Down Sounds: August 2010

 And as the American summer of ‘chillwave’ enters its third phase, whereby the most obvious signifiers of the sound (‘genre’?) – high, saturated keys; condensed vocals; faded album photos of skinny-laughing-girls on jetties, etc – are tacked onto albums that would better stand on their own merits and the label is given to music that bears no resemblance to things that ‘chill’, we’ve got our own shit going on.

In Brisbane, where things tend to get a little bit ‘big-fish’ and yet undeservedly overlooked down south, two remarkable releases appeared last week. The first is the debut album from Disco Nap, the newest band project for former Iron On singer/songwriter Ross Hope, titled Running Red Lights and out independently. Though the sound itself is a fairly subtle update on fuzzy ‘90s indie-tronica, it’s one of those releases where the songwriting and the little ideas that fill it keep you going back; not to mention knowing those ideas are being executed by a band featuring Screamfeeder’s Dean Schwereb, Seja Vogel of Sekiden and The Gin Club’s Jane Elliot on cello. It’s nuanced and blissful (and oftentimes blissfully angst-making) Aussie pop rock, Hope showing he really has reached the point of knowing his voice and using it well.

The second Brisbane brag is BigStrongBrute (pictured), the project of Paul Donoughue that he’s now been building for four years (and for those of us who remember him starting it as a teenager, that’s a very scary prospect). Donoughue is ever so slightly more jam-band than Jens Lekman, which results in his new EP, We Can Sleep Under The Trees In The Morning (Independent), being a pairing of early Midlake horn expresses and some charming, deep crooning. Even his aesthetic is a little bit Juergen Teller meets Huck Finn. Both BigStrongBrute and Disco Nap are out on tour.

Speaking of Lekman, the tall one with the handsome mug has a new track out, awesomely titled The End Of The World Is Bigger Than Love, and available for free download here. Do I really need to sell this one? It’s called The End Of The World Is Bigger Than Love and it’s by Jens Lekman.

 Anyone who remembers the very early house-party shows of Melbourne’s Flying Scribble (pictured above) was a) probably not on the same stuff as everyone else in Brunswick in the mid-2000s, and b) probably not thinking the lopsidedly talented, somewhat hopelessly introverted pair were going to become one of the most delicately intriguing pop prospects in the country. The duo call themselves “spook-pop”, and their debut album, We’re A Chameleon (Independent), is full of the kind of broad, colourful synth atmos Bachelorette also likes, along with church organ, live drums and hand-holding vocals that make you want to join a convent. Qua’s Cornel Wilczek is behind the production and the attention to detail and his ability to keep sounds continually pushing forward is at its best. Truly great stuff.     

I mentioned it last week, but the new Julian Mendelsohn remix of Catcall’s Swimming Pool is probably the best ten minutes you’ll spend staring at a wall and rubbing your own leg fondly all month. Sydney’s Catherine Kelleher is from the new class of subverted pop (as taught by Cyndi Lauper) and understatedly brings the sexy, slightly off-balanced-ly singing, “This is for my body,” over French post-punk guitars and twinkling synths, Get it free from swimmingpool.catcallmusic.com.  

 But of course this whole American ‘chillwave’ thing/misnomer is still producing some excellent stuff. The announcement of the Meredith festival line-up last week somewhat surprisingly included new Atlanta hyper-colour-wearing man Washed Out (pictured), who trades in a West Coast version of Roots Manuva’s beats. There’s a great (and apparently ‘fan-made’) video for his track Feel It All Around online, and so far I haven’t been able to find out whether anyone in Australia is releasing his recorded stuff. I’ll keep you posted. Also coming out are San Francisco’s Girls – but if you like them, then also check out Ryan Lynch’s other project, Dominant Legs, who are, unlike the Canadians themselves, excellently furthering Arcade Fire’s trembled fear-pop by adding hand-hit percussion and less obvious (and pretty damn sweet) melodies. Yeah, yeah, AF obsessives, bring it on.    

Influence this: Old Spice, new tricks

Lately I’ve begun to feel like every second track by a ‘new’ act that I happen upon online or that arrives in my inbox is a remix. This week, those included a Delorian remix of a track by calypso-choral LA woman Glasser, whose debut album will arrive to us via Remote Control Records soon; a Julian Mendelsohn (he produced some Pet Shop Boys in the ‘80s, amongst others, and now resides in Melbourne) remix of Swimming Pool by Sydney’s most excellent Catcall (pictured; download the track free at the link), and a John Talabot remix of The xx’s Shelter. Some of the reasons for sending out remixes or making them free downloads from label sites or blogs are obvious: they are a way of promoting an act’s album without giving the album’s tracks away; they keep acts whose albums have been out a while (such as The xx) in listeners’ consciousness, and they lend themselves to play on radio and in clubs in which the act may otherwise not have been given a look-in. But there’s another reason, particularly for acts being led by their labels into wider markets, and it’s fast becoming one of the most used terms in online marketing: those who remix are also seen as ‘influencers’.

In broader online marketing, ‘influencers’ are the latest ‘hot’ target for viral campaigns and product placement. This has always been the case with traditional media, however the nature of social media, the transience of blogs and the general (and growing) cynicism of people being marketed to in their ‘personal’ space means it’s no longer as simple as sending out a few products to magazine editors and ‘celebrities’ and hoping they’ll spread the word (soz, Andrew G). A July post in the blog run by domain provider Netregistry took a look at the recent Old Spice campaign and the way it used ‘influencers’ as its target market. In Australia, the source advertisement in which a ripped dude ends a series of random events with the lingering ‘LOL’, “I’m on a horse,” was passed around without any involvement by an Australian agency.

 In the US, however, the process was longer and more interactive. The agency running the campaign mobilised a team of ‘creatives’ and was churning out new, original Old Spice videos featuring Old Spice Man in response to questions and comments made on the Old Spice Twitter account. These videos were mostly aimed directly at online ‘influencers’ – people like famed San Fran vlogger Kevin Rose and D-list stalker Perez Hilton – in the hope that if they personalised their message, those ‘influencers’ would then spread the campaign to their millions of ‘followers’ out of ego. The Netregistry blog contends that the target market for Old Spice wasn’t the ‘influencers’ or even their direct audience, but could have been as far removed as three people from the influencer’s reach –as long as the message filtered down, without the spend of a national traditional media campaign and while grabbing the attention of a ‘media-savvy’ audience, the idea worked.

The term ‘influencers’ has been getting thrown around in advertising for a couple of years, but its stronghold as a buzzword is tightening. A web app called Klout, launched in 2009 and slowly building its name amongst online ‘entrepreneurs’, allows users to sign in and get a measurement reading of their ‘influence’ via Twitter, measuring a person’s ‘true reach’ and giving them an overall ‘influence score’ out of 100. With information like this, some of the marketing power is potentially handed back to the ‘influencers’ themselves, rather than being held solely by the companies targeting them, allowing them to pitch themselves to companies and therefore share in a bit of the cash being put into such ventures.

 The logical – also gross and cynical – conclusion is that remixers can get in on this action and gauge their own online marketing reach in order to put themselves forward for further work. Of course, the further we dig into the research and measuring of social media, the more convoluted once simple ideas become. After all, aren’t sales, or even creative reach, the ultimate indicators of influence? Maybe Ferris Bueller really did say it best when talking up his sick-day clammy hands foil – “It’s a good non-specific symptom. I’m a big believer in it.”

Hot witches playing house

 When I was eight, I became obsessed with the paranormal. Ghosts, witches, psychic activity – pretty much anything I couldn’t see but could talk myself into believing at any moment I caught myself alone, which at the time was a fair bit because my two sisters and brother were in high school near the city and I had the house to myself for an hour every afternoon until they got home. I’d sit downstairs in the lounge room and listen out for footsteps on the floorboards above me, or close my eyes and try to ‘sense’ if other ‘beings’ were around.

It wasn’t that I was thrilled or unafraid by the prospect of hanging out with unearthly hobos or being taken by the darkness. I was fucking terrified. Most of the time I’d end up locked in the toilet or the others would find me sitting in the front yard when they came home, waiting for someone else to arrive before braving the house again. But it was the fear that attracted me. Sure, the thoughts of evil shit came on their own and with disturbing frequency, but I pushed them in my mind until they overtook me to the point of hyperventilation. At the same time as I felt like I was going to die, I loved being scared. (I also went through a phase of pretending to be dead every time my mother got home, but that’s possibly a different phychology for another time.)

For my ninth birthday, I asked for a horror-themed party. My sisters had the idea of turning our double garage into a haunted house and they and my mother went about the business of buying up on supplies from a Halloween shop across town. This made me nervous. By that age, it already wasn’t particularly OK to be into games, let alone dress-ups, and my party was going to include both. I realised I was placing my Grade 4 social status in the hands of the less-than-cool women in my family and I had a lot to lose – all five of my friends were coming.

On the night, I got into my executioners costume (which I had to keep explaining seeing as I was really just carrying a fake axe around – and I’m sure their nine-year old repeatedly sighing, “I kill people,” wasn’t creepy for my parents at all) and my friends and I were led to the entrance of the garage. One by one we were blindfolded and taken around the cold, cement-floored room and made to touch various objects with our hands: a bucket of ‘guts’ made from offal, a plate of ‘eyeballs’ from grapes. Then, with the blindfold removed, we had to climb through cobwebs and a tunnel and past my father sitting in the corner, staring blankly like a brain-fried patient with a torch to his face. I remember proudly thinking that my family was less sane than I’d given them credit for. 

 The scariest part, though, was the soundtrack playing while all this happened. It was a grainy, sparse recording of doors creaking and slamming shut; of soft laughter leading into tortured breathing and muffled struggling sounds. It was purely sadistic. My mother later gave me the tape (it was orange and branded “Halloween sounds”) and I’d put it on sometimes if I wanted to freak my sisters out when they weren’t expecting it.

My obsession with the paranormal eventually faded – resurfacing at 14 via an anti-Catholic-upbringing investigation into The Book Of Shadows as well as a heavy god complex – but the disturbing sounds contained on that cassette never disappeared from memory. Now, I know I was not alone in having lo-fi, eery effects ingrained into my psyche. Now, there’s ‘witch house’, the genre causing about as much “that’s not a genre” and “FUCK OFF AND DIE PITCHFORK” the last six months as ‘chill-wave’ or most other things before it, but definitely some kind of ‘happening’ generally considered to be led internationally by Texas label Disaro and Michigan act SALEM (pictured top), and encompassing California’s oOoOOand, most recently, Rhode Island’s Dream Boat and their ‘haunted’ beats, droning synths and interjecting effects. If it’s your ‘thing’, make sure you also share it with your younger brother or sister. They might look scared but, believe me, they secretly love it.

Festival vomit (or: Existence is futile)

Splendour In The Grass and its associated ‘sideshows’ are all but done, which wouldn’t be news (because it, like, happens every year) except that this year ‘people’ have been talking it up as the ‘best’ festival line-up Australia has seen for *insert age- and experience-appropriate timeframe*. I didn’t go to Woodfordia (gag). I did, however, see a few of the ‘sideshows’ thanks to the generous folk at Street Press Australia and the generous promoters and publicists they make out with, and, for some reason, this year’s far-reaching range of Splendour bands has triggered a bit of an existential questioning of the reasons bands do what they do and why people want to see them do it. It goes a little something like this.

Why do bands perform at all? When it comes to festivals and events as big as Splendour, money and audience scope are perhaps the most obvious (and cynical) answers to that, however there’s a reasonably ‘natural’ path to becoming a band ‘popular’ enough to get on a festival bill. Band writes songs, band performs songs, people like songs, people like performance, band performs songs to more people, more people like songs and performance, festival. Granted, there’s a whole lot of ’industry’ wankery in between and multiple variations, but that’s the general procedure. So, then, the question posed at the festival level is the same at the house-party level. Why do it at all?

It would seem there are perhaps two clear answers to this: because bands want to ‘express’ their ‘art’ in public and because bands want ‘people’ to watch them perform. These two statements are not the same. A person may feel the selfish need to ‘express’ themselves regardless of who is watching/listening because the act in itself gives them ‘personal satisfaction’ or ‘catharsis’. Alternately, a person may only receive this satisfaction if they have an audience to ‘respond’ to their performance. They want to ‘entertain’.

These two answers are also not mutually exclusive, however the degree to which a band prescribes – consciously or not – to either side has rather large ‘ramifications’. In the first instance, the ‘work’ or ‘ideas’ are inherently more valuable than the performance itself. Think of bands you have seen who quite obviously do not care whether you are there or not. I am thinking of Pixies. You may mutually not care whether the ‘personalities’ of the band are present. There may be aspects of the performance outside the songs that you ‘appreciate’ as audience (Kim Deal’s smiling mug; Frank Black’s obnox mug) but, for the most part, it is the songs or ‘work’ you ‘connect’ with.

In the second instance, it is the performance that is more valuable. A band’s ‘personality’ or ‘technical ability’ may be so tied to their performance that it overshadows the ‘work’ to no great detriment to ‘appreciation’ by an audience. This is often said of ‘rock’ bands whose playing is ‘impressive’ or whose ‘stage manner’ is entertaining. I am thinking of Foals and Florence & The Machine. This is also often said of ‘pop stars’ who cannot sing and have bad songs but have ‘endearing personalities’. I am thinking of Scissor Sisters.

In this second instance, a band’s ‘career’ will generally not last long without at least some appreciation of their musical output. However, it has been seen many times how long a band can ride on performance and ‘personality’, to the point where, by now, the question must also be posed: have we fully entered an era in music whereby performance is ‘acceptably’ valued as much as the ‘work’ itself, or indeed is valued as ‘work’? I am thinking of Lady Gaga. (No, she was not at Splendour; that was Luke Steele.)

I realise there are no lines, let alone blurred ones, in any of this, but the train of thought is thus: bands perform for themselves or for others; either motivation is capable of eliciting a response of ‘connectivity’ or ‘appreciation’ by an audience; therefore the debate over ‘style vs substance’ is redundant; therefore Scissor Sisters are as ‘culturally valuable’ as Pixies. All right, back to the beginning…