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[Photos + Review] Cinemechanica, Manray, Lazer/Wulf @ 529 (1/29/11)

All photos by Clint Miller

Saturday, I went to see Athens based, Cinemechanica at 529 in East Atlanta. I had never seen them live before, but had heard that cardiac arrest and brain aneurysms were key components to their live show. There was no way I was going to pass up an opportunity like that even if my life, or more realistically, my ears, were at stake.

The first band to play, Lazer/Wulf, was a three-piece, and my expectations were low. They looked like typical frat-guys who decided to ditch the tailgate party and start a band that wears warrior-style face paint. Although, it was the fact that they were the first out of three unknown bands to play that led to my low expectations, not their appearance. I was pleasantly surprised as soon as they took the stage and began to play. I found myself compelled to move with the music and stare open-jawed at the guitarist who was playing notes faster than I previously thought was humanly possible.

They alternate between traditional metal and speed metal, although they make the sound their own. I was surprised at how well they sounded live while having only three members. The guitarist was the best part of the show via getting the crowd amped and making strange faces, although, what really helped was the fact that he is insanely proficient at playing his instrument. The bassist and guitarist both entered the crowd several times while playing extremely technical solos. The only drawback to seeing this band live was the semi-annoying fan-base that had followed them from Athens. (I knew they were from Athens because every time one of the bands mentioned they were from Athens, multiple people shouted “wooo! Athens, Yeah!” )About 2/3 into their set, an impromptu mosh pit broke out, reminding me why I stay away from 90% of all metal shows. Luckily this was the ‘friendly’ mosh pit and not the ‘punch everything that moves’ type pit. Still, though, its never fun to have beer spilled on your face.

Click here to read the entire post…

Ohmpark’s 4th Year Anniversary

As you probably know by now, we’re kicking off 2011 with some our favourite local artists this Friday night at The Earl. Here’s the tentative schedule (we’ll be using two stages):

8:30pm Qurious
9:05pm Nigredo
9:45pm This Piano Plays Itself
10:30pm Jungol
11:45pm From Exile

Hope to see you there.

Buy tickets here

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Ohmpark’s 4th Year Anniversary

Ohmpark will be celebrating four years of covering Atlanta’s independent music scene with an epic party Friday, January 7th at The Earl. Helping us commemorate this little blog’s birth are some of my favourite Atlanta artists, From Exile, Jungol, This Piano Plays Itself, Nigredo, and Qurious. Mark it down on your calendar now, because it will be a night you won’t soon forget, or maybe a night you won’t remember at all. But either way we’re going to have a blast, so I hope you’ll join us.

Buy tickets here




Lineup:


From Exile

“The band makes seemingly effortless shifts from Gothenburgian dual-guitar shred to Megadethian thrash-gallop to soaring blues metal to druggy, proggy post-rock to Crowbarian molasses… and that’s all within the first four songs.” – Metalsucks.net




Jungol:

“Jungol’s movement continues to gain momentum and they have done nothing but accelerate that momentum with Over the Sun and Under the Radar. The album stays true to Jungol’s indefinable experimental path…thriving tribal beats, soaring guitar riffs, electro pop power and skyrocketing and passionate vocals that will no doubt carry Jungol and Over the Sun and Under the Radar to the glory that they both undoubtedly deserve..” -Beatlanta




This Piano Plays Itself:

“Revealing itself as if it were the puzzle of a dream unfolding, the new album As the House… from This Piano Plays Itself sort of sounds like what Neutral Milk Hotel might’ve done had they absorbed a somewhat different set of influences. Sprawling, swirly and ambitious, the CD offers eight effects-laden psyche-prog-spacerock mini-epics that somehow coalesce into a rather compelling, heartfelt whole.” -Stomp And Stammer




Nigredo:

“What is the underlying source of purpose in Nigredo? What makes their sound so powerful as if it reaches the bottom of your heart, awakening it to motivation, life, and expression? It’s an intense instrumental musical project willingly based around those very shared philosophies, and emotive desires to express despite all our best efforts to live in apathy. Submission is the key for us all as this collection of experimental players do all they can to collaborate a shared movement that can not be reached individually. It is the key for this musical project to express, and to be shared. It is exactly in those moments where we all unify in our greatest potentials. Nigredo is the music of our whole lives from our darkest moments to our most joyful expressions, and dynamically, all in between.”




Qurious:

“Qurious’ self-described “space noise” is ambient and hypnotic; it contracts and swells and drifts along hazily like memories of a half-remebered dream. There is a haunting, spectral quality to the electronic duo’s music, an eerie atmospheric glow that permeates the recesses of even their most ethereal jams. It’s fantastic headphone candy, full of skittering beats and surreal sonic textures that reference everything from trip-hop and electronica to post-rock and shoegaze, and Catherine Quesenberry’s siren’s call vocals, iridescent and and windswept, add a layer of dreamy sensuality that serve to lull you further into the depths of a blissed-out trance.” – Latest Disgrace

Deer Bear Wolf

Long time Ohmpark readers may have noticed that this year I focused the blog almost exclusively on local acts, forgoing my previous coverage of national indie music for the most part. I had reached a point where I felt that that sort of content had become redundant and unnecessary due to the massive amount of other people doing the same exact thing. After Pitchfork, Stereogum, magazines, bloggers, newspapers and everyone else and their mothers have commented on an album, there isn’t that much value to hearing yet another opinion on the matter. And while I do enjoy a great many popular indie artists, music of that sort on the whole has grown safer, duller, and extremely predictable. This of course is a natural part of a genre becoming popular, but it has turned me off from spending a lot of time here discussing that particular stuff. Also, I feel even though there is virtually an infinite amount outlets covering new music these days, the vast majority of those outlets cover only a relatively small handful of bands, mostly based around who Pitchfork mentions.

So, I’ve decided to do something a little different. The primary reason I started Ohmpark in the first place was to learn more about music and to listen to sounds I hadn’t previously heard. Now that same desire has driven me to launch a entirely new music blog called Deer Bear Wolf. The idea behind DBW is to try and actually discover new music that people haven’t heard. I aim to make it a perpetual mixtape for adventurous listeners. That means DBW will avoid covering artists that appear on Pitchfork, or blog buzzbands, or artists who send me PR emails. It will often highlight weirder, more experimental stuff, and it will especially be focused on International independent music, which receives very sparse coverage on the hype machines relative to the quantity of quality music hidden across the globe.

Anyways, go ahead and check it out and listen to some tunes and see what you think:

http://deerbearwolf.com/

[Diatribe] Sufjan Shenanigans


Photo by Marzuki Stevens


Sufjan Stevens’ label, Ashmatic Kitty, laid out an interesting plea by email this week to their artist’s mailing list. The email is in regards to the upcoming release of The Age of Adz (pronounced odds), the first full length LP from Stevens in almost 5 years.

Here’s an excerpt:

“We have it on good authority that Amazon will be selling The Age of Adz for a very low price on release date, not unlike they did with Arcade Fire’s recent (and really terrific) The Suburbs. We’re not 100% sure Amazon will do this, but mostly sure.

We have mixed feelings about discounted pricing. Like we said, we love getting good music into the hands of good people, and when a price is low, more people buy. A low price will introduce a lot of people to Sufjan’s music and to this wonderful album. For that, we’re grateful.

But we also feel like the work that our artists produce is worth more than a cost of a latte. We value the skill, love, and time they’ve put into making their records. And we feel that our work too, in promotion and distribution, is also valuable and worthwhile.

That’s why we personally feel that physical products like EPs should sell for around $7 and full-length CDs for around $10-12 We think digital EPs should sell for around $5 and full-length digital albums for something like $8.”

All of this strikes me as very odd, considering that they obviously had to sign a deal with Amazon to distribute the album digitally. The rant even states that they can see how many new fans this can help bring to the table, and their comment about The Suburbs clearly shows that they are making an attempt to mirror the success of the Arcade Fire’s latest effort. That album went number one in its inception, largely due to the Amazon week one price tag of $3.99 and highly discounted first week rates from other digital outlets. Digital downloads accounted for 62% of that album’s first week.

The NY Times did some digging recently, and it turns out that Amazon usually takes a loss by buying the albums at the wholesale price of around $7 from the record companies in an attempt to gain more ground in the digital download arena. That’s only ONE dollar less than what they state in their article is how much they would like for people to spend on a download. If you wanna make that much for an album download, why don’t you just make $8 your wholesale price?

All of these facts make me a little bit irritated by this rant from Asthmatic Kitty. If you don’t want your album available for digital download at Amazon, I’m sure you could have not signed that dotted line! I understand how you are just a little indie label but groveling for my money after YOU make all kinds of business deals to move your company forward is just plain ridiculous.

The internet is going to continue making it difficult, and labels are going to have to think outside of the box to find solid ground for a long time to come. But if an artist creates good music, people will buy the album, come to shows, and buy merchandise. I still believe that most music lovers find their way to help their favorite artists to continue moving things forward.

The Age of Adz is available on October 12th and seems to deliberately expand his sound into a more electronic and synth driven realm. Also, if you haven’t gotten his All Delighted People EP it serves as a great precursor to the upcoming album.

Sufjan Stevens’ Bandcamp

Thanks

Thank you to everyone for voting us “Best Georgia-based Music Blog” for the second year in a row in Creative Loafing’s popularity contest. In celebration, I’m cooking up an expansion of sorts to unveil on Monday.

[Diatribe] The State Of Music Journalism & The Fallacy Of The Cost Of Free


Who is this “Davey Minor” kid anyway?


My previous diatribe, a response to Paste Magazine’s demise, elicited many different reactions and started a bit of a conversation on music journalism, so I thought I would follow it up with something more in-depth on the topic. I only had about an hour to put that piece together at the time, so I want to expound and better explain my points, as well as communicate how I feel about music journalism on the whole. Since Creative Loafing bestowed one of their rare non-advertising print spots to rebut my piece, I’ll start off addressing that first and go from there. My number one fan at CL, Chad Radford, declared that my “arguments are deeply flawed”, but I’d say at worst they lacked clarity. Let me break it down for you.

So of course what has gotten all of the grampas up in arms is my purposefully cavalier and prodding statement, “Old people shouldn’t be in charge of covering music for kids.” What I was getting at was more about mindset than physical age, but I do believe that getting older is a significant handicap in understanding current music trends. Most people tend to solidify around an aesthetic at about college age and the musical styles they enjoy becomes part of that person’s identity. They develop a sense of what they believe to be good and bad music, and after a certain point that doesn’t fundamentally change very often. But the history of music is in a constant flux. Some style comes along, gains popularity, and then another style is birthed as a reaction and repudiation of the current fashion. It’s a never-ending oscillation between trend and counter-trend. The problem is that once someone identifies their personality with a particular trend, it’s difficult for that person to overcome their bias. Abstractly, the way that it usually manifests itself is in a belief that older music is better, which I would argue is virtually never objectively true, and anyone who claims as such is a victim to their own subjective preferences. People, and especially music journalists, tend to believe that the music they enjoy is better than what everyone else listens to, and it’s difficult for anyone to see things outside of that lens.

That’s not to say that it is impossible to overcome this limitation. I did state that there are exceptions, and Radford’s response to my piece name drops a few that I actually had in mind when I myself stated there are exceptions. But in terms of understanding what’s happening right now, even those particular journalists hardly grip the musical climate as well as the prominent new media folks. Let’s take Jim DeRogatis for example. I like him and I read him on occasion because he has an interesting perspective, but when it comes to assessing new music, he is as out of touch as any other print journalist. For example, here’s Hipster Runoff lambasting DeRogatis for being a “bitter, old music critic.” I get such a kick out of how much Animal Collective mystifies and enrages old-school journalists. But to the point here, I would be surprised if more than a tiny sliver of DeRogatis’ audience is young kids looking for new music suggestions. So his audience is old, which is fine, and totally compatible with my statement. I didn’t say that old people shouldn’t be covering music, they just shouldn’t be in charge of targeting and connecting with a young audience when a business is at stake because it’s more difficult for them to do so. With regards to Paste, if you don’t think they were attempting to target younger readers, go read their press kit.

The correlation between growing old and being out of touch is probably bolstered by biology and how the human brain develops over time, but I would postulate that it is mostly psychological. As fun as it is to joke around about old people, the central idea I’m trying convey isn’t really about age, it’s about hubris.

Print-era music journalists are their own worst enemy.

One of the starkest differences between bloggers and people who claim to be music journalists is in terms of tone. Journalists smother every word they write with a sense of authority. They act as though they own a monopoly on knowledge. They painstakingly assemble their own resumes inside reviews to justify their declarations. They are eager to explain to us just how important they are. They’re the experts, they know best, and we would all be lost without them.

Once bloggers came on the scene and began competing against established journalists, most journalists didn’t take bloggers seriously. Journalists believed there was some intrinsic value to what they did that separated them from the amateurs. Then once new media started kicking their asses, instead of simply working harder and doing better work, journalists started concentrating on communicating how much better they were. They looked for excuses instead of looking to improve. They wanted to ride their previous achievements rather than compete on a level playing field.

A great example of a journalist in denial is Chunklet’s Henry Owings. About a year ago, he cried on the shoulder of the LA Times about the state of music journalism:

“My biggest gripe with online journos is their false sense of importance when they’re oftentimes just regurgitating press releases and tour dates. Of course, that mindless mentality is what many labels love. Me? I just find there to be a negligible amount of talent in what passes as a blogger in this modern age. What ever happened to attitude? What ever happened to opinions? What happened to pissing off advertisers? What happened to alienating readers? What happened to having fun? Sadly, I believe that the new boss is the same as the old boss. I just wish and pray somebody would be out there stirring things up instead of following the herd of mindless sheep. But then again, when you have publicists that just needle you all day to write about their clients, it makes a blogger’s job easy.”

This is hilarious to me because I could make that exact claim, word for word, about print journalism.

Now look, I can understand that it would suck to have a cushy job where you could just go through the motions and get paid to write about music, and then all of a sudden there are thousands of kids popping up giving you real competition. But that’s the situation you find yourself in, so instead of complaining, you should be demonstrating why you’re the professional and they’re not.

It’s not the cost of free, it’s the cost of not being the best at your job.

At another point in that LA Times piece above, Mr. Owings states the biggest fallacy in journalism right now, what every journalist falls back on when they get their asses handed to them:

“When presented with quality writing that costs money versus questionable writing that’s free, like most things, the masses go the path of least resistance.”

I’m so tired of professionals using this excuse. First of all, there was free content in journalism long before the Internet. Both Creative Loafing and Stomp And Stammer are free. There have been and still are plenty of free print sources. Secondly, it’s a false dichotomy. Print music journalism isn’t losing to questionable writing, it’s losing to superior writing. Of course when a ton of amateurs get access there is going to be a plethora of horrible content, but with such a large pool of people, there is also going to be much more talent rising to the top. It’s easy to go find a couple of examples of bloggers that suck, but those aren’t the bloggers that the masses are choosing. It isn’t Joe Shmoe’s little blog that gets 30 hits a month that is beating print, it’s Pitchfork. And that’s the biggest hole in this argument. If Pitchfork can make millions of dollars a year dispensing free content, you can’t blame your lack of success on the cost of free.

It’s all about quality and efficiency of content.

One thing that didn’t seem to get across in my Paste piece is I’m not speaking in absolutes. I didn’t mean all old people are uncool. There are plenty of hip oldsters, though rarely are they print music journalists. And I never declared print to be dead. The problem with print isn’t the medium, it’s the people running it. Print will survive in some form for a long time, but that doesn’t mean that hundreds of crappy magazines will survive. With other media options available, demand for print has inevitably decreased, and that demand is further hampered by the level of relevance in most print publications.

In his reaction to my Paste piece, Mr Radford attempts to reveal a paradox in my arguments by paralleling my praise for Pitchfork with me stating that “demand for long-winded, deep-digging album reviews” has diminished. But a lot of the reason that the demand has shrunk is because Pitchfork has cornered that market. Why do I need to read ten different five paragraph reviews for every album when one place does it better than everybody else? Look, I could write a novel on all of the things I don’t like about Pitchfork, but when it comes down to quality, there isn’t a single other music outlet of any sort of media that even comes close. That’s the reason they are rich and everyone else is losing business. And while Pitchfork’s long, flowery album reviews were what established them in the first place, that’s pretty much the only content area they haven’t expanded since coming into prominence. Maybe The Rad One didn’t catch on to the fact that Pitchfork’s latest endeavour is a website featuring the most succinct reviews possible. And honestly, I would love to see what fraction of people actually read all of Pitchfork’s reviews versus who just glances at the number scores and listens to the mp3s. If Pitchfork thought there was more market share to capture out there with “gratuitously in-depth record reviews,” which is their specialty, they would be expanding in that direction, but they’re not. Instead they are putting their efforts in capturing competent and relevant voices, because that’s where the only unmet demand exists.

Mr. Radford’s final stab at my arguments embodies the hubris I mentioned earlier:

“He then adds that “aggregators and torrent site’s top lists do a better job of efficiently communicating the best new music then [sic] 99% of music journalists out there.” What he fails to understand is that just because something is popular does not mean that it’s good.”

Really? You actually think I fail to understand that? You believe I think Katy Perry is good? Wow, you really got me on the one. Way to call me out.

But see, this is the excuse journalists typically fall back on when they become out of touch: If people don’t agree with them, then those people are just stupid. Journalists know best, and they don’t feel they have to prove it in any sort of measurable way. Sure, being popular does not equal being good. But the two aren’t diametrically opposed either. In the past, journalists could get away with praising whatever random, obscure thing they wanted and readers didn’t have the resources to call their bluff, or many other alternatives. But now that there are so many media choices, and previewing records is easy for anyone, journalists can no longer hide behind their title. They have to stand purely on the merits of their words, and that’s where they are losing.

If you can’t attract an audience, maybe you aren’t really a professional.

Journalists get so wrapped up in their own self-importance that they forget their purpose is much more than to simply get a check for being so cool. They claim to be providing a service to the public. If you look at this whole situation from the point of view of the end user, things are better than ever in music journalism. No matter what your taste, you can find what you’re looking for easily. I mean, Pandora is more efficient at giving a random person music suggestions they will enjoy than anyone in the history of music journalism. Between technology advancements and the more relevant voices being featured almost exclusively online, people have discovered that they don’t really need print journalists to learn about music. These journos act like if they didn’t get paid to tell us about some shitty 7″ that only forty people in the whole world care about, the Earth would spin off its axis. If we get to a point where technology and a rotating cast of amateurs can more efficiently serve the public’s music information needs than journalists, is that necessarily a bad thing?

“But there’s still a demand for writing that offers cultural context rather than knee-jerk tantrums written in your “parent’s basement.” The bottom line is that while some music blogging passes as good journalism, blogging and journalism are rarely the same. And where the extinction of print is concerned, we’ve heard the same doom and gloom about analog recording, vinyl records, and even record stores over the last decade, but they’re all still here, so don’t hold your breath.”

What Chaddy Rad “fails to understand” is that a decrease in demand is not the same thing as an absence of demand. I guess economics was left out of his journalism curriculum. Yes, there will always be a place for musical historians. But with such a vast amount of information easily accessible to anyone, how many professional art historians do we really need? There are plenty of people who are out of touch that will enjoy another out of touch voice to echo their thoughts, but beyond that, there just isn’t that much need to explain what was good in music twenty or thirty years ago. It’s easy to go to the Internet and figure that out.

One of the biggest problems for print is that they can’t measure metrics the way digital media can. Creative Loafing can dump as much trash in the front of bars and claim whatever circulation numbers they want, but that doesn’t mean their reach per article is actually that large. Beyond big headlines bumping up circulation, print can’t easily discern which sections and pieces are generating readership, at least not as easily as digital formats. It makes them less nimble to adjust to changes, which is why they are trapped with all of these out of touch voices weighing them down. But even worse for print is this attitude among the journalists that metrics aren’t important. They have this sense of entitlement, yet find it both impossible and bothersome to justify that worth in any empirical sense. I’m sure once this attitude, as well as some of the inefficiencies, get purged from print, it will see a nice resurgence down the line by recruiting more relevant and efficient contributors. While I seriously doubt the demand for print will ever return to pre-Internet levels, some print will surely survive, the institutions that adapt better than the others. Creative Loafing has certainly made an effort to adapt, bringing in fresher voices in recent time who may obviously be lacking in overall musical knowledge, but they at least demonstrate an effort to compete. I mean Spencer Sloan’s “Tracklist” series on Cribnotes is identical to the “Friday Free-Style” and “Monday Mash-Up” posts I used to do here back in ’07 and ’08. If Creative Loafing’s music department is ultimately successful in the end, it’s because they adapted, thus proving that journalism’s fate is in its own hands.

Free content is a viable business model, but sympathy for sucking isn’t.

While I do enjoy being playfully antagonistic, my intention here is not just to bash old people, print, and journalism. I didn’t invent the Internet or blogging, and I wasn’t even on the forefront of those things. I didn’t make people grow out of touch as they grow old. I’m only the messenger. I’m trying to help journalists get their heads out of their asses. I wish we could all sit around and talk about music and get mad paid and never grow old, but that’s not reality. I’m doing you journalists a favour and attempting to wake you up from this slow suicide of mediocrity where you blame your ineptitude on everything outside of yourself. Because I’m not really your competition. To me, no matter what cultural context you put it in, music journalism has always been more about cronyism, corruption, and vanity then anything else. So I have no interest in being identified as a music journalist. As a writer, I couldn’t think of anything more horrifyingly boring than having to write record reviews for the rest of my life. Sooner or later I’ll lose interest in this blog, but someone else will come along to replace me. I’m sure this massive wave of bloggers will eventually recede, but access to an audience will never be as restricted as it once was. So from now on, you’ll have to prove your worth in some sort of measurable way to be successful. And if not, you’ll go the way of Paste.

[Diatribe] Why Paste Magazine Died

I wasn’t planning on blogging this week, but I just found out that Paste Magazine, based in Decatur, has ceased its print publication, and I’m guessing there won’t be much else left after that. I hate to see this mag go, because at one time long ago it was fairly decent, but I have to say that I’m not very surprised this happened, and from my perspective, it was nobody’s fault but their own. I didn’t want to pile on them when they were struggling, because as much smack as I talk to other music journalists around here, I don’t want people to actually lose their jobs or anything. But now that Paste is done, I’m going to explain exactly why they have sucked so hard recently. I have absolutely no idea what their monetary situation was, but I’ll outline the reasons I feel Paste failed, and if other print mags happen to come across this, they might want to pay attention because they could be next.


Top 3 Reasons Why Paste Failed:


1) Old People shouldn’t be in charge of covering music for kids.

Now, I’m sort of slitting my own throat on this one as I’m not exactly getting any younger, and I’m sure people who want to make music journalism a career will hate this, but it’s true. A few months ago I received a promo email from one of Paste mag’s high-up dudes, shilling for some local band. I listened to the band, and they played the most cliche’ hard rock garbage, which no one has actually cared about for at least twenty years. I thought, if this guy that helps run Paste really believes in this band, if he is willing to spend his own time backing this particular group, just exactly how out of touch with what’s happening in music today is this guy and Paste Magazine on the whole? And that was their biggest problem; Paste had become so out of touch with the music scene it was covering. They were evaluating music based on ideals that were obsolete and anachronistic. As much as they were pioneers in a lot of different ways, they were cavemen when in came to gripping the current music climate.

Now, there are certainly logistical problems to letting kids run a mag. For instance, it is difficult to find people who possess both the knowledge of current styles and sharpened writing skills. But that’s exactly what talent scouts should be looking for, and as soon as they find them, they should be looking for the next ones to replace them. Instead, these institutions are typically run by a small handful of people, lost in their own bubble, slowly racing towards inevitable irrelevance. Sure, there are exceptions, really great music writers who have weathered plenty of eras well, but for the most part, people who are getting paid the most for music journalism by older institutions are by and large older journalists who could easily be outmatched by a kid in his pajamas in his parent’s basement.

The heart of it is this: If you are not putting an immense amount of effort in keeping up with current trends, you will be left behind.


2) Inconsistent voices will be ignored.

Even when Paste was more in tune with what was going on, they were always terrible at discerning the good from the great. Nobody could possibly count on Paste’s numerical values of reviews, because there was no cohesive rhyme or rhythm to them. It felt like there was a whole bunch of different people all tossing around opinions randomly. It may seem that in theory being democratic about the many voices inside your institution will reach an even-handed, median voice, but in practice it doesn’t work. That is one of the biggest reasons blogs have taken over, because most of the time they contain a singular voice. There are lots of music journalists who I read regularly that I rarely agree with in terms of music taste, but I can always count on them being consistent with their evaluations, and thus I can make sound assumptions based on their work. Just having a hodgepodge of opinions is beyond useless for the end user. One of Pitchfork’s biggest achievements is managing their writers and numerical grades. Even though hundreds of different people write their reviews, you can always count on Pitchfork to have a reason for their tone and number grades, whether we disagree with them or not.

The only big institutions that will survive this print-tumbling era will be the ones who develop and maintain a consistent voice.


3) Music journalism isn’t as important as it used to be.

This is another one that my many music journalist friends won’t want to hear, but you ignore it at your own peril. Before anyone with the slightest bit of resourcefulness and access to the Internet could download any record they wanted, there was a need for gatekeepers to inform the masses what was worth their dollar. But now, aggregators and torrent site’s top lists do a better job of efficiently communicating the best new music then 99% of music journalists out there. With so much music being created, and attention spans of readers diminishing, there just isn’t that much demand for long-winded, deep-digging album reviews. People want to know whether they’ll like the record or not, plain and simple. Now we may all want to harken back to a simpler time when music journalism came with it a certain amount of status and honour, but today most paid music journalists are nothing more than concealed publicists, pandering to their ever decreasing amount of ad revenue. We may all wish that people couldn’t steal music, and that everyone who wants to could stay employed, but you can’t operate a business on wishful thinking.

The economics is this: Demand is shrinking, and supply is growing exponentially. If you don’t understand this, your music mag will fail, and even if you do understand this, your mag will still probably fail.

Nameless Goatfarm Festival Schedule

All The Saints 11:30pm
The N.E.C. 11:00pm
The Coathangers 10:15pm
The Selmanaires 9:30pm
Hawks 9:00pm
Predator 8:30pm
Balkans 8:00pm
Abby Go Go 7:30pm
Carnivores 7:00pm
Mermaids 6:30pm
Hollow Stars 5:00pm
This Piano Plays Itself 4:30pm
Tv Torso 4:00pm
Lyonnais 3:30pm

It’s going down this Saturday at 1200 Foster St. Atlanta Ga 30318. The fest is free, but they may be charging for parking if you don’t carpool efficiently so be aware. This is going to be a fun one for sure. More info here.

Nameless Goatfarm Festival

All The Saints
The Coathangers
The N.E.C
Selmanaires
Hawks
Predator
Balkans
Abby Go Go
Carnivores
This Piano Plays Itself
Mermaids
TV Torso
El Fossil
Lyonnais

Music Starts at 1PM and runs until whenever
1200 Foster St. Atlanta Ga 30318

ITS FREE


Festival facebook page

On a related note, the Goat Farm now has new owner.

[Diatribe] Riding The Chillwave In The Year Of Indiebore

“Chillwave is the pinnacle of the snoozification of indie music…”

Six months ago, I wrote off the chillwave hype as just a passing fad, but as this year has progressed, I’ve realized the phenomenon is much more than a anomalous blip. I don’t find the music encompassing chillwave particularly impressive, though some of it is very nice when I’m in the right mood, but in terms of discerning the current state of music, chillwave turns out to be pretty damn fascinating.

First of all, the nature of the genre is rather unique. Typically in the history of pop music, genres emerge either from a single artist inventing a new style and others copycatting, or due to various people in one geographic location or scene co-inventing an aesthetic together. With chillwave, various artists in completely different locations having no ties to one another coincidentally developed respective sounds that were similar enough to be grouped together by people observing them on the Internet. Certainly these artists have some common bonds in terms of influences, but for an entire genre to come into existence and predominance this quickly from this sort of origin is previously unheard of and it marks the beginning of a new, “post-blog” era in music.

Welcome To The Post-Blog Era

Before this music blog/Internet/Indie revolution happened, a very small handful of people decided what most people would get to hear. Label execs and old school music journalists guessed what would be in fashion and fed it to listeners who only had few options in terms of sources to discover new music. Once the Internet changed that, there was promise of more freedom for music listeners, and with the barriers to entry tumbling down in journalism, it seemed there would be endless voices and opinions to aid people in finding the music they enjoyed most. All of that came to pass, but with an ever-growing amount of voices and options out there, the problem has shifted from not enough choice to an over-abundance. Which of the five billion blogs does a random person go to for finding new music they like?

With an overload of information, people have migrated towards the sources that could make sense of all of that data best, or the ones they recognize most. So in the last few years, even though a new blog is born every second, the amount of people with influence in the world of indie has coalesced into fewer and fewer hands. Power has been consolidated into three general groups: you have aggregators like Hypemachine and Elbows, you have the sites with the most comprehensive and quickest press releases, like Largehearted Boy, Brooklyn Vegan, and Pitchfork, and then you have tastemakers who have been the most successful at chasing down the zeitgeist of indie, like Hipster Runoff, Gorilla Vs Bear, and again Pitchfork. But that’s pretty much it, because if an artist isn’t doing well in those three spheres of influence, then most people won’t ever hear of them.

Looking back, the blog era didn’t end up changing music journalism as fundamentally as some thought, it more forced a changing of the guard. What is happening is a solidification and amplification of the most successful of the blog-era journalists. The trend will now shift towards conglomeration. Case and point, for a while I have thought there has been an enormous opportunity to create a viable alternative to compete with Pitchfork, if someone with the resources and understanding went out and just drafted all of the best music bloggers, putting them together on one website. It seems so simple, but it appears the only other person who thought of it was Pitchfork, who made another brilliant move in creating their potential competition themselves. Next week, Pitchfork will unveil Altered Zones, which is exactly what I just described: a central-website with a staff of hand-picked bloggers.

Back to chillwave…

It is the first example of a genre popularized by this new, post-blog regime. Hipster Runoff, Gorilla Vs Bear, and Pitchfork all but colluded in coming together and creating a successful music fashion by themselves. A musician’s career in the indie world can be made overnight by one of these three websites, and chillwave’s ascension is empirically irrefutable evidence to that effect.

But chillwave wasn’t simply an arbitrary occurrence. It isn’t a case of those with influence shoving something down everyone else’s throats. Those websites have become the primary tastemakers because they know what they are doing. As indie music has continually become more popular, these sites have backed records that they believed would have the broadest coalition of indie music fans. The music they endorse may not be mainstream in popular culture on the whole, but they rarely give their blessing to music that couldn’t at least become popular among indie fans. And chillwave appeals to so many different cross sections of indie listeners. The lo-fi kids can get into it, but so can electronic and electro peeps. It’s got that fashionable beachy vibe. It’s psychedelic, but nice and melodic, even containing a strong ’80s thread. It’s as if the genre was put together purposely to be the most commercially viable indie genre ever.

Of course, this race to the lowest common denominator is nothing new. And if chillwave is the worst of it, than indie may never die. I mean, think about what grunge morphed into six or seven years down the line. Indie music is still not as mainstream as previous major pop music movements, and it’s in the nature of indie listeners to enjoy a much wider range of styles than mainstream listeners, so there are limitations to how watered down things can get.

In addition, it’s not just a matter of indie getting too popular either. There are also fundamental changes in the way people listen to music and the way people make music that has driven us to this chillwave era.

Before everyone could steal whatever record they wanted, most people could only afford to buy so many, and they spent a lot more time with their music. These days kids are blowing through as much music as quickly as possible to find the next buzzband, and if a record doesn’t have a track that can catch someone’s attention right away, it can easily get overlooked. The successful music websites understand this and play to it, thus forcing musicians to play to it as well in order to break out from the other 5 billion musicians.

The audience is now the entertainer. Reality music has arrived.

And that’s the other side of the coin. The barrier to entry has faded away to become a musician just the same as it has to become a journalist, making chillwave the first confluence of these parallel shifts. Everyone is trying to stand out in an extremely saturated market, and that situation dictates the nature of what emerges. Any retard can download a cracked version of Ableton Live and be a chillwave-star. Talent is less a prerequisite to becoming a musician now than it ever has before. There is a dumbing down happening simultaneously in both indie music listeners and indie music makers, so the indie music journalists succeeding are simply giving people exactly what they want.

I’m not sure if that mostly accounts for how boring mainstream indie releases have become lately or not, but things have definitely gotten mundane. And that gives chillwave even more momentum: lack of competition. Chillwave is the pinnacle of the snoozification of indie music, and there aren’t many other major trends happening at the moment.

Ultimately though, I find all of these developments to be natural, not necessarily negative. Music works in cyclical ways, and when a lull in interesting sounds happens, it usually leads to something completely new breaking out. Either indie will find a way to renew itself or something different and better will come along. And as far as boring music goes, again, we could do a lot worse.

The Summer Generation

There is something more cultural than musical that helps sustain chillwave as well. With everything in the news so dramatically full of conflict, a cultural backlash of people who are apathetic to those events has emerged. Unlike the ’90′s generation, kids today just want to chill out and be happy. This generation doesn’t care about protest songs, they want something to casually listen to while they are hanging by the pool.

So in absence of popular indie trends that I prefer, I’m just going to go ahead and ride the chillwave for the rest of the summer. Hopefully by autumn there will be some more compelling national releases than the bulk of what has come out so far this year, and if not, there’s still plenty of good stuff out there if you dig deep enough, but there sure is a lot of junk to sift through as well.

Here are a couple of my fave chillwave jams, coincidentally from relatively local acts:

Toro Y Moi : “Blessa”
Washed Out : “You & I”

I touched on a lot of different subjects above, so I thought I would post of a few references that I recommend you check out to dig deeper into these topics. First, if you are clueless about the genre of chillwave, this is a piece to give you a primer, though I’m not sure I agree with all of their characterizations:

“In Defense of Chillwave” by Brandon Soderberg @ Village Voice

Carles of Hipster Runoff popularized the “chillwave” term, and here is his most recent piece discussing it and the state of indie music:

“CHILLWAVE OIL SPILL: When Natural and Man-Made Forces Collide To Form an Indie Disaster” by Carles @ Hipster Runoff

Here’s a little something further explaining the “post-blog era” with a more thorough examination of why this has happened:

“Dizzy Polari: music blogs are dead, long live music blogs!” by Matt Tyson @ Earfarm

On the subject of what the barrier to entry collapsing for musicians has done to music, Atlanta’s own Eric Guenther (From Exile) dropped a rant on Metalsucks a few months ago addressing that very subject:

“MUSIC IS DEAD.” by Eric Guenther @ Metalsucks

Finally, I want to thank Kill Your Darlings ATL for helping me edit this piece.

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