Author: Grievous Angel

So, Eden’s trying to do another mix CD (http://uncarved.chaos.org.au/), which is a good thing, cos he does excellent mix CDs (despite — or possibly because of — the fact that he can’t, and apparently doesn’t need, to actually mix. So, you should all be excited.

However, the trouble he’s experiencing is due to him taking a Big Bang approach to mix CD compilation. Just picking up a load of vinyl, firing up the decks and switching on the recorder is alright if a) you get a chance to practice properly, at decent volumes, on a regular basis, b) your (almost certainly digital) recorder is consistently plugged in and needs no more set-up) and c) you can go back and re-do it several times.

None of which is possible if you have children, a relatively normal relationship with your spouse, and a normal income (all is possible if you have a team of nannies doing the childcare for you, but that’s not really parenting, is it?).

What John should be doing is recording bits of mixes in between baby-minding and blending them together. That way he can build up a mix by accretion. It’s a lot easier to record a bit of mixing that’s good and then stick it with some other bits that are also good, without worrying that THIS WHOLE MIX HAS TO BE GOOD IN ONE TAKE OR IT’S NOT WORTH HAVING! This would also suit his mixing style. Of course, many would also say that such an approach lacks “authenticity”, or something. Well boo sucks to them. They don’t have to try to compile mix CDs within the hour and ten minutes of personal available in a day (available that is if you cut down on civilised communications with your partner). I blame capitalism, for obvious reasons.

Unfortunately, as he has complained about at great length in his blog, his Mac is in a different room to his decks, so this is difficult to achieve. What he therefore needs is either a long cable running from the mixer to his Mac (feasible, but Macs running SoundEdit have a tendency to crash if you don’t stand over them), or something like a MiniDisk recorder (or Archos MP3 recorder??) by the side of the decks to record into, a mini-optical to full-sized optical cable to take a digital out from the MD recorder (possibly with an opticaltocoaxial converter box), and something like an Edirol USB UAD1 digital audio capture device (basically a cable with a USB connector at one end and a coax digital connector at the other. They’re ace, I want one cos my old Korg 1212’s digital cables went walkies years ago so I can’t record digitally. They’re only about 60 quid. But John doesn’t have 60 quid.

Or, he could take the low-tech route. He could record bits of mixes onto ANALOGUE tape using his old tape recorder, which still functions pretty well, at his leisure, with no pressure or hassle (other than remembering to switch the tape deck on, but John is good with discipline like that). Then he could plug that tape deck, or even just a walkman, into his iMac’s sound-in port, record into soundedit the bits he likes, and compile the CD (ideally using ProTools Free).

Voila. No further expenditure, cheap media, lovely. Sound quality won’t be crystal-clear digital beauty, but analogue tape and reggae go together pretty well. And anyway, he can always bung the pre-master of the CD over to me and I’ll process the tracks with my very expensive collection of Waves Plug-Ins (something like Renaissance EQ for the top end sparkle, Ultrabass for the low end, and C4 to keep everything under control). Best of both worlds, innit.

Why on earth doesn’t Danny Sullivan have his own website? Or better still, blog?

Why for that matter is Paul Devereux’ site two years out of date?

I think there are signs of burn out in the landscape alignments camp…

I’d just like to say how much I’m enjoying the Lisa Maffia single.

The latest iteration of the ragga-mainstream crossover starts here, I suppose.

Re: The Big Chill’s deal with VH1

It’s an interesting business strategy problem in many ways. It’s a
little like the Chasm theory in marketing, where (to reverse the usual
train of thought of this theory) offerings fail to survive because in
trying to make it across to a wider audience they alienate their
initial, and most substantive audience, and their market collapses. Part
of this problem is choosing which business partners to go with in order
to monetize the intellectual and cultural capital you’ve accumulated.
You really can blow it in business terms by trying to squeeze too much
money out of your offering and alienating your audience as a result.
More pointedly, no matter how underground you;re trying to be (or really
are), the wrong business partner can just destroy your brand value, and
this can happen very quickly.

Demonstrably, the Big Chill hasn’t suffered from this, at least not yet,
despite the extreme precariousness of their position: the very fact
that their audience is to a great degree un-served by mainstream
offerings, yet largely white, middle class and monied, makes them
intensely valuable to marketeers. In fact, a lot of people can (and do)
assume that the Big Chill has sold out simply because it has always
served a valuable demographic niche. (Without getting too deeply into
the cultural politics of the big chill, I think this is broadly an
unfair accusation, BTW.)

What is interesting about the deal with VH1 — a brand that to be frank
fills me with the creeping horrors and which I find deeply alienating
and very far from what I want BC to be — is that it’s not a sponsorship
deal. It’s a quid pro quo. VH1 gets access to the Big Chill’s audience
and a small amount of branding and communications — but it doesn’t just
buy the Big Chill’s arse / cultural capital off the shelf. Instead, the
Big Chill get some of VH1’s business and infrastructural capital — they
get a slot in VH1’s schedules. This gives BC something they couldn’t
achieve on their own, significantly extending BC’s capability, while VH1
effectively take all the business risk.

It’s a nice move.

But the minute BC starts playing three hour late-eighties Eric Clapton
acoustic sets to “mellow people out”, that’s it, I’m turning up with the
Ambush raggacore sound system with some Bug dubplates.

Past coming back to haunt…

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3501286195

Had a fab time at the Sheffield demo yesterday. Texted various ppl on the
way and most of em were on the way to London (12 coaches IIRC
from Leeds alone). The demo had several hundred people there, mainly CND
and Quaker and floating voters. No SWP, must’ve been in London, but this
seemed to mean it was a mainly white crowd — SWP seem to be very good
at getting the asian community out judging by previous demos. Day was
blazing sunshine all day, didn’t see a cloud anywhere. Mood was very
friendly and relaxed, loads of kids playing, hardly any cops, really
nice. Cringed a bit at the Xtian peacenik singalongs but fuck it they
were there. All passed off very peacefully.

Afterwards went to an art gallery and played in the peace gardens, which
have fab water sculptures, with the near-full moon looming overhead. I
was struck by how well served Sheffield is by public spaces that bring
together people from different cultures — a real sense of politics of
the everyday in the air. A sense of hope.

The mighty John Eden, who is blogging nicely at http://uncarved.chaos.org.au, is investigating political mythaeopia, which is good to see. No doubt he will be mercilessly attacked by the fundamentalist-realist leftie massive, but then they are always attacking everybody, all the time.

From Simon Reynolds on garage rap slowing down…

“he’s not talking about that though, a brief intermission of slow jams — but the whole tempo of the scene’s output falling — you’re starting to get tunes like ‘they wanna talk about us’ which ahve the UK garage style of Mcing but are as slow as American rap like Ludacris. tunes that are quite dirgy with doomy fanfares a la ‘rollout’ or Swizz Beats tunes.”

In other words — “you’re out of touch matey”! Oh well, I guess I’m too far away from the pirates to keep up with the bleeding edge of garage, despiute Onextra…

EDITED

re: “the truly awful 100% Dynamite series” at http://www.hollowearth.org/blog.html…

Bit OTT… They make sure people get paid. As much as they can do, and maybe the original deal wasn’t brilliant, but so far as fairness can be achieved, Soul Jazz try to achieve it. This is important — real people in the real world benefit from Soul Jazz and 100%. <

Garage rap getting slower:
from simon reynold’s blog:
> Blissblog regulars might recall the dissenting views of one Matthew Ingram,… now he reckons the way forward is for tracks to get even slower.

But this is an old trend in UKG. Lots of UKG stars have gone slow when they need to crossover into wider markets or flex their creative muscles — think Ms Dynamite, Misteeq, or now Big Bruvva both of whom have gone down to r’n’b speeds for later jams. Or, some years ago now, the Dreem Team going back in time in the their record collections and adding in slower soul, r’n’b and hip hop tracks to their shows. Canny…