Slow Food, Track By Track, Pt 4 – Imaginary Robot Ninja Assistant 2 Sep 2010, 6:50 pm

You can download Imaginary Robot Ninja Assistant here, and the whole Slow Food album here.

Who doesn’t have an imaginary robot ninja assistant? Fixing stuff, being awesome, ass-kicking when needed, and, uhm, assisting…

When I finally get my real Robot Ninja Assistant, it will sing like this track.

And I’d understand every word it sang.

This is how all robots should sing.

It’s a love song.

Nowhere near as dark as it sounds to us.

Robot harmony is different, y’see, not based on dodgy fudged physics. Theirs is the essence of rock ‘n’ roll.

And ninjas.

The main loop on this is, I think, me looping some of Trip’s weird noises. I don’t actually join in til about half way through. Quality weirdness

Great New Album From She Makes War 1 Sep 2010, 9:31 pm

OK, I’m going to interrupt my ‘track by track’ breakdown of my own new album to tell you about a GREAT record by my lovely friend Laura Kidd, AKA She Makes War.

Here it is, in its entirety, on bandcamp (naturally) – hit play while you’re reading this (and then hit the ‘buy’ button when you’ve finished):

Laura is a true renaissance woman - singer/songwriter/producer/videographer/session bassist/blogger/social tech ninja/web designer… A huge skill set, all of which has come into play on the process of making the album and telling stories around it.

She’s made a whole load of really cool physical packages available – click here to read about those – and is in the process of making a video for every song on the album. Here’s my favourite of them so far (it is, in all honesty, one of my favourite music videos ever):

It’s a truly wonderful record, no filler, no extraneous keep-the-record-label-happy anomalous BS. Just a whole album full of brilliantly written/played/produced songs that you REALLY need to hear and will more than likely want to own after that. And she’s even made a marvellous microsite to tell you all about it.

And if that’s the case, you can pay what you think it’s worth for the download, or grab a limited edition piece of history with the various physical formats…

If you’re looking for the next strategy for releasing your music, the thing that’s going to make it all work, try making music as great as this, then come back and ask the question again – the answer will be a lot clearer…

(fear not, tomorrow I’ll be back to talking about me )

Slow Food, Track By Track, Pt 3 – Growing Up And Moving On 31 Aug 2010, 1:17 pm

[sorry for the break in posts - was away at Greenbelt over the weekend]

You can download Growing Up And Moving On here, or the whole Slow Food album here.

This was the first thing we recorded. It is, I think the most edited too… Perhaps.

Nerves? Expectations?

Trip and I met 11 years ago. We wouldn’t have played like this then. We were young. Unformed. A different world.

We’ve moved on, up, out, through… Sometimes in parallel, sometimes divergent, always with a bass in hand.

It’s a slow build, the underlying loop changes not. The emotions evolve. We’re exploring, tentatively (it’s the first thing we played, remember?) Satisfied as it unfolds.

It’s good. Let’s play more.

Slow Food, Track By Track, Pt 2 – Grown-Ups At Play 27 Aug 2010, 12:18 pm

You can download Grown-Ups At Play from here, and the whole Slow Food album from here.

The simplest tune on the record in terms of the techological wizardry. There’s one little loop towards the end, but most of it is just Trip and I playing, with him hitting some deep, deep bass pedals (srsly, you’re not going to hear those if you’re listening on laptop speakers or through crappy headphones. They dig deep.)

Trip and I have experimented with this kind of thing before. I think this is the best tune to ever come out of our non-loop improvs. It’s almost like we growed up ‘n’ stuff.

This is almost an old fashioned duet.

Almost.

The loop section adds a lil’ StevieSpice to the proceedings. After all, we are grown-ups.

Slow Food, Track By Track, Pt 1 – The Upward Spiral 26 Aug 2010, 1:13 pm

Click here to download The Upward Spiral. And here to download the whole ‘Slow Food’ album.

It was really tricky to choose the opener for the album, and this wasn’t the obvious first choice, as it has a kind of false start… it feels likes it’s going to be all big and ambient, then Trip hints at a sparse bass groove, I switch to the rolling rhythmic line, he follows, then jumps in with the jaunty melody, switches to fretless…

Two minutes in, it’s hopefully clear why it’s the opener.

Joyous, optimistic, improvised music. That’s the idea.

Of course it turns into a freaky glitch-fest at the end, but not before a crescendo of euphoric blade-runner-esque cinematic guitar-ish-ness.

All hail the Kaoss Pad KP3. Nuff Said.

And Nothing But The Bass Is 10 Years Old Today. 25 Aug 2010, 9:00 am

10 years ago today, I received a shipment of CDs from ICC duplication, to the Greenbelt Festival in Cheltenham – it was my first solo album, And Nothing But The Bass, and the start of my solo recording career.

Here it is – please download it for free:

10 years on, and I’m less than 24 hours into the life of a brand new album, Slow Food, with Trip Wamsley. It’s been such an amazing journey, not least of all because what seemed like such a weird thing to do back then – to me and to everyone else – is now so normal. The internet is awash with people experimenting with solo bass, and looping crops up everywhere from coffee-shops to the top of the charts.

The gimmick potential diminished many years ago, for which I’m most grateful. It let me get on with making the music that mattered to me, via the method that made most sense.

Solo bass was never a circus trick for me.
I was never interested in looping as a way of showing how clever I could be.
It was a way of me getting the music inside my head out to the world.
I hear things in layers, I hear evolving texture not rock drums and last-chorus-key-changes.

The template is still much the same. I’m just much better at it. The vision is more refined, the tech is better (thank the baby Jesus for Bob Amstadt and the Looperlative) and yes, I’m orders of magnitude more developed as a musician – technically, theoretically, conceptually, melodically… I just make better music happen. At least, I make music happen that is ever-closer to the soundtrack to the inside of my head. And I’m still loving it.

I’m loving the collaborations this has all led me to – the albums with Jez Carr, Theo Travis, Lawson Dodds Wood, Mike Outram and now Trip Wamsley. The gigs with Lobelia, Michael Manring, BJ Cole, Cleveland Watkiss, Julie McKee… The myriad incredible musical moments of the Recycle Collective at Darbucka, The Vortex and Greenbelt.

And I’m grateful to every journalist that’s ever taken the time to listen to and write about the music, every radio DJ that’s ever played it, and every person who has played a CD to their friends and said ‘check this out’, or emailed them a link, burned a CDR for them, emailed them some tracks. It’s all great, and I thank you for it.

So, 10 years on, here’s the new album: Have a listen, enjoy, pay whatever you think its worth. For me, the last 10 years have been priceless.

“Slow Food” With Trip Wamsley AKA Making Music With Awesome Musicians. 24 Aug 2010, 12:07 pm

Here it is!

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll be all-too-familiar with ‘it’ – the first of two duo albums with Trip Wamsley. I blogged about them here, and at the time thought they’d both be EPs. Well, I’m not sure about Trip’s release, but this one has grown into a full album – all 42 glorious minutes of it.

It’s called Slow Food – I’ll be blogging more about why over the next day or so, but there’s a short explanation on the bandcamp page. Trip has been a favourite musician of mine for a LONG time, and a friend for over a decade. It’s a real treat to finally get something recorded of the two of us playing together. And there’s more to come!

It’s also – crucially – my first album to be released in 24bit – that’s ‘better than CD quality’ - Bit depth is the bit of the digitization equation that deals with dynamic range – it means that each sample is made up of more bits, more data to define what’s happening at that time. It’s the one that I can ‘hear’ better than the sample rate (the 44.1khz bit in the CD spec) – so I’ve uploaded all the tracks to Bandcamp at 44.1k/24bit. Are you going to hear it and know it’s 24bit? Clearly not, because you don’t have a comparison file. But you will hear the awesome, all the more clearly because of it. Trust me.

So, enjoy – as always, it’s priced at ‘Pay What You Think It’s Worth’ – even though it’s a high-res download. A lot of places seem to charge loads more even for normal FLAC lossless files. That’s just not how we do things round here.

You’re a grown-up, you know what these things are worth to you, and can pay accordingly. If you’re completely skint, pay nothing. If you’re minted, love it and want to help smooth the process of more records like it coming into existence, feel free to go nutz…

It’s The Little Things That Count – You Are The Press. 9 Aug 2010, 9:00 am

Over the years, I’ve sent literally hundreds of CDs to magazines and radio, in the hope of reviews and airplay. And I’ve had a quite large amount of both:

• Some high profile radio play (Late Junction on Radio 3 and The Freak Zone and BBC Introducing on 6Music),
• Some great magazine reviews (see the press quotes section of this site).

But, what is evident to anyone who experiences these things first hand, is that word of mouth – my listeners telling their friends and family about the wonderful music they’ve just discovered – is worth more than all that mainstream press put together.

That’s not to say the radio and magazines aren’t useful or wanted – I LOVE it when we get played or featured – but that the single biggest observable impact of radio and magazines is people who already know about us talking about the press we’re getting! The amount of ‘nought to 60’ discovery that happens via normal channels is statistically very small, so requires the channel to have a MASSIVE audience for it to have any recognisable impact on recognition or sales (which is why TV works still works.)

But, the bump that happens – when I send out an email telling people about the radio/magazine/website that’s featured us – is easily observable. There’s often a sales spike and an upsurge in plays on apps like Spotify or sites like Last.fm, as well as visits to the site and views on youtube.

So, this is where you can help – every time you

• Add a video to your Facebook page (just pasting the URL into your status with a note about why you like it is GREAT)
• Tweet a link to the album of ours you’re currently listening to,
• Click the ‘love’ button on Last.fm
• Click the ‘like’ or ‘add to favourites’ button on YouTube
• Click ‘share’ at the bottom of any post or page on this site and send it to one of your networks or via email
• Take the opportunity presented by Bandcamp to let your friends on Twitter or Facebook know what you’re just downloading
• Email a friend who you think will enjoy what we do,
• Put the music on at a family gathering,
• Bring friends to a show

YOU are acting as part of a movement more powerful than the massed ranks of the mainstream press.

Fan-power.

You can make a difference. It’s all about percentages. If you tell 3 people in a year about our music who then get into it, that’s a four-fold increase in our audience because of you – from one listener to four listeners. If you send a tweet to your 30 friends on twitter, and 10 of them click the link to hear what we’re doing, that’s a huge help.

Why? Because you’re not alone. The social web is empowering us all to become the recommendation engine that the press used to monopolise. I spend most of my time online telling people about great music that I find.

• I use my Posterous blog to share links and songs and videos,
• I tweet about them,
• I come up with easy ways for people to share what I do and what other people do.

We no longer need to hit the streets with a pile of paper flyers to be part of a movement.

This isn’t ‘the future of music’, it’s the glorious now of music. All these tools are here, and while our friends are sitting at home feeling nostalgic but strangely unfulfilled by the latest crop of hopefuls on X-factor, we can point them to something altogether deeper, more real, more connected, more significant – great music, played by real people telling their own stories who are available to chat about it, to thank, to become friends with after we’ve heard what they do.

How great is that? Very great indeed.

So, at the moment, the current record for us is “Live So Far“, and our latest video is the one for Happy. So you can:

• Share the link
• Write a review
• Embed it on your blog
• Download it and give it to someone as a present
• Play it to your friends
• Keep a track or two from it on your phone and bluetooth it to people who you talk to about music.
• Use all those like/love/favourite buttons that litter facebook, last.fm, youtube and vimeo.

Try it. Let’s call it an experiment. How far can our album go in a week?

I’ve no idea if this’ll be ignored, or take off in a massive way. It’s in your court.

Feel free to post a progress update in the comments below!

(all three photos in this post licensed under Creative Commons)

What’s A Download Worth Pt II: Recovery and Discovery 6 Aug 2010, 9:00 am

So, does the ‘massive downloader’ scenario I outlined in the previous post account for all download traffic? Of course not.

My own torrenting experience has been almost exclusively to get digital copies of music I own physical hard copies of. For me, torrenting wasn’t a replacement for buying music, rather it was a replacement for buying a USB turntable to legally convert my vinyl collection to MP3… or actually, borrowing one – I hope the BPI wouldn’t be in favour of people buying unnecessary hardware for limited use.

I’ve no idea if that would stand up in court, were I sent threatening letters for downloading music that I could produce the hard copy of. Perhaps it would be impossible for them to prove that they weren’t, in fact, mistaken and that I’d ripped it from my collection. Either way, it’s certainly not music I was about to buy again – I’m just recovering music that was lost to me thanks to obsolete tech.

The big record industry has relied for 25 years on producing new formats to get people to buy the same legacy product again and again. CDs worked for them for a time – sheer portability made them more useful than vinyl, and they were much higher fidelity than cassette, but the volume of back catalogue sold had precious little impact on new music. I’d love to see a sales curve for new vs back catalogue CD sales from 1986-2010… I’m guessing the fall off in back catalogue sales probably maps pretty well to the arc of the decline in overall CD sales, if not accounting for all of it… It certainly wasn’t compensated for by Minidisc, DCC or SACD…

And what of people who download music instead of buying it? All the research suggests that a pretty large percentage of youngsters just don’t see music as being worth paying for any more. So they download it. But what are they spending their money on instead? A fair chunk of it goes on computer games – all of which contain music, all of which is licensed and paid for and all of which generate income for musicians via the collection agencies, who bafflingly also supported the Digital Economy Bill.

As I’ve said before, spending on physical entertainment media is up, it’s just now shared between music, DVD/blueray and games. I’m a fairly big music buyer, but I’ve spent even more on DVD boxed sets in the last year than I have on music.

I have a friend who was/is a composer at RockStar games. That wasn’t a career that existed 20 years ago. Guitar Hero didn’t exist 6 years ago – and for its first few years, the Guitar Hero/Rock Band franchise was yet another locked-in major label ruse to squeeze more cash out of dinosaur rock hits. Now there’s a whole load of other music ending up on there, that’ll be paid for by the people buying those choonz.

So some kids copy music for free, brand themselves with it, and eventually that branding leads to them spending some money on product that contains licensed music…

Hasn’t it ever been thus? Back in the 80s when I was at school, it was common place for one person to buy an album and for it to go round a LOT of people being copied and shared. We also did compilation albums for each other – highly illegal, but which led to me buying a LOT of music – and there were certain albums I never bought because I heard them enough at friends’ houses to never have to buy them – entirely legal, but ultimately damaging the sales of the artists… Home taping, we eventually realised, did no more to kill music than ‘inviting people over to listen to records’ did.

So where’s this leading us?

• All this is not to say that I think Torrenting is the future of music.
• I don’t think ‘feels like free’ is the future of music, and
• I have no truck with people who unlawfully repurpose other people’s work to make money (using free downloads of someone else’s music to drive traffic to your ad-supported site is pretty shitty…)

What I DO think is that the impact of illegal downloading on music across the board is absolutely nothing like the BPI figures that underpinned the desperate ‘need’ to get the Digital Economy Bill passed into law, particularly the ludicrous notion that file sharing ‘disadvantages new and emerging artists’ (who are the very people who benefit from it most, as a free alternative to the insane waste of money that passes for ‘promotion and marketing’ in the recording industry).

As lovers of music, we need to be aware of the influence and power the internet gives us as creators AND consumers. We can make music sustainable both by paying for it, AND by sharing it with others. We can be links in the chain of discovery that mean our favourite artists need to be neither hopelessly obscure nor debt-burdened thanks to wasteful promo.

The as-yet-unknown future will emerge out of the relationship between artists an listeners, as we seek to build web environments that are better than torrent sites, that give people a reason to come to us first, and find out what we’re about, and how and why we make music.

There’s lots more to be said, feel free to bat these ideas around in the comments below…

-o0o-

And here’s some amazing progressive jazz for you to have a listen to – Neil Alexander is an insane talent, not ‘famous’ by any stretch, but immensely gifted, imaginative and dedicated to his art.

If you like it, please head over to his site and pay what you think it’s worth – he’ll thank you for it, I’m sure!

Two EPs On The Way, Duets With Trip Wamsley 4 Aug 2010, 9:00 am

Trip and I have been friends for over a decade. We met at the NAMM Show in LA in ‘99, and I was immediately a fan of his music. I doubt he heard anything I was on at the time – I was still 11 months away from my first ever solo gig, and he’d already been doing the solo bass thing for best part of a decade – he was SO far ahead of the curve, inspired by Michael Manring, playing opening shows for big name acts in The South all on his own. A real inspiration.

Over the years, we met up each year at NAMM, listened to each other’s records, and whenever possible played shows together – mainly in California around NAMM time. He’s been over to the UK to play, and this last US trip was our second time visiting him and his lovely family in Louisiana, playing house concerts at their place both times.

This time, we got to record a load of music together - with my new travel set-up, it’s so easy for me to plug in and make a noise, without any of the dread expectation that hiring a studio would inspire. We could play, it could be good or terrible and no-one was going to lose anything.

Trip and I have very different work-flows – I tend to record live, do minimal editing/mixing and put it out. He’s much more meticulous in how he puts things together. So after a day of trying things my way, my had another bash at things his way – starting with loops and noises made in Reason… At the end of it all, we’ll (probably) have two EPs – one of his, one of mine.

We’ve both just put our first pieces up on Soundcloud for you to enjoy. Here’s his:

TITUS by TripWamsley

And here’s mine:

Walking In This Heat Is An Act Of Civil Disobedience (feat. Trip Wamsley) by solobasssteve

Enjoy, share them around, and we’ll see you back here for more ASAP