Musical Advent Calendar - Recap Days 21 - 24
Written by: Hugh Platt
By the time you read this, it’ll be Christmas Day. Music Towers will have shut up shop for a while (at least until we’ve put the finishing touches to our 2008 Almanac), and will have settled down to watch the Dr Who Xmas Special with a big bottle of gin. Later on you will find us wandering the streets, drunkenly singing the four songs you can see below. We might be dressed as Santa, we might possibly just go naked - in either case, it won’t be pretty, but gosh darn it will be entertaining.
Have a very merry Christmas, from all of us here at Music Towers. We just hope that someone got us that White Zombie boxset we’ve been dropping hints about over the last month….
Day 21 - ‘Christmas Is Awesome’ - Rueben
Day 22 - ‘Merry Christmas Baby (I Don’t Wanna Fight Tonight) - The Ramones
Day 23 - ‘Happy Christmas (War is Over)’ - John Lennon
Day 24 - ‘Oh Come All Ye Faithful’ - Twisted Sister
Zavvi goes into administration
Written by: Hugh Platt
Well, as predicted, Zavvi, the UK’s largest high street music retailer, has gone into administration today. The death knell came when the collapse of Woolworths took distributors EUK down with it - without it, Zavvi found themselves unable to re-stock, and the current financial climate was just too severe for them to survive.
The downside is, of course, that now HMV are the only major player when it comes to high street music retail. Sure, there are still a smattering of independent stores (all of whom will be struggling) and supermarkets (just don’t expect to see anything other than the most MOR of the mainstream on their shelves), but as far as the high street goes, HMV is all we’ve got. Regardless of your views on the players in the retail game, this can only be further bad news for the music industry.
Well, I doubt that’s going to be any consolation to the 3500 Zavvi staff who found out they’re going to be made redundant on Christmas Eve. That’s got to make for a merry bloody Christmas.
Musical Advent Calendar - Recap Days 16 - 20
Written by: Hugh Platt
Have you done your Christmas shopping yet? We have. We’re so up on Christmas like you would not believe. We’ve taken to striding about our office dressed as Santa Claus. Local children are terrified when thye see us struttung up and down the high street like a gaggle of red-clad drunks. It’s amazing.
ANYWAY - here’s the last five days of our splendid musical advent calendar - we really love Joel Moss Levinson’s bitchin’ song we used yesterday.
Day 16 - ‘Last Christmas’ - Wham!
Day 17 - We Wish You A Merry Christmas’ - Weezer
Day 18 - ‘Fairytale of New York’ - The Pogues ft. Kirsty MacColl
Day 19 - ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ - My Chemical Romance
Day 20 - Christmas Kicks Hanukah’s Ass!’ - Joel Moss Levinson
Reasons Not to be Christmassy: The State of the UK Record Industry
Written by: David Harrison
Bah-chuffing-Humbug. I my mind, Christmas isn’t a time of merriment, it’s a time to reflect on how this year was a bit crappier than last year, and how next year already looks like it’s going to be bloody awful.
Christmas TV these days seems to kick off with a teenager saying
“I have been through so much to be here’
If I hear one more, I will have to start burning effigies of Simon Cowell in Trafalgar Square. This year I was unfortunate enough to watch about 8 episodes of the blimmin’ X-Factor. No longer content with being an X-Men spin off, they ditched all the original characters (The Beast, Angel, Marvel Girl, Cyclops) for a bunch of sniveling cretins.
It is an endless guilt trip of how they will commit suicide/murder a puppy/murder the rest of their family if they don’t get to put out a flaccid Christmas single before fading into annonimity again. Maybe with these reality TV shows they should just skip the singing and dancing and have a crying competition.
For the fifth year on the trot, an X-Factor contestant has done a smaltzy cover and bagged the Xmas number one. Simon Cowell has single handedly ruined Christmas. Again.
Christmas in musicland is also ruined by the annual realisation that the industry is smaller, more disparate, more desperate then ever before. As my tax return deadline comes into view, I notice the shrinking of clients budgets in glorious excel spreadsheet technicolour.
While Alexandra Burke cries ‘Halleujah’, I’m taking stock of 2008 and am finding it a miserable experience. Some of the major players are struggling to exist, with the infrastructure of the UK recording industry crumbling faster than Zimbabwe’s economy. It seems like we’re approaching the tipping point.
The UK’s largest independent distributor, Pinnacle, and previously largest-cheesy-pop-that-goes-in-Tesco’s distributor, EUK, are both in administration. Past giants in retail are now minnows, with Woolworths, the biggest retailer of music of the 90s, twitching in its death throes. This time last year we had Fopp and Virgin Megastores, but now there is just a struggling Zavvi and a loss-posting HMV. It’s got to the point where the music industry can’t sell enough records to support a single high street chain.
My local high street has more Sushi bars than stores where I can listen to or buy music. The last 8 years have trained a whole generation that music is something to be had for free. Electronics outfit, Maplin’s, sell a terrabyte hard drive for £70. Who needs Peer 2 Peer? Just pop round this afternoon and take ALL THE MUSIC THAT WAS EVER RECORDED on one hard drive.
The recent industry conferences in London all seemed to be called things like ‘We are all really feckked - does anyone have any ideas?’ or ‘Can we get someone a bit famous to charm an MP, maybe that will help?’. Nobody did have any ideas, but the MP was a bit charmed by it all, so maybe there is hope. Although the sea will rise before there is a music tax included in the license fee.
Oh, but the live scene is booming you say? In 2008, the live scene reached the apex of a ten year boom; from here on in it is down down down, so grab a decent bobsleigh. In the last 12 months the UK has been lucky to have a pretty strong pound, $2.1 to £1 this time last year, to just $1.4 to £1 now. This means that those dollars you pay Kings of Leon for their umpteenth miserable festival appearance might just double.
Most of the profits from the last few years has been shipped out of the UK in the form of giants Live Nation or AEG. And I can’t remember the last time a live events company put any money into developing acts, as instead they’re saving all those pennies for gut-busting deals with Madonna or Jay Z. As our money goes stateside by way of those colossal artist fees and share dividends, UK acts, and in turn those medium-sized shows, dry up. Big tickets get more expensive, and control in in fewer and fewer hands. Across the board, old hands get let go as younger, cheaper, and easier to shag command staff get hired.
With the country approaching two million unemployed, I think punters’ casual spending on a round of £4-a-pint beers might be replaced with a renewed vigour of smuggling in some booze. People will start skipping behemoths like Glastonbury, as it is rubbish and a bit samey anyway. We spent most of the festival at the campsite watching people trying to do handstands.
The long and the short of it is that during a time when more than ever before, more music is being created, listened to, carried, watched and moshed to, never has it been more impossible to make a living from it.
Which, unfortunately, was what I did up until up until now. Bah Humbug.
Musical Advent Calendar - Recap Days 11 - 15
Written by: Hugh Platt
OHMYGODTHERE’S
JUSTTENDAYSTOGO! No, we don’t know why Christmas makes us so exicted here at Music Towers. Maybe because we know we’ll be getting that White Zombie boxset we’ve had our eye on for the last few weeks. Or maybe because there’s a Doctor Who special on TV. Or maybe because of the vast amount of mince pies we’re going to eat. Or maybe it’s the mulled wine. Or the mistletoe! Or the fact we’re going to get dressed up like Santa and ruin someone’s office party. Or that we’re going to hire a snow machine and set it off in our garage.
Or maybe it’s because the best is still yet to come on our amazing Musical Advent Calendar? There are some real gems coming up in the last ten days. In any case, here’s the last five entires, which you may have missed if you’ve been out Christmas shopping or something.
Day 11 - ‘We Wish You A Merry Christmas (Rave Mix)’ - DJ Cool
Day 12 - ‘It’s Christmas And I Hate You’ - Paloma Faith & Josh Weller
Day 13 - ‘Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End)’ - The Darkness
Day 14 - ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ - Girls Aloud
Day 15 - ‘Someday at Christmas’ - Stevie Wonder
ALBUM: DeadMau5 - ‘At Play’
Written by: Shokrates The Finger
Dance music hasn’t always agreed with everyone at Music Towers. To this day, I still believe that whenever I go clubbing it fucks with my bodyclock.
I wake up the next day with a hangover as fierce as a pride of pissed-off lions, even if all I drank was Red Bull and over=priced bottled water. I get constipated for days. There is a residual throb that’s in my sinuses that that feels like someone’s going at my nostrils with an industrial milking machine, set to “udder buster” level.
But At Play by DeadMau5 makes me want to feel like I’ve gone through my personal clubland assault course. Listening to it makes me long for a mouth that doesn’t stop feeling dry even after 3 litres of water, for eyes that feel like we’re rubbing them with sandpaper every time we blink. It makes me want to stay up for four days straight, so stuffed full of cheap pills that we make a noise like a pack of tic-tacs when we walk down the street.
Listening to ‘Hey Baby’ is like having your best mate’s boyfriend whisper dirty talk in your ear when she’s in the same room as you. It borders on the pornographic, and no matter how much it gets your juices flowing, there’s something wrong about it. Whether it’s a case of “so-wrong-it’s-right”, or “plain downright wrong”, is something I can’t make up my mind on.
Watch DeadMAu5 perform live at the O2 Wireless Festival from this summer:
Then there’s the flat-pack instructo-techno of ‘This Is The Hook’. Oddly charming, it manages to keep the right side of toe-tappingly addictive without being overpowered by its vocal schtick - a disembodied Stephen Hawking-voice dissecting the various parts of a dance track.
The rest of the the record is chewy with house basslines and nightclub sleaze. Normally we’d find the juvenile lines of a track like ‘Afterhours’ (sample line: “Throw me down on the bar / should we do it in the car?” Urgh) too laughable for us to really mesh with DeadMau5‘ album, but it’s party season and common sense has deserted us. We just want something vivid and full of vigour to distract us from the prospect of having to spend a few days in the company of our closest relatives, and At Play does that and more. Pass the disco biscuits and get over here.
More reasons to be Christmassy
Written by: Hugh Platt
Did you come to the big Music Towers ‘Oh Christmas!’ party last night? It was amazing. The police turned up. There was blood everywhere. People danced till they hurt, and everyone who could get sexy, got sexy. Jon Bon Jonas and Death & Glory stole the night with a sing-a-long ‘Love Hurricane’, and John Doran of The Quietus and our faves, Beef Warehouse, kept the tunes spinning till late, late doors. If you missed it, then you are an idiot.
But hey, the real reason I’m bothering you this evening is to let you know of the recession-busting sale going on at Xtra Mile Recordings. They’re knocking a shocking 20% - TWENTY BLOODY PERCENT - off some of their records till December 18. Included in this sweet little Xmas shopping shortcut are Million Dead, Lights Action, Reuben, Jonah Matranga and Frank Turner. That’s him in the picture up there. He’s got a new single out, ‘Reasons Not To Be An Idiot’ which those of you with magic radio boxes might’ve heard aready. We tupping love it here at Music Towers.
Watch the video for ‘Reasons Not To Be An Idiot’ by Frank Turner:
Frank Turner is also touring the fuck out of 2009 - he’s all over the place alternately with The Levellers, The Gaslight Anthem, and Anti-Flag. You ought to buy some ticket - BEAT THE RECESSION!
Musical Advent Calendar - Recap Days 6 - 10
Written by: Hugh Platt
The results of Days 6 through 10 of our Musical Advent Calendar, presented for those who might’ve missed a day.
Day 6 - ‘Christmas Duel’ - The Hives and Cyndi Lauper
Day 7 - ‘Dick in a Box’ - Saturday Night Live and Justin Timberlake
Day 8 - ‘Heavy Metal Jingle Bells’
Day 9 - ‘Christmas Tree’ - Lady GaGa
Day 10 - ‘No Presents For Christmas’ - King Diamond
Are you as excited as we are that it’s NEARLY CHRISTMAS!?!?!?!?!!!
LIVE: ATP: Nightmare Before Christmas
Written by: David Harrison
When All Tomorrow’s Parties started this Christmas Festival, everyone said they were mad: “It’s Christmas time, do people want to go festivaling, what with the financial pressure, the weather, the location? Who wants to go to Minehead at this time of year?”
Well, we do! ATP choose unique artists to curate their festivals, picking their choices for the festival line-up. This weekend is being curated by the Melvins and Mike Patton, and so features a heavy dose of bands on Ipecac, the label owned and run by Mike Patton (of which the Melvins are on). And it’s not just the music that’s getting curated: the chalets everyone stays in have two channels of programmed TV specially picked by the festival organizers and the curators. Everyone I spoke to seem to catch Spider Baby, a very weird black and white film about a family of 60’s hotties gone totally psycho. The soundtrack was delivered wonderfully by Fantomas. Being back-to-back with Rosemary’s Baby, it had me bouncing about in the crowd of bearded men that seems to gather for ATP.
The road to Minehead and the surrounding area actually really gorgeous. For all Mike Patton’s jibes throughtout the festival, the north coast of Devon along the A39 is idyllic. If you ignore the fast food chains and endless slot machines, the Butlins where the festival is based is quite fancy. It has quite beautifully kept flora and forna, the buildings are all kept nice, it’s right on the beach, and although the weather is icy cold, it’s still sunny and all the gigs and bars are inside anyway.
King Buzzo, aka Buzz Osbourne, mainman of the Melvins, wins the award for most amount of times playing this weekend- 3 Melvin’s performances, 2 Fantomas‘ and a Porn (the band, rather then a carnal show) performance, plus a few Astoria shows before and after. His white ‘fro allows the lighting guys to get a chance to perfect the art of lighting his hair.
Isis deliver the 25 minutes of sound that induce both awe and love for them, before the third song reminds you of that there’s a bit too much of a formula going on: enter melody, enter storming riff, and enter a in-need-of-a-Lemsip voice, and one wanders off in search of a beer.
The Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio delivered a quadraphonic version of a Stockhausen’s avante garde music piece, KONTAKTE, of which out of the seeming improvised (but wasn’t by any means) plinks and plonks the Gong solo was by far my favourite bit. While it was very odd, with lots of chinstroking was in order, it was so good that Mike Patton himself rushed up to congratulate the performers when then finished.
Farmers Market delivered a blindingly complicated folk set, although we were spoilt on the Saturday night when the 10-piece Roma Gypsy band, Taraf De Haidouks, took to the stage. They were making a rare appearance on these shores, and they are so fast and so, so brilliant. What was unusual was instead of the usual Barbican-type audience, they had glowstick-welding circle-pit loonies. The crowd worked the band up into such a frenzy they took the show outside for ten minutes before the security moved them on.
The usually-alternative Melvins came across almost normal, in that they had songs with choruses and beginnings and ends. They seemed positively mainstream poised against the experimentation littered about the rest of the bill. Even with bass player, Jared Warren, taking his wig off and spending a good 15 minutes wandering about the audience, in some sort of tongue talking preacherman mode.
One of the best things about ATP festivals is that the partying never really ends; you only get a break when you can’t hack it anymore. I heard tales, from people holding their heads in shame, of a few bands playing a chalet with a full PA and drumkit, another shindig kicking off with a dry-ice machine. I, however, woke up at 5am, watching Star Trek and facing a cold journey back to London.
Gear: Korg Kaoss Pad KP3
Written by: David Harrison
Having got the Mini-KP pinched at Glastonbury was an excuse to head up to Kilburn and have a nose at around that DJ kit shop there. The Pioneer EFX 500 was my aim, priced at about £300. But Korg’s Kaos Pad KP3 has just been reduced to £230 - not only is it a bit more flexible, but it has some sampling tools too.
Out of the box, the Koas Pad KP3 is pretty easy, with sending and receiving a breeze through the mixing desk, and - Eureka! - 100-odd extra finger-controlled effects, available in glorious flashing red lights. The first change from the Mini KP is the power of the thing. The Mini KP always required a bunch of compensation on the channel you were mixing to equalise the levels. The KP3 is powered, over-powered if you want it to be, so if anything you’ll need to make sure that you aren’t going to blow away your last track in a spate of finger-powered enthusiasm.
The effects on the Mini KP and KP3 are pretty much the same: Sweeps, Flangers, are both fun sometimes. I find a little to much of the pad is ’swept’ quiet so these take a bit of getting used to. The EQ that appears on the KP3 is totally weird, and is very good at taking out the ranges - it’s too odd to be that useful. Delay is good for making some simple guitar sounds good. Matt Bellamy of Muse has one of these embedded in his guitar for that vert reason.
By far the effect that I most use are the Distortions. The perfect tool for my Lionel Richie/Slayer mix, everyone is reeling from, a one timed electric-storms is perfect for hiding what is lurking round the corner. In fact I love the Distortion so much, I used it to carry an entire set last weekend.
One small bugbear is that when selecting an effect, its default mode is off until the pad is pressed. Without the pad being pressed there is no sound. It needs an idiot-check, otherwise a simple distraction can become a disaster, as you miss your hundredth press down on the hold button.
By directing a track through it, you can sample about 30 seconds using the KP3’s Sampel tools. It’s then possible to take out slices of the section, and remix the track on the fly. This is very easy to use, and is all saved on the standard SD memory Stick.
However, I would of liked the KP3 on start up to remember the last loaded samples and tools, as loading up the KP3 can be a bit fiddly. I have found my workflow disturbed, and have to make a little book of notes to remind me what all my settings were. The actual sampling buttons are a little deep and are not as responsive as an MPC, so can be easy to mis-hit. I’ve been using it to layer up guitar riffs, and the extra millimetre of button seems to get in my way.
The machine has a microphone jack, so you can sing straight into and effect your voice a bit like Mike Patton, and of course it has the obligatory MIDI in and out.
In total, the sharpening of the sampling tools, and maybe some odder FX like pitch or robot, are welcome additions, as it does OD on sweeps and flanges. I wouldn’t mind it doing a couple of things less, but also a little better - either lose the sample function and have a few hundred more effects, or lose all the synth sounds and sharpen up the sampling.
The nearer to £200 you can get it, the closer it is to an utter bargain. And to be honest, the Mini KP isn’t that much of a difference and at half the price it is a total bargain.
