Jeremy Larson

Hats Off

After spending a few days last week trying to dig a little hole to place Spotify into, I started hearing more and more about the new Bjork album.  In case you haven't heard, it's called Biophilia, and it will be released in September.  

You see, as music is getting cheaper and free-er, many bands (like myself) are looking for cheaper and free-er ways to release it.  Not Bjork.  She's running the other way.  Take a look at these pics from the Biophilia "Ultimate Edition"

"The Ultimate Edition, presented in a lacquered and silkscreened oak hinged-lid case, consists of theBiophilia Manual—the album on CD, plus a second disc of live performances from Manchester, in a 48-page, full-color, hardbound, cloth-covered, and thread-sewn book, tipped on lenticular panel to the front cover, with foil-blocked spine and back cover—along with 10 chrome-plated tuning forks, silkscreened on one face in 10 different colors, stamped at the back, and presented in a flocked tray. Each fork is adjusted to the tone of a Biophilia track, covering a complete octave in a non-conventional scale:

Moon: E 329.6 Hz
Thunderbolt: B 246.9 Hz
Crystalline: G 392 Hz
Cosmogony: Gb 370 Hz
Dark Matter: Silent fork
Hollow: C 261.6 Hz
Virus: Db 277.2 Hz
Sacrifice: A 440 Hz
Mutual Core: Eb 311.1 Hz
Solstice: A 220 Hz

The Manual, which includes essays by Nikki Dibben, design and drawings by M/M (Paris), and photography by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin and M/M (Paris), is removed from the case by means of a ribbon pull. Each case comes with an individual numbered certificate detailing the use of tuning forks." (From nonesuch.com)

Pricetag? $800

Hat's off to you Bjork.  It's beautiful.  And though I will probably never shell out the $$$ for the Ultimate Edition, I will always have these pretty JPEGs to look at.

Thanks for reading.

Jeremy

Critics

There is no shortage of critics out there.  It used to be, that as a musician, you had to worry about what music critics and magazines would say about about your art.  A bad review from one of these could make even the most seasoned artist extremely self conscious.  Things are different now.

Have you ever been to a movie?  Let me rephrase that.  Have you ever watched a preview for a movie in the theater, and in the silence after the preview was over, heard whispers saying things like, "Whoa, that looks terrible!"?  Watching previews in a theater gives everyone the chance to be a movie critic.  We all turn to our friends and give each preview our thumbs up or down.  So, now they've installed these buttons on just about every website to let you give your thumbs up or down on whatever you are looking at.  You can anonymously give your own "Booooo!!!" to everything you see.  

And people LOVE this button.

You can be sure that every video you post online, will get a hand full of "dislikes"- no matter what the video is.  To prove my point, here's a screen shot of a video of a cute kitten:

Just look below the 84,656.  Five "dislikes".  I want you to remember this every time you face any sort of critique online.  There's a good chance that if someone is going to hit the "dislike" button for a cute kitten, they will hit it for just about anything.  If you are feeling self conscious, just read and re-read this post.  Thanks for reading.

Jeremy

(124 people "booed" this)

(6,108 people "booed" this)

Hoarder

Elsie and I have been watching Hoarders quite a bit lately.  Today I had to deal with almost a decade of hoarding myself.  On hard drives.  I'm not sure if this seems strange or not, but I have everything I've ever recorded laying around on hard drives.  There are external hard drives everywhere.  I even have every computer I've ever owned, and every hard drive- even the ones that have crashed- as well.  The problem is, nothing is labeled correctly.  When ever I start a new song, I just create a temporary file name for it like, "November Drums", or "Piano Idea".  These names on the folders never get changed.  What makes it worse, is that I create MANY different files throughout the process of writing.  For instance, on one particular song, there were a series of files that went like this (these files are the actual recording project files for songs):

Nov 22

Nov 22nd 2

Nov 22 timestretch

Nov 22 newkey

Nov 22 newkey newchorus

Nov 22 final

Nov 22nd final

Nov 22nd ACTUAL final

Open This One

Open This One 2

That represents a lot of different stages that the song went through.  And ALL of the songs are labeled like this.  

So, someone has requested instrumental versions of all my songs.  I had to go through and actually make these versions, but first, I had to find all of the songs.  This took several hours.  Next, I had to re-mix the song for the instrumental version, and bounce it down to an mp3.  There was a very tragic third step that just about ruined my day:

As I was going through all of these old songs, I wasn't too surprised to hear that all my mixes sounded terrible.  So, I tried to do a quick mix on them as I went through; but they still sounded pretty rough.  However, it wasn't until I actually finished mixing ALL of the songs from Salvation Club, that I realized I was working with older versions of the songs.  They were older demos, and I had moved everything to a different drive as I retracked a lot of it.  How did I not notice I was not working with the final versions?  I don't know.  It may surprise you, but I probably haven't listened to that album since it was released.  

Thanks for reading.

Jeremy

 

Don't Play No Game That I Can't Win

Been working away mixing a few different albums this week.  I will report more in detail next week.  Have you seen this?  Pretty amazing.  Spike Jonze directed it.  It's not for kids.

(Sorry, even the embedded version has an ad at the beginning)

Thanks for reading.

Jeremy

PS. I Want To Shoot Myself In Eyeball

I stole this chart from:  http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/

This is a chart to show how much music musicians have to sell/stream to make minimum wage.

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HOW MUCH DO MUSIC ARTISTS EARN ONLINE?

APRIL 13, 2010

Recently, the UK government passed The Digital Economy Act which included many, perhaps draconian, measures to combat online music piracy (including withdrawing broadband access for persistent pirates).

Much was proclaimed about how these new laws would protect musicians and artists revenueand livelihoods.

But how much money do musicians really get paid in this new digital marketplace?

Thanks for reading.

Jeremy

I just noticed the whole graph doesn't fit into my borders.  Sorry.  Follow the link above to see the whole thing.

Stupefy

I'm paraphrasing here, but I heard a quote from Trent Reznor that went something like this, "It took them two generations to convince us that music wasn't worth paying for." -something like that.  Now, you could take that in the context of illegal downloading, or this way:

 

Before you read on, I must admit, that I have NOT researched what I'm about to say, so I reserve the right to change my mind later.

First of all, as a consumer, I think it's awesome.  I may even sign up for Spotify.  (But I doubt it)

As a musician, I'm pretty astounded.  Everyone views music as this weird exemption to the rules.  If you were a coffee shop owner, and someone setup a coffee stand right in front of your business, and gave away all the drinks on your menu for free, you would take issue with that.  I guess people view music differently because we have been convinced that music should be free.

When I watch the video above, it's almost heartbreaking, but for a different reason than you may think.  I don't have any hopes of ever making a good living off of selling music.  I gave that up last year.  I'm deeply bothered with the fact that there is currently no remunerable value attached to music.  A lot of the bands you listen to took out a small fortune (sometimes the equivalent of opening a small coffee shop) to make that album.  They labored over it, and loved it.  It is now expected that their masterpiece should be yours at no cost.  A new system needs to be in place.  Elsie had this idea:

Much like the ad revenue program that youtube set up last year, bands with high traffic on their page/songs for a site like Spotify, would share in the ad revenue.  Since people visit the site- not because they love the site itself, but because of the bands that are exploited- the bands should get a share of the ad revenue.  (I'm assuming since Spotify is free, that is how they make their money).

I've heard from many of you on this subject, and you all seem like you really love music.  I would love to see a change here.  Much in the same way that there was a "Fair Trade" movement for coffee, I'd love to see one for music.  I would support a site that was kind to it's artists.  I think a lot of people would even pay an extra nickel per song if they knew that the band was being taken care of.  I know, it's hard to beat free, but "free" over time usually ends up meaning "without value".

...........................................................

I did a little research after typing this up, and it appears that Spotify is attempting to pay the bands with ad sharing.  HOWEVER, it's a pathetic sum.  You can read all about it here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/aug/17/major-labels-spotify

Make sure to scroll down to the part about Magnus Uggla, it's key.

Thanks for reading.

Jeremy

CR

(The title of this post is a hint to myself later so I can remember what I was working on tonight)

Most of my day was wasted.  I sat and tried working on some parts for a song, and I hated all of my ideas.  Around 5 this evening, I switched gears and started working on an old demo that Stacy sent me back in March.  I just want to say for the record, that the music I created tonight was probably the most beautiful thing I've ever written.  I felt in love with music again.  I chased this idea all evening, and left my studio about 15 minutes ago.  It felt like a first date- I didn't want it to end.  It would have been easy to work all night on this, but I'd rather save some of this inspiration for tomorrow.  

One more thing.  As I was driving home, I had the thought, "Wow, no one's music moves me the way that the music I wrote tonight does."  Then, I thought, "Don't even say that internally.  It's incredibly arrogant".  But I fought back.  I said to myself, "If I can't write music that moves me, then why should anyone else's music?".  These are my damn feelings coming out through the strings.  My music should move me more than anything else.  And I'm not ashamed to say that it usually does.  (I haven't forgotten that this is actually Stacy's song by the way...)  My hope for anyone reading this, is that you are able to say the same with the artistic ventures in your life.  Sleep well.

Thanks for reading.

Jeremy 

One Year Ago Today (Re-Pur-Post)

This was what I was doing...

......................................................

 

My good friend Brandon Goodwin sent me his good pictures from Todd's bachelor party.

I will give a little music update tomorrow.  I'm off to get yogurt with the girl.  Thanks for reading!

Jeremy

Oh Dear Lord

On Saturday, I gathered up four of my friends and moved this:

Up this flight of stairs:

It was even heavier than I thought it would be, and was much harder to move than I expected.  We had to move it up one stair at a time, resting after each one.  Huge thanks to Wess, Darren, Chris, and Joe for making this happen.  (And thanks to Stacy for taking video)

Despite the strange "graffiti" on the piano, it's actually one of my favorite uprights I've ever played on.  It's an old Baldwin Sterling.  It was restored by my good friend Joseph Hunt.  I'm extremely anxious to write some new music with it.  I may track some piano today.  Thanks for reading.

Jeremy

Wm F L Snare

I had a nice little thrifting day on Friday, and found this:

From what I gather, it's a WFL marching snare from the 30's or 40's.  It didn't actually have a badge, but there was a little logo on one of the hoops that said "Wm F L".  After doing some research, I learned that this is what WFL was called before 1939.  One of my best thrifting finds yet!

Most of the rest of Friday was spent working with the Juno keyboard that my brother loaned me.  I am going to have to buy one.  Great keyboard.  Darren and Stacy at work:

Darren and I at work:

Apparently, it takes two people to work this keyboard...

More to come soon.  Thanks for reading.

Jeremy