As we have previously reported, we are currently recording a radio serial for Radio Merseyside’s Roger Hill and his PMS show (variously known as Pure Musical Sensations, the Popular Music Show, and several other pseudonyms)… on Sunday 1st April we will be going in to meet Roger and play some music we love, as well as talk about our serialisation of ‘The Last and First Men’ by Olaf Stapledon…
On the following Sunday (8th April) the first part of our serial will be broadcast on Roger’s show…
In other news, we have joined a fantabulous list of local musicians nominated for Peter Guy’s Get Into This (GIT) Award… if you haven’t already seen the list, you can peruse it at www.getintothis.co.uk … joining us on the list are Outfit, Stealing Sheep, Ex-Easter Island Head, Forest Swords and many more extremely talented people… we will, consequently, be performing at the GIT Awards ceremony on April 27th at Liverpool’s Leaf Cafe…
We are beginning work on a radio series for Roger Hill’s Radio Merseyside show… the project will run as a series for around 6 episodes, during which we will serialise a Science Fiction novel and produce a score to be played alongside the performance… Thankyou to Roger for allowing us the opportunity to do this, news on the development of the piece to come soon…
The sandstone hills are crowded with woods, patchworks of dirt-orange paths that meld together like running paint. Over the years the Council have designated dozens of cycle and walking routes, with complementary signs put up by the National Trust (who have no jurisdiction to do so). On a warm summer afternoon, walkers emerge out of the quilt of shade into areas of clear sky, green-rimmed horizons that merge with the diamond-like estuary, and for a while, silence reigns. In truth, the silence here is not much more profound than down in the town, where quiet moments can be found on certain cul-de-sacs even during balmy periods, when the ducks and the geese in the park are hushed to the occasional rustling of slick neck feathers. The wider streets, solidly packed with cars and bicycles, are lined with grand old beeches and oaks which allow what little rain has fallen to remain as sludge in the uneven gutter. At dawn, the ducks waddle across the busy road and splash into the half-barrel pool in number 30’s front garden. They will return, unnoticed, before rush hour. I go to the sloping lawns of Ashton Park to lie down and try to write something, or make some progress on the History of the Arab Peoples I’m reading, but I quickly put aside any thought of writing and let a few pages of tribal customs and migrations float past me. A day like this, which hasn’t happened yet, which I’m dreaming of from January, is not for language. Even the act of creation seems like a chore, which it should never become. So instead I’ll lie there, here, on the sloping lawn, and open a second frame, picturing myself in the past now, wandering through the grounds of Tatton Park, in the Oriental garden. There is a pool, brick-built, with leaves and algae; the water is cold, but reasonably clean. No insects skate the surface, the tiles are aquamarine. If I was younger, I’d be dragging on my mother’s arm to go into this pool. I stop, and stare at the surface. Eventually, I follow the girl out of the garden, through the leaf arch.
We’ve been doing some photos.
Here’s a little taster, they’ll be more coming soon…
Astral Plane.
Were one to come to us from the moon would our sea winds
brace him? Desperately he would choke in the heavy fumes
that give us breath.
Would he cry, “Oh happy world not stark like mine, but
gay with greenness and with the voice of birds”? As well
might the grass seem to him verdigris and the birds whistling
fiends.
Were he to meet the fairest woman would he say “Surely
it is some divinity: I have dreamt such but not seen.” To
him she might well be repugnant as to us a toad.
And if anyone told him “Thou shalt not steal, nor covet
thy neighbour’s wife,” would he answer, “Indeed it is
against God’s law”? Probably he would smile.
Our morals and politics, our arts and all that we delight
to do, how meaningless they would seem to him!
One thing only on the earth, if he were himself an
enlightened lover of Spirit, he might admire.
After long study he might send home this message:
“Here also are spirits. Here also they struggle to keep
alive, though as yet they have only children’s sorrows and
their joys are brutish. Here also they begin to learn, though
tardily, that all is for the Awakening.”
How much music did you steal last year?
A month or so ago I found it convenient to illegally download a track from Soundcloud. The track wasn’t my own, so I stole it. I know the people I stole it from, and I didn’t tell them I’d done it.
Afterwards I found myself thinking up excuses for my larceny. The track hadn’t been released, and in all likelihood, never would be. It was poor quality (128 kbps). It was only one track by the band, so they wouldn’t really miss the revenue. I’m a musician myself, so I’m constantly being stolen from, I deserve something back.
The moral debate at the centre of illegal downloading has, for the most part, gone quiet. People are doing it everyday, usually while doing ten other things, as freely as they would set a TV reminder.
It’d be fatuous to suggest that illegal downloads are the equivalent of a stolen flat-screen during the riots; many rioters when interviewed said that, from their point of view, anything they could take was fair game. Download morality works in the same way – the music is there, so why not take it?
(Some people even claim that stealing music helps bands; ‘I would never buy an album by them, this way I might actually choose to go see them live!’. So you take a year’s worth of work from them for nothing, then buy them a gift-wrapped scented candle in return? You generous bastard!)
Of course, for the music industry the effects are very tangible. For every band ‘broken’ by a whirlwind online viral campaign, there are ten labels who couldn’t cope with the catastrophic loss in revenue. The outcry after the PIAS warehouse fire was equally loud from people who thought nothing about immediately logging on and downloading everything released by a hundred labels who lost their entire physical stock, for free.
I’ve had this argument in the pub many times with friends. Most of them fall on the side of practicality; you can’t stop people stealing music, you may as well learn new ways of making a living from it. Ironically, the grand result of all of this will almost certainly prove to be a shift in the moral compass of musicians.
With record labels marginalised, and unable to offer large signing-on fees to 99% of the acts they take on, musicians are increasingly turning to publishers for their income. This normally means licensing music to TV and radio for advertising or syncing over other mediums (that bit at the start of Hollyoaks where everyone argues over the top of some random indie-dance track you’ve never heard of, that’s a sync).
Musicians are, therefore, increasingly being drawn towards incorporating their art for use by private companies to advertise their wears. This often grinds on purists who claim that musicians who allow McDonalds to use their art to soundtrack their latest act of eco-terrorism are ‘selling out’. Problem is, when music fans become thieves, musicians become businessmen.
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