GENOMICON

So earlier on the twitters, I said

and then

and

Only I won’t

Jeremy Taylor The Terrible works in this great big record shop in Cuba St, Wgtn. I’d lost touch with him for years, then wandered into this shop… and the top 100 albums were lined up in order, in a great big display around the walls… and I could tell by the order that I’d found him again. Went over to the counter and said “I don’t suppose Jeremy works here does he?”

I don’t want Jeremy’s shop to go out of business. I want there to be a Jeremy’s shop in every town. A Jeremy in every town. I’m not sure how his business is affected by the fact that people (who presumably have finite disposable income (which has been stagnant since the 80s)) are now spending:

- more on their monthly phone bill than they ever did on records or
- more on computer games than they ever did on records or
- more of big-ticket live gigs than they ever did on records or
- more on ISP connections than they ever did on records

or that people are now using shared files to find out about new music, rather than radio. But… but…

Half the people I know are musicians, or work in the music biz in some capacity. If I was going to go nuclear on the music industry, there would come a time when I would find myself downloading and burning one of Sprouts‘ records… and I couldn’t do it. It would feel like I was being cruel to a small furry animal. And Sprouts is just one. I couldn’t even do it to people I don’t know. I could never mass-pirate a Grant Lee Buffalo record. A dEUS record. I’ll evangelise (which means sharing) but I won’t… (how you say?) “hurt sales”.

Someone is going to put the entire history of recorded music onto a single disc, but it ain’t going to be me.

However.

The entertainment/copyright industries are visiting their own version of a nuclear option onto the Internet in the shape of 3rd-party liability… the current incarnation of which is the entirely repugnant, and secretly-negotiated-trade agreement ACTA. It obliges ISPs to spy on you. Next time you send an email, next time you visit a porn site, next time you do a search for some embarrassing ailment, next time you do a search for something that is quite innocent, but the combination of words is a bit weird….

… the entertainment industry has created a situation where you’re going to be spied on. All the time. By law. Everything you do must be monitored.

In addition to this, there’s the incredibly chilling/stagnating effect – the fact (for example) that you can’t make a movie without ‘errors and omissions insurance‘ – which similar to a lot of other regulation, pretends to be about “protections” but has the side effect that only big corporations can afford to innovate in the open market. IP law needs to be reformed… taken down a peg or 12, and IP lawyers need to be put in the stocks and pelted with shit-filled crisp-packets.

The Internet is more important than the entertainment industry – I mean fuck, the telephone system is more important than the entertainment industry… and the Internet is that multiplied by about 12 entirely new dimensions. The Internet is definitely more important.

The entertainment industry does not have a god-given right not to have to adapt.

So.

A nuke option is required… or more accurately, a response to the entertainment industry’s attack on us is required… or more accurately, we need to get rid of any corporation that is big enough to change government policy to the detriment of the society that hosts it. We need to get rid of the copyright cartels.

I think it needs to be a supply-side change. I think we need to render the copyright-cartels irrelevant not for the consumers, but for the producers. For the musicians, writers, film-makers – and I don’t think many of them will be too sorry about this, because “The Industry” with very few exceptions was always a bunch of total cunts to start with. Andy Ross is an example of someone who isn’t – if the music biz was entirely populated by people like Andy, the entire terrain would be different I think. I can think of a handful of others… they do exist, but right now the majors are a machine owned by financiers, and mega-corporations who fund all sorts of dubious shit.

Look it up sometime. The last time I looked, the same people who put out Jimi Hendrix’s records were also building a massively polluting and outdated incinerator in East Sussex UK. Vivendi are attempting to do to water, what the 20th century did to oil. These people are greedy rapacious scum.

And they’re attempting to force top-down control of the internet.

So. Supply-side change. What do we do?

Damned if I know. Set up systems where people can be paid directly by their fans rather than going through a risk-aggregater (who no longer risks)(and who pays them back a pittance, after they’ve recouped) That would do it.

The way through it is to cut out the supply-side middlemen.

But I still haven’t figured it out. The other day Adam was going on about this: http://stillcorners.bandcamp.com/

Great song. For sale for 1 quid.

Sorry, that’s pathetic. That’s sad on so many levels – not least of which, it’s a pathetically low amount – nominal… pitched at such because it’s what the market will stand… only the market isn’t bothering with it. It’s so low that all it represents is the symbolic reluctance to get out a credit-card. The Reflexive-Stinge-Hump.

Do people pay that? I guess they might.

I’m feeling kindof torn on this one though. The last (and possibly only) digital track that I bought was this

And that was AFTER I’d pulled an MP3 from youtube (yea, you can do that).

It didn’t feel good doing it – paying for an MP3 I mean. There is something clangingly wrong about that deal. I like Trixie Whitley so much that I’d donate money to the cause… I’d pay money (proper money… you know, like $100) in advance for her next record – if she kickstartered it or something… but paying for an MP3 is like paying for an echo. It’s already out there… and I don’t want to ‘tip’ her a single quid. That’s taking the piss.

Maybe I’m hung up on cult of artifact… because I would pay for… a pebble off her local beach or something. Something of symbolic exchange – though if she sold a million records, she’d run out of beach… and it’s kindof ridiculous making someone go down the beach and post pebbles about the place anyway… but you get the idea. That scary Amanda Palmer

seems to do a roaring trade in indirect sales of stuff as well. Trent Reznor does as well I think. Monetising fame (that to a degree was paid for by their record companies before they split). Maybe that’s the way through – monetising fame. Not exactly meritocratic I know… but then it is more or less exactly what we have today anyway… only the terrain has shifted so what was once the product is now the advertising. And it’s really fucking good advertising, but you can’t really expect people to buy advertising. They want artifacts damnit. Like the ones Jeremy sells.

This has turned into a massive ramble… sorry.

Something else though… when I was a kid I was addicted to space-invaders. I must have spent thousands… 20c a go… would spend about $1 a time. I loved it. Every once in a while though I’d come across a broken machine that you could play for free… and it wasn’t 1/2 as enjoyable. I’d actually spend less time playing machines where nothing was at stake. I’ve noticed a similar thing with movies. If I’ve made some investment, I enjoy them a whole lot more. The value that I give to something is an inner-thing… and it gives back.

There must be a way through this… and I’m about to cast myself head-long into it because this year I’m shooting a movie based entirely on these principles.

So anyway… to boil it down to one memorable phrase: “I think we can destroy the legacy entertainment industry, by supporting artists directly”

Or… “The nuclear option is to water the grass-roots”

edit:
Unless of course they break the internet, in which case all bets are off.

Art grows best in the cracks of what you’re not allowed to do. Always has.

But never mind about that, this turned up last night…

Which is the funniest thing I’ve seen in my life and I literally asphyxiated with hilarity and passed out and died etc.

Fucking genius.

A Finnish guy taking the piss – and he’s quite famous, has been on mainstream US TV… So I’m pretty
late on the uptake. There must be more people than just him doing this now. There are loads and loads of them.

See, you don’t have to pay people to take the piss out of them…

… and it makes it even funnier that Led Zepplin’s Record company in an entirely predictable fit of idiocy decided that they were going to use the DMCA (a bogus piece of legislation) or Youtube’s “censor at corporate whim, ask questions later” policy (a bogus policy) to remove not only their artist’s material, but all material that used similar melodies, including Led Zep’s, who’s melodies weren’t actually theirs in the first place a lot of the time, a fact to which they’re happy to attest, being resonable human beings…

… and not the fucking bent lawyers that their record company decides to hire.

There are loads of them – and a lot of them are pretty clever. Like that last one does actually manage to get Stevie Ray Vaugn’s guitar sound kindof right.

Clever as fuck. Funny as fuck – a lot of them seem to have been seen more than the original tracks as well. LOL.

Forget about Favela Chic, try some Favela Punk.

Both appalling and riveting, as any good punk should be – this lot appear to have become quite famous… largely to do with an infamous dick-swinging bit in another video. A whole lot more here.

Die Antwoord

Cos for all your beautifully designed… “stuff”, and for all your earnest, striving, well-meaning, TED-headed (standing ovation-earning) world-savingness… the future doesn’t belong to you, or even people like you. The only vitality that “Chic” has is from money… and if you don’t have that, where do you go? You sit around in your bubble of refined niceness, group-thinking contentedly away with other bubbles – and then one day you wake up to find that the world outside has gone on without you, and a new generation has arrived.

Anyway, this video/act could have come from anywhere – if I didn’t know it was Afrikaans I would have said somewhere in the Wild East of Europe… where the wave of the property boom finally broke (and rolled back), beyond it an eternity of Soviet Era housing blocks with fucked pipes and playgrounds with weeds growing through the concrete.

Reminds me of this thing that came courtesy of one Brian Limmond a while back.

As the devil once said, “what gives me the edge, is that they never see me coming”.

Or maybe they do. We’ve had Favela Punk in Scotland forever.

Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair

Ramona Falls – Clover (9:16 edition) from blair neal on Vimeo.

Via the eternally marvelous notcot.org

This is cool

Someone’s somehow managed to find the time to take classic bits (apparently) of classic movies and edit them down to 3 frames, and then loop them.

This is what modern entertainment’s all about. Something that takes ages to do, but which can be watched and moved-on-from in less time than it takes to say “wahtevah”

The essence of art. Pick out what’s good, amplify it and ditch the rest. Reminds me of Spacemen 3 from back in the day

They’d take MC5 songs, take the bits they liked, and just play those over and over again, until the end of time. Fuckin Art-Rock Rocks. You think Heavy Metal was loud? It was never as loud as Art-Rock.

I was in a band with Debs from the thing above for a while. Too loud for me man. 20 years later and my ears are still ringing.

(fae)

Cybraphon.

Plays happy music when loads of people are looking at it on the internet, gets depressed when traffic is low.

It’s hard to imagine this ending well actually.

One line leads to another…

Parody etc. All bets are off.

This is cool

I’m not sure if it is what I think it is, because I’m an ignoramus* but what it looks like to me – what it looks like it could be (almost) is a way for people to make their own music videos.

It provides a palette, a brush and a simple mechanical hand-holder (you fly sideways across the page) basically turning you into a human scribble-bot, loosely choreographed in time to some music. When the song is finished, you can send it to your friends.

It’s similar in some ways to what MGMT did a while back – but they alas are controlled by a major record company, who’s head is firmly stuck up the arse of the 20th century – so they block video embedding and ban youtube (et al) copies. The idiocy of these people is utterly dumbfounding – these are the same people who pay millions in payola “Independent Promotors” to get something on the radio, then persecute/prosecute people who are actually trying to help them, for free, in a medium far more powerful.

Check it out. I’ve gone out of my way to break the law to help you people. I think this song is excellent and I’m advertising on your behalf, for free, at cost to myself.

Your record company doesn’t deserve to be in business. Sack them.

So anyway – back to the slinky inky thing – I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say that this is the future of music promotion – giving people the software tools to make cool videos of their own… but it’s a fairly good tactic I think. I mean people are going to do it anyway – I found this the other day:

Which is a video that someone’s made of Catpower’s cover of a Velvet Underground song.

It utterly gob-smacks me that there are about 300 variations of this on youtube – and this is a pretty obscure song.

And it’s illegal (although Matador Records don’t contribute to the RIAA and I know because I ask them, because I boycott all companies associated with the RIAA) – it’s illegal, and people are doing it in droves anyway, in this huge act of civil disobedience which would be Ghandi-like if it actually mattered that much, and if the people involved were even thinking about the political aspects rather than simply expressing themselves.

Simple amateur creativity is the biggest act of civil disobedience going on in the world today?

It’s a nice thought.

Still. The Velvet Underground.

It’s been said that they never sold any records, but everyone who heard them picked up a guitar. It does my head in that they’re from the 60s, and not even the late 60s – and in a funny kind of way they represent a prototype (of some sort) of what’s happening now – what Clay Shirkey describes as an open invitation to participate, as in “I could do that too”. They taught the world to sing, by the age of 21. They broke every mould and taught people how to write songs from the pieces – listen to the song-structure in that first catpower video. It’s a tacit freeing of all successive artistic progeny from the constraints of conformity. You don’t need verses, you don’t need choruses, it doesn’t have to rhyme, it doesn’t have to be radio-friendly… and most importantly…

… it doesn’t even have to be terribly good.

And that in a nutshell is the genius of it.

I’m almost tempted to make a website of home-made videos of songs that are covers of Velvet Underground songs – 2 generations of replication etc – by both artist and medium.

But I won’t. I’ll just break the law by embedding this:

It’s not even a video… but getting back to the initial point about writing systems that allow people to create and propagate their own videos – like the inky thing at the beginning could almost be… really, the whole internet is one giant system for doing just that.

ps: Initial inspiration courtesy of atomicshed :twitter.

pps: it’s also projectable onto walls:

pps *

Someone who can speak many languages : Multilingual
Someone who can speak two languages : Bilingual
Someone who can only speak one language : English.

C’est moi.

Ok, I know this just came of Reddit etc – but this is cool

Someone’s flipped the tables on youtubees and used youtube clips as mix material. And it’s fucking excellent.

Genius:

Which is a lo-fi version of this:

which comes from a company that is making modular musical instruments…

We believe that the industrial world could become truly collaborative only by democratizing the creative process. With Zoybar, you don’t need to be a huge corporation to develop or promote your special effects application. We’ve done all the heavy lifting, and your application can be easily attached to the Zoybar platform, just by adding and changing its position across the profile grooves with common bolts
and screws.

As part of the design and production process, the Zoybar Hardware is manufactured only by demand, with no over production and minimum waste.
Our decentralized production process and the modular components system were designed to accommodate flexible productions scales with variety of solutions.

So they’d appear to be absolutely spot-on there then.

As a musician mind (and I will go off-topic here) I think this is a fairly good reflection of the fact that you can get too knob-orientated when it comes to music. It isn’t about creating new shapes, it’s about creating new sounds, and a physically (and historically) resonant way of weilding those notes. I mean Freur/underworld made a video playing brooms.

It’s not about mime (and making wackily shaped instruments is to a degree about mime), the instrument needs to be a physical manifestation of the sound. It needs to make your body a physical manifestation of the sound. The electric guitar is the size and shape it is for a reason. Bo Diddley’s oblong guitars didn’t catch on for a reason. Headless guitars didn’t really catch on for a reason.

Still, if you like this…

ie, playing over your own echo, you’ll like this… from Camille, who is a genuis:

She writes lyrics as a rhythm instrument, and the tune is beautiful. Incredibly clever, though being the jazz-purist that I am, I inevitably prefer her earlier stuff. Web-designer nerds should check her site out. Interesting navigation.

Anyway, she also does things with wool, for which I have a minor, unacountable fixation.