Month: November 2011

What’s Japanese for “Netlabel”?

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

1. 固有のウェブサイトを持つもの
2. soundcloud,bandcampなど既存のウェブサービスを使って運営しているもの
3. すでに運営していたレコードレーベルのサイドプロジェクトとしてのもの　

That text above is the first three rules from my netlabel manifesto, “If You’re Thinking of Starting a Netlabel …,” translated into Japanese. It’s very rewarding to see this sort of thing happen. This is at least the second time the piece has been translated from English into another language, the previous being Italian: “20 modi per distribuire musica in modo creativo.”

Netlabels, for those new to the concept, are online record labels that actively distribute their releases for free, with the willing, and enthusiastic, participation of the musicians who recorded the music. A sizable portion of the music covered in this site’s daily Downstream department originates on netlabels.

The original version of “If You’re Thinking …” was published on April 11 of this year in an attempt not so much to direct the flow of traffic among netlabels or scare away potential free-music moguls, as it was to list some useful, one would hope helpful, correctives. It was fascinating to me at the time, and sadly remains so now, how many netlabels neglect such useful tools as RSS feeds, streaming audio, and song-specific links (as opposed to massive Zip files).

Of course, despite this prevalent neglect, the netlabel community continues to flourish. As C. Reider pointed out in a recent reflection on the state of netlabels and their correlation to earlier networked cultures such as mail art and the cassette underground (“You Are Your Own Archive”), the exhaustive list of active netlabels accumulated by David Nemeth at actsofsilence.com now numbers over 500.

The Japanese edition of my netlabel piece (“ネットレーベルをはじめたいと思っているあなたへ”) was accomplished generously by Yutaka Nakashima, a Japanese native currently living in New York. Nakashima wrote an introduction to his edition of the piece, and added a few rules of his own for emphasis. When he sent me the link today to his post, he included this translation (into English) of his added rules, which are numbered to occur after the 21 on my list:

22. Don’t start yourself. Have some close friends to do it with you.
23. Use archive.org more! archive.org is a huge website and a community.
24. Make a label compilations sometimes. Its very useful for first time visitor of your label to understand.

He asked for my permission to do the translation, which was appreciated, though it certainly wasn’t necessary. My permission is inherent in the Creative Commons license that appears at the bottom of the pages of this website. Though the netlabel concept predates the Creative Commons, as envisioned by Lawrence Lessig and his colleagues, the former is deeply informed by the latter. There’s a sweet irony to the translations that have extended the conversation about my netlabel story. I wrote the piece to help spread the word about netlabels, about the growing cultural practice of actively releasing music for free distribution — but the same structure that allows for that music to flow freely has also allowed my article to.

The Nakashima translation appears on his website, The Polyhedron Formula, where he writes about various free-music releases posted not just on netlabels but via such services as Bandcamp.com.

Protecting Against ‘Protect IP’ (November 16, 2011)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Tomorrow, Wednesday, November 16, is American Censorship Day. For that day — well, starting the evening prior — the logo for this website will be blacked out. The action is part of an effort originating at americancensorship.org to bring attention to the flaws inherent in the Protect IP Act, which is being considered in the United States Senate, and its sibling legislation in the House of Representatives, where similar regulation is called SOPA.

The act would criminalize such an extensive array of uses of copyrighted material that it’s self-evidently too broad to be upheld in court. But the period of time between the bill’s passage and that potential, though certainly not inevitable, court ruling would be a dark age for the Internet, and for free speech.

From a very specific standpoint, this legislation is egregious to this website, because of the site’s longstanding interest in sampling and in the unintended uses of technology and in the longstanding cultural practices that have come to be termed the Creative Commons. But that is, frankly, just the start of the matter.

Here’s a usefully alarming video that summarizes the issues with the PROTECT IP Act:

Also recommended is the New York Times editorial on the subject (“Internet Piracy and How to Stop It”), which acknowledges the impact of piracy, but also points out examples of the “broadness” of the language in the bill:

In one notorious case, a record label demanded that YouTube take down a home video of a toddler jiggling in the kitchen to a tune by Prince, claiming it violated copyright law. Allowing firms to go after a Web site that “facilitates”intellectual property theft might encourage that kind of overreaching — and allow the government to black out a site.

The date of November 16 was decided because that is when the House of Representatives will hold hearings on SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), its version of the PROTECT IP Act. Apparently “PROTECT” is a reduction of “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011.” If only the ability to craft a nifty acronym aligned with informed legal vision.

The bill is available at senate.gov as a PDF. Please distribute it freely.

Brian Eno Leans on Stephen Colbert

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Brian Eno appeared on The Colbert Report last Thursday, November 10. (Watch the episode at colbertnation.com.) It was a peculiar conversation, enjoyable for its peculiarity. It ran through highlights of Eno’s career, but not “the” highlights. With barely a nod to Eno’s most recent and prominent work (the latest Coldplay album, new recordings under his own name), Stephen Colbert focused on subjects that are of concern to an admirer.

One of the pleasures of Colbert’s show is figuring out where his parody of a talk-show host ends and where “he” begins. Complicating matters is that in both modes he likes to poke at the pretensions of his guests. In a way, Colbert’s hardcore fan-ness peeking out from inside his assumed identity makes a good parallel to the video that Eno put together a year ago, the one for which he interviewed himself under the guise of “Dick Flash of Pork Magazine.” Both videos invoke alternate identities, and both involve interviewers who go their own way.

Colbert spent no time spent on U2, but plenty on Roxy Music. (Eno talked about how he knew to quit the band when he found himself thinking about his laundry while performing.) No time on Coldplay, but on the “77 Million Paintings” project, which involves a generative approach to visuals. (Eno estimated it would take 400 million years to view the thing in its entirety, but gave no “guarantee,” as he put it.) As is his strength, Colbert managed to praise the work while providing mild ribbing. After comparing “77 Million Paintings” to a computer screensaver, he asked if flying toasters come across it. He asked about the Long Now project, about the giant clock that is at its heart, the 10,000-year clock, and proceeded to josh: He asked if it has an alarm. Eno reminded him it does have a chime. He asked Eno if he can sing the chime. He then reminded Eno of his work on the Windows 95 chime and asked could he sing that? Eno said he did 83 versions for that project, and he isn’t sure which they used. He said it’s his most popular piece of music ever. That’s a familiar line, as is much of what he said, but the absence of commercial pandering made the reiterated material feel less like he was on rhetorical autopilot (the talk-show-guest equivalent of thinking about the laundry), and more like Colbert was eager to run through the true fan’s greatest hits.

As a measure of Eno’s range, and of Colbert’s, they barely talked about music, and when they did, they talked about singing. (Eno’s growing interest in the human voice is a subject of his recent interview on the Sound Opinions podcast.)

And then they sang. Not immediately, but at the end of the show. They sang “Lean on Me” with Michael Stipe, whose band since 1982, R.E.M., recently announced it was breaking up. Their makeshift trio’s harmony was pretty strong, even if the lyrics got flubbed a little, and at times they weren’t entirely all sure who was leading, if anyone was, if anyone should be. (Perhaps Eno and Colbert were also distracted by the possibility that they were singing with Captain Beefheart, whom Stipe has eerily come to resemble.) They actually did the entire song. The show didn’t fade out midway through, as the viewer might have expected.

Once upon a time, the idea of Stephen Colbert, Brian Eno, and Michael Stipe singing “Lean On Me” on national television would have been surreal. Now it is simply television. Surreal, by the way, is reading the comments that appear on the show’s webpage, where all the subjects of the episode (the Occupy movement, Rick Perry’s inability to recall the name of the Department of Energy, the Eno interview) are tossed around like ingredients that resist coalescing into a salad.

The Eno interview (colbertnation.com) begins with an introduction by Colbert at 9:27.

The Hard Ambience of a Cold Day

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Don’t pry the guitar from Marcus Fischer‘s cold, cold hands. Let him play. Perhaps when he strums that guitar, he isn’t getting quite the precision he desires, but he’s aware of the limitations, fully conscious of them and compensating for them, embracing them. The cold, in turn, reveals itself less as a detriment and more as a filter; the cold serves as a kind of natural dampener, restricting motion. It introduces unexpected sounds and unusual cadences. The best art comes from working within confines, self-imposed and otherwise. Fischer recently shared a track he titled “Guitar Improvisation (With Cold, Cold Hands) at a Room Atop a Tree,” which was taped under circumstances that its title lays bare.

He describes the setting as follows, and presumably the photo that accompanies the track was shot around the time of its recording:

“the days are getting colder again.  here is a short guitar improvisation i recorded up in my studio as squirrels ran across the branches of our walnut tree busily gathering food for the winter.  just a simple room recording from my iphone. nothing fancy.”

Shortly after the piece begins, taut strings are balanced by a slowly growing space of foggy reverberation, one that for awhile manages to both nestle the strings and to highlight their sharp quality. Eventually the nestling wins. The piece develops slowly, less a song than a kind of natural progression of sounds. There’s a point toward the end, pretty much for the entire last minute, when the evidence of the guitar strings being struck has, for all intents and purposes, disappeared. The result gives the impression of a loop left on repeat, perhaps one slowly gaining in texture, slowly degrading, thanks to a variety of effects. It’s hard to hear it and to not imagine that the player has taken comfort in the computer’s ability to extend the performance, and he sits nearby, hands in pockets, shivering. (A postscript, on Monday, November 14: When I wrote “computer,” it was a lazy shorthand for “effects.” Fortunately, Fischer provided me, via Twitter, with details about his tool kit: “it was all just guitar and pedals. two loopers, a delay, reverb and fuzz. once again… nothing fancy.”)

Track originally posed at Fischer’s unrecnow.com blog, and hosted at
his soundcloud.com/mapmap space. Note that the downloadable version is an M4A, not an MP3.

Broken Dub (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The title is Broken Dub, not Broken Beat. It’s named not for a plentiful if somewhat invisible genre but for a fledgling concept of a potential one (references to “broken beat” outnumber “broken dub” on Google by about 3,740,000 to 61,700). If the idea of a “broken dub” music can be thought to take its cues from “broken beat,” then it’s not surprising that the latter’s mark is heard on the former here, here being the recent Pablo Ribot album by that name on the Modisti netlabel. The strongest track of the album’s seven is titled “Disappointment,” and it’s the one that opens the set. There are broken-beat staples: rhythmic patterns that dissolve amid their own complexity, metrics that fall apart like a tinker toy solider that fatefully misses a staircase step. But there’s more to it: thick and brief piano lines, Bösendorfer thick, that plumb the depths; frazzled fritzes that illuminate the upper regions. Broken beat is the IDM of hip-hop, which is to say it’s concerned with what happens when the backing material is pushed past its functional purpose. To ponder broken dub is to first ponder the purpose of dub.

Track originally posed for free download at modisti.com (the direct download is to a Zip file, hence the absence of a streaming track here). More of Ribot’s music at freemusicarchive.org and soundcloud.com/pablo-ribot.

An earlier Ribot album, Beat Interlocutor, was covered here almost exactly a year ago: “Glitch or Not” (November 23, 2010).