Posts Tagged "music"

Bundle Selfishly

Posted by The Author on 27 Feb, 2012 in Digital Publishing | Comments Off

From about the age of ten, I spent most of my pocket money on records. I spent some money on books too, although most of my reading came from school libraries. I can’t even remember how much a long player was, but suffice to say it must have been a significant investment, given the kind of dough I was making at the time and the number of discs I still have from back then.

These days, I’m still buying long players. Mostly I get them from the US because, even with exorbitant postage, it’s still cheaper than buying them locally. Where I can, I buy them directly from the artists. And when I take delivery of them, I frequently find a surprise card hidden inside with a code to download the same album as mp3 files for free.

The overall package is more expensive than a CD or just downloading the files, but not a lot more and the perceived value is much greater: the sound and packaging of the vinyl (see, I’m not immune to object fetishisation) at home and the convenience of digital songs to drop onto my phone when out and about. Really, it just updates what I used to do, which was make tapes of the records I bought to listen to on my Walkman.

The Karinthy Connection

Posted by The Author on 21 Sep, 2011 in Stuff That Happens | Comments Off

Few people know of Hungarian writer and poet Frigyes Karinthy, but you would know the phrase he coined, “six degrees of separation”.

Every Tuesday after 5.30pm, a music lover is invited onto Drive with Bernadette Young to continue a musical chain called The Karinthy Connection.

Yesterday was my turn. I had to pick up from where Brendan Gallagher left off last week with B.B. King. So here’s my six degrees.

Muted (R)evolution

Posted by The Author on 10 Sep, 2011 in He Writes, Stuff That Happens | Comments Off

A small piece pondering the impact of digital on street press and the music industry generally has been published in the September issue of Meanjin (volume 70, number 3).

You have to knock. If you’re supposed to be there, someone will let you in. The exterior broadcasts little; only a small sign in the window marks the name of the magazine.

‘Hi,’ he says. ‘Come on in.’

Inside, the walls groan with the weight of history hanging from them. Posters old and new jostle for the limited space available: Powderfinger bidding farewell to the world, the Smashing Pumpkins touring their new album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. To the left, a reception desk curves away from me around the corner of the room, overlooking the entire area. No one sits behind it. To the right, stacks of papers line the wall by the front door without any discernible order to them: the reformed Saints here, the Residents there. There’s at least fifteen years of history lying at my feet, almost discarded on the floor.

It’s available in all good bookshops or you can buy a copy online over hereabouts. Go buy it. Go on.

Regurgitator interview

Posted by The Author on 12 Aug, 2011 in Digital Publishing, He Writes | Comments Off

I recently interviewed Quan Yeomans from Regurgitator about their new record Superhappyfuntimesfriends (which I recommend you buy).

The article from the interview is published over at TOM Magazine, but I thought I’d add a few choice quotes from Quan that didn’t make it into the final text and that have some relevance to writing and publishing.

On working from home:

We did an EP in the studio and we just weren’t particularly blown away by the sound quality or the experience and we were left wondering why we spent the money. The technology has grown so quickly, you can’t tell where things are recorded any more. It’s really about getting the performances down. There are better producers and better mixers out there, but then 90% of the people don’t care as long as it’s a good song. Home is the ideal environment to record in for the both cost and control. As long as you have deadlines, then I think it’s a really great way of doing things.

On the influence of digital and the subsequent need for ‘artefacts’ among fans:

The reality now is that there’s less panic about selling the physical form than there used to be. It’s more that these are limited edition artefact for fans who need the thing in their hands and it’s really great to see the artwork in multiple forms. It’s great for an artist to see. If you want the artefact, then we’re happy for you to support us. But we’re also happy for you to have the music for free if that’s what you want. That is the state of affairs right now. Data is uncontrollable, take it if you want it, download it if you feel like it. Come to the live shows (which is how we survive right now). That’s the state of affairs.

Authditor

Posted by The Author on 23 Jul, 2010 in He Edits, Stuff That Happens | Comments Off

Author. Editor. I tried coming up with a portmanteau for what I do, but the best I could manage was ‘authditor’ (given that ‘auditor’ was already taken). Somehow this unholy Vulcan-mind-meld of roles has not so far completely done my head in. Then again, maybe I’m not the best judge of these things.

Being both an author and an editor means you sympathise with parties on each side of the brilliant-writing divide. You know how hard it is to crank out a draft, but you also know the groaning horror of facing trite, clichéd, poorly spelled, and even more poorly punctuated slop from overly sensitive and precious wordsmiths. Being an authditor is like being a swinging voter, except you’re not necessarily also a bogan.

So in late October, my collaboration with Sean Sennett on an anthology of Australian music street press will be marching inexorably through the landscape in what I hope will be plague proportions. Like any good anthology, it will be big and fat and absolutely chock-a-block with references to Iggy’s Fun House record. It even has the word ‘boner’ a few times for good measure.

To create the book, Sean and I trawled (really there’s no other word for it) through more than 1,300 issues of Time Off. A conservative average of three interviews per issue still comes up with around 4,000 stories to consider. We had to reduce that to under a hundred. It was a wild ride. Digital files exist only for articles published since around 1997. Everything before that had to be eyeballed. Neck pain, eyestrain and inky fingers were standard fare. It was fun, though. Prominent advertisements for massage parlours jostled with exhortations about how AM Stereo was going to transform Australia’s radio landscape. I took photos. When you’re locked in the world of your subject, strange things happen. I almost wet my pants when I saw a 1984 interview with Johnny Marr. Then I almost threw the computer through the window when I Googled the quotes and realised the story was rehashed from a contemporary article in The Face.

To help us deal with the volume, we identified early on a core list of artists we thought should get a jersey. That list ran to about two-hundred. Each of those artists might have featured anywhere from a single interview to ten or more. We had to decide not just on artist, but the era (was that period interesting for the artist?) and author (did the piece take an interesting angle?).

We were working with previously published pieces, but pieces composed in a very different environment to ours. A few people pulling together pages and pages of articles, information and ads every single week. As an editor, when I came across a rough patch of prose, I mostly sided with the authors. Spelling howlers? Blame the lack of resources or the deadline. Change the text, shrug, and move on to the next sentence. As an editor, it was easy to take a withering approach. As an authditor, the feelings were mixed. Still, the results are exciting.

There was a point to this article when I started. Now I’m just in need of a good editor. Know any?