Ghosts in A Burning City : Red State Sound System

Driving a ragtop Malibu down Las Vegas Boulevard with Don and Frank has obviously left its mark on Joshua Ellis’ and his newly released “Ghosts in A Burning City” album.



There is a sound of sun permeating the whole album, whether it be the bastardized version of Boys of Summer skewed by exposure to the midday Nevada sun which is the opening track “Scatterlings and Refugees”, the hazy ambience of “Airport Terminal” or the overcooked manic guitar on “Divine Intervention”, with dust devils harassing the old Chevy as we desperately try to get out of the city. It’s there lurking in the background of the menacing “Berlin Floor Show”, but this isn’t lets get bronzed sun, oh no this is your gonna get burned, you’re gonna get burned real bad, and your gonna love it! The bleached bones of Cohen and Waits lie supine in the desert sun throughout the minimalist "Not in this world.." before being strung up ang juiced by the cybersound of "Scarecrow", whilst "The Secret King of Africa" punctuates the soundtrack like some delirious hallucination bought on by a cocktail of too much sun and a few too many tequilas whilst

"Every hour wounds" pares the sound down to a post punk ditty with echoes of the Pixies (and all descendants thereof) but not before a nod and a wink to the best of the british new wave.




The title track drips vitriol as Joshua rips into the fallacy of Hollywood's Vegas that has been fed to us, but has to be listened in conjunction with "Sleeping in Flame", which tempers that emotion, adding an air of desperate melancholy to the mix.




In my opinion Mr Ellis leaves the best till last "Coda:Requiem for a Diplomat". A lament in three four time well suited to Joshuas vocal delivery with well crafted lyrics and a brilliant arrangement. For this track alone the minstrel deserves rewarding with filthy lucre.




Ghosts in A Burning City is available via http://www.redstatesoundsystem.com/

Pay the Piper

Following on from my earlier post concerning the viability of the net as a means of distributing your artistic output for profit this recent report from the PRS seems to suggest that getting out and playing has now become more profitable than selling recordings of your work.

Then again, this could be skewed by the fact that some of the Major artists command a rather sizeable ticket price for their performances......

MP3 to Vinyl

There is a plethora of ways to covert your cherished vinyl recordings to MP3's but, in light of the recent campaign by Jarvis Cocker & friends to support independant record stores in the UK, what about the reverse? Is it possible to reverse the process and create the beautiful tactile discs that were once the staple of the music industry?

Perhaps this may point the way!

Seriously, though, if you really want to go the whole route of putting your artistic endevours onto a peice of black plastic then, as this article points out the only way seems to be to pay someone else....unless of course you have 10k burning a whole in your pocket

Songs in the key of Shakespeare

Whilst searching the web for some form of online musical composition programme (look I don't get access to Reason from work okay) I came across literature2music.com.

It strikes me that this is a similar concept to the one that Pete Townsend wanted to use for the Baba o'Reilly track, insofar as it is data being input to generate a musical sequence.

Unfortunately I've also forgotten my earphones to plug into my works PC, so guess I'll have to wait until later to try this little gadget out - it would be interesting to compare whether the Bard or Barbara Cartland produces a better composition when the text of their work is input!

Jukebox Jive

Okay, so you've accepted that you've got to give stuff away to get attention but where do you put it? Something that springs to mind, especially if you are a gigging ensemble is to get yourselves on the various sites of the venues that your outfit has performed at. Take for example the London venue of the Bull & Gate . Now in the dark distant past one of my old outfits played there, and as is the norm, we asked the sound guy to record the live performance. This was before the net had really impacted on every day live & recording to a CD was the height of technology

Now, what if you played that venue today and agreed to make such recordings available to the venue to put on their web presence in a sort of jukebox of bands that have played there?

You would get increased exposure, and the venue would have a growing showcase to pull in the punters.

The band plays “live” at the venue which supplies a soundman to record the performance and let the band have a copy.

The venue itself may not have the hosting capabilities to store all the mp3's that would invariably end up on the proposed jukebox, so why not put your recordings in the Internet Archive with a Creative Commons license attached. In return for giving the venue the right to broadcast the tracks free of charge, the band could then have them featured on the venues on-line jukebox.

The venue gets to show its credentials in terms of the past acts it has hosted, and the acts get further exposure.

Extrapolating from this the venue could use this as a means of gauging which bands to re-book by capturing the hits each act gets via the jukebox. If they are so inclined it should also be feasible to produce charts – let’s face it we all like our names in lights.

Likewise with a little clever meta-tagging the bands could exploit the “showcase” to point punters in the direction of their material and/or website- naturally it would only be right to include reciprocal links back to the venues site.

Cafepress - Outsource your merchandising

And why not? Can you really afford to pay for a run of 500 T-shirts and then have to sell them at a loss when the band splits? Basically, if you haven't somebody else's money to play with why should you risk your own when others can do it a lot easier than you?

Okay, so the Cafepress thing has been around for a while and is possibly only really viable if you live in the USA, but there are sites that offer similar services whatever your geographical impairment.

It will cost you nothing and may even give you a little bit of exposure in a field that you wouldn't normal venture into - it's worth a try isn't it?

GotSeen.com

After what seems to be await of eternity there finally appears to be a site that offers what Mperia used to do all those years ago
GotSeeN is a new UK music discovery site that allows artists to sell their mercahandsise on line as well as allowing listeners to stream and download material.

At the tiome of writing it is only acouple of weeks old, but the site appears to have gone down the payments via PayPal route to get the moula to the artist

Interestingly enough, the site also seems to be geared up to allow bands to sell merchandise, though quite how thias works needs further investigation.

The site is primarily UK based, but given the trans-border nature of the internet there should be no reason why artists outside the UK cannot benefit from the service

New Music Strategies

Just a quick nod towards an excellent reference site that may be of interest, namely New Music Strategies, which contains a bit of advice that may (or may not) be of use to you when trying to negotiate your way through the minefield of trying to market yourself & your material via the wonders of the worldwide web .