PR, Email, and the Eternal Deluge

A note about music promotion

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


A note about email. This is intended in particular for individuals and organizations who’ve sent me, or intend to send me, email about their music releases and not heard back from me. What follows is a snapshot of my email inbox as of 9:00am California time today, October 25, 2012. This morning feels representative, if a little on the light side — hence the time I feel like I have to take a break from the deluge and comment on it. First, some statistics:

Number of emails received: 113

Number of emails about album releases: 19

Number of emails about videos (streaming and DVD): 4

Number of emails about concert tours: 3

Number of emails about 7″ singles: 2

Number of emails about milestones in the lives of musicians and organizations: 7

These numbers (well, aside from the overall count of 113) don’t include additional press inquiries about video games, movie screenings, art gallery openings, club nights, mobile apps and other software applications, gadgets, and so on. Nor do they include artist and record-label newsletters I have myself actively subscribed to. Nor do they include personal/professional correspondence with musicians, artists, and related individuals. Nor do they in any way represent the fact that the significant majority of the music I write about is music I come upon through my own surfing, RSS-feeding, concert-attendance, social-network participation, general media consumption (magazines, TV, movies, books), and so forth.

This is, mind you, all by 9:00am. I assure you by the end of the day those 113 emails will have at least tripled, and most of these other stats along with them.

On occasion when I receive an overwhelming number of emails from one source that have nothing to do with what I am focused on, I send this quick summary statement:

For future reference, I pretty much focus my writing on “technologically mediated sound” — ambient music, sound art, experimental classical, hip-hop production, that sorta thing.

And on occasion, I send this form letter as a reply:

Hi. I don’t reply much to PR correspondence, even directly from musicians.

There’s simply too much of it, often as many as 300 emails per weekday.

The best way for me to state the situation is as follows: I receive an enormous number of inquiries about reviewing music, I listen to as much as I can without doing what I’m listening to the disservice of being too casual about it, and I write about what I find interesting.

Feel free to send me music email (as a link, not an attachment). Just please don’t take it personally, or even read into it any reflection of my (dis)interest in the music, if and when I don’t respond.

And yes, this is a form letter, as is most of the PR I receive.

Best,

Marc
[email protected]

(Photo of character from Mary Mapes Dodge’s classic story about the boy who put his finger in the dike found via thesubversivearchaeologist.com.)

Ukulele Ambience (MP3s)

Brian Biggs puts the slack – and a bit of glitch – in slack key

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Brian Biggs has posted three experimental duets that appear to have grown out of last week’s Disquiet Junto project. The project, the 42nd in the ongoing weekly series, involved participants employing the oldest and newest instruments in their practice to create a “naive melody.” Taking a cue from Talking Heads, the melody was accomplished by employing the oldest, more familiar instrument in the production of the backing track, and the newer one — on which the performer was, by definition, still something of a novice — in the production of the foregrounded melody. By coincidence in advance of the announcement of the project that led to that piece, Biggs had tried out a variety of modular apparatuses and approaches, in addition to his saxophone and ukulele, yielding three varied tracks:

He explains in brief:

Tracks created with a ukulele, a Harvestman Tyme Sefari (version 2), and a MakeNoise Phonogene. A little four-note strum in F went to the Tyme Sefari, another simple uke thing in A went to the Phonogene. The outs of the two samplers went to the audio input of a Cwejman MMF-1 filter, and then output and recorded to a Zoom H4N with reverb from the Motu 828 interface.

I was on the fence regarding keeping both the Tyme Sefari and the Phonogene until these tracks. The end-of-loop output of each module kept the other in “time” and being able to fool with each independently of the other is worth keeping both.

The technical information aside, especially recommended is the first of the three duets, which uses backmasking to create a sense of timelessness that merges well with the acoustic intonations of the instrument.

Set originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/dance-robot-dance. More detail on Biggs’ process at dancerobotdance.com, where the above image is sourced from.

Live Trio (MP3)

Schoster/Landis/James, guitar/synth/electronics/voice, Providence 2011

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

If ever the shape of a recording’s waveform presented the potential listener with a vision of an enticingly varied performance, the April 6, 2011, live concert by a trio of electronic musicians (Ted James, Erik Schoster, Brendan Landis) is a chief contender.

The waveform of the 20-minute set, as shown on Landis’ soundcloud.com/hey-exit account, seems to take every possible visual approach, from sharp changes in amplitude to staccato subsets to extended singularities, from tepid passages to richly dense ones. The instrumentation is loosely described in the accompanying liner note: James on “Synthesizers, Electronics,” Schoster on “Computer, Electronics,” Landis on “vox, guitar.” To begin with, the voice: this isn’t singing, not in the sense of words and songs and melody; the voice, as employed by Landis, is one instrument among many, one source of drones and noise among others. If it at times seems distinct from everything else because of its recognizability, so too is the occasional case with the guitar, which once in a while stops being an anonymous provider of sonic effluvia and comes to resemble what is more immediately recognizable as a guitar. In both situations, though, even when the sound sources become familiar, the music remains abstract, deliberately non-associative. There are, indeed, varied approaches here, from light percussive fields to attenuated drones, from subdued glossolalia to heady shimmers. Furthermore, these sounds are just a few among many others, and overall the performance is less about simultaneous collaborative effort, less about harmony, and more about concentration and communal pursuit, about music that unfolds, that develops, that moves forward.

Track originally posted on October 20, 2012, for free download at soundcloud.com/hey-exit. More on Schoster at hecanjog.com. More on Landis at heyexit.com. More on James at tedjames.info.

Scanner 4/4: God Sample the Queen

4th of 4 free Scanner tracks in a row: a meditative anthem

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There is national music, and there are national anthems. There is music that is derived from regional culture, and there is music that is composed with the intention of encapsulating, of standing for, that culture. “God Save the Queen” is a template for national anthems, echoed throughout the globe in various of England’s colonies, vestigial and otherwise — it’s a palimpsest subsumed in the United States’ own “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” (not its national anthem, of course, but a close second).

“God Save the Queen” was also the source material for Scanner‘s “Anthem,” which subsumes the song even further still. Commissioned for the 2012 Olympics (and Paralymics), “Anthem” slows the British national anthem past the point of recognizability, until it is as thin as the material from which one might cut a flag. It’s ethereal rather than rousing. And, by Scanner’s own design, a bit renegade. The audio was installed at Lancaster House, which, as Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) explains, is a high-security building. He infused his work with a double sense of infiltration. First, he had it playing in the Lancaster bathrooms, assuring that every visitor was sure to hear it in an especially intimate manner. And he posted it online for free download, assuring that all who couldn’t penetrate the fortress would still hear its music.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/scanner. More on Scanner at scannerdot.com.

Scanner 3/4: Vertical Sound

3rd of 4 free Scanner tracks in a row: future of elevator music

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


“Mind the doors, please.” If you step into the elevator at the gallery Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm, Sweden, those familiar words serve as the beginning of your short trip. They are also the opening of a sound work by Scanner, aka Robin Rimbaud, that is currently installed in the elevator, and that will continue to be through December 2 of this year. “Elevator overloaded,” the work continues. “Fourth floor. Second floor.” This isn’t a linear journey by any means.

The work, titled “Hiss Concrète,” brings together the sounds of that specific elevator with similarly sourced audio elements from Rimbaud’s extensive travels. He writes in a brief descriptive note: “The work is installed in the museum elevator, drawing attention to a very specific non place. It uses all the sounds of the elevator itself, doors, motor and ambience, combined with recordings I have made all over the globe of other elevators, bells, buzzers, gates, voice announcements for different floors, in a variety of languages from English, German, Spanish, French, Japanese and Chinese.” It’s part of More Than Sound, an exhibit at Bonniers Konsthall that features work from Tarek Atoui, Hans Berg, Nathalie Djurberg, Malin BÃ¥ng, AyÅŸe Erkmen, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Susan Hiller, Matti Kallioinen, Haroon Mirza, and Susan Philipsz, in addition to Scanner/Rimbaud.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/scanner. More on Scanner at scannerdot.com. More on the Bonniers Konsthall exhibit at bonnierskonsthall.se.