The limited edition run of CDs for “Songs from the Scientific Cabaret” are finally ready to greet the world, and fine they look too:
A micrograph of stained penicillin is printed onto the CDs, which are presented in an attractive Petri Dish setting. The album sleeve notes come in the form of a 20-page scientific paper, telling you all you could ever wish to know about the origins, methods and results of this art/science endeavour, as well as full lyrics and some scientific background to explain the songs.
It’s available now to pre-order for £7 + £1.50 p+p in the UK and will ship on March 10th, when the digital version will also be available for download.
However! If you come to The GeekPop Launch Night (March 10th, Wilton’s Music Hall, tickets £10), you are entitled to buy a copy of this incredible package for only £4. £4! That’s a £4.50 saving, or equivalently, like getting the launch night ticket half price!* You’re welcome.
If that’s not enough to convince you, the night also features Steve Mould, The Amateur Transplants, and takes place in one of the most amazingly Lynchian venues I think I’ll ever have the pleasure to play. They say you play Wilton’s twice in your career: one on the way up, and once on the way down… it’s good to be back**.
*pretty much
**actually, it’s my first time. But let’s not read anything into that…
Plans continue apace for the release of “Songs from the Scientific Cabaret” – CDs are on their way to the pressing plant, tracks are uploaded to BandCamp, and I have a job lot of petri dishes about to arrive at my door! In the meantime, I’ve been putting the band through their paces for the geekpop launch night:
at a mere £10 – and for this, not only do you get Dr Martin Austwick and his Beautiful Band, you also get Steve Mould and the musical stylings of The Amateur Transplants. NOT ONLY THAT – people at the Launch Night will also be able to buy a copy of the limited run CD* for only £4 (available on the website for £8 including postage!). You’d be CRAZY not to COME!!!!
Ahem. You can find more info here, if you’re a Facebooky type:
This is a very sad song. If you like, you can let the seemingly humourous references to Winona Ryder and Richard Linklater lull you into the sense that this is a flip or at least somewhat frivolous tune. But the song is about some very sad things that happened once upon a time, and I put those things about Winona Ryder in there, not to floccinaucinihilipilificate*, but to remind myself of the things that inspire or inspired me in this sad and beautiful world, and so to temper it with a weird sort of hope. I’d say that every word of it is true, but I don’t think I know anyone who’s ever caught malaria. At least if I do, someone’s keeping their cards very close to their chest.
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*To pass something off as if it were nothing but a feather
I know that mid-January is a bit late to be rounding up 2010 and looking into 2011 - but I had gastric flu for the first week of the year which , along with the usual Xmas and New Year Business, meant my 2011 didn’t really begin until this week. 2010 was a year of big changes – new job, engagement, released my first album, recorded my second album (more of which later), and a bunch of other stuff so multitudinous that I’ve forgotten most of them.
So let’s look forward: the second album I alluded to above is my first Songs about Science album, under the moniker “Dr Martin Austwick”, featuring 7 songs drawn from my various science performances over the last 4 years, and including 3 others which previously appeared on my “Songs about Space EP”. I’ve chosen to do this as Dr Martin Austwick rather than The Sound of The Ladies, because the music is really rather different and it was getting confusing. This new album will be out on March 10th, and to celebrate its release, I’ll be playing at the GeekPop 2011 grand launch at Wilton’s Music Hall in east London. Not only that, but I’ll be bringing a band. Expect more news about the album and the launch here..
Another big project I was working on last year is coming to fruition – “Trying and Trying and Trying” by Gethan Dick. Gethan is a textual artist and TTT is a Wellcome Trust-funded project to create art out of science. Last June (when I was a medical physicist), Gethan visited me and we talked a lot about my work – then she went away and created prose that would be set to music. In a weirdly schizophrenic twist, I then played guitar (as part of Overdrive Orchestra) on the music for the piece. The album will be released on February 23rd, and they’ll be an awesome launch party at which I’ll be playing as part of Overdrive Orchestra; in the meantime, you can hear some of the tracks on Reverb Nation.
Now I know that this is a lot to take in; I won’t expect you to remember it all and will pester you incessantly to come to both. The next couple of months are going to be sciencey as all hell!
By the time you listen to this, you probably won’t be feeling remotely festive, but here is Xmas/January’s podcast. Sorry it’s so late. Happy New Year anyway.
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I just got back from the curated music festival Bowlie 2, hotbed of exclusive indie chic (although this time, generally more melodic and with fewer sweary bandnames, thanks to the fact that Belle and Sebastian were curating and not bloody Pitchfork), and of course water slides, Herta hot dogs and ennui (all three courtesy of its Butlins location). The usual fun times were had: I especially enjoyed B+S, a bit of Frightened Rabbit, Zoey Goey, Dirty Projectors were much better than when I last saw them (about 2 years ago), the Vaselines were ok, The Zombies amazing at points, even Crystal Castles were good. But a couple of bands made me wonder about the changing nature of indie music, which is the point of this post and not just to list bands with stupid names.
Let’s take Jenny Lewis, here under her guise as bassist/singer for Jenny and Johnny, a band she formed with her best bf (if that doesn’t scream “vanity project”…). I should be clear that I don’t really enjoy Jenny Lewis’ music – I think I see what she’s trying to achieve and I don’t think she does it very well or interestingly – although she is clearly very talented. The point is not to criticise the quality of Jenny and Johnny – but more to point out that their music is very mainstream (not a word I’ve had to use since 1990, but since it perfectly describes what I mean, let’s go with it) – they were a rock band, pure and simple, with no “post-” or “math-” or even “folk-” prefix to muddy the clear waters of four to the floor. Now, when I started listening to independent music in the 90s, it was as an alternative to the mainstream rock music around on major labels – the bands too odd to be given a “proper” record deal. I suppose I’ve never completely grown out of that attitude, because I found it a bit of a shock to hear a band that sounds like Joan Jett at an indie schmindie fest like ATP/bowlie.
And it led me to ponder the world of independent music. Even when I was growing up, the indie music I listened to was often on major labels – Nirvana ensured that noisy weird guitar bands would forever have a place in the major label roster (I think all of the big grunge bands were on majors, unless I’m mistaken). The collapse of the mainstream record industry, the rise if big indie labels and the democratisation of music production over the last 15 years has totally changed the game – now more and more artists will be indie by default. In that context, the indie artist is pretty much everyone – certainly any musician who writes their own songs and has yet to appear on a TV talent show – and so, independent music becomes a broad church. Sure, there will be extreme noise terrorists chipping away at the periphery – but there will be a bell curve of more accessible music previously mopped up greedily by the majors. This is probably a pretty good state of affairs – indie is no longer “our music” but “everyone’s music”.
So how do I feel about that? Well, as nice as it is to be able to identify myself with a subculture, I have been banging on for YEARS about how putting the means of production into the hands of the artists will enable everyone to express themselves, so to be pissed off by the results of this new democracy is a tad hypocritical. I am curious about what a younger generation thinks of as indie or independent music, seen afresh without the cultural baggage of the 90s. Is indie music a business model, or a state of mind?
I’ve been rehearsing this week with a strange kind of band – a sort of conceptual post-rock group. They’re called The Overdrive Orchestra by virtue of their 6 guitarists (plus bass, drums and spoken vocals). This collective operate under a singularly odd set of rules, namely:
1) The line-up is never the same for two gigs.
Although built around the core of Steve Cross (ringleader), and Charlie Pyne and Matty Hoban often play bass and drums respectively, everything else changes. An OO incarnation practices twice, records once, then disbands.
2) The music is improvised.
3) Each song starts with a bassline (often borrowed from a mid-90s hiphop track). This does not change at all over the course of the song. The drums lead the dynamics, the guitarists follow suite.
4) Songs should be exactly 8 minutes long – the quality of a song is judged mainly by how close to 8 minutes long it is.
No idea why.
And that’s it. Semi-improvised 6-guitar weirdness. 6 guitars can chuck out a lot of sound, so OO often sounds like the house band on a paddle steamer to hell – although, we can manage a surprising amount of melodic niceness at moments. And then back, once more, into the boiling waters.
One of the pieces we’re playing is co-written by textual artist Gethan Dick, based on biomedical optics research I was doing in my previous job, and using the visible backscattered spectrum of Gethan’s finger to generate the dynamic structure. If that’s blowing your mind now, wait till you hear it…
We were in the studio yesterday recording The Gethan Dick Finger Song and some other fine stuff:
I started writing this post in praise of the concept album because I may be a serial concept album writer. I’ve just recorded my first full album of songs about science, and there is a nonzero probability that the next “straight” Sound of The Ladies album will be about animals. Or something less lame. “We went to the bottom of the ocean (or, what we did with our lives)” had a very nautical theme to it (although not all of the songs stuck to that) – so, am I becoming a repeat offender?
I think like most people nowadays, I associate the concept album with a particular era of 70s prog-rock, but I have to confess to not really understanding where a concept album ends and a regular one begins (in the case of prog rock, it could be argued “around the 4th disc/three-hour mark”). Wikipedia describes them as “unified by a theme, which can be instrumental, compositional, narrative, or lyrical” – but isn’t that any good album unified by the style and preoccupations of the songwriter?
I can think of three obvious classes of concept albums: “story” concept albums, “theme” concept albums, and “recording” concept albums.
In “story” concept albums, the songs link together to make some kind of narrative. In the olden days this would have been called a “musical” or “rock opera”, but now we should probably just call it “trapped in the closet-type albums” and be done with it. More auspicious examples might be Lou Reed’s depressing “Berlin”; “The Wall” by Pink Floyd; “Ziggy Stardust…”; the usual suspects.
So, the “recording” concept album; here something around the recording process dictates or constrains the style or storytelling. Tom Waits’ “Nighthawks at the Diner” is a studio album, recorded as-live complete with between-song banter from the “beat poet bum” character which was his persona at the time (for that matter, live albums could be considered in this bracket, but they rarely are). Albums recorded with basic instruments or recording equipment might come into that bracket too. Like that Bon Iver album that he supposedly recorded in a shed with a guitar knitted from his own chest rug. Whatevs.
“Theme” concept albums can be harder to pin down. These can work within constraints (like the above) or just try to touch on themes. “Colorful Ventures” apparently mentions a colour in each song title (7 tracks?) – I think we can agree that’s a clearcut case of a concept album. I’m happy that my “songs about science” album falls into that bracket. But what if it’s less obvious? Is the artist just arbitrarily assigning meaning to a disparate collection of songs? How about “Pet Sounds”, an album I’ve heard described as “representing Brian Wilson’s mental state at the time”. As opposed to all the albums where the songwriter studiously ignores their own thoughts and feelings? If that represents a concept album, then 90% of records released are concept albums. “Sergeant Pepper” apparently started life as a story and turned into the twee mess “we” know and love. Not a concept album. Well, in the Sound of The Ladies’ world, here are the ten concept albums that it’s ok to like*:
1) “I see a Darkness” by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (Death)
2) “The Transfiguration of Vincent” by M Ward (Break-up album)
3) “Bone Machine” by Tom Waits (Death again)
4) “Franks Wild Years” also by Tom Waits (Musician Frank O’Brien sees his life in flashback whilst freezing to death on a park bench)
5) “Doolittle” by Pixies (death, the bible)
6) “69 Love Songs” by The Magnetic Fields (duh!)
7) “The Residents’ Commercial Album” by the Residents (40 tracks, each just over a minute long)
8 )”Tallahassee” by The Mountain Goats (married couple move to Tallahassee, Florida to drink themselves to death)
9) “12 Golden Country Greats” by Ween (dada-rock duo play straightahead country songs)
10) Most albums by They Might Be Giants (science, no!, see (7) )
*Not forgetting the entire Sound of the Ladies catalogue(science, the sea, animals, sexual dysfunction, death, breaking up). According to my last.fm playlist, I listen to a lot of Noam Chomsky, who tends to make concept albums about anarchism and dissolving centres of state and corporate power, but I doubt he’ll take his omission too hard.
Yep, I don’t have a name for this one yet (or at least I have several names, but they’re all bad). I don’t want to put ideas in anyone’s head, but I had been listening to a lot of Spiderland by Slint and playing western-themed games (red dead and Fallout New Vegas), with the a result that is to my ears slightly “post-country”. If that genre hasn’t been claimed, I plant my flag now! Thoughts, comments, queries to the usual address…
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Now I’ll probably have to explain what MySpace is to younger readers, which is a big part of the problem. MySpace was a social networking site which, perhaps five years ago, was tremendously popular. Crucially, it provided the feature for musicians to embed their music in a player prominent on their page. For a while, this made it the go-to place to find out about new music – partly because it offered a standardised template which made it easy for users to navigate, and partly because it allowed listeners to listen to and download music at a time when bands weren’t necessarily in the habit of letting people who wanted to hear their music hear their music*. The critical mass of musicians on MySpace definitely provided a push, so MySpace can in part be given credit for the transition to musicians giving listeners what they want, namely the chance to hear the music before they fork out for albums or concert tickets. It was also a tremendously powerful tool for musicians trying to book gigs – whereas in the past, a cd would be posted and followed up with phone calls and/or emails, now it was a simple matter for promoters to click on a MySpace message and have a listen.
Crucially, though, MySpace still functioned as a social site for “civilians” – so musicians could connect with real people as well as promoters and fellow musicians. Of course, that started to change with the rise of the MySpace band – bands who “befriended” hundreds of people a week in order to spam or wallpost promoting their band. With the advent of Facebook, real people started to go elsewhere, and by the time Twitter started to take off, MySpace felt very old, a platform left behind by changing trends in social media. MySpace has horribly intrusive advertising (certainly compared to Facebook), has limited music functionality (compared to ReverbNation or Bandcamp) and looks TERRIBLE (at least compared to every other website ever made). And, if you care about such things, is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International, whose recent Times paywall experiments suggest to me that they don’t know an online strategy from a hole in the ground. Which does not bode well for future changes in MySpace.
So what’s keeping us there? Momentum? Nostalgia? I’m SEOd** up and ready to go – but I haven’t deleted the myspace page just yet. It’s still at myspace/thesoundoftheladies until the sword of Damocles falls. I’d be curious to find out – does anyone still use MySpace, either for promoting their music or discovering new music? Because I doubt I’ve logged in for 4 or 5 months…
*I’m sure there are other opinions about MySpace’s success, but these seem important factors to me.
**search engine optimised – so when you google “the sound of the ladies” you find me and not some ladysite
The Sound of The Ladies will be at the Green Dragon in Croydon on Tuesday (19th) – part of a lineup featuring the excellent Superman Revenge Squad, Roshi Nasehi and Jennie Saunders. All being well, this also should be a teaser for a new band incarnation of The Sound of The Ladies*… but in any case, it will be balls-to-the-wall awesome. As all SOTL gigs are. See you there anytime after 8pm…
The latest Sound of The Ladies podcast is out now, featuring a brand-new, banjo-oriented song called “The Day of The Snail”.
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A lot of things fed into this short song – I’d been reading Harlan Ellison’s “I have no mouth and I must scream” (unfortunately I can’t explain why this is relevant without ruining the nub of the story, but suffice it to say: it does not star a snail), and listening to a lot of “Goat” by The Jesus Lizard, which has some really dark and fucked-up lyrics on it (really great album by the way, one of the first albums for ages I’ve listened to obsessively to get to the bottom of it). And if we’re looking for musical antecedents, the main riff bears embarassing similarities to “Holiday Road” by Lindsey Buckingham (you may know this from Chevy Chase classic movie “National Lampoon’s Vacation”) and lyrically “Home Sweet Home” by Bobby Conn tells a not dissimilar story.
Or, Mathematically
Harlan Ellison + David Yow + Lindsey Buckingham + Bobby Conn/Me = The Day of The Snail
The last few weeks I’ve been busy practising with a new live band incarnation of the Sound of the Ladies – and really enjoying it. This is a bit of a turnaround given the length of time tsotl has spent as a solo act. Well, for the last few years I haven’t really been interested in bands, for several reasons.
First, division of talent – there aren’t many bands where everyone is similarly talented and contributing equally. Unless this happens, unless the arrangements are sympathetic and intelligent and balanced, the additional instruments will just detract from the core, for example, the lyric and the vocal. This is especially true where a band come in as a support to the lead singer/songwriter, and the band don’t really get to do anything but “support” and not do what they’re good at.
Jeff Buckley is a good example of this – his band were good and all, but compare the later live albums to what he does on his own on “Live at Sin-e”.The flexibility and intimacy afforded by not having a band massively outweighs any reduction of texture or dynamics.
For my own music, there’s also the factor of not wanting to be a dictator – I may not be Jeff Buckley, but I do have strong ideas about the way things should sound, and the idea of bossing people around doesn’t sit that well with my ideas of creative democracy.
It was playing in wonderful steamcore outfit The Monroe Transfer that changed my mind about that. I’d been busy assuming that everyone was like me – wanting to write the theme tune, sing the theme tune and generally be the centre of attention. Well, for many musicians, playing music they like and expressing themselves through their playing is as much attention and creative outlet they need. Playing with them reinforced what I already knew: I’m not a musician in that sense – I am someone who, instead, likes to come up with ideas and make them into things. But not everyone is like that when it comes to music. Ironically, this means it’s ok to boss musicians around.
Secondly, the noughties was the era of Bad Guitar Bands: terrible, predictable landfill indie. Why break the intimacy of a solo performance if you’re only going to replace it with something garish and hollow? Well, I’ve seen a few bands over this summer’s festival season who have used instruments outside of the holy trinity (guitar-bass-drums) to create some great moods – The National and Noah and the Whale’s use of brass, for example; not groundbreaking but tasteful and very much adding to the music (I suppose the counterexample would be Oasis’ use of strings in the 90s – but then, they are a Terrible Band). And thanks to them, I inexplicably really wanted to play with a band again.
I don’t want to give too much away, because it’s early days yet – but we’re experimenting with banjo, accordion and superbass (longtime readers will know that a superbass is half bass and half guitar) and possibly a couple of regular guitars. I’m hoping quite a lot of harmonies too. It’s sounding awesome. Watch this space.
The latest episode of the Sound of The Ladies podcast is out now, with a new song called “Whatever Happened to the Girl with the X-ray Eyes?”:
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Well, next Wednesday marks the release of the limited edition CD version* or “We went to the bottom of the ocean”. It’s lovely – handprinted, featuring ten interchangeable cover images created by Consumer Revolt. This is what it looks like:
(at least for non-iPhone users) and you can pre-order it here for an introductory price of £10 (or a bit more if you’re ordering from outside the uk). The are only 100 copies and once they’re gone, they’re gone. So get ‘em while they’re hot.
*If you don’t want to pay a tenner for these gorgeous limited-run items, you can hang on for the non-limited release, which will be a wee bit cheaper.
The latest episode of the Sound of The Ladies podcast is out now, featuring a cover of Bridges and Balloons by Joanna Newsom from her debut album The Milk-Eyed Mender (available from her record label or Amazon or iTunes):
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Since the last post, we’ve also got a lovely review of We went to the bottom of the Ocean from The 405. Thanks, guys! Expect news later this week on the Limited Edition CDs which are due out on August 11th…
The reviews are starting to come in for “We went to the bottom of the ocean” – all very nice. Indie tastemakers Subba-Cultcha have lots of nice things to say:
Phew! I’m hoping that’s the tip of the iceberg – I’m really pleased with this album and want more people to hear it – so spread the word bloggers, twitterers and social networkers, and get in touch if you need a review copy!
Yesterday I started printing the sleeve for the CD version of “We went to the bottom of the Ocean” with Consumer Revolt (aka Daley Walton). Well, he did most of the printing, I did mainly folding and pinning things up. This was the first ever sleeve printed for the album:
I think you’ll agree, it looks rather beautiful. There are many more where that came from:
A limited run of 100, including prints of 10 images (one for each song) will be available on August 11th, via this website. Until then, you can listen and enjoy the download via the usual route:
The Sound of The Ladies’ first full length album, “We went to the bottom of the ocean”, is available now, here at thesoundoftheladies.com. You can listen to the tracks in the fancy player below (iPhone users click through for player):
and you can download the album by pressing the “download” button (hardly rocket science, I know). You can pay whatever you want for it – noughtpence or a million pence – or somewhere in between. If you prefer to go the alternative route and pay 79p per track on iTunes or similar – the album will be there on August 11th. But you can get it earlier and cheaper here, and I will get a better deal too (Steve Jobs’ golden Porsches don’t buy themselves).
There’s also a “share” button, so you can email, tweet or facebook your chums, or embed the album player in your blog to tell every how much you enjoyed listening to it. If you did enjoy listening to it, please do take advantage of these features and maybe help this record reach a few more people who might like it.
The cover art, and different images for each song, were created by the brilliant consumer revolt – be sure to check out his folksy shop for some of his excellent prints. In due course, these individual prints will make their way into a limited edition CD with a print for each song – watch this space. They are going to be AMAZING. There will also be handprinted non-limited CDs without the plates. Those will be pretty cool too.
