The latest Sound of The Ladies podcast is out now! You can listen to it here:

Download audio file (47_-__The_Coldest_Western_City_Outside_Anchorage.mp3)

or via iTunes or RSS or direct download.

I’ve had the lyrics for this song floating around for over a year –  originally set to a slightly shitter chord progression, which I’ve forgotten because it bored even me. Almost all of the songs I write happen because I have a riff or chord progression and an idea for a lyric or a story in mind –  the concrete lyrics condense around the rhythm, melody and harmony of the music. Then there’s usually some wrangling as bits get added and subtracted, different instruments wander in and out, and I make some effort to put a pretty frame around the whole thing. Anyway, this was a very rare case of writing the music around the extant lyric – and the first outing for my hammond organ guitar sound. This was achieved with a lot of different guitar parts, all ebowed and stuck through Logic’s Leslie effect. A lot of in-the-box recording, which I don’t tend to do for clean or dirty guitars, but for heavily effected sounds it can sound pretty good (ebow+leslie deffo counts in that category). Anyway, I digress… let me know what you think, through the usual channels.

Btw, I don’t know what the coldest western city outside Anchorage is. I don’t even think Anchorage is the coldest city in “the west”, however you define it. The song implies that the coldest western city outside Anchorage is London. Although it feels that way on this cold February evening, the coldest western city outside Anchorage is probably somewhere in Canada.

It’s a bit late, I know, but here they are: my new year’s resolutions for music and life.

1) Write more songs
This is pretty much my constant resolution – write more, write faster, write looser, write better. Last January, Darren Hayman wrote and released a song a day – a workrate I don’t think I would ever achieve without the songs being shit, and certainly not while I have a job. I toyed with the idea of releasing a cover a day, but decided against it – it’s a pale shadow of what Hayman and others have accomplished, and I would feel as if it were trying to wring undue attention for myself from work that is not my own. If I were doing it every day, I worry I’d struggle to inject much stylistic variation and I think it would start feeling like hackwork quite quickly.

Nevertheless, I want to write more. Having a slightly lower barrier to entry helps – i.e. being less critical of ideas before they’re fully formed – but just acknowledging how important writing is to me and how weird I get when I don’t do it properly and often is also key. It’s something I forget.

Summary: Songs aren’t a chore, they’re an opportunity for creativity.

2) Enjoy it more
I put a lot of pressure on myself to write more, write better. Paradoxically, I think my best and most creative stuff comes from having a certain amount of playfulness. If the writing process is fun, I generally enjoy listening to and performing the song more.

Summary: More fun please!

3) Gigs
I’m not certain whether I should be focussing on more gigs or better gigs. Probably both. If there’s going to be a crowd, if we’re getting paid, if a gig is fun, if I like the promoter, if the promoter hasn’t asked us to bring 20 people, if there are people on the bill I like, if it’s something a bit different, if it’s a gig or a venue we’ve never played before, if we feel like the promoter likes us and their crowd might – these all feel like decent reasons to play a gig. I may even get involved with organising a gig or two. Ooooooh.

Summary: Not more, not better, but nice gigs.

4) Tweet a bit less
I feel like 2011 was the year I hit my twitter stride and really started enjoying it – using it for conversations, jokes and a medium for a form of surreal stream-of-consciousness storytelling that I find highly enjoyable, especially when other people join in (to wit: an alternative version of Sex and the City that even I might watch) . However, these experiments take up a lot of tweets, and I get annoyed with others who fill up my timeline with volume, whether or not their quality is good. Don’t expect my stream to be less self-indulgent or discursive – far from it, I think there’s a lot to be done with Twitter that I haven’t figured out yet – but maybe I could moderate my rate a bit?

Summary: Twitter friends don’t let other Twitter friends alienate their followers with large quantities of stream-of-consciousness tweets.

5) Make Pastry
I learned shortcrust in 2011, and have already done puff from scratch in 2012. Filo is NEVER going to happen, so let’s cross this one off, eh?

Summary: SUCCESS!

6) Eat less pastry

I am a little bit tubby after Xmas, still. Time to stop shoving pie at my face.

This will require feeding all the pastry I plan to make to people I like. You’re welcome.

Summary: make friends with pastry then give them pastry

7) More photography
I’ve fallen out of photography in the last few years, and getting an entry-level DSLR and (unrelatedly) an instagram account may be my way back into it. I really like how science blogger Alice Bell uses photography and commentary to make London look way existential* – how photographic composition forms an observation (figurative as well as literal). Obviously the use of photos has been widespread on twitter and flickr as a social tool, a discussion-starter – and I find the creation of a world (environmental storytelling, if you will) by judicious use of image very interesting – patching together fragments and inferring the inbetween. Let’s see what happens.

Summary: Photography is way existential

8 ) More drawing
I’m a terrible draftsman; I got barely a passing grade at GCSE art. But I’ve used pen drawing a lot to start to sketch out the conceptual heart of a song, its shape before I have words to describe it. Its inky birth moan.

Summary: Draw your own album cover(s).

9) Film-making
Not sure about this yet, but I feel that I want more to fit around a song – give it its pipe and armchair and comfy slippers. I don’t know whether this is image or costume or dance or film yet.

Summary: More art, more story.

10) More blog
Or rather less blog, more frequent. Something between the essays I write on this site not often enough and the fishfood I sprinkle on my twitter feed rather too often. Works in progress, ideas, comments, images, rather than just… essays.

Summary: Less is more.

That’s all the news. Add your suggestions below the line.

*this is less a resolution than a comment: 2012 will not only be the year that “way existential” becomes my default compliment, but also the year it fully transitions from being an ironic Clueless quotation to me really meaning it and forgetting where I got it from. Current status: only 42% Cher.

The latest Sound of The Ladies podcast is out now! You can listen to it here:

Download audio file (46TheLookUponYour_Face.mp3)

or via iTunes or RSS or direct download.

Audience-members at one of the Sound of The Ladies’ December gigs should recognise this new song, written for Robin Ince’s 9 Lessons and Carols for Godless People on December 20th. It was pretty hard to write an atheist carol – if you can’t give thanks for the birth of Jesus and how nice God has been to you, you’re faced with a want of uplifting material. Inspired partly by Dr Manhattan’s speech in Watchmen, and partly by stuff I’ve been reading about how bad human beings are at judging risk, and acknowledging how much luck plays a role in our lives, this is a tribute to random chance. The uplifting bit comes, I guess, from the fact that we are, each and every one of us, the sperm that won – so we are all, in some small way, winners.

Here’s the SoundCloud version, if you prefer:

The look upon your face (v4) by The Sound of the Ladies

It’s been a fairly busy year for Dr Martin Austwick: I was wed, got a new job, released an album of songs about science (which got mentioned in BoingBoing), launched it at a beautiful old time music hall (thanks to Geekpop), wrote half of a new Sound of The Ladies album (it was meant to be out by now but RL/PS3/not being happy with all the songs [delete as applicable] got in the way), recorded songs for Spirit of Play, performed at the Bloomsbury Theatre, recorded the 200th episode of Answer Me This!, started a new academic podcast, wrote a jingle for Josie Long and Andrew Collins’ BBC6 show, and last but not least, learned to make shortcrust pastry and understand clues in the Telegraph cryptic crossword. If only it had been a less right-wing paper.

So what for 2012? As ever, no masterplan. I hope to finish the SOTL album, maybe a science EP if I can think of a way to make it different from the last album*, do more gigs with the band, find more ways to be creative and do what I do but better.

I can’t help admiring Darren Hayman’s January Songs project (where he released a new song every day in January 2011, later releasing it as a double-album) – that’s a proper work ethic and a really good way to strip away a lot of the barriers to writing by forcing yourself to write lots. There are a bunch of reasons I wouldn’t do that myself, foremost amongst them being 1) Darren Hayman’s already done it 2) I have a full-time job and don’t see how I would physically have enough time 3) I just don’t write that fast, the results would probably be really thin. Of those, 3) is probably the least convincing -  I probably could manage it. Certainly Jonathan Coulton’s Thing a Week project would be doable, if I set my mind to it and thought it would be a good idea.

The alternative I’m toying with is to record and share a cover version every day until I run out or get bored. This is not quite as good as writing them, but it has the advantage that I know a fair few covers and could learn others, so I could probably keep this going for several weeks if not months. I could bash them out quite fast, and this would be another way to force me to do stuff every day. On the other side… it’s kind of been done (I assume). And it would be karaoke. And promoting myself on the basis of other people’s songwriting talent (although maybe it would introduce people to some cool songs they’d never heard, who knows?). What do people think? Is this a waste of time? Would anyone listen to a variety of songs reduced to a guitar/vocals arrangement? Can you let me know in the comments, on email (thesoundoftheladies@gmail.com), or on twitter (@martinaustwick) – should I bother? Does this sound like a fun thing or something a bit shit?

*nothing wrong with Songs From The Scientific Cabaret, it would just be a shame to repeat it.

The Sound of the Ladies will be gigging, in an actual, real, non-virtual space this month, and you should totally come to visit.

—

In our first gig since Green Man and our last before Xmas*, we’ll be at the Camden Enterprise on December 19th. This should be a lot of fun, so please join us for some SOTL-style festivities (slightly folky, slightly odd). There may be prizes. You can find the venue here:

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=camden+enterprise&hl=en&ll=51.5444,-0.153079&spn=0.014853,0.012596&sig=T2F&fb=1&gl=uk&cid=0,0,8871128865711171183&t=m&z=16&vpsrc=0&iwloc=A

—

No plans for New Years Eve? Then get your tickets for The Last Best Party at the Wilmington Arms, featuring TSOTL, Steve Hall, Helen Keen, Bright Club sets and punk rock karaoke in a night of geekery, music and comedy. You can purchase your tickets here (earlybird specials until December 9th):

http://www.wegottickets.com/event/142995

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Be nice to see you on the 19th – or, if you’re not having it large in Rio/watching the sun rise over a whale from an arctic icebreaker – New Year’s Eve!

*(On the 20th, we’re playing at 9 Lessons and Carols for Godless People, but we’re only playing one song and it’s probably sold out – so come to the more intimate warm-up gig on the 19th instead).

The latest Sound of The Ladies podcast is out now! You can listen to it here:

Download audio file (45YesterdayIsHere.mp3)

or via iTunes or RSS or direct download.

This month marks a rare foray into a Tom Waits cover version – rare because he’s one of my favourite artists and I have very little to add to his definitive versions. I talk a bit about why I’ve made an exception for this song on the podcast, and in a previous post which also includes the video of me performing it – the short explanation is that I thought of a way to make the arrangement a bit different and I felt like it. Comments below or to the usual address…

Last week, I was very lucky to meet America’s Radio Sweetheart, Jesse Thorn, who was in London to talk to a roomful of people like me about “making a living from doing cool stuff on the Internet” (his title was better). Forty of us gathered in a baking hot room in Fitzrovia* and he talked us through his 12-point plan for 1000% success. I won’t give away his trademarked plan (you’ll have to send your $29.95 to storage garage on a desultory industrial estate to receive a DVD, abs toner and sachets of miracle gro), but I will touch upon his first point. Because it’s very close to something I’ve been saying a lot; weirdly, on my science blog and at an academic podcast training course, but it applies to so much more beyond that niche of a niche. Namely: do stuff. Do it now. Do it as well as you can. Learn by doing. Get better.

To anyone who does anything DIY, this probably seems too trivial to state. And in a world of GarageBand, iMovie, Facebook, YouTube, phone cameras, Bandcamp, Vimeo, blogger, wordpress, podbean, libsyn, etsy, folksy, CDbaby, Ditto, ReverbNation and hundreds of other sites existing only for the sharing of user created content, I hope that Teh Kidz are so used to just making stuff and getting it out to people, this comes as a no-brainer too. But I see the spectre of the x-factor and its poisonous ilk, where people trying to get up and do something scary are judged by a panel of experts (you know, people who know all about The Good Musics) who either smack them down (usually) or propel them to “stardom” (occasionally, thankfully – those saps are really fucked). Outside Cowell’s dark fairytale, the value of creative work should not be decided by a panel of experts** and you don’t have to wait for anyone’s permission to share your creations with the world. The World will soon let you know if it’s not interested.

Anyway, I’ve talked about this a lot in the past, so I won’t labour the point. You start off being a bit rubbish, and you get better by practice and application. What Jesse’s talk reminded me is that the purpose is not entirely process-oriented! After a few years, say, of doing that thing you do, you have a library of stuff you’ve done – hopefully, much of it pretty good – which serves not only as something people might want to buy – but a reminder of why you did it in the first place.

Jesse’s talk did hit on a number of points (11 more, to be precise), some of which I felt very in tune with and some which were new to me – and if you’re a DIY person*** you should seek him out when he brings his 12-step plan to your town…

*seriously, The Green Man of Riding House Street, WTF? I genuinely have a heart condition that I spent all evening expecting to kick off because of the OPPRESSIVE heat

**obviously awards, tv and radio commissioners, grants, etc do sort of do this – many after the fact of creation though

*** that’s a lot/most people, right?

This is a movie of me playing “Yesterday is Here”, a sublime Tom Waits song from his 1987 album/play “Frank’s Wild Years” (he’s no stranger to litigation, so I hope that if his publishers come across this they recognise it as a heartfelt fan homage rather than an attempt by me to cash in).

I’ve never attempted a Tom Waits cover before, at least not on t’internet. There are a number of reasons for this, not primarily his aforementioned robustness with people he feels are taking the piss with his music. Tom Waits is a musical hero of mine, and every aspect of his music is creative and deliberate: from melody to lyrics to arrangement to production to mixing. This is simply the first time I’ve thought of an arrangement of one of his songs that isn’t just a pale copy of his, definitive, version. I mean, it’s not wildly different, but giving it a Johnny Cash-y, country-ish guitar and putting it up a fourth sort of felt right. I have a much lighter, more frothy voice than he – a cappuccino to his whisky.

I wanted to base the song around a “live” guitar and vocals performance – which, after a lot of false starts, I got in 3 or 4 takes. Recording yourself can feel a bit like juggling – recording yourself whilst filming it is like juggling on a unicycle – lots of falling over. You may notice some bass and slide guitars – the intention was always to build some other parts in on the live skeleton (which has some post-production on it, but was otherwise done “without cheating” -  no overdubs or comps). I think this approach makes for an interesting hybrid. I have made a couple of small changes to the lyrics so they sat a little better in my mouth – but you may not spot those changes unless you’re as big a fan of Frank’s Wild Years as I am.

If you like my version, then obviously you should listen to the original version on Frank’s Wild Years – available for Spotify users here – and the CD is available (e.g.) here.

My most recent song, Retrospectively is a duet of sorts (well, with myself), partly because I’ve had the opportunity to work with singer Morgan Rushton in the Sound of The Ladies recently, begging the question “what can you do with a second lead vocalist?” (beyond the obvious answer “Kick-ass harmonies”). I wrote a blog a long time ago on duets (in which I was rather rude about the  cliched “iron fist in a velvet glove” male/female duets), and in the comments Tommy Herbert  mentioned Moldy Peaches duet “Steak for Chicken” (spoiler: this contains language and themes that some might consider a bit rude):

(Listeners to the podcast may have thought I was referring to their better-known “Anyone Else But You”, featured on Juno – this is a more conventional structure where the singers trade verses.) I agree with him that this is a fascinating song; two overlapping narratives, shifting in and out of coherence with one another, like two bent guitar strings, beat frequencies appearing and disappearing. I love the self-destructiveness in this style of writing – the lyricists have written two different threads, and (on each listen), at best the listener will be able to appreciate one all the way through. More likely, the overlapping structure will fracture both strands into little chunks of isolated meaning floating in a sea of noise* – at least that’s my experience of listening to this song. The writers are willfully setting fire to any work they’ve done in writing the lyrics in the first place – a carefree attitude I admire and which enhances my listening pleasure.

That was my original intention when writing Retrospectively – but then I sort of chickened out and decided that doing that wouldn’t sound as melodic as I wanted (to be fair to the Moldy Peaches, neither did their song). I’d done something similar a long time ago with a song called Centralia, PA:

Verse 1 goes:

You stood so close you could catch her breath

But left it hanging your stare

She pressed her palm down firmly

Pushing on your best friend hat…

Verse 2:

From the fire on the outskirts

To a tower of ash ascending

The burning coal which blew a hole

Where your home had been…

And verse 3 synthesised these into:

You stood so close you could catch her breath

A tower of ash ascending

She pressed her palm down firmly

Where your home had been…

As you can probably see, I am rather fascinated with the idea of overlapping and interacting ideas creating new meaning. Only the day after the podcast was released did I remember The Delgados “13 Gliding Principles” from their sublime 1999 album “The Great Eastern”:

Singers Alun Woodward and Emma Pollock are still active (the latter with The Burns Unit) and I would warmly encourage you to check out their back catalogue. You may sense I’ve done a complete about-face about duets in the last two years; but don’t worry, I still hate Joan Baez, Sinatra, and Serge Gainsbourg -  I just have someone I can duet with. As ’twere.

*like my twitter stream

The Sound of The Ladies podcast this month features “Retrospectively”, a brand new song:

Download audio file (44_Retrospectively.mp3)

or via iTunes or RSS.

There’s a rather dark line towards the end of the song, based on a Kafka quotation which goes something like:

Sometimes, and in my secret heart, perhaps, all the time, I wonder I am a human being at all.

I say “goes something like” because it’s in translation and I read it in a preface to an edition of “The Trial” at least 8 years ago and can’t seem to find it anywhere since. I would be very grateful to any Modern Languages scholars who could point me in the right direction, because it’s a quotation that I’ve been trying to work into a song ever since I heard it. There’s something about such an astringently nihilistic statement that I find incredibly pure, and emotionally palette-cleansing; a pretty bitter sorbet.

The song was inspired by a conversation about burlesque, something I realised I’ve never seen in the flesh, uh, as it were, and so there’s a lot of physicality in the song. It’s the closest I’ve managed to come to writing an alt. folk Jesus Lizard song, and for a lot of the song I was thinking about David Yow dancing. Which is a form of late-20th Century male burlesque, I guess. There’s probably a lot of Pixies there too.

The time signature is 5/4 in the “choruses” and 6/4 in the verses, making it a real pig to record. But very satisfying when I got it to work. Let me know what you think, as ever, at the usual address.