cross over to other primates. More information here.
It’s the start of school! Here are your reading assignments for the week.
Music History 101: The transition from live music performance to recordings. In the 1950s, music used to be about songs – what we now think of as standards. Whether in Paris or Poughkeepsie, people wanted to hear someone sing Cole Porter’s “Miss Otis Regrets,” and it didn’t really matter who. With the rise of radio in the 1960s, music began to be about recordings – “Hey Jude” is not only by the Beatles, but there is a single, canonical version of it in our collective memory. In this article by Elijah Wald, he discusses the history and context of this transition, including how it reinforced racial segregation.
Intro to Sociology: Indie rock from the perspective of our parents. While “The Grown-Ups Guide to Indie Rock,” is a less than appealing title, fifty-something music critic D.J. Palladino writes an appreciation of indie music that gets closer to its heart than a score of Pitchfork 9.4 reviews ever could.
[extra credit] Advanced Topics in Neurobiology: Why we respond emotionally to music. Scientific American had a great article last month on the neurological basis of the emotional response to music. You can read a summary here, but unfortunately the full article is behind a paywall (if you happen to actually be at a college, you should have online access).
After a summer hiatus, zed equals zee is getting back on a regular posting schedule. But you probably still want to sign up for the RSS feed.
Catching up on some music, tech and culture from around the web and around the world.
Owen Kelly designed the graphic, above, to help bands visualize their fanbase, from casual fans to the long tail of committed fans. Click for a larger version, and read more about it here.
In case you haven’t been following The Flamings Lips, who played in Boston last night, they have an interesting modelfor music distribution: when you bought your ticket, you received immediate access to three tracks from their new album. This month, you received access to three B-sides. And finally, after the show, you receive access to an audio download of the concert. All nice and legit, with the cost of the music factored into your ticket.
Nina Paley, creator of Sita Sings the Blues, collaborated with QuestionCopyright.org to come up with the Creator-Endorsed Mark. It complements Creative Commons licensing, in that it allows distributors of CC-licensed work to indicate that they are sharing profits with the creator. Paley argues that, when fans connect with a creative work, they want to give back to the artist and it should be clear when they are doing so. Read a PBS MediaShift article about it here, and you can download the marks here.
Finally, you’ve probably heard that Apple is planning a proprietary album format, code-named Cocktail, which bundles together an album’s worth of music with assorted extras like art, movies, and lyrics, all wrapped up in a shiny DRM’ed wrapper. Since music lovers have made it clear that they aren’t interested in buying albums when they can buy songs they want à la carte, it’s not clear to me why they’d be interested in buying Cocktail packages – Apple’s sweetening the pot, but rather missing the point. But straying a little bit outside the purview of this blog, it does make me wonder about the future of DVD extras – when we are downloading movies instead of buying DVDs, what will become of all the additional goodies that filmmakers provide? Will they just go on a website to help promote the download? Premium content? What do you think about bundling extras with downloadable content?
Still no internet at home, so instead of mainlining information, I’m getting methadone through my phone and the occasional infusion at Diesel. Back on a regular schedule shortly, but here’s some of what I’ve been squeezing through the needle:
In case you’ve missed it, Boston physics student Joel Tenenbaum (pictured above)is blogging his trial, defending himself against a $4.5 million lawsuit from the RIAA (parts one and two, at the Guardian Music Blog). Also, who gets the money the RIAA collects from filesharers? Not the indies.
On the agenda: checking out MTraks, which is billing itself as a indie-oriented eMusic alternative after the Sony debacle (and boy, the word on the transition was not good).
There’s a new website out of England called GigPay, for electronic performance contracts – the performer and the venue draw up a contract, the venue puts funds in escrow, and the performer is paid after the gig, and GigPay takes a small per-transaction cut. I’ve heard a bunch of horror stories from bands, and it seems like it would be a useful way for a venue to create, track and pay performance contracts (since you can do it by bank transfer or credit card, not just cash or cheque). But it also seems like there would be a big network effect hump to get over. Artists, others – what do you think?
Day 6 of the road trip: Toronto, ON to Cambridge, MA!
Okay, so now it’s your turn. What songs remind you of Boston? I wrote about several when I was in town last December, but I’m sure that, if you’re reading this, you have some great suggestions to make. Please respond in the comments!
Okay, after the fourteen-hour Kenora-Sault Ste Marie drive, I’m a bit too braindead to say anything clever about my hometown of Toronto. The video is for “Songtario,” by Henry & Clare (thanks, @kimblem!). And Broken Social Scene is a pretty good representation of the Toronto indie music scene, since the collective contains practically everyone anyway, and I imagine my choice of BSS song is pretty self-explanatory.
Day 4 of the road trip: Kenora, ON to Sault Ste Marie, ON
Going even further afield than is usual for z=z for a brief lesson in physical geography, try this: Go to Google Maps and centre the map around the eastern half of Canada (Hudson Bay should be in the middle). Notice that Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba, the northern half of Saskatchewan and Nunavut are all liberally laced with blue? Now switch to ‘terrain’ view – see how all of this is a darker green than the south? This is the Canadian Shield, created during the Pleistocene when glaciation scraped it down to the 4.5 billion year old bedrock. Pockets in the newly-exposed granite filled up with rainwater to create hundreds of thousands of lakes; so many that when you fly over it, you can’t tell whether you are looking at lakes or islands. Today’s drive, along the north shore of Lake Superior, is in the heart of this geological region.
All of this is really by way of preamble to introduce Montreal’s Besnard Lakes, which is named after one of these glacial bodies of water.
Day 3 of the road trip: Swift Current, SK to Kenora, ON
…which means crossing the Hundredth Meridian and heading through Winnipeg, the hometown of z=z faveThe Weakerthans, who played a great set at Neumos in Seattle last Saturday night. The MP3 below is their backhanded paean to that city, from 2003’s Reconstruction Site. The picture above is of The Tragically Hip; if you click through it, you’ll get to the video of their classic track “At the Hundredth Meridian.”
Day 2 of the road trip: Revelstoke, BC to Swift Current, SK
Today’s Canadian indie song is “Your Rocky Spine” by Toronto’s Great Lake Swimmers, featuring the quintessentially Canadian metaphor of geography, from their 2007 album Ongiara. It’s my song du jour as I cross over the Canadian Rockies and enter the Prairies. Great Lake Swimmers have a Polaris-Prize-nominated new album out, Lost Channels, and the video above is for the new single, “Pulling on a Line.”
Day 1 of the road trip: Seattle, WA to Revelstoke, BC
Despite heading inland and therefore bypassing Vancouver, I thought I would share this track from Lotusland’s The Awkward Stage. Frontman Shane Nelken is part of the extended New Pornographers collective, having played piano on AC Newman’s The Slow Wonder and collaborated on Dan Bejar and Blaine Thurier side project. The Awkward Stage has a brand-new album out, Slimming Mirrors, Flattering Lights, but this is the title (and my favourite) track from their 2006 debut. But the video above is for a new track, “Mini Skirt of Xmas Lights.”
We won’t be back to our full schedule until August, but we will be posting over the coming week as z=z headquarters relocate back to Boston – if you’re a longtime reader, you may recall our move out west. As we’ll be doing it as an epic cross-Canada trek, stay tuned for a special week focusing on independent Canadian music. Finally, I’ve been sitting on this great bio of Sonic Youth and I have a copy of it to give away, so keep an eye out for that (and I’ll do my best to mail it from some hamlet in the middle of the Great White North).
Finally, we’re planning another zed equals zee happyhour in August, and we look forward to seeing you there!
Not enough z=z for you? You can follow debcha on Twitter for tidbits of music news, as well as snapshots from across Canada and assorted nerdiness.
Just a heads-up that updates to zed equals zee might be intermittent over the next two weeks, as I’ll be traveling in Europe. If you’re not already subscribed via RSS, now might be a good time (posts, comments). And, as ever, you can follow me on Twitter, where I’ll continue to microblog music and tech stuff, as well as the usual minutiae.
If you’re reading this blog, you probably care about the intersection of music, culture and technology. Interested in doing a guest post? Drop me a line at debcha at gmail dot com. And tips (the information kind) are always welcome.
Finally, if you have suggestions on cool things to do in Amsterdam, Delft, Rotterdam, Antwerp or, especially, Berlin, please leave them in the comments! I got a great set of suggestions when I went to Austin last week, and I really appreciated them.
Last week, CBC Radio 3‘s online radio broadcast and their Sirius Satellite radio station merged their playlists and schedules as a cost-saving measure. As part of the merger, they solicited input on whether the joint entity should play 100% Canadian music (as the online radio did) or 85% Canadian music, as was the case for Sirius 86. Scores of people sent in comments, and in the end they decided to play only Canadian music, but to also reserve the right to make exceptions: for example, covers of Canadian artists by non-Canadians, or for Neko Case, “who is American, but is widely considered an ‘honourary Canadian.'”
But the whole issue of CanCon in the age of the Internet probably deserves to be reconsidered. If you’re not familiar with this, the basic premise is that Canadian broadcasters are required to play a certain fraction of Canadian content, as a way of supporting Canadian artists who might otherwise be drowned out by the bigger and better-funded American industry (or as cultural protectionism, take your pick). Many Canadian artists have gotten airplay via this support, and there are some artists (like Sloan and The Tragically Hip) that are superstars north of the border but who’ve never really made it big in the US. When broadcast was the primary means of disseminating music and video, the CanCon requirements made a certain amount of sense (remember, something like 90% of Canadians live within 100 mi – ie within broadcast range – of the US border). But it’s not clear how it’s going to shake down these days. On the one hand, the global playing field is increasingly leveled by the existence of Internet. On the other hand, it makes it easier to follow, see, and support local bands. Tellingly, one of the reasons why CBC Radio 3 decided to go with the 100% (give or take) Canadian approach in the merger is because, in a crowded online marketplace, it differentiates the station from the rest of the world.
…to pocket the royalties. The BBC reports that a group of people, including a number of DJs, are accused of buying three-quarters of a million dollars worth of music they themselves posted to Amazon and iTunes, earning themselves royalties of more than three hundred thousand dollars.
You have to admire their creativity, even if the execution is somewhat lacking. As David St. Hubbins says, “It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.”
Got a fave meal from SXSW? A favourite bar? Know a divey little place with the best Mexican in the city? I’m heading to Austin for a few days, and I’m looking for things to do, places to eat and drink, and live music venues where I stand a good chance of hearing something cool. I know that many readers of this blog are musicians or who’ve otherwise had reason to hang out in Austin – what was memorable? Where’s the first place you’re going to go when you arrive next March? Please share your suggestions in the comments.
(If you’re interested in where I end up going, you can follow me on Twitter.)
EDIT: Thanks for all the great suggestions, everyone! Unfortunately, I didn’t end up with a lot of free time, but I did end up seeing LOTS of motorcycles and eating BBQ at Stubb’s and at Iron Works.
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