i dont want my words to be taken out of context
i dont want to be infantilized because i refuse to be sexualized
i dont want to be molested at shows or on the street by people who perceive me as an object that exists for their personal satisfaction
i dont want to live in a world where…
wow
Here is what the staff at Blog.To think you should check out at CANADIAN MUSIC WEEK.
1. Rhianna - love how the top choice at Canadian Music Week is American pop star Rhianna. “Like, duh.”
2. CHVRCHES - This sums up Canadian music writing nicely - number two pick is a Scottish electro-pop…
This was a massive year for the dark, noisy bands of Southern Ontario. The ignorant shit of Ford Nation baked in the drought of an oppressive summer to the point where they could smell it from Hamilton, and everyone seemed on edge. People craved a violent psychedelic, to make this sweaty…
George Orwell (via nevver)
(via nevver)
Save for a passing mention of Dick Dale or the Ventures, not much is ever said about Odonis Odonis’ incorporation of surf-rock into their sound. While comparisons to shoegaze bands from The Jesus and Mary Chain to A Place to Bury Strangers are apt, on their debut record Hollandaze, there’s a significance in their use of surf-rock that goes beyond influence.
Though shoegaze and surf-rock complement one-another by referencing unique sounds from the 50s and 60s, they developed from fairly disparate origins. The shoegaze bands that are often mentioned in the same breath as Odonis Odonis are heavily indebted to Blues and Gospel traditions. Surf-rock, however, draws heavily on Middle Eastern and Mediterranean folk traditions (listen to Dick Dale’s “Misirlou,” vs. “Misirlou” played in a traditional style on a Bazouki) distinguishing Odonis Odonis from the rest of the lot in a very substantial way.
The band makes the difference quite apparent: when juxtaposed, the reverberated, tremolo-heavy, surf guitar technique easily cuts through shoegaze’s drones, as evidenced on Hollandaze by tracks like “Ledged Up.”
The song climaxes as waves of industrial-sized static abound; the result of Denholm Whale’s low-end wallop colliding with Jarod Gibson’s cymbal crashes. They repeat and intensify the cacophony until Dean Tzenos’ violent guitar-work arrives to join in on the bludgeoning and offer the final blow.
The songs on Hollandaze are all fairly violent in nature, both lyrically and musically. In fact, that theme carries itself over to the band’s videos, as well as the projections that often adorn their live shows.
“I wanted people to get at a really campy-horror-feel when they hear Hollandaze.” said Tzenos, as we spoke before the Daps Records NXNE Showcase. Indeed, Hollandaze might as well have been called Blood Feast on the Beach, as the band’s use of surf guitar to punctuate moments of sheer violence and horror is echoed by their choice of visuals.
Surf music gained much of its popularity as the soundtrack to “Beach Party” films that were popular in the early 1960s. While the premises of those films started out innocent enough, filmmakers started to dabble with science fiction and horror toward the genre’s decline in popularity.
Odonis Odonis invite and encourage comparisons to those genre films by setting their own music to similarly sinister montages. The combined elements of sound and film help Odonis Odonis achieve a very uniform kind of aesthetic, one that allows for a multitude of experiences that combine to create a singular idea or image. For Tzenos, the coupling of their music with visuals was a no-brainer:
I think the music is very visual. As soon as we added the visual element to the band I think it made the vibe we’re trying to go for a bit easier to understand. I feel like it’s easier to translate what we’re doing when you can see our projections and hear the music at the same time.
Both Tzenos and Gibson come from visual arts backgrounds, making added visual elements a natural extension of the group’s talents, though music videos and live projections weren’t always their top priority. That aspect of their aesthetic has developed slowly as Tzenos explained:
You always need to take the live aspect of your music into consideration, but when this project started, there was very little consideration beyond just getting it recorded. […] I started this as a bedroom project and really didn’t know if the songs would ever be played live. At the time, I really didn’t want it to be a live project, which is funny because […] we’ve been playing live music mostly non-stop for the past year.
Odonis Odonis didn’t go from bedroom recording project to world-touring live band overnight, though they credit that rigorous touring schedule for keeping them on their toes: “you really have to hone what you do when you hit the grind like that. Sink or swim.”
That “sink or swim” kind of attitude has encouraged the band to stay open to change, and is in a sense what has helped them develop their aesthetic along the way.
It’s refreshing to see the band’s commitment to an idea evolving and taking shape, rather than trying to go in every direction. Everything they do seems to go back and reinforce the original idea.
There’s a remarkable focus to what Odonis Odonis do that doesn’t get much attention, despite so much evidence to support that claim. The band’s growth from ideas on a tape to live wrecking-ball in the matter of a year is a huge accomplishment in itself, but in that time they’ve also seen their debut record’s concept fully realize itself in a fantastic way.
This hard-working group have already made great headway, and they’re still evolving. Odonis Odonis have essentially been on tour since the debut of their album in May 2011. Showing no signs of slowing down, the band have a new album due out in the fall of this year, and already have touring plans in the works to support it. Recent live performances have also revealed another member potentially being added to the fold: guitarist Maddy Wilde (Moon King, ex-Spiral Beach). If that wasn’t enough, Tzenos revealed that albums number three and four are also currently in the works.
It remains to be seen if the subsequent records will reinforce or depart from what was built on Hollandaze, but their commitment to creating engaging and enthralling art will certainly continue.
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NXNE Hip Hop Show Cancelled
photo by Richard Trapunski
More information is slowly coming to light regarding the cancellation of the NXNE SmashMouthEntertainment event scheduled to take place last night at the Rivoli.
The event was to feature 11 Hip Hop acts hailing from around Canada and the U.S.
At the time of the cancellation, SmashMouthEntertainment issued this statement:
Due to unforeseen circumstances, and at the request of the Toronto Police and the Toronto Gang Unit, we regret to announce that our NXNE “SmashMouth Mentality” showcase scheduled for June 13 at Rivoli has been cancelled.
As of this posting, SmashMouthEntertainment, NXNE and the Toronto Police have yet to issue official statements elaborating on the cause for the cancellation, but SmashMouth Entertainment told me that the cancellation was the Rivoli’s decision, following the Toronto Police’s visit to the venue earlier in the day.
The Police had been in contact with both NXNE and SmashMouthEntertainment during this period, and had reason to believe that there was potential for gang related violence due to an artist’s gang affiliation. The Rivoli was told by Police that should the event go on as planned, it would be under tighter security measures. Ultimately, the Rivoli decided that it was in their best interest to pull out from the showcase all together.
Whether more cancellations like this will occur throughout the festival is unclear. Both the Toronto Police and NXNE have not responded to inquiries regarding whether or not the Rivoli incident was an isolated one.
Brenden Hewko of SmashMouthEntertainment had this to add:
Our showcase was the only major hip-hop showcase of this year’s NXNE festival, aside from a much smaller “hip-hop” showcase that took place tonight as scheduled. I personally feel that our event was targeted due to the hip-hop nature. Hip-hop is a culture that is widely misunderstood and one that comes with many stereotypes. I know every artist I had on the bill personally and not one has any gang affiliation or promotes violence in their music.
Music Unlimited (MU) is a new subscription-based music-streaming service from Sony that made its way to Canada in April. After its success in the United States, Sony has been slowly rolling the service out on all its platforms, with a focus on Blu-Ray players, Playstation3s, Playstation Vitas and Android devices. Though debuting MU in Canada before competitor Spotify launches is a smart move for Sony, the program itself leaves a lot to be desired.
You can browse MU’s music database on your own, or listen to one of the many available channels (commercial-free playlists that group music by popularity, genre, mood and decade). After doing a quick browse of the “Top 100” channels, I started to add artists to my own library. You can do so through regular playback (playing MU’s stations and selections, then adding what you like to your library), by searching out content on your own and by syncing your computer’s library with your MU one. You are prompted to do the latter option immediately after starting up the MU program on your Playstation3, but don’t have to.
I was reluctant to allow a record company access to my hard drive. Maybe it’s my guilty conscience, but the thought of allowing them full view of my music collection so that the program can clone that collection in the cloud for my convenience did not set me at ease. Cloud-based computing has some serious issues when it comes to privacy, so even if this service wasn’t put together by one of the largest music companies in the business, I’d still be reluctant to give a service like MU permission to scan my music collection.
What I did, and what I recommend anyone who wants to use this service do, is set up a separate folder of music I wanted scanned to the MU library. To start, I picked about 20 albums or so that I thought were fairly representative of my tastes, and that would also test the expanses of MU’s music database. I recommend doing that not only for sake of security, but also because the program that scans your library and sends that info to MU takes a long ass time.
Speed isn’t the only issue with the program, as importing your own collection into the system has some major hiccups. MU’s ability to seek out songs or albums in your folders and then find the corresponding recordings in their collection is fairly flawed, particularly when they don’t have a specific album from your library but have something similar. The intuitive thing for a program built on mimicking your personal music library would be to prompt the user as the hard drive scan is taking place, so that when MU doesn’t have a copy of David Bowie’s Lodger on file, it doesn’t just jump to import cuts from a Bowie cover band or worse, karaoke tracks.
Not much can explain the almost disproportionate presence of cover bands and karaoke tracks to the real thing on MU. Not having the rights to an artist’s catalog is one thing, but treating covers and copies as interchangeable with the originals belies the notion that Sony are treating the music in this program as anything but capital. I suppose Sony’s people were more eager to show that the technology behind MU was working rather than do the smart thing and wait until it was ready. Anyone hoping to add their Beatles discography to their MU library will be sorely disappointed when they find “Rumba Beatles” there instead, though there’s always something to be said for making happy discoveries.
This well-intentioned but nevertheless ineffectual scanning process reminds me a lot of LastFM in their early days. They had a hell of a time with attributing song data to the correct artists or albums, and their radio “stations” were mixes of album tracks, live songs and remixes, though not always labeled as such. The missteps were forgivable because they nevertheless provided a great service, but they also proved early on that the data they were mining couldn’t be relied upon.
As I began to explore my own tastes within MU’s offered selection, the benefits of this service really shone. Users can explore an artist’s discography, which can then be added to their personalized library. Again, working much like LastFM, users can also see lists of “related” artists and listen to those. The connections MU makes between related artists seems fairly intuitive, albeit unclear, and might involve a mix of genre, period and locale.
Exploring the depths of MU’s collection will quickly reveal a few things, none of which are that flattering. The word “depths” definitely applies here, so at least there’s that; however, artists’ discographies are almost always incomplete and the albums themselves have a similar problem. I was ecstatic to find Bill Withers in the database, but less enthusiastic once I learned that Just As I Am was chopped down to five tracks. Perhaps such absences are only temporary, as music licensing is a tricky thing, but at this point in time they poke a rather large hole in the idea of MU being a successful platform in the long-term.
The convenience that MU offers in allowing users to stream music from a bevy of devices is undermined by the sense one gets while using this program that it is incomplete. Not only are there significant pieces missing from artists’ discographies and albums, but there’s also a lack of foresight in terms of the potential for this program to be a social one. There’s no opportunity for users to interact, nor is there any real communication between Sony and its subscribers.
Much of the way in which the media is organized on MU reinforces the idea that Sony sees the relationship they have with their subscribers in a top-down manner. Naturally curiosity takes over when you first start using the program and search its catalogue for your favourite artists, but once you start using MU for more than a month, there’s no way to tell what music has been added or removed since you’ve joined. When you have no idea what new music is being added, finding that new music becomes an incredibly difficult task. Even Netflix has wised-up recently and thrown a “Recently Added” category for their users to peruse.
I’d care less about the lack of information coming from Sony if there was any semblance of community-building happening on MU. Being able to share playlists with other MU users would foster the kind of community that rewards users for coming back and being active. There might not be a clear way for users to find newly added music on their own, but connecting users would ensure they’d never bore of the music available through the service. Incorporating social media into their strategy would actually situate MU in a much more secure place against their competitors. Currently, Spotify users can make and share playlists with one another, and that ability not only encourages community and therefore user-loyalty, but sharing Spotify content (like playlists) through social media is quickly making Spotify the must-have service for cloud-based music streaming.
In essence, Sony’s idea of the cloud seems far too restrictive to really offer their users the full benefit of cloud computing. Similar to Apple’s own strict control over content within their iTunes world, the content available in MU allows users to stream and build libraries, but not much else. Though the premise of the software is dependent upon users having accumulated a library on their own, it doesn’t actually directly encourage adding to that library outside of itself. Users are still encouraged to buy records, because they do not retain any ownership over the library they build within the confines of MU. If this venture is ever shelved by Sony, users will have to re-accumulate everything that they added to their library. It seems as though MU has positioned itself as a convenience, rather than an answer to the file-sharing problem.
This is a song we’ve all heard before: in a world where almost every product bears a label warning of voided warranties, consumers are continuously told that they don’t own what they’ve paid for. Apple refuses to update hacked iPhones, and Sony and Microsoft have similar philosophies when it comes to users jailbreaking their video game consoles. In terms of MU, the limitations on the user and what they can do with their music are similarly rigid, as new additions to your MU library aren’t copied back to your hard drive. You pay MU to hear the music on whatever device you prefer, but whatever new music you add in the program stays in the cloud. At this point, even the idea of exporting a list of your library is an idea foreign to MU’s developers.
The debate surrounding what consumers should and should not be able to do with music they have purchased remains ongoing, but what makes MU a disappointment is how it has chosen a side, as opposed to rewrite the rules. This is the first real foray record companies have made (on their own) into such territory, and in true record-company fashion, they’re completely missing the mark. In exchange for convenience, users sacrifice more of their personal information, and relinquish more of the basic rights they hold as consumers to do whatever they please with what they buy. The service they make these sacrifices for does a tremendous job of undervaluing the role community and transparency both play in shaping musical tastes and trends, while inflating the role of the record company as middle-man. Musicians should be compensated for the music they make, but that compensation should be voluntary, and not an absolute. Let me listen to your album first, and I’ll be much more likely to buy it. Though it’s nice to see record companies developing and working with new strategies that expand the horizons of the marketplace, it’s still the consumer that’s bearing the brunt of these changes.
It’s being dripfed, a chunk of a letter at a time, limited to those records they can access on Spotify etc. so far - though they’re taking steps to find others. The interface is lovely. They’ll run out of funding in October, so who knows if the whole thing will go online.
Scattered thoughts:
I don’t think there’s much to be gained by treating this particular record collection as sacred: people remember Peel for his range and his approach to broadcasting, not so much his taste, and that range is more accessible than ever now. I wrote ages ago about the impossibility of Peel and all that still stands.
& would there be public funding to preserve the collections of Gilles Peterson, Dave Godin etc? People who are more specialist but go deeper into a particular area?
The stuff that made his collection unique - the genuine obscurities - and that needs exposure most is precisely the stuff that isn’t on Spotify, of course. If the collection IS an important historical artefact then the money should probably be spent on negotiating rights and ripping vinyl.
It’s taken close to a decade for this to happen - if the contents of the collection had leaked there would be multi-part torrents (continually updated and reissued with newly found material) up within a month or two. An Anonypeel Project might have digitised pretty much the whole thing by now - assuming enough people cared. Not that this wouldn’t be without massive legal and ethical issues but it’s worth throwing out since piracy culture is pretty good at ‘preserving’ and collating vast amounts of material if it wants to be.
All this makes it sound like I think the Peel Collection is a bad idea and I don’t - it’s a lovely idea, but the specific choices (some forced) in the execution do illuminate a lot of the issues around the nostalgia/sainthood of this one old gatekeeper, and the practicalities of archival projects in a crowded, pirated age.
