Simon Fairbairn – Aural Antidotes for a Prescribed Life

I’m not very good at discovering tracks that I haven’t heard before. I don’t have a TV, I find most radio stations to be too inane and safe and I’m not subscribed to any podcasts. I have a spotify collaborative playlist – which last year introduced me to the amazing Bat For Lashes and the inspiring Angus and Julia Stone – but other than that I don’t really have any major ways of discovering new music.

It’s a shame, because when I was at university I was a like a musical sponge. I had good friends that introduced me to a huge range of wonderful, original music – from chilled out electronica to 70s funk to traditional folk. It was a great time for my musical development, but since then I’ve been exposed to less and less.

In an effort to change all this, I have subscribed to the following interesting-sounding blogs to fill up my already-too-full reader:

• Aquarium Drunkard
• 20 Jazz Funk Greats
• Derek’s Daily 45
• FluxBlog
• Gorilla Vs Bear
• Mapsadaisical
• Pretty Much Amazing
• The Needle Drop
• The Quietus

I’m listening to a few songs a day and I’ll post details here of anything interesting that I find.

Mumford & Sons

The first track that’s caught me recently is Mumford and Son’s Little Lion Man:

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I love the fast-paced acoustic vibe, I’m a sucker for double basses and the catchy chorus and the darkness of the lyrics is the perfect balance between profundity and poppiness. I hope the rest of the album is as good as this tune.

Where do you go to discover new music? Leave a comment and let me know – I’m always on the lookout for more!

My partner and I are about to leave to go travelling indefinitely and I’m slowly selling all of my studio gear as it will no longer be necessary. I’m in the middle of recording four more songs and I have until the start of February to get them all finished before my studio gets dismantled.

Nothing like a consequential deadline to get motivated.

After that I’m hitting the road with a Martin Backbacker and heading off to South America. For the next year, at least, I’m going to be focused solely on songwriting, performing and discovery. South America has a rich musical culture that I’d like to learn more about and maybe get involved with.

To reflect this scaling down, I’ll be doing a minor redesign of this site in February. Then the plan is to start a regular update schedule which will feature any interesting musical discoveries that I make together with my progression and growth as a songwriter.

I’ll be recording rough demos of songs as I go initially, which will also get posted here, then maybe down the line I’ll invest in a Zoom H4N hand held recorder to do more polished tracks.

My partner and I will be writing more extensively about all the non-musical aspects of our trip over at Never Ending Voyage and I’ll continue writing about my design work over at Line In Web Design.

So on top of recording these four songs, I’m designing and writing content for three new websites as well as preparing to leave the country for good.

It’s going to be a busy few weeks!

The film starts with Jack White making a one-string slide guitar out of a few blocks of wood, an old Coke bottle and a pickup. Running it through a distortion pedal and a guitar amp, he ends up coming out with a sound that’s like an angry cat being set on fire.

Point made, he looks back up at the camera and says “Who says you need a guitar?”

Nice.

Three Blokes with Guitars

It Might Get Loud is a 2008 documentary that sees The Edge from U2, Jimmy Page from Led Zepplin and Jack White from The White Stripes/The Raconteurs getting together to discuss the electric guitar.

If you’re not a guitarist, the premise can sound a little dull, but stick with it because there are enough moments where you get a glimpse of what these guys are really like that it makes the journey worthwhile for anyone who has an interest in popular music.

Make no mistake, though, a frank chat it is not. From the fake living room on a studio lot to the nostalgic visits to the musician’s schools, there’s a lot about this film that is contrived. It could have been a lot more cringeworthy but thankfully some judicious editing prevents it from descending to far into unrestrained hero worship – The Edge asking Jimmy Page about his ‘mythological’ status is about as painful as it gets.

Gear Vs Passion

I’m not much of a gear junkie – in fact, I’ve spent the last few weeks selling all of my stuff as I prepare to take a travel guitar and a Mac around the world – so it was never going to be easy to warm to The Edge and his focus on effects.

I find his huge, 30-odd button pedal board absurdly comical and there’s a moment in his studio that is reminiscent of the Bill Bailey sketch in Part Troll where Bailey is playing a pretty accurate pastiche of a U2 song and the power to his effects pedal goes off, revealing the actual part that he’s playing to be hilariously bad.

Ironically, it’s not too far off the truth as in this film The Edge actually does turn off his FX unit and we get to hear what he really is playing. It turns out that the huge wall of sound he was producing is just two chords and a ridiculously simple rhythm.

Although I respect the clinical dedication to getting to that sound as well as the uniqueness of it, I much prefer Jack White’s conclusion that “it’s all about attitude”.

Of course, it’s nice to have your beliefs confirmed by someone who you respect and who is very successful, but the idea is very important – that music is, first and foremost, about what you feel.

It’s about finding your voice and using that voice to connect to other people. It’s not about how much you know, it’s about what you do with what little you do know. If you’re not playing with every inch of your being – if you’re not channeling all of your emotional power into your music – then chances are you’re only ever going to sound average or, worse, just plain dull.

White says that he wants music to be a struggle, that he wants to fight with it, and that’s something that resonates with me a lot more than the gear and technical ability focused approach of many musicians.

Raw Music

He then plays us his favourite record, which turns out to be Son House’s ‘Grinnin’ In Your Face’. This bare recording features House singing accompanied only by the sound of his own clapping.

This is a nicely placed contrast to The Edge – when you strip everything else away, what are you really left with? With The Edge, you’re left with something that even he admits you can’t really play on an acoustic guitar.

In contrast there is House playing a song where he doesn’t have even that – just his raw, emotion-laden voice. It’s a powerful moment.

I guess part of the problem is that it’s not a straight, like for like comparison. White, it seems, is a songwriter first, playing guitar only because a moment in his life demanded that someone had to.

Page, for all the wonderful music that he has made in the past, seems a little out of his depth throughout the whole thing.

White claims that he has tricked the other two and that he is secretly going to learn everything he can but I can’t help feeling that it’s the other way around.

It Might Get Loud, Sony Pictures Classic (2008).

In a fit of blogging originality, I thought I would do one of those Predictions for the New Year posts that seem to get popular around this time. May I therefore present to you the snappily-titled Top 5 Predictions for Music on the Internet in 2010.

1) The major labels will continue to die a slow death while erronously blaming file sharing for all of their ills

Unfortunatley for the lumbering dinosaurs, the musical landscape has changed dramatically and is continuing to change at a rapid pace and, like those beasts of yore, they are facing extinction unless they are able to accept the changes that new technologies have brought and evolve to meet new consumer demands.

I have spoken many times about file sharing, so I won’t repeat the arguments here, but suffice to say that it’s not p2p that’s killing the music industry – it’s the total lack of innovation both in the music produced and the marketing behind it coupled with the insane desire to restrict how people consume the music that they just purchased.

Even if they get their way and the craziness that is the Digital Economy Bill gets passed in its current form, record sales will not suddenly start going up again. File sharing is simply a scapegoat for an industry that can’t accept that the rules have changed and are unable to meet the demands of a new century.

Thankfully, there are plenty of indie labels and artists that understand the benefits of getting as many ears as possible on a band in whatever ways they can, and they will continue to thrive well into the new decade.

2) MySpace will finally be rendered irrelevant

Every time a band sends me a link to their main website and it begins ‘myspace.com’, I die a little.

It is the GeoCities of the noughties and, hopefully, this year it will go the way of GeoCities and be forever banished from the internet. Unfortunately, I fear that this is more wishful thinking than something that is likely to happen given their purchase of Imeem earlier this year.

Still, any musician that wants to be taken seriously in twenty ten needs to have their own site and, given how easy it is for a band to set up and customise a website (not to mention the hundreds of other web properties out there), there really is no excuse not to have their own domain name and website out there.

3) The bands and musicians that work hardest and smartest will reap the rewards

There are now a bazillion opportunities for musicians to get their sounds out into the world. Technology has made it incredibly cheap and easy to record high definition video and audio. There are hundreds of free or cheap software packages that make music and video creation easy.

Video is going to become absolutely huge in 2010. It’s no longer just about music videos once ever 6 months, it should be video updates weekly or monthly – short clips of rehearsals, parties, gigging, everything.

Bands don’t need a PR agent, an A&R guy, a manager or a record label and any band that says they do are simply making excuses for why they are not taking their career into their own hands and making big things happen.

But it’s not just about the tools – it’s about using ever opportunity to its full potential. Each gig should be tweeted and blogged about, then filmed and excerpts released to YouTube and Vimeo. The audio should be cut up into tracks and released as a podcast.

4) The myth of the rock star will finally die

Social media is here to stay (if it was ever really not here) and a big part of being fully engaged with it will be sharing everything. The independent bands and musicians that are the most transparent, the most true to their music, the most real are going to be the ones that enjoy the biggest successes and the most loyal fanbases.

Bands that act like prima donnas; bands that think the world owes them a living; and bands that refuse to lift a finger to do anything other than play music are going to (quite rightly) suffer because fans talk. All it takes is one tweet or blog post.

5) There will be even more empowering tools released to help bands and musicians succeed

Wordpress (together with the hundreds of useful and free plugins that are available) allows bands to keep their music and gig dates updated easily – and if they have an iPhone, it gets even better. They can use AudioBoo to record and share short messages wherever they are on the road, quickly and easily.

All the tools are there – a Flip Ultra HD camcorder can record sterling quality video and is ridiculously easy to use. The Zoom H4n has 2 built in condenser mics and 2 XLR inputs and is roughly the same size as the Nino – perfect for a quick and dirty recording of a demo or a rehearsal.

Most of these tools are free or relatively inexpensive, yet they open up a world of direct engagement the likes of which independent musicians have never seen.

This is going to be the decade of the independent musician, and in a wonderful twist on the old ways, the weirder your music, the better your chances. Happy new year!