Nostalgic flashback: Depeche Mode – Speak & Spell

Man, oh, man, I haven’t listened to Speak & Spell for a long time. I’d say at least ten years, probably significantly longer. I had forgotten how eclectic it is, switching back and forth between happy ditty tunes and dark and brooding futuristic (for 1981) sounds. I suddenly remember exactly how it felt being fifteen again.

And I don’t think I’ve realized before now how much it has affected my sound ideal. Yes, I loved the album when it came out, but it wasn’t the kind of auditory revelation that I got when I first heard Trans-Europe Express or A Walk Across the Rooftops. This probably means that it wasn’t very revolutionary when it came out, soundwise. For example, Penthouse and Pavement came out earlier the same year, and I remember that having a much bigger impact on me then.

But Penthouse and Pavement doesn’t stand the test of time at all in the same way. The songs are still there, but it just sounds dated, which of course is what you expect from a synthpop album from 1981. But Speak & Spell doesn’t. It still sounds great! Kudos to Daniel Miller, I guess.

 

Please kill the Grammis.

The Swedish music industry has a yearly ceremony for patting itself on the back, just like all other countries have. I have no problems with that. But what I don’t like is how it makes the Swedish music scene look like a stagnated old pool of middle aged loosers. Just look at these finalists:

Group of the year

• Backyard Babies: These guys formed in the 80’s and have been doing a rather bland hard rock/punk mix since then.
• Bo Kaspers Orkester: A very good jazz-rock-pop band with serious easy listening influences. Sure, they are good. But no more good this year than with their debut in 1993.
• Kent: These are the mega stars of Swedish rock, sort of Radiohead and Coldplay rolled into one (and divided by half), but in Swedish. But they have been the mega stars of Swedish rock since their second album in 1995.
• The Hellacopters: See Backyard Babies, above. They are even founded by the same guy.
• The Soundtrack Of Our Lives: Founded in 1995, you might thing that this is the newest and most innovative band in the list. But you’d be wrong. This band was formed from the ashes of another band, Union Carbide Productions, formed 1986.

Yeah, as you see these are bands all formed in late 80’s – early 90’s. Yes, by people who are either in their 40s or rapidly approaching it. Is this really accurate of the state of Swedish music?

Of course not. There are lots of good music, but it’s being ignored. Because the Grammis is not about the music industry giving praise to the ones who deserve it. Nope, it’s an advertising stunt, and the people who get to be finalists are the ones the record industry thinks have the chance of selling more albums with a bit of exposure. That’s why Kent always wins, but only if they released an album. Funny that, isn’t it? Touring evidently doesn’t count as being a band. That’s also the reason the defunct band Gyllene Tider became artist of the year in 1996, even though the band even didn’t exist for ten years, but did a temporary reunion tour. Gyllene Tider was the Kent of the early 80’s if you wonder, and all those people with no taste in music that is my age will of course go out and buy their records. Especially since we apparently don’t know how to use Pirate bay.

Oh! There we have it! It’s not the music scene that stagnated. It’s just that kids of today, that listen to good and interesting music, and not to middle-aged farts who think they rock, they don’t buy records, they just download them!

That explains it. Or not.

 

Predictions for 2009: It’s only going to get worse

So, it’s a new year. I would wish you happy new year, if I didn’t know it was completely futile. It’s only going to get worse. And I’m not talking about the recession, but about music. Put on Ligeti’s Requiem to set the proper doomsday mood, and read the top 5 disastrous things making 2009 worse than ever:

5. Amy Winehouse will either die, hence make no more wonderful records, or clean up, fix all the problems in her head and as a result do no more wonderful records. Best case she will clean up, grow up and make a comeback as a classical jazz singer in 2030, and promptly become a national treasure. But 2009 will suck.

4. Radiohead will continue to make some sort of history, but no matter what they release it will be still worse. It’s time to face the fact, they reached their peak with Kid A/Amnesiac and nothing will ever be that good again. The year 2000 was the pinnacle of western civilization. Keep those albums near and dear in 2009, you will need their excellence to get through the year.

3. Kate Perry will continue to do boring music, but while she in 2008 compensated for it by sodomizing a cake, in 2009 she will not make an ass out of herself at all. Except musically. Sorry, being cute does not compensate for torturing my ears like that. If she makes a face plant in a heap of dung I will forgive her.

2. The record companies will get even more desperate, convince even more politicians that file sharing should be illegal, with the result that in the end, pretty much everybody under 40, and many above, will be criminals. Which is very handy if you want to throw somebody in jail for no particular reason. As a result the state will start monitoring peoples Internet connections. 1984 is 30 years late, but well on the way.

1. Guns’n Roses are back and will do a tour. Guns’n Roses songs was always boring and inane, with stupid lyrics and the new album is no different. Mediocre songs by a mediocre band. Except of course, Axl Rose, who is far from mediocre. He can’t sing, his voice is whiny and nasal and he dances like a lubed up anal probe on slippery ice. Slash’s hat was stupid and his hair just silly. Still, Slash was a decent guitar player, so that’s a saving grace right? Wrong, he quit in 1996. The only positive thing that can be said about Guns’n Roses is that they took the concept of overhyped crap bands to new heights, and held that crown until Limp Bizkit arrived around 2000 and totally wiped their asses with all other contenders to that porcelain throne.

So there you go. 2009 will be a crap year in music. Trust me.

 

New Song: Magdalenas Wedding Waltz

When the newlyweds dance the first dance during a wedding, it should traditionally be waltz. Viennese waltz of course. But most Viennese waltzes are really fast, and so hard to dance to for amateurs like me. So for my wedding I started looking for other nice waltzes that wasn’t so fast. I didn’t find anything I wanted, so I ordered my first commisioned music. From myself.

The result is the first song I wrote for a specific purpose and situation: Magdalenas Wedding Waltz.

An instrumental in a style inspired by Detektivbyrån, although I can’t play the accordion, so the song is completely electronic with a sampler standing in for proper accordion playing.

And yes, the dance went fine, and I got married without making a fool of myself at all!

 

Don’t buy new recording equipment!

On mailing lists and discussion forums for recording music you always hear stuff like “you need to get good preamps” or “you can’t use the DAW’s internal summing” or “you gotta spend at least $1000 on the microphone” and similar. Or my favourite: “You want to sound as good as X and they use Y”. Well, be happy you don’t have exactly the same equipment as X, because then you won’t sound “as good as” X. You might sound better, or worse, but most importantly: You’ll sound different.

After 20+ years of hobby music technology nerding, I have one solid piece of advice: Learn to use what you have until you know it’s not you, but the technology that is preventing you from sounding better. And when you get there, you will know where in the chain the problem is.

So, if you don’t thing the preamps in the A/D converter is preventing you from sounding better, then most likely they aren’t.

As an example:

I started out on a Yamaha 4-track. I soon needed more channels, so has a Boss mixer. This sounded like crap, of course, but it took me a lot of time to learn how to cram out every percent of sound of this. Then I switched to a Fostex 8-track. To my surprise, although things sounded “better”, in other ways it didn’t. The Yamaha 4-track has a sound that means that whatever you record, it will come out sounding like a unity. Simply speaking, the frequency response is anything but linear.

I got used to this, got better at mixing, and things started sounding as a whole again. But still like shit, and most importantly, very different in my headphones than when I mixed. Clearly, a stereo system no longer cut it. I got proper monitors. It was like putting on glasses. And Ivery soon realized that my Boss mixer sucked. So, I got a Tascam 24 channel. It sounds amazing. I could reach another level in my recordings. And I realized my reverbs sucked, so I got a new one.

Another stripping out of sonic unity came with me dropping the 8-track and starting to use a computer instead. I still mix everything through the Tascam, and it definetely has some sort of subtle sound, which helps a bit. If I would mix digitally, I’d loose that too, and I would have to become yet a bit better at mixing.

Now, if I had been given access to my current setup when I started recording in 1984, would the things I recorded then have sounded great? No, of course not. It would have sounded like shit. In fact, even more like shit than the did sound, because the Yamaha 4-track wouldn’t have forced everything to sound the same. None of the things I bought because my equipment limited me would have helped me if I bought it much earlier, because I wouldn’t have known how to use the other things I got the best way.

New equipment only helps, of it was the old equipment that was the problem. And with todays digital recording equipment, it’s very rarely the equipment that is the problem.

And yeah, some of that stuff I did on the Yamaha 4-track and the Boss mixer sounds, well, kinda like crap. But in a good way!

 

Hilarious comic: Long band names

This was very funny. At least for me, but then I once was in a band called “Döda apans förälskelse eller Sonya Hedenbratt och hans jävla manskör”. Which translated to “The dead monkey’s infatuation or Sonya Hedenbratt and his damned male choir”, or possibly “Kill the monkey’s infatuation or Sonya Hedenbratt and his damned male choir”, whichever you prefer.

My band had one concert, in the singers garage, to an audience of six. It was an awesome concert. We played a keyboard-dominated experimental dada-punk, and ended with a 20-minute cover of Light My Fire, with special effects of loads of burning incense. The smoke almost choked our guest-starring keyboard player. We might not have been good, or trailblazing, or popular, but dammit, we were *something*.

Yeah, I know, this breaks on the obscurity clause so it doesn’t win the longest band name contest, but it explains why I think it’s funny.

 

Lift To Experience: How can this possibly be good?

When you see reviews of music, especially in fanzines and indie magazines, you see a lot of name dropping. It’s pretty annoying, especially when the band name that is dropped are from the obscure bands that some person was in in high-school that never made any records because the name dropping is then only there to show the reviewers deep knowledge of what amounts to useless trivia.

But often the name dropping comes from the fact that following names can lead you to good music. For example, today I suddently found myself wondering who did the backing vcals on Bat For Lashes “Trophy”. Well, it’s Josh Pearson, who’s claim to fame is being the song writer in a band called Lift To Experience. So I looked up their MySpace page, and listen to the three songs there. And they are good. So, by the obscure name dropping feature, I found some good music! See, it has a purpose!

Lift To Experience is a bit of a shock. Not their music in itself. But this is a bunch of people fanatically devoted to Texas writing Christian songs. There is normally no chance in hell this could be good. Fanatical Texans write songs like “All my Ex’s Live in Texas” and sing with a horribly nasal drone to music with steel guitar and violins in them. Nothing wrong with steel guitar or violins, it’s just the music that combine the two tends to be horribly bad country. And we all know that Christian music is boring crap, based on the idea that if you just embrace Jesus you don’t have to care about the fact that nobody loves you and your life sucks, becuse Jesus will fix your life for you so you will be happy. After you are dead. And this is somehow fantastic news that need singing about a lot.

But Lift To Experience is nothing like that. It’s massive droning alternative rock that has very little to do with either country or gospel, and thankfully doesn’t have one inch of Christian fusion jazz-rock in it. It should be impossible for Christian Texas do do this, but I guess this either proves that God doesn’t exist, or he moves in very mysterious ways indeed. Although their one and only album, they have now split up apparently, must be the ugliest in existence. I guess this is a homage to their Christian Texan roots.

Check it out. You will probably hate it, but I don’t. Now I’ll
have to figure out where I can buy the album.

 

Up and coming artists not to miss: Tam Walker and Jnay

While I was in London this week I was invited to a showcase of artists at My Place by my friend and DJ Kinetic P (catch him on Push FM) I missed the start, and didn’t see all the artists, but this I can say: Keep an eye out for Tam Walker and Jnay, who were the artists that stood out.

Tam Walker has the combination of great voice and stunning looks that is needed in the tough business of soul music. She already is cooperating with some good songwriters and have a good set of songs, some with definite hit-feeling.

Last on, and as I understood it, not part of the Showcase, but an extra treat, was Jnay. He has a great voice, and loads of carisma, and a bunch of good songs. The recordings on his myspace page doesn’t make justice to the live performance, and I think that a good producer should be able to channel the live charisma into the studio recordings.

I’m telling you now: Keep your eyes on these two!

 

Electronic French folk-chanson from Sweden

Just so you don’t think that all Swedish music is bad or intentionally pathetic, I have to make some advertising for the Swedish band Detektivbyrån. They have made one of my current favourite albums, the Hemvägen EP. Check out the title song, here played live on Swedish TV.

Yes, it’s swedish folkmusic, mixed with french chansons, and electronica. Unique, melodious and awesome. Go bloody buy the album.

 

Nine Inch Nails release music online (and for free)

Nine Inch Nails now join Radiohead as experimenting with alternative revenue models. The new album, Ghosts, is available to buy online either as downloads for five dollars or as a double CD for ten dollars. You can also download the first part of the album for free via BitTorrent.

I’m listening to it right now, and a review is most likely in a couple of days.