While you’re waiting, here’s some music to keep you entertained. It’s a UK Garage mix I did last year, focusing on the more abstract, chthonic elements of classical UKG. It’s funky as fuck and has some of my favourite 2step tracks on it.

It’s here at http://www.grievousangel.net/Abstract_2_Step_Mix.mp3.

Track listing:
Dem 2: Keep It Coming
Dem 2: Bad Funk (Big Time Scary Dub)
US Alliance: All I know (Dem 2 Dub)
El B: Digital
Leee John: Your Mind Your Body Your Soul (MJ Cole Mix) /
Wideboys Feat. Rusty: Somethings Got Me Started (Wideboys Breakbeat Dub)
MJ & Rob D: Cum Cakes!
El B: Urban Myth
Headtop: The Matrix
Dem 2: Baby You’re So Sexy (Dub)
Groove Chronicles: Black Puppet
Groove Chronicles: Holiday Da Vybe
M Dubs: For Real (Grievous Angel Twisted Dub)
Top Cat: Gal Dem Sugar
Lady Saw: Bump’n'Grind
ATFC Bad Habit (Grievous Angel Edit)
Artful Dodger / Robbie Craig / Craig David: Woman Trouble
Artful Dodger / Craig David: Drop the Funk

It’s 73 minutes long, and weighs 84Mb. More mixes are coming.

Yes I know no-one’s reading right now but I just wanted to pop this in here so it’s in the archive at least… There’s a lot of discussion right now about whether we can have, or need, a “proper” magazine. There’s a lot of rumination on the glory days of the NME. Eden talks about France having three reggae zines, wheras here we have none. K-Punk and many others would really like a proper music/ culture publication. But Luka suspects such a beast would be poor. Here’s my take:

I certainly agree that the NME in the 80s was better than now. It had much better writing then, which it could afford, because it had a much bigger readership. It was physically larger, and it loomed larger over the cultural landscape to a far greater degree. (Pace Reynolds — MM never had the same kudos or clout. Never had the design or photography of NME either.) People forget what a paucity of media there was then: barriers to entry meant there was little scope for voices other than the big players. It was physically and financially very difficult even to do a fanzine. This was actually rather a good thing — the fanzine underground was very healthy then. Eden first became aware of me through my writing in zines like Grim Humour.

None of this is arguable or nostalgic. But it might be nostalgic to say we can go back to that. I’m not saying it’s nostalgic to want good writing about music and culture; not at all. But it might be nostalgic to want good writing that is supported by a SINGLE substantial medium, whether print or digital. The world is different now; not better, but different.

And probably worse, which is why it’s worth us old timers whingeing to people like Luke about how it used to be. We now have fewer large magazines, and a dwindling number of specialist titles, all owned by an ever smaller number of conglomerates. Worse, mainstream titles like newspapers cover the scene. Far from promoting the scene, as one would expect, this satiates many people so they don’t need a “proper” magazine, and even if it doesn’t, it captures loads of advertising revenue from smaller titles. It’s a lot like the revenge of bars and pubs on clubland: keep the punters drinking with ersatz DJing and they no longer have an appetite for real clubbing.

I suspect that we DO need a magazine — as in US lot, blogging round here. But it’s difficult to say whether THEY need a magazine — the non-bloggers, the uncommitted.

While you’re waiting, here’s some music to keep you entertained. It’s a UK Garage mix I did last year, focusing on the more abstract, chthonic elements of classical UKG. It’s funky as fuck and has some of my favourite 2step tracks on it.

It’s here at http://www.grievousangel.net/Abstract_2_Step_Mix.mp3.

Track listing:
Dem 2: Keep It Coming
Dem 2: Bad Funk (Big Time Scary Dub)
US Alliance: All I know (Dem 2 Dub)
El B: Digital
Leee John: Your Mind Your Body Your Soul (MJ Cole Mix) /
Wideboys Feat. Rusty: Somethings Got Me Started (Wideboys Breakbeat Dub)
MJ & Rob D: Cum Cakes!
El B: Urban Myth
Headtop: The Matrix
Dem 2: Baby You’re So Sexy (Dub)
Groove Chronicles: Black Puppet
Groove Chronicles: Holiday Da Vybe
M Dubs: For Real (Grievous Angel Twisted Dub)
Top Cat: Gal Dem Sugar
Lady Saw: Bump’n'Grind
ATFC Bad Habit (Grievous Angel Edit)
Artful Dodger / Robbie Craig / Craig David: Woman Trouble
Artful Dodger / Craig David: Drop the Funk

It’s 73 minutes long, and weighs 15Mb. More mixes are coming.

I don’t think there’s anything in there from after 1999, but there might
be one or two nuggets from 2000 I forgot about.

That last, Indian Summer, golden period of dance music before it
collapsed as a creative force… but god did it go out on a high point.
2step was for me the absolute pinnacle of dance music’s creativity.
Techno’s intelligence, house’s propulsive grooviness, r’n'b’s
sensuality, d’n'b’s harshness, ragga’s itality, breakbeat’s sheer poppy
silliness. And if there was ever a better record than Something’s Got Me
Started — soul + abstract breakbeats + plane-taking-off noises — I
never heard it.

There’s a big contrast between this and grime. For one thing, as the new
orthodoxy suggests, grime isn’t dance music. For another, Grime is
pretty monotonous in comparison, cos the backing track is downplayed.
Here, there’s scarcely room for an MC. There’s scarcely room for vocals.

With many apologies to Mark K-Punk and John Eden, the bookmark for this blog is changing again due to unavoidable technical difficulties. Please don’t bookmark the current location unless you don’t mind changing again in a week or so, and if you’ve already done so, I’m sorry. The new location will be http://blog.grievousangel.net, but there’s nothing up there yet — I’m still sorting things like archives out. Maximum respect to Daniel from Spinwarp.com (best d’n'b producers’ resource on the planet) for his help with this.

Pounding System: “I Believe”

Great stuff. Dubversion is clearly a man who needs one of my Belief Is The Enemy T-shirts. And big up Dubversion for liking the Come Together jungle remix I did.

However:
“(PS these are some things that i decided i didn’t like this week:
Bitches Brew. Vashti Bunyan. Piles. the NME (again). Nectar Cards.”

Bitches Brew is worth sticking with but go for On the Corner first if you haven’t already. And In a Silent Way for something else completely — like, simplicity. Vashti Bunyan? You’re a brave man not liking her in this neighbourhood, geezer! Piles — I reckon I could do a heavyweight piece in this subject, though no doubt someone will tell me it’s a bad idea.

Speaking of In a silent way, I presume there’s loads of d’n'b records that sample this, but I haven’t heard any. If anyone can confirm this one way or the other I’d be grateful, cos I’d love to do it and it would be fairly easy!

I’m now running this blog on a new server: it’s here: http://blog.grievousangel.net

Please tell ten friends The Breast Cancer site is having trouble getting enough people to click on it daily to meet their quota of >donating at least one free mammogram a day to an underprivileged woman .

It takes less than a minute to go to their site and click on “donating a mammogram” for free (pink window in the middle). This doesn’t cost you a thing. Their corporate sponsors/advertisers use the number of daily visits to donate mammogram in exchange for advertising.

Here’s the web site! Pass it along to people you know.

www.thebreastcancersite.com

>AGAIN, PLEASE TELL 10 FRIENDS TO TELL 10 TODAY

WOEBOT: “If Grime came to be understood as UK Hip-Hop it’d be a disaster. Why? Because, put simply, Brit-Hop has never managed to get over being a inferior version of American Hip-Hop (Grime on the other hand seems mercifully oblivious of America).”

Excellent, excellent piece on this topic from Matt. Excellent because he’s not just commenting on articles in the mainstream press, he’s actually engaging with the authors. Excellent because he develops his point through detailed examination of specific, key records. Excellent because of an almost anthropological reportage on Mr Bongo. His argument is in essence that Grime shouldn’t be tarred with the UK Hip-Hop / UK-Rap brush because those genres do, basically, suck.

And quite right too.

However I feel that Grime can fruitfully be seen as being, at last, a decent British response to US Rap. As he was kind enough to point out, my view is that Grime and US hip hop are structurally similar — emphasis on the vocal rather than the backing, Black urban culture as the source, all that stuff. And, while Matt undoubtedly knows more than I do about Grime, it seems to me that Grime people do have US rap reference points. This is scarcely new. Plus uk garage crews went r&b as soon as they got popular — So Solid, obviously. Champagne garage and US R&B have always gone together.

The music doesn’t sound like US Rap though. It’ll get closer though. As I think I mentioned here before, Cameo is dropping grime tracks with girly choruses already — I preferred this to a lot of the more banging stuff FWIW.

* Cha Cha Slide looked great on the telly too.

* Oh, and great to see the Gothic Futurist article coming out, it’s fantastic. Essential post punk too.

WOEBOT: “A surprise and a delight, here.” Getting bigged up on Woebot is like getting an Oscar. Certainly more valuable than getting a bloggy or whatever BS award is being invented.

“Here’s one for fans of my discomfort.” Shit, that must be irritating. I guess a demanding fan can be pretty critical. For a fan of woebot is what I am — it’s the best blog out there, certainly the best music blog, even if he doesn’t like Jurassic 5 (what is he LIKE?). He’s one of a select group of blogs I try to check every day while feverishly checking UK-Dance. The rest of my blogroll:

1. Uncarved, for the crispest writing: Woebot can be fast and loose — and is all the better for it. More importantly, Uncarved does two things: he writes about more than just music, and he goes off and digs stuff out that you simply will not read about ANYWHERE ELSE. Because “Real Life” still has a thousand times as many stories as you will find on the Internet.

2. K-Punk. I don’t always agree with him — he’s far too much of a hipster-intellectual for my views to always chime with his — but he’s essential reading.

3. Reynolds for the same reasons as anyone else — i.e. his obsession with 80s scratch’n'sniff cards, the endless JPEG self-portraits of his red-white-and-blue mohican, and of course the engagingly-written recipes for rollmop herring.

Other than these three I just surf around the link side bars like everyone else.

“Nice to see so much going up big feller.” Yeah well there’d be a lot more if I wasn’;t spening every spare hour trying and failing to get this FAAAAAAARRRRRRRKING blog system working. Otherwise you’d have a series of articles about leylines in Dore (Sheffield suburb on the edge of the Peaks). Seriously.

Yeah.

PS – the gutters here have just filled with hail, but there’s blazing sunshine. Must be symbolic.

shards, fragments and totems:: “So I’m looking at the moveable type faq, and I’m thinking, this looks like a nightmare. “

And of course, my host doesn’t do movable type.

But it does appear to like word press — so why won’t it damned work?

Bloody computers.

movabletype.org : Requirements

So, I’ve got this spiffy new webspace to host my trax and mixes and stuff. And of course to host the blog, with photos etc. So I d/led WordPress, cos it’s the updated version of Eden’s blog software. And can I get it to work?

Can I fuck.

So I’m looking at the moveable type faq, and I’m thinking, this looks like a nightmare.

Surely there’s a simple to install system that’ll let you do modest blogging, with pix, on your own webspace, that’s free, or at least cheap? I don’t fancy spending more on blogging services than I do on my hosting…

Keith: gwan nice’tup wit ma bredren…: “nothing is better than Nasty Crew’s live sets. If you haven’t yet, do yourself a favour and listen to that one I linked to down below, it’s better than Boy in da Corner, which is album of the year”

I went back to this page — which I’ve blogged before — just to remind myself how good roll deep were. And none of the mixes work anymore — I guess the server is maxed out. Which implies the live tapes will come back, but then again they may not.

FWIW, I thought the MCing was pretty good, but not mind-blowing. However the Dizzy Vs Asher D clash was fabulous — I think because it was all acapella spittin’, undisturbed by plinky-plonk grime backing. Fortunately, I wiretapped that one. I have a techno-ragga instrumental to get out the way first, then I’ll be using that in a track…

WOEBOT: “like this recent contibution to an old post by Rolo who used to be in The Woodentops.”

I just want to point out that the Woodentops were according to my memory both a fantastic band and an important one, absolutely crucial in describing the cross-over from rock to dance.

Absolutely KILLER live — I would very much like the 12″ of Well Well Well.

Amazon.co.uk: Music: Coughing Up Fire: “Occult roots of grime”

Just got this as a present off John Eden and it’s an absolutely magnificent record of eighties Brit dancehall reggae done live. Saxon were arguably the greatest British sound system ofthe 80s and on this CD you can hear why. It’s all about the DJs so the backing tracks scarcely get a look in. You get fragments of famous rhythms (Armagideon etc), mainly with the bass cut and constantly spun back, so don’t buy this to hear the tunes themselves. You also get massive amounts of crowd noise . But if you want to hear the apotheosis of the Brit chatting art, this is it. The biggest name on here is Tippa Irie, who gets a HUGE response, but all the MCs are on top form. If you want to know where grime (the most recent, and most MC-heavy, variant of garage) and the rest of UK rave MC culture came from, this is what you need to hear — and it’s a lot better than most yard tapes you’ll buy in Brixton market. Absolutely killer, and this is where jungle and breakbeat artists get a lot of their vocal samples from, so it’s spotter heaven…

I’ve decided to use this blog to release my music. This is slightly ironic in view ofthe current mp3-hosting debate (how often do producers release tracks through bloigs? All the time probably). In any event, most of these tracks start from loving a tune, but having a different mix of it running in my mind, often for weeks at a time. The same thing happens with DJ mixes, so there’ll be some of them up here, including some refugees from Marc Dauncey’s excellent but (hopefully temporarily) late and lamented bassnation.net.uk. Plus there’ll be some new ones, mainly dirty UK Garage and reggae.

I’ve used the Grievous Angel moniker for years. I think thought about it first in 1989 — it was a chemical weapon in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which seemed to make terribly exciting at the time. I didn’t find out til years later that it was the title of a Gram Parsons LP — which is great iconography as far as I’m concerned, even though the music is a mile away from his. I’ve never listened to the album in case I don’t like it — I’m just glad he looks good in the photos.

People I’ve sent tapes to often think they’re getting heavy metal, which amuses me a great deal: there’s a lot of metal’s deliberately dumb attitude here, a cartoon feel. This is something I’ve noticed in a lot of my favourite music — Funkadelic, Congo Natty, Tackhead, Lady Saw — and I reckon the best bands start off wiith a “this’ll be a laugh” attitude and find their soul by accident. Certainly all good dance music has some of this attitude. Beats being po-faced anyway.

The tunes I make tend to fall into two categories: jungle, usually re-edits of reggae tracks; and ragga techno, which is usually acidic, dubby ragga running at techno speeds. But I’ll be posting a couple of different things here as well. If I was smart, I suppose I’d stick to one genre, but the ideas keep coming in different shapes and sizes. (Well, I say ideas, but I mean completely obsessional ear-worms I have to exorcize or risk going mad.) And anyway, even if these tracks aren’t all at the same speed, they all recognisably have the same personality: brash, pushy and dumb.

Styllistically, it’s all about squeezing reggae through dance music’s funky sphincter. There’s nothing I like more than a good dancehall tune that’s had an amen break shoved up it and I’d really like to do more stuff like that.

Grievous Angel Vs Admiral Tibet, Anthony B & Tafari: Rise Up (Vocal Mix)
7Mb

Grievous Angel Vs Anthony B & Tafari: Rise Up (Hard Dub)
7Mb

I’m obsessed with taking John Eden’s DJ mixes and turning sections of them into new tracks, and that’s exactly what I’ve done here. For one thing it saves me the hassle of buying choosing, buying and digitisng great reggae records and for another there’s a fantastic sense of multiple versioning creating multiple layers of meaning which can really lift the engagement of the listener compared to an average club track or boot. (In other words — I like vocals.) Incestous? So what?

Having said all that, this one is actually quite gentle in its Vocal Mix form. Full vocal selections, a tight beat and a big, soft, rolling bassline mean you just ride the lyrics, which is what dancehall is all about. This one’s about the songs, not the beats. They’re twisted, but subtle.

Whereas the Dub is all about funk noise at jungle tempo. The vocals are reduced to a fragment cyclng over over dirty breaks. But the groove is wide open and swinging. This isn’t smart at all but it is fun and very punk. And yes it does go rolling half way through.

Grievous Angel Vs Primal Scream: Come Together
(6.1Mb)

I’ve always wanted to do this. It’s just a big, smiley, big room tune, and it deserves to be heard in drum’n'bass sets as well as old-school house ones. It was done in the run-up to seeing Weatherall do his amazing set at Dust – away of psyching myself up for it. Not that he played any drum’n'bass, nor would I particularly want him to, but if I heard Come Together playing in a jungle club, this is how I’d like it to sound. Ecstatic. Turn it up.

WOEBOT: ” followed the link through to Down Hill Battle, and was really alarmed at what they’re up to, which seems to be a ‘rolling together’ of an antipathy to the big five labels with a tactic of encouraging file-sharing. … I’m quite sympathetic to the major labels. I’ve heard plenty about record companies ‘evil’ tactics … but they’re not the manifestation of single evil geniuses. … Selling music is somewhat like drilling for oil, a label will sign 50 artists and only one will make them any money.”

I checked out the Downhill site and thought it was OK really. It’s primarily trying to make clear just how evil most record contracts are and the degree to which a “successful” band is unlikely to reap their fair rewards. It’s good stuff. I think their promotion of file sharing as a way of hurting the record labels doesn’t really hold water as evidenced by yesterday’s economic analysis. And I quite agree that filesharing is as Matt says a “muddy gesture” at best. Far better to try to create alternative distribution channels, most of which are dying right now (not because of MP3s, but because the dance music market has contracted). However I think Downhill is fairly obviously not making promotion of filesharing central to their purpose; it’s a tactical thing to support their wider of objective of music activism. To that degree it’s acceptable to me and I sympathise with Down Hill.

But I think Matt is wrong to be synpathetic to record labels — despite the venality and greed of the average artist. The fact that record companies lose money on much, probably most, of their portfolio of investments — as ever other business in the world does, believe you me! — does not justify the demonstrable ripping off of those rare acts that DO manage to generate some positive cash flow. Record companies clearly are not the product of single evil genius. No: they are quite clearly the product of single, evil, economic system. If there were a truly free market in record distribution and artist development, record companies would not exist in the manner they do today. But that free market does not exist, and record label corruption and exploitation of talent is a continuing tragedy, which music fans should care about, in my view. Critique Downhill’s position all you want, but don’t excuse the record labels’ their undoubted sins.

WOEBOT: “Anyway it got me thinking. A lot of people spun out of Post-Punks orbit into mad crazy shit like Free Jazz (you meet Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry on the road out of PP), Dub and Roots (Prince Far-I and Scratch) Improv (Tristan Honsinger, Toop and Beresford), Electro (Tommy Boy) and most importantly World Music (Sunny Ade, South African Jive, Fela, etc) ”

I’m not with you on the link to world music, or at least not as enthusiastic. Thinking back I remember just how removed Sunny Ade and other twinkly Charlie Gillett* approved world music was from post punk. You’re quite right about the move into Free Jazz. Let’s list them: Float Up CP, PigBag, that band that Neneh Cherry was in that I can never remember, The Cravats — on the Crass lable, The Collossal Tunes Out, AMAZING record — arguably Ut, Biting Tongues, arguably Cabaret Voltaire, somewhat less arguably Clock DVA. And dub and roots speak for themselves — for me this is by far the most important linkage, by a mile. Electro of course — this is a key route from post punk to dance, alongside industrial, which is itself I think the most recognisable outlet for improv. Wheras world music… I don’t remember that being a central part of post punk at all. I remember it being very much a grafted on, middle-class beatnik’s attempt to get down with the kids sort of route. A stand-alone, defiantly nerdy subscene much like the check-shirted cohorts of Long Ryders and Green on Red fans worshipping at the temple of Andy Kershaw, who himself campaigned for the world music cause and eventually made that his primary focus.

Yer more banging / transcendental afrobeat was and is a different proposition. And I personally liked the weirder, arguably groovier African shards that went into the undertow of the WOMAD movement, and had parallels with the ongoing acid casualty / post hippy scene which interlocked so closely with both industrial and, later, acid (all the same people, and all the same records as influences).

But don’t let me mix up my personal tastes with what I hope is an objective point — which is about the degree to which the 8Ts world music scene interfaced with the post punk scene. On the one hand Fela, Tony Allen, anything to do with dub, most of what Matt describes in fact, would as I remember it have fitted into the paradigm of post punk at the time. But Sunny Ade and South African Jive / township was a different scene, a different taste, with little cross over of record collections. In other words, yer post punk fans of 23 Skidoo and Magazine and PiL and Joy Division might buy one Sunny Ade record, but they wouldn’t buy two. The miners strike was, for fucks sake! I’d be interested in any other pushing-40 music nerds have different recollections.

So much for history. The real locus of Matt’s rant is the contrast with post punk then — tiny scene really (actually — anyone got numbers for record sales???), but very influential, opened up a lot of areas exactly as Matt suggests — and The Post Punk Revival (TM) now. Which is selling a few records, not very influential, not really opening up any areas. Just being raked over for any residual taste in the gum.

On the one hand this is terrible and an indication of the terrible state of the nation’s youth.

On the other, this is exactly what I was doing when I was 17, 18 — picking over ten year old records and squeezing the last bit of taste out of them, and not really giving a fuck about how they were supposed to be listened to or what vistas you were supposed to open up as a result. In my case, I was digging out Led Zep, AC/DC, Deep Purple and just grooving on it. Same with Miles Davis, though I was into him earlier (cos of the post punk scene’s influence and Cabaret Voltaire). Oh and I don’t count the exploration of 70s reggae, cos I always thought that was effectively current music — still do.

Take your pick. The jury is still out on whether the youth of today are a bunch of know-nothing, vacant, unrebellious morons who don’t know they’re born

* who is a great broadcaster and arbiter of taste… and he wrote a FABULOUS book called Making Tracks, which is a history of Atlantic and Ahmet Ertegun. Does a good show on radio 3.

I found this great paper here on the subject: “Will MP3 downloads Annihilate the Record Industry? The Evidence so Far”. It’s by a Stan J. Liebowitz, School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas, who is not so far as I am aware a sublow fan posting on the woebot thread, but lets give him some ear time nevertheless. Here’s some nuggets:

“Although the decline in singles has been a long time in the making, there is little doubt that 1998 marked a major acceleration of that trend. The bottom began to fall out of the single?s market a year before Napster came into existence.”

“{Album sales} increased by a factor of 2.5 {1973 to 2002}, from 400 million to approximately one billion units. Yearly sales of albums per capita (defined over the population between ages 10 and 60) increased almost as much, from 2.7 albums in 1973 to over 5 during much of the 1990s. Since the population (as defined) only increased by 37% over this period, total and per capita measures cannot greatly differ.”

“The second feature of interest is the nonlinearity of the plot. There are at least four dips in sales prior to the current dip which is underway. These dips occurred in 1978-82, 1984-86, 1991, and 1994-97 with the current dip having begun after 1999. The fact that sales are currently falling, by itself, would not appear to be a cause for alarm, since this has happened several times in the past, only to be followed by further sales increases.”

“During the period of growth of cassettes, however, there was also a large increase in the sales of prerecorded albums. Clearly, the existence of cassette recorder/players seems to have had a positive overall impact on record producers, although we can not say that the growth might not have been more robust had the recording (copying) potential of cassettes been removed.”

“Changes in videogame software sales and changes in the sale of albums {seem to be related}. If we limit ourselves to the period before 2000, before any impacts of MP3 downloads, there is a positive correlation of .16, which indicates that the two move together and not separately. This relationship also fails to support the claim that videogames are particularly close substitutes for CDs.”

… This seems to derail one of my arguments!

“I believe that the movement in the market to but a single recording format, and the maturation of the portable and automobile markets imply that sales would at least have leveled off, with or without MP3s. Whether they would have fallen is less clear, but since purchases of dual recording formats would no longer have been necessary, there is some possibility of a decline in sales.”

“The decline in album sales per capita since 1999, as illustrated in Table 4, is 1.41 units, but the decline in the album subcategory of ?cassettes? is .50, leading to a decline in albums, net of cassettes, of .91 units. A three year decline totaling .91 albums per person excluding cassettes, would still be the largest and steepest on record, but not extraordinarily so. Since there are no other potential causes of this decline that held up under examination, we must conclude that MP3 downloads are harming the industry.“

Matt’s mea culpa is justified! But hang on…

“If the analysis in this paper is correct, MP3 downloads are causing significant harm to the record industry. It is not clear, however, whether such downloading in our current legal environment will cause a mortal blow to the industry. I suspect that the worst damage to the industry is behind us, but we will know soon enough as new data are made available.”

So, make of that what you will. But I would caution you not to take this paper as a stick with which to beat the mp3 bloggers. Here’s another nugget from here, which is where I found the first paper:

“In 1982 the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) – the record industry advocacy group – estimated piracy at 11% of the total market in North America, 21% in Latin America, 30% in Africa and 66% in Asia. In 2000 it estimated (PDF) that 36% of the disks and cassettes sold across the globe were pirated – around 1.8 billion items.”

In other words, the clear and present danger to the record industry is commercial piracy. And the Liebovitz paper indicates that the level of mp3-driven falls in record sales are nowhere near this level of over one third of discs sold. He can tell there’s probably some negative impact on the industry which can be directly attributable to mp3s and not the other factors I discussed previously. But he can’t tell if that negative impact is particularly severe, and he certainly doesn’t think mp3s are responsible for the whole decline:

“What, then, is the impact of MP3 downloading? Given the enormity of the whole MP3 download enterprise it should be easy to recognize its impact on album sales if its impact is large. What do I mean by ?large?? If each MP3 song substituted for a purchased song, as has often been claimed by the record industry in the case of blank tapes, we would clearly have a large impact. If each two MP3s substituted for one purchased song, that would be large. Even if each four MP3s substituted for one purchased song, that too should probably be considered a impact large. If, on the other hand, each hundred MP3s substituted for one purchased song, that would not, in my opinion, qualify as a ?large? impact and it would be most difficult to measure, given all the factors influencing the sales of albums.”

He decides that the impact isn’t miniscule, but it’s not large — not large enough to account for the decline of record sales:

“Given the enormous number of MP3 downloads (if the numbers can be taken seriously), which are themselves an incomplete portion of the entire MP3 phenomenon, it seems safe to say that the CD equivalent of MP3 downloads is at least equal to the entire sales market for CDs. If MP3s downloads replaced sales at a 1 to 1 ratio, there would be no CD market to speak of. In that case we would be talking about a drop in CDs of 5 units, not .89 units. If MP3 downloads converted at 4:1 the album market would have dropped by 25%. Removing the impact of the decline in cassettes, which seems appropriate, it would appear that the conversion rate at the moment is on the order of 5:1 or 6:1. Not large but not small.”

Just a few notes on the recent discussion of the ethics of mp3 hosting, sharing and consumption.

1. The most important point — for me — is that mp3s give me a chance to actually hear stuff that I wouldn’t otherwise get a chance to hear. This is a good thing in my view. DJ mixes in particular is what I go looking for, but mp3 sharing services are also great for actually getting a listen to grime, dancehall, techno so I can know what people are talking about. In other words, I can get to hear music it would otherwise be almost impossible for me to buy — up here in Sheffield anyway. You can’t buy that much grime online either.

2. The second point is that mp3s can sometimes fulfil a different usage occasion for me. Tracks that I want to listen to occasionally, or more likely, once or twice, but don’t particularly want to buy, to own. There’s no micro-payments infrastructure to enable this kind of transaction to occur. iTunes’ quid-a-track pricing policy doesn’t go far enough. I don’t want to winge but it’s not as if we haven’t had long enough to invent this. Back in 1991 we early Internet evangelists were plotting out how business models for online media consumption would work, but we’re just as far away from this as we were 13 years ago. And the only reason it’s not happened is because the major record companies were wedded to a particular business model — shipping large volumes of a small number of acts through a few retail channels. Micropayments were not and are not what they are set up for. So I don’t mind paying 10p or something every time I listen to Clocks by Coldplay, but I don’t want to spend a quid on it.

(Actually I probably will buy the ColdPlay records at some stage just for the convenience, especially when the new baby arrives and we need some soothing. But probably second hand… which again denies the artist, and the record company, their share… )

In other words, stuff I consume as MP3 is fairly likely to be stuff that I won’t buy on CD, because I just don’t want it that much, or otherwise, will be stuff that I would buy if I could (ragga jungle, for example) or will buy in different versions if I can (dancehall). Above all what I’m interested in is NOT merely the original record, but how a DJ uses it. There are never enough DJ mixes available, BTW.

3. The blogz featuring their top tracks of the day are focusing on showing off their taste and building their cultural capital by virtue of their selectivity. They benefit not from someone simply downloading the track they host or reading their words, but from the listener valuing the record. As a marketing professional I can see absolutely no distinction between this activity and market-seeding and sampling activity — which is, believe you me, fucking expensive to run. It is by far the most expensive communication activity there is on a cost per exposure basis. These boys are doing the job for free. This is particularly true of the kind of minor artists that these blogs tend to focus on — in fact they tend to deliberately try to promote the artists. What is in no doubt is that there is a world of difference between this sort of value-added, off-your-own bat, at-my-own-expense marketing and simply sharing a CD of tracks through your SoulSeek folder. If they really want to salve their conscience they should try and include a link to a record label store where you can buy the record. And try and do something with the webpage so people can’t just leach it / link to it as if they were hosting it.

In other words, the mp3-hosting bloggers look to me like they’re offering a good deal, but then I look at these things from an economic and business perspective rather than a moral one. If I was the marketing manager for the artists I’d be trying to cultivate these bloggers. Of course whether or not the artists themselves will even begin to understand the issue is another matter. I think that reducing the quality of the hosted tracks is a bit self-defeating personally but I suppose it’s a matter of taste.

4. The record industry — as in the conventional, major record industry — is in trouble but it’s not because of P2P to any significant degree, so far as I am aware. The record industry has two main problems. One is that in the west there are fewer young people with a lot of different products and services competing for their leisure time. When the Bay City Rollers were going, Space Invaders was just being launched. By 1995, video games turnover was bigger than music and arguably bigger than movies (the argument was nuanced for the Wired cover story). I can’t remember where the numbers are now, but the fact remains that recorded music has gone from being one of the two or three primary items of expenditure in the youth market to being one component among dozens (which is why the ITV chart includes radio airplay).

The second industry issue is piracy — serious, professional piracy, which mimics the record companies’ traditional modus operandi of pushing copies of the biggest-selling products. In particular, the markets where the youth market is growing fastest tend to have a lot of piracy.

According to the numbers I’ve seen, the measurable impact of filesharing on record sales has been minimal when compared to changing demographics and piracy. That’s not to say it doesn’t exist, but it doesn’t seem to be statistically significant in the overall scheme of things.

It is therefore impossible to sustain an argument about mp3s filesharing hurting the record companies because the economic evidence does not support it.

I’d be interested in any pointers to good research in this area, with proper numbers and academic review please, not just RIAA projections based on paranoia.

And I want to caveat this argument. It is possible that filesharing through the networks, rather thn via the blogz, might hurt independent record labels more than the majors. I’ve heard a few underground labels say they can’t cash in on healthy vinyl sales with a high margin CD compilation because they know their record will be pirated immediately and they won’t sell any. Thank god for vinyl. Just how serious this is I don’t know — I hope indie record fans aren’t pushing their favoured labels out of business.

4. Part of the value of mp3s is that they are digital, easily replicable, and therefore disposable on a personal basis. You can always chuck in the knowledge that you can probably pick ‘em up again if you want them.

Compare and contrast with the humble JA seven. Poorly manufactured, slowly eroding to dust, impossible to back up without digitisation, but saturated with the patina of real humanity, precious due to both rarity and specialness, and you paid someone real money for it — most likely someone who is part of the scene. I am not against mp3s and I personally love the convenience (much better than CD — I want a big jukebox connected to my hifi) and I can deal with the sound quality. But I do NOT want OBJECTS to be supplanted by digitisation (leaving aside Terrence Mckenna’s arguments).

I’ve tried three times so far to write something cogent about Dust on
Saturday and I just can’t so you’ll have to put up with the usual random
wibbling.

Dust is a techno club. It’s rapidly becoming a bit of an institution, not because it’s big and successful and creating a big coke-addled career for the people doing it, but because it goes out of its way to reject careerist, corporate clubbing codswallop. Instead, we’re talking 200 people in the back room of a pub or working men’s club HAVING IT RIGHT OFF to really classy, funky, deep techno played by mostly underground but extremely good DJs. More importantly, we’re talking about a SCENE — people go there and meet people and connect. This is largely driven by the Little Detroit forum, which the Dust collective runs. A lot of techno fans have gravitated to Little Dteroit and it’s probably one of the three or four leading techno forums in the world, certainly the most influential of those not affiliated with any of the big techno record labels. They tend to meet up at Lost, Haywire parties, Sonar, and now Dust.

Dust’s inspiration, or at least its closest historical parallel, is northern soul: the tagline for Dust is “Northern Electronic Soul”, and the logo features the classic clenched fist emblem. The similarities are obvious. When “real” 6Ts soul was out of the charts, consigned to landfill and ballast, ignored and reviled, there was a die hard scene of real soul fans who found that the more the commercial value of soul withered, the better the records were, the purer the scene, the sweeter the buzz. I think it’s axiomatic that commercial decline or marginalisation tends to create better music. For one thing, the poeple making it know they’re not going to be getting more than a few quid out of it, so their motivation is stronger. Of course this is a pretty elitist phenomenon, but so what; this form of elitism implies no contempt for the masses.

Dust therefore has a buzz, and it’s a real phenomenon, which is catching the attention of people who care about really good parties (and techno). Including Andy Weatherall. I don’t know about the rest of you but I still really rate him. His records (with Radioactive Man) still rock. And I’m interested in looking back to the pre-diaspora state of dance music; hipsters (including pretty much the whole of blogdom) turned their back on techno in favour of jungle. And fair enough. But I never totally lost interest in 4×4 modernism. And getting Weatherall to play a pub on the outskirts of Sheffield to 250 paying punters (no guest list, 250 tickets only…) is an achievement. It means Dust has assembled a scene of some vigour and great preciousness that allows the techno aristocracy to, as they say, return to the source. Weatherall is headlining a 10,000 capacity arena next month in Manchester; but he’s playing a pub in Sheffield because he knows he’s going to get a rare old buzz out of it.

It took a bit of effort to get there, not because it was far away — the pub is ten minutes from my house — but because my wife was away on a long weekend in Berlin, so I was already knackered having been looking after our toddler for a few days alone. But I parked him with the childminder overnight with no problem — he even told me to have a nice time. My mate from UK-Dance and house producer Ross was coming up from Derby. He showed up having battled both steel city’s insane road system — it can best be described as “hermetic” — and my almost totally non-functional directions, and I poured cold curry and warm lager down his neck. We cadged a lift from the pub with some mad women in a rickety car with no suspension to speak of and arrived at the venue, which is not “in town”. Well, nowhere in Sheffield is that far from town, but the Earl of Arundel is in a “mixed use” area opposite a builders yard and a boarded up terrace. Marginal. Liminal, even. Perfect for that space-between-worlds vibe which is the Dust trademark: techno’s synaesthesia mixed with Sheffield’s everyday weirdness. The atmosphere was intensified by a low-hanging ripe full moon rising over the Peak District.

Dust had sold out the week before — unheard of in Sheffield in recent times. I’d been to see the club’s main man Martin Dust that afternoon to pick up my tickets and basked in the reflected glow of a man who knew he was about to make Sheffield clubbing history. At the club we were greeted by pounding funky electro seeping out the door and Martin’s cool, happy face. He was resplendent in his flash leather coat, he’s always liked his nifty threads has our Martin. Happily for him he’d found a spot where he could watch the door and the DJ booth, which was just as well cos he was stuck there all night. The Dust residents, Aitcho, Bionika and Ian Orto played the best I’ve heard them, dropping sparkling groovy electro and dirty, high energy house, no looped-up bangers as at all as far as I could tell.

Then Weatherall was on — definitely on time, maybe even early, which was welcome — and dropped loads of electroclash-tinged, inventive 130bpm tracks that were’nt quite techno, or house, or breaks, but somehow squidged the best bits of each into whomping big chunks of beats and hooks. It was great music — really danceable, REALLY noisy, but smart and diverting too. Bit too much electroclash linearity at times for me but the flow was fantastic. Weatherall took things in a tougher techno direction at just the right points, making the sound rock-hard, but never head-banging. Even better was the crowd — it was packed but friendly, no meatheads, everybody going for it and whooping, lots of party atmosphere. One of the things that makes Dust special is that while it’s aimed directly at real techno fans, it’s not an exclusive techno fan-boy zone. There were scarcely any personality-free spotters but loads of party people and loads of women. And the crowd went mad. There are pictures in this thread.

After an hour I needed a break, but when I got back he was dropping the most sublime hard funky acid you can imagine. It was quite heavenly and I had a real techno epihpany; I decided that Weatherall really is God. I spent some time at the DJ booth — something I never do normally — and stood three feet from him, amazed at both his dextrous timing and his minimalism — he was never doing that much but god was it effective. It was just crossfader and FX abuse but he was genuinely making completely new tracks from what he was playing and most importantly it just made you want to scream. He looked superbly cool — minimal rocker style, neat pressed black slacks and shirt, teeny little quiff — nothing like the steretype techno DJ. Somehow he contrived to be unaffected by either the stained spotter clinging to one Technics, or the ludicrously insensitive raver swinging his arms constantly over the other.

But this wasn’t just another pub set through fart-o-matic PA. The sound was excellent, fat and clear and exciting. I suspect this was a lot to do with the laptop-based digital eq. The Dust crew were constantly tweaking the sound — led by a dyed-in-the-wool bearded hippy who stood there radiating warmth to everyone with his little smiles all night. I’ve heard better — the
Fletcher Munson sound system in the second room at UKDX sounded unbelievably liquid when Rich was tweaking it — but it was phenomenal for a small venue.

Eventually fatigue caught up with us but we’d caught most of the set and had a royally good time. Looking back it was so much more than just a great DJ set: it was a landmark, an icon. Music that good played to a crowd that sweet and up for it in a venue that relaxed (there was a police raid that closed the bar and I didn’t even notice) made this one of those really special clubbing moments you treasure in your memory forever. Maximum respect to the Dust crew and especially to Martin for making it happen, against all the odds. Next up is Surgeon on 2nd April… can’t wait.

… lying in bed moaning and holding my head. Worst flu ever. Came on last wednesday, just as I was walking back over the Broom Hill in brilliant sunshine having dropped the boy off at the nursery. Started with a strange pricking sensation under my scalp, then by the end of the day — blam. Just felt like I was going to die. No cold symptoms, just overall viral nastiness.

Now I feel better, in that “life renewed” way you get after an illness. Probably because I spent 18 hours a day sleeping. What I have been doing is:

1. polishing off a garage-cum-broken beat track that uses a wicked Methodman vocal. Sounding good to me, very complex though.

2. Doing a d’n'b re-rub of an old acid house / belaeric classic.

3. Reading three books simultaneously —

* John Michel’s At The Centre of the World (actually, when am I NOT reading this wonderful book?)
* Hamlet’s Mill, the 1968 academic magnum opus on mythology being a medium for transmitting astronomical (and much other) information from the neolithic, if not the meso- or even palaeolithic, which is weighty and mind-blowing, though you have to skip lots of it to get the explanations
* and the main event, Paul Devereux’ Haunted Land. For the first 20 pages I thought this was a re-hash of old idea, but it actually takes themes he’s covered over the last ten years or so and brings them up to date. We’re talking the Dutch death roads, Amerindian stuff, all the material you got compressed into five or six pages in, say, his revised Ley Hunter’s Guide.

Anyway, you stick all those together and you’ve got a pretty comprehensive model for understanding ancient landscape consciousness, using the best evidence available and using both your head and your heart. I’d like to synthesise this into one easily digested framework, but I’m sure it’s been done before — these are well-worn furrows after all. Even so, it’s some good shit. The new John Michel one on Jerusalem turned up today, so I’ve been giving that a good skimming too.