jet

I have to admit I never liked the Happy Mondays... I'm listening to Bone Thugs at the mo, tho, so take what I say with a grain of salt. ;)

I am really impressed by the big dumb fun stance... I guess the rock'n'rollers like the Datsuns were into that too, but unabashed party vibes and roughness seems like a good thing (check their comments about recording vox on their myspace). (Well aware I don't champion this shit at all in my own music...)

Um, I should say that I wrote those posts in a spirit of snarkiness more than anything more intelligent. :)

The bit about amplifier staff being dicks was sarcastic, following on from my praise for Murdoch - when compared to Murdoch it seemed funny to call someone else a dick. Someone else emailed me with the same question, though, so chalk this up as another far-too-obscure comment on the internet. :)

If I was writing in a more upfront fashion I would've said something like: This is nothing new. This kind of service has been available for a long time, in a variety of forms. I'd choose another option that left less of a bad taste in my mouth before I chose myspace.

As for my reasons, I don't really have anything intelligent to add to what's been said in that Dissensus thread about myspace. I'm disappointed at what I see is increasing consolidation of capital and control in the realms of new media. I don't think that will bring long-term benefits to "the little guy" anywhere.

As for better designed services, I thought Orkut was a better looking, more fully-featured social networking application and I think last.fm is a more focused, less 'How To Win Friends & Influence People' approach to punters finding music and artists promoting it. I'm pretty sure it has much better features in every respect than myspace, with the exception of this new turn of events. Regarding MP3 shops, I think emusic.com, beatport.com and bleep.com are some great businesses.

Usual sulky-bitch-ness aside, there was a pretty interesting discussion of this on another forum I read. A few of the contributors are kiwis. :)

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It's awesome to know it's so easy to give a little bit more to Rupert Murdoch.

I wouldn't want to support dicks like amplifier.net.nz or any of the numerous other online mp3-selling services...

On a tangent, I find it kinda gutting how good ideas are not important, but rather popularity is. Like the utility of something like myspace comes from it being so fucking popular, not from it being original or well designed or anything like that. Is that only the case on the internet, do you think? Is this a feature of "new media"?

This is really popular, so maybe plenty have seen it, but it's a Michel Gondry style vid of a guy who can't play drums or piano playing both, all chopped up to be in time and make a tune. With funny bits.

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Um, lots of people on here aren't in Welli.

If the anal sex comment made no sense, I was referring to this other topic:

[ http://www.nzmusic.com/topic.cfm?i=16782 ]

Good stuff so far, I reckon.

More specifically about the length, the standard approach is to have a "one-sheet", which means an A4 page that has everything you really want people to know. It could be everything, or it could just be like a warm-up, but the idea is that you assume whoever's looking at your press kit doesn't have the time or enthusiasm to read beyond the first page.

I've also had it suggested to me that it's good practice to try to put 5 points of interest on your one-sheet. Structure your points before you begin, think of how to make 'em flow. I think this helps with what White Rhino mentioned about back story - if it's not a point of interest, don't put it in.

Definitely make a point about having had anal sex with a British tabloid celebrity in a pub toilet, if possible.

You could try Red Eye. That's the most well known of the independent shops that I know of. Definitely has some vinyl, but can't remember if it's second-hand or what. I think it is.

They're on the web.

Sorry, to attempt to be a little more helpful, the two rationales I know of for increasing the overall volume are:

If your song is louder than others it will stand out more on the radio

and

if the overall volume of a song is louder it's better to listen to in a busy environment, whether that's travelling or in an office cubicle or cafe.

First one becomes quickly moot, of course...

Second one's not shit, but obviously it's easy to go too far, and as an idea it's thinking of music firstly as a functional thing rather than as a composition, isn't it? I guess if the artists want the music to work in such an environment then that's no problem.

I have had plenty of times when I've wanted to listen to something delicate and intricate when on a train or wherever, cranked up the volume a bit and suddenly been munged by a loud part hiding around the corner...

Yes. Yes we can.

The song I heard is at the link I posted above ... yep, it's off 'Be Mine Tonight'. Quite a few Kiwis relevant to this topic have been released on Kranky.

Hey Hollis, weren't you slagging Dean Roberts over in the Dimmer thread?

"I would have thought that even a garnishing of Dean Roberts might be a bit to much."

What's the deal?

Man, check those before and after remastering shots... it's fucked.

Obligatory Wikipedia links, here's one on the "Loudness war" I was trying to get at above - records being limited more and more heavily. Has a simple waveform comparison too, to show a clipped wave.

It's a sad phenomenon, IMO, cos even for those who are anti limiting to the hilt the goalposts about what's a reasonable volume of mastering have probably changed for good.

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Imagine a soundwave. Compression takes the loudest parts and shrinks them down, so that you can then turn up the overall mix. Net result is that the average volume is louder.

Traditionally this was done mostly on individual instruments or voices, so that e.g. a singer had a bit more oomph going on.

When compression is quite extreme it gets called "limiting". Your limiter has a faster attack time (i.e. it detects loud bits faster) and pulls the peaks back further so you can crank the volume of the resultant sound a lot.

Radio stations use limiting before the transmitter to ensure a loud, strong signal. Somewhere along the way producers started limiting the entire mix of a track to boost the overall levels. This has got more and more extreme. R&B and hip-hop are, of course, hideous culprits in this regard, but often have a ridiculously sparse mix to take advantage of it as best they can. Relatively recent blatant offenders on the rock front would be the last few RHCP albums, especially 'Californication', and The Killers, but any commercial bands like Linkin Park, Simple Plan, Evanescence, etc. noticeably have this effect taking place.

The complaint with any kind of compression is it takes out dynamic range, which starts to take away from the impact of any changes in a song. Really simple example - if you've compressed the drum mix massively and someone hits a crash cymbal... well the overall mix will still be the same volume (and potentially the other drum sounds will actually shrink down a little when the crash is hit) so that kind of punctuation point in the song is lost, or at least diminished.

When talked about in the context of mastering (i.e. limiting the fuck out of a whole song before putting it on CD), this concern obviously gets stronger and it's got to the point where sound waves are clipped a lot. This means that if you zoom in on the loudest points in the waveform of a song you'll see a flat line instead of a nice sine wave... and at this point information about the character of that sound is lost. Or changed, if you like, but with recordings of a live band, most people consider it lost.

I personally get this kinda edgy, fidgety feeling if I hear this kind of mix... like my ears are getting tired or something. It really feels "noisy" and not in a good way... not an exciting rush of noise, more like standing in a busy train station or something. :)

Rosy & Dion Workman's Sigma Editions is my favourite Kiwi label. Actually, I think less than half of the releases are by New Zealanders, but whatever.

I don't really imagine any of these bods try to be well-known in NZ.

Listened to a Dean Roberts track the other week that sounded an awful lot like (British band) Hood. The vague irony being that Hood always name-drop 80s Flying Nun records as influential.

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Rosy & Dion Workman's Sigma Editions is my favourite Kiwi label. Actually, I think less than half of the releases are by New Zealanders, but whatever.

I don't really imagine any of these bods try to be well-known in NZ.

Yeah, I don't like this kind of monologue, but it's been one aspect of dance music for a good... 20-30 years now? So I found it funny to hear a Kiwi accent on it instead of someone from Chicago or a European guy talking almost-perfect English.

As for popularity, check the link ... definitely still going, even if it's not ubiquitous. I do talk to people every day who like music like this!

Re: electronic music being innovative, well I think this type of stuff is first and foremost dance music, whatever the means of making it. Complaining about its inanity or lack of development is like being fucked off at AC/DC or other bogan dance music for the same reasons. I guess some people did bitch that the Datsuns were churning out a dead sound when they blew up, but I reckon that's kinda off the mark... it doesn't really matter if it's all really familiar, in fact that's probably part of the appeal to its fans.

Ramble on... not sure why I'm (sort of) defending a kind of music I'm not interested in, I guess I'm just surprised that anyone is surprised about this kind of thing still going on.

PS. QUEEP maybe try obscure.co.nz and biggie.co.nz for a more responsive audience.

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