Folk mp3s and salon CDs

Roddy Schrock has made his re-organisation of my Water Song:

The Water Song (Dream Mix by Roddy Schrock)

If you like and keep it, this button enables you to donate a dollar or a euro or so to Roddy's PayPal account:

I really like the idea of Roddy doing more work on the album, refining and estranging it. I want to change the basic relationship between CDs and mp3s. With all these mp3s circulating, I really have no reason not to experiment with what the CD might be, and to make it as different as possible. Traditionally, mp3s are free, 'folk' versions of CDs which appear at around the same time. (I call the digital culture, with its Robin Hood-type redistributive piracy, 'folk'.) Mp3s are clones, and CDs the master. But I want to re-instate the popular art / high art divide, making my 'folksy' mp3s available as they're written, letting songs which celebrate popular heroes (Ken Shimura) or tell stories (the great cockle picker disaster) flow freely (well, cheaply and easily) around the digital folksphere, but then releasing CDs which, although based on the same material, actually bear little resemblance to the original 'folk songs', being a kind of sophisticated salon product, arty, courtly, avant garde and difficult, available to a minority of connoisseurs. In this way I can be both populist and elitist, accessible and arty, free and expensive, low risk and high risk, low art and high art. Bela Bartok and Bela Lugosi, if you will.



I spent much of the weekend with Toog, Bernhard Gal and Anne Laplantine at the Amplify Festival, held at Berlin's Backfabrik and featuring people like Keith Rowe, Otomo Yoshihide, Toshi Nakamura, Sachiko M, Oren Ambarchi and Fennesz. It was a mixed experience, sometimes enrapturing, sometimes rather boring. It was the classic electro-improv event, with trestle tables, mixer spaghetti, rigid and fixed yet intense performers, people playing brass instruments for the breath sounds instead of the notes, and the audience afraid to take a sip of their gin and tonics in case the sound of the ice cubes resounded around the room. I appreciated the lack of 'music', the chance to be alone with my thoughts, watching clouds go by across the windows or the chestnut leaves across the street whirl and stir. And of course the almost religious seriousness and the enigma of many of the sounds being teased out of the contraptions on the trestle tables. The musicians listening to each other and the audience (almost all musicians themselves) listening to that listening. The highlights for me were Toshi Nakamura and his 'no input mixing desk' (natural earth buzz sounds, freight train whistles, high-pitched sine waves) and the mysterious ambient guitar of Jewish-Australian mystic Oren Ambarchi.

(Lo fi clip of Oren Ambarchi in performance.)

There's a new interview with the ever-inventive Nathan Michel on Pixelsurgeon, in which Nathan is asked whether his work qualifies as Cute Formalism. An extract:

'I think I can also trace my interest in composition-- in formal balance-- to playing with Legos when I was a kid. That said, I don't consciously attempt to recreate childhood, but I do think I have a nostalgic impulse for states outside of  rational thought, whether it's a fascination with childhood, animals, or so-called "outsider artists". To me these people and animals represent a kind of utopia that exists before we are told what is right and what is wrong. I guess this is kind of a romantic notion.'