Pride

My dear friend Monica Richards has released Pride, a new digital single from her upcoming album Naiades. The song features guitars and bass by renowned horror writer (and erstwhile DC punk) Steve Niles, who played on about half of the album. I co-produced and mixed it all at The Eye Socket, and added drums to a few songs (including Pride).

Naiades is a unique and very exciting project. The CD will include not only an album of Monica’s strongest music to date, but a beautifully packaged 32-page hardcover board book with original artwork from some of the most remarkable names in comic and pop art: Bernie Wrightson, James O’Barr, Bill Sienkiewicz, Kelley Jones, Chrissie Zullo, and many others! The album is set for release in January 2012 on Danse Macabre Records.

Pride is available now from Amazon and iTunes. Visit monicarichards.com for more information.

Unless They're Weird, Your Kids Will Eat It

Santa Monica, California rockers Wooden Robot have released their debut album Unless They’re Weird, Your Kids Will Eat It. The members of Wooden Robot combine hard rock, alternative and metal influences into their own distinctive sound. I mixed about half of the album (seven tracks) at The Eye Socket.

The album is available now from iTunes and Amazon, with a Kickstarter project underway to fund a CD pressing. Visit the band’s website and sign up for their mailing list to receive two free tracks from the album.

Watch:

Apparently Leonardo DiCaprio is in it.

It all started quite innocently.

The twentieth century was coming to an end. James Cameron’s insanely expensive 1997 romance/disaster film Titanic was the biggest thing ever, dazzling housewives and teenage girls everywhere and out-grossing every other perfectly respectable highest-grossing-movie-ever by a comfortable margin.

It was the first film ever to earn more than a billion dollars at the box office. It won eleven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and scores of other awards. Celine Dion had a worldwide #1 megahit (and a Grammy, of course) with that wretched song, and the (mostly orchestral) soundtrack album sold over eleven million copies in the U.S. alone. The TV ads were relentless. People wouldn’t shut up about it. The film was #1 for fifteen consecutive weeks in the U.S. (still a record) and stayed in theaters for the better part of a year. It held the record for highest worldwide box office for twelve years — until Cameron’s own Avatar beat it in 2010.

I didn’t see it.

King? What is he talking about?

At first, that wasn’t so unusual. I don’t always get out to a theater for every “must see” Hollywood sensation. Even when I’m really excited to see a movie, I often wait until it’s released on video, to avoid the high cinema expense and the inevitable annoyances from less discreet audience members. But something about Titanic made it exceptional. A pop culture phenomenon of that size exerts its own influence, its own pressure. Pressure to participate. Societal expectations. Everybody saw Titanic. After a while, it became a genuine curiosity that I hadn’t. It even seemed to bother some people.

And the more Cameron’s behemoth saturated popular culture, the more I resisted. My petulant, rebellious inner youth wasn’t about to let $1.8 billion in box office make entertainment decisions for me. As the pressure increased, I resisted more. (This wasn’t difficult, I admit; despite near-universal acclaim, the film never looked very interesting to me.) I rejected the hype; I defied the pressure to take part in the phenomenon. Finally, I made the ultimate vow of resistance: I would never see Titanic. Not seeing it was such a rare distinction that it became a point of pride, my invisible badge of honor. I wear it still.

I think in the film he has hair.

I’ve seen bits of the film, of course. The trailers and TV ads were inescapable back then, and in the years since I’ve caught the occasional glimpse of it while flipping through channels. Period costumes. CGI water. Billy Zane.

I’ve been assured on many occasions that it’s really a very good movie, and that I don’t know what I’m missing — both points I cheerfully concede. I have no reason to doubt that it’s an entertaining film, probably rather moving, perhaps even inspiring. But I won’t see it. Titanic has taken up a special place in my life — the one film I will absolutely never ever see. It’s a very specific kind of non-participation into which I’ve invested well over a decade, and it means something to me.

Now, here’s something interesting: Upon learning about my special relationship with Titanic, a common response from people is to begin devising a scheme to force me to watch it, or to somehow trick me into seeing it (as if I wouldn’t notice until the end credits). Where this impulse comes from — why even dear friends would have this desire to destroy my special relationship with Titanic — has never been fully explained. Is it envy? Jealousy? The cascading social pressure of the ubiquitous mega-blockbuster? Some people seem truly uncomfortable with the idea that someone in their midst hasn’t seen Titanic. And that makes my petulant, rebellious inner youth giddy with delight.

Yeah, like this.

It works for me, you see. In fact, I think everybody should have a Titanic: one special, exceptionally popular movie you’ll absolutely never see. It’s easy: Two hours, more or less, that you simply don’t invest in that particular title. Choose one and claim it. Stake out your permanent exclusion from that one little piece of pop culture. It takes commitment, and discipline — you cannot un-see a film once you’ve seen it, of course. There will be pressure from others to cave in, and your friends may attempt to subject you to a Clockwork Orange-style forced viewing. But if you successfully defend your non-participation, you’ll have earned something that few others can enjoy. And the longer you defend it, the sweeter it gets.

Who knows? In our media-soaked existence, with practically unlimited entertainment available on demand, we may find ourselves better defined by what we haven’t seen than by what we have. As human culture becomes ever more homogenized, the distinction of personal inexperience might only become more valuable. As of this writing, I haven’t committed any other films to Titanic status, but really, there’s no inherent reason to limit one’s Titanic List to a single title.

I still haven’t seen Avatar…

[EDIT: As of November 18, 2011, I have officially added all Twilight films (current and future installments) to the Titanic list.]

Laboratory X

My new radio show Laboratory X broadcasts live every Wednesday (now Thursday!), 9-11pm Eastern Time, on channel birn1 of the Berklee Internet Radio Network. The birn is student-run, musician radio from the Berklee College of Music, broadcasting around the clock on six channels. Listen anywhere in the world!

Every week I’ll be playing selections from the darker side of rock and electronic music: modern indie, electronica and post-rock, late seventies/early eighties post-punk and new wave, classic rock, psychedelia and more, all threaded together with bits of film music, exotica, and other unstable ingredients. I’ll be talking about record production, technology, inspiration, invention, and other geekery, with weekly themes, unknown variables and unpredictable outcomes. Tune in every Wednesday Thursday night and be part of an ongoing (and possibly quite dangerous) radio experiment!

Visit the Laboratory X show page for more information.

Here’s a direct link to the live stream: birn1

The Strange Familiar EP

Multimedia performance artist, creative superforce and ex-D.C. punk Monica Richards has released a new solo EP entitled The Strange Familiar, which I co-produced, mixed and mastered at the Eye Socket.

A preview of her forthcoming album NAIADES, the EP showcases Monica at her best, effortlessly commanding a colorful landscape of orchestral majesty, gothic rock, and electronica, with her distinctive voice front and center. The EP includes an exclusive remix (also done by me) of the song “A Good Thing” from Monica’s previous solo album Infrawarrior.

Order The Strange Familiar on import CD (signed!) directly from Monica’s site, or download from CD Baby.

Hear samples below:

end of an era?

Analysts and commentators in the music business are a gloomy bunch. Dogged by devils around every corner, they’ve foretold the death of their industry since its birth. Rapid changes in the way musical product is composed, recorded, manufactured and distributed — brought about by constantly advancing technology — have made the record business a tumultuous one, giving recording companies plenty of reasons to worry along the way. Now, many believe technology finally is bringing about the end of the recording industry, and that its first victim is the album format that dominated the second half of the twentieth century.

They are wrong, again.

Even at their bloated, decadent peak in the 1970s and ’80s, the major labels scrambled for self-preservation against the threat of “home taping” enabled by the insidious Philips Compact Cassette. Convinced that consumers equipped with cassette recorders would simply record all the music they wanted from the radio — or from friends’ copies — and never buy records again, industry consortia RIAA and BPI fought for years to defeat the technology through lawsuits, Congressional pressure, and public campaigns.

it's sort of cute, in retrospect.

We know the story: No one could stop the audio cassette’s wave of destruction. Profits soared anyway. Failure! Success!

Of course, that wasn’t the first time (nor the last) that shrieking publishers of creative works rang alarm bells and fought a desperate war against the perils of sinister new technology. Jack Valenti and the MPAA frantically lobbied Congress in 1982 to thwart the rise of the VCR (Valenti: “We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry … whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of this machine.”). That didn’t work, but somehow, the VCR went on to earn countless billions for movie studios. Failure! Success!

the horror!

In the 1970s, the photocopier was the folk devil of book publishers, certain their sales would seize once the public had the ability to Xerox all the books they wanted. Even the quaint player piano and the gramophone, at the beginning of the twentieth century, had their opponents (including John Philip Souza) who worried over the threat of “mechanical music” against real art and its creators. Technology is scary! Still, industry thrived.

In the late 1980s, the music industry was enjoying its greatest-ever boom, with labels re-releasing their back catalog on Compact Disc (and persuading customers to buy their record collections all over again), when a new threat appeared. Digital Audio Tape (DAT) prompted a whole new “home taping” panic, along with a new wave of Congressional pressure from hysterical major labels. The RIAA kicked and screamed and foretold the apocalypse: The “perfect fidelity” of digital recording (a sad fallacy, in fact) surely meant no consumer need ever pay for music again; one could simply keep a library of “perfect” copies on DAT!

eek!

Electronics manufacturers were coerced into a compromise: the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992. Under the AHRA, a substantial tax was levied on digital recording devices and blank media — ostensibly a royalty to be distributed to artists through performing rights organizations and musicians’ unions. (The convoluted distribution structure allots the majority of royalties to labels and music publishers.) The AHRA also mandated the Serial Copy Management System, wherein all but the most expensive “professional” machines were fitted with hardware that disabled them from making second-generation copies. Marketing stalled, confounded consumers balked, and DAT never saw widespread use outside of professional studios, where the copy-protection scheme (among other technical problems) vexed recording engineers. As a consumer medium, DAT was doomed, along with its SCMS-yoked cousins DCC and Minidisc. Success! Failure!

some people dislike the RIAA.

The more recent story of MP3, Napster and the DMCA has more than its share of irony. Industry reactions to the first actual threat of illicit music copying exacerbated the problem at every turn. The 1999 lawsuit against Napster brought such widespread attention to the file-sharing service that many millions of new users joined, and a number of similar services sprang up around it. The inherent copy-ability of digitized music and the Streisand effect of the industry’s efforts to stop it fueled a global explosion of “music piracy.” Meanwhile, consumers who paid for their music were punished by rising prices and unadvertised copy-protection encoded into their CDs. Public sentiment toward the RIAA continued to darken with its wave of lawsuits against hapless grandmothers, children, college students and other “pirates.” The recording industry was alienating its own customers and fighting a hopeless war against uncontrollable technology, ostensibly (as ever) to protect artists and copyright owners (who are usually not artists, but their labels and publishers).

(By the way: As reported by techdirt, the $64+ million the RIAA spent on anti-piracy lawsuits between 2006 and 2008 yielded about $1.4 million in settlements. Great job!)

Jobs to the rescue

It was the RIAA’s longtime nemesis — innovation from the consumer electronics industry — that saved it from certain death. Steve Jobs’ audacious Apple iTunes Store launched in 2003 and quickly proved that many consumers would pay for music when given a convenient, reliable alternative to illegal downloading. By 2008, iTunes was the top music retailer in the U.S., a position it still holds. Yet even this effort was partially undermined by industry paranoia: In their initial agreements with Apple, the major labels insisted Digital Rights Management be used in all downloads from the iTunes store, to hinder copying. It didn’t really work, instead causing its own problems, as perhaps best expressed in Jobs’ own 2007 screed against DRM, “Thoughts on Music.” Apple later that year discontinued the use of DRM (although some of their catalog is still encoded with it).

While illegal downloading continues, the success of iTunes and other legitimate download vendors is undeniable. Their sales statistics are increasingly cited as the metrics of music consumption, and they are good enough to provide some reassurance that, although the previous music industry model is inoperable, there can at least continue to be a music industry (with some adjustment of methods and expectations).

They are also the numbers trotted out by those sounding the death knell of the album, and they can be compelling, as shown in this graph from a 2010 Ars Technica article:

In terms of units, single songs outsold albums in 2009 by an overwhelming margin: 1.1 billion downloaded singles against 76 million albums. It seems clear that, as the article asserts, people “just aren’t buying albums.”

Then again, 76 million is still a significant number, and when you consider that a typical album comprises ten or more individual songs, the data appear rather less one-sided. Moreover, when we take into account the revenue from downloaded albums — and from physical CDs — a very different picture emerges. Here is a more complete data set, from 2010:

If $1.2 billion in singles is worthy of attention, $4.2 billion in albums probably shouldn’t be ignored either. It’s true that recent trends show a steep decline in overall sales, with a telling rise in sales of singles. But is this really enough to pronounce the album dead? 309 million albums (in the U.S. alone) is not a small number. And you can add another 2.8 million to that number for vinyl albums, a market that continues to grow steadily. (Neilsen SoundScan reports an even higher number, 326 million total albums sold in 2010.)

But even if sales figures reliably foretold the total dominance of singles, there’s a more important principle at work here: The creation of art, even commercial art, stubbornly refuses to be driven by demand. Most music is made by artists, and artists like making albums.

think "Revolver"

The rise to prominence in the 1950s and ’60s of the album format, and its pervasive presence in our culture since then, were not accidental, nor driven purely by industry. The album format makes sense — especially for music creators. Being a group of songs recorded within a specific time frame, by a particular team of people, often in the same environment(s), a proper album has a sonic identity that represents that unified effort. More than a collection of songs, the album is its own form of expression, a portrait of the artists’ lives in the time — a week, a month, a year — that they spent working on it. Many albums go further, weaving thematic threads throughout: lyrical, musical, emotional, even visual. And the fact missed by those watching only numbers is that people who create music really like working this way. The practical, economical, and creative advantages of recording an group of songs together as an album hold undeniable appeal for artists, and for labels. In 2010, according to SoundScan, about 75,000 albums were released in the U.S. alone.

and some people actually like listening to albums.

Numbers people may be quick to point out that this number is down 22% from 2009′s album releases (96,000). Gasp! But while analysts speculate on the devastating implications, they ignore previous years’ statistics: 2009 represents a curious rise in U.S. album releases since 2006 (76,000), peaking in 2008 (at 106,000). Recent SoundScan figures also fail to account for all of the releases marketed by independent artists directly to their fans through newly available self-distribution channels. (Independent releases can be set up for Soundscan tracking, but not all artists do so.) It’s probably too soon to derive concrete meaning from this rise and fall in the wake of the file-sharing explosion, but the fact remains: 75,000 is a hell of a lot of new albums in one year. Remember, too, that most of the single songs being purchased today were recorded and released within albums, and otherwise wouldn’t exist to be downloaded individually. The album as a creative framework remains the primary impetus behind singles.

I'm gonna be rich!

Music, and the industry that exploits it, have always been powered by the naïve optimism and unrealistic ambition of artists and music lovers. Few teenagers ever picked up a guitar and started a band because they (or their parents) saw it as the pathway to a lucrative career. Nearly every record label ever launched — including those that went on to great success — was founded not by a savvy entrepreneur keen to capitalize on a sure thing, but by an idealistic music fan with just a few dollars in the bank and the urge to share great music with the world. At least 99% of all music is made as an expression of ideas and emotions, not as commercial contrivance to make a quick fortune.

When industry ignores the creative forces behind genuine art and forgets the people who make it, we get fabricated pop pabulum. And we do — all the time (check this week’s top ten). Thankfully, human culture is not built solely on commerce. Thankfully, most artists continue to find inspiration from sources other than sales figures and market demand. Thankfully, they continue creating and producing within and without the system wrought by major labels, with no end in sight. They make albums — and they sell them, in increasingly innovative ways, to hungry audiences.

Until they stop doing that, the album is very much alive.

Moloch

The new album Moloch by the Swiss electro-rock band Metallspürhunde was released April 8 on Danse Macabre Records.

On this album, the newly streamlined band (following the departure of two members) shifted their sound away from the gothic metal emphasis of their previous work. Their new sound combines hard electro beats and aggressive synthesizers with rock guitar and a touch of eighties synthpop, with sinister vocals (in German as always). The band recorded in their own studio and sent the tracks to The Eye Socket, where I did some additional production and mixed the album.

Moloch has spent several weeks already in the Deutschen Alternative Charts and is receiving excellent reviews. Congratulations to the band!

The album is available by MP3 download from Amazon and as an import CD, in a single-disc edition and a limited deluxe edition with bonus remix disc.

Rise Against/Face to Face split 7-inch

My old pals Face to Face have been busy. Their excellent new album Laugh Now, Laugh Later comes out May 17, with a big North American tour in support. Their Kickstarter project for a limited edition 180-gram colored vinyl edition (with artwork by renowned tattoo artist Corey Miller!) was a quick success, meeting its funding goal in short order. Copies are still available as of this writing. (To be clear: I was not involved in the recording of Laugh Now, Laugh Later — the first record they’ve made without me since the 1998 Live album!)

Meanwhile, the band have a split 7-inch single with Rise Against out May 10. Face to Face’s cover of “The Good Left Undone” (which I did record and mix) is backed with Rise Against’s cover of “Blind.” The limited edition colored vinyl single is available for pre-order right now (five bucks!) from Folsom Records.

Rise Against / Face to Face Split 7″ by folsomrecords