Cool stuff I'm into right now

 

 

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Success

So my internet's down at home and all of a sudden life gets about five times more complicated. Emails don't get received or sent. Artists don't get their mixes. YouTube sees a sudden unexpected dip in its views...

Actually, it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things at all. But it does mean that you, dear reader(s), have been denied your daily doses of my wit, wisdom and whimsical meanderings. For that, and everything else, I humbly apologise.

So in the vague hope my iPad comes into the realm of a free wifi zone before my landline is resurrected, here's a collosally witty, wise and whimsically meandering update on what has been big in Hi-Sonorous land in 2013 so far.

Alun Leppitt's record is big. And great...5 tracks of beautiful, vital, epic, worshipful rock. I'm really proud of it and, happily, it's going to be available sooner than you might think. A loose deadline of the end of the month is looking possible. Tom Gregory (drummer extraordinaire for Mr Tommy Eye and good friend of Alun's) joined us at the studio for a great percussion session which culminated in him laying down some parts played on the side of chair and the top of a music stand. And the best part of this is they're not even gimmicks we'll push to the back of the mix on second thoughts. The EP also has a really good name and LOADS of cool sounding guitars. I guess it's not hard to understand why I'm so into it!

Byron Gold is very soon to announce big news on a brand new release. I don't think I'm allowed to give anything more away yet but it's the track we've been waiting to write for Byron for about two and a half years and it's basically a stonker and Sanj and I are both well pumped about the news. Expect clips, vids, facebook spam and general twitter hype madness within the month!

Our tax returns got filed. OK this isn't news. But how else do you account for my chipper and lackadaisical tone?

I set my guitar up in stereo and jammed on my looper for two hours in Wednesday morning. This isn't really news either, apart from the fact it may well have spawned the basis of an amazing idea we've come up with a remix for Byron's single but haven't yet had a chance to work through properly. The remix involves an incredibly cool patch we made up on the MPC where we sample spliced one of the hooks from the tune and built a beat out of the various ensuing vocal samples. Great fun to play with and prime remix material. We even shoehorned a tiny element into the single mix!

Anyway, before I get down to how many socks I've washed so far in 2013, let me get onto the subject of my blog...success.

Am I alone in thinking that the creative industries have much less definable measures of success than some? If you're a doctor and you correctly identify their illness, prescribe the right drug or treatment and they get better, job done, no? If you're a lawyer defending someone who's innocent and you argue their case well and the jury returns the correct verdict, again, good job. OK, so I'm sure GPs and barristers the world over will be writing in in uproar at my crass oversimplification of their roles, but compare it to the creative equivalents...

I'm a web developer who gets hired to build a website for a company. At the end of the design process the site looks great, functions well and you get your cheque for a job well done. But the site's far from being a success at this point. It has to get seen by search engines, it has to build awareness, it has to attract customers, it has to sell a message. Ultimately, it has to make money for the company. As a designer, you won't probably stick around to know if any of these things happen.

Take another example even closer to our patch...making records. Any contemporary artist who's made an album will tell you the same story...albums are a songwriter's symphony; their film or novel. They are the final and most eloquent medium of expression for the contemporary musician, where the weeds are mercilessly picked, where every microscopic detail is analysed and questioned and reasoned into existing. Great albums are given everything by the artist to be what they are. But, as an artist you don't ever really know the impact your music has on the people who receive it. You don't even really know the impact for the people who love it, who go crazy for it. You speak clearly, precisely, but what you get back isn't an equivalent response. It's either an inarticulate and meaningless jumble of superlatives - "it's so amazing, you're so great, I love you", or more in my case a deafening silence.

Some will say don't be so vain. Do it for the art. Do it for fun.

But making music as an end in itself has never really been it for me. I've always had this daring dream that music can change people. That it can be about people, rather than about 'art'. Or at least that art is helpful and good when it's concerned with people and not just itself.

But this is a really hard dream to hold on to because it's nigh impossible to know when you've done anything worthwhile and even when you have, it's an incredibly expandable vision - there's always this desire to reach more people and have things on a bigger scale.

I've seen that time and again even bands who've had all the success in the world still want to be number one again. 'You're only as good as your last single'. Success is pretty insatiable when you're chasing that version of it.

And in the main I'd say I don't need all the success in the world. And by my own logic it seems it would be folly to desire even an ounce of all the success in the world because it would never be enough.

So where does that leave me then? How do I reconcile the ambition I have for what I do with the knowledge that success won't ever satisfy?

I guess the best answer I have for you now is to try and make all the music making about people. To make it about having good relationships, building people up, having integrity, being honest, being positive, being an example etc etc. I think even a little bit of this can make you feel really good about what you're doing and become a really positive way to channel all the ambition.

Chris

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Feeling inspired

Chris

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Er, what??!?

Oh my word, this is so amazing...

Off to High Leigh tomorrow for the annual songwriter's consultation tomorrow. Expecting great things!

C

 

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Revisiting old and reinventing new

It's all go again in Hi-Sonorous land! I'm sitting on my sofa watching U2 and reflecting on an enjoyable week starting two new records. Pre-production can be a lot of fun and I realised that this week as myself and Sanj hung out first with Alun Leppitt (the first of our recording artists) making noise and re-imagining Alun's songs, and later on our own, noodling with ideas for our own tunes and getting ready to begin recording for real next week with the legend that is Alan Sampson.

So it's two Al's and two albums, and I'm well excited to see what happens over the next month or so.

In other news, I've been sneaking a few peeks at the above and really enjoying the brilliant way they segue from 70's Police-styled retro groove to a great 'current' surging chorus. And his voice really is something.

Current - it's a word we're throwing around a lot at the moment - trying to find the melodies, sounds, beats, chords that feel of now. As I think about it, I'm beginning to fear that we're not too good at working out what is 'current' right now. But we seem to be getting better, faster and more effective at creating. And this seems to be true for the guys we're working with creatively as well.

And, I've said this before, but I really think the genus of 'current' is just you being the most you you can be. Maybe I've never said it that ineloquently before but you get my meaning. I think the past few months Sanj and I have been discovering more of how you do this, for yourself, and (as with producing) do this for others. The tunes are coming out bolder, more individual and more polished than ever before and that does give me confidence.

But it's not all instinct: there's a fair amount of analytical cut and paste that goes on throughout. We jammed out a cool hip-hop groove as a new possible direction for an old tune we're going to revisit for our record, but listening back there was this really clichéd chord turn-around that had felt great at the time but really dated the sound on second listen. It's funny, because anything that becomes retro surely starts out being dated and then becomes cool again. And it takes someone with enough confidence in its greatness to defy the notion of 'current' in order to make it cool again. Take the 80's!! (To be honest, I'm not even sure that has become cool again, but that kind of wrecks my point...). Anyway maybe my Bflat9 will stay in after all...or maybe it's just cheese. Time will tell I guess.

Anyway, this was the sound of me coming up for air, blathering on and on, before diving into the next vat of creative soup (or, in more familiar terms...Slough).

Icelandic blessings!

C

Ps. Bit disappointed by Mumford. Finally got new Sigur Ros album and loving it. Excited about this. And really want to hear this.

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It's Tuesday...!

What better start to the day than discovering some old friends up to amazing things? Introducing, once again...the lovely Hannah Holley and the awesome Kate Brown.



HANNAH HOLLEY - "MILES AWAY" (LIVE ACOUSTIC) from Hannah Holley on Vimeo.

The Boxettes live...in a laundrette

 

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Redefining awesome

OK people. Serious whooaaaa's this morning...

How is it...? #worldsbestkeychange

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Aloe Blacc fest!

Wow. Had a genuinely great evening in yesterday watching Aloe Blacc videos on YouTube with Lorna. Here are a couple of gems, but basically there's at least an hour and a half of amazing stuff to enjoy. Particularly check out the rest of the MADE sessions. The Billie Jean cover is the absolute pick but the other five parts are incredible as well. Needless to say Amazon are shipping me the record as I type this. Signed sealed delivered I love this guy.

 

 

Chris

Elusive songs

OK so I'm pretty excited currently about what's happening in Hi-Sonorous land. We had a great week last week. Worked on some new Tommy Eye tunes which are sounding amazing. Arranged some string parts. Chewed the fat with old friends over the bank holiday.

Also, we met up with Myles Dhillon and Alan Sampson in London on Wednesday and saw/heard the amazing work both of them are doing, musically and other. Got really inspired by them. It turns out we're all basically on the same page in wanting to do something together, so later on this week we'll be adjourning at the Squares to find out what that something sounds like.

At the risk of getting ahead of ourselves, we're also thinking about some filming as well, and the ideas are coming thick and fast. In many ways, so many of the usual things that scupper ideas like this are in place, or aren't issues. Like finances, space, equipment, time. What it comes down to are the songs, and the people. These are the two biggest factors in determining whether any of this is a success or not. And interestingly they're the things you can't really control.

Song writing is tough because it's so elusive. You can learn the craft, but you can't learn to control the creativity. Not really. The essence of a song, the bit that feels magical, the bit that makes you go "yes" is never something a writer can claim ownership of. It's a gift that's imparted - a seed that's sown in you, the writer, by something, or someone else. I like to think it's a bit of heaven on earth.

It's still a mystery to me. Which makes a deadline a very scary thing indeed. In fact a deadline is the sort of thing that is very likely to produce very mediocre, uninspired "craft" from a writer, rather than a bit of real magic.

Anyway, Friday is when all of this comes together, and by then we need to have some songs worth working on. So my thought for today is going to be to reflect on the best piece of song-writing advice I ever had, which actually did not come from another songwriter, but from an activist and political advisor called Jim Wallis, who said "if you want to tell the story, you have to be in it".

 

Ghostpoet

Loving the simplicity of this tune. Ghostpoet's delivery is so hypnotic and evocative. Loving it!

 

What's going on?

Time for a mini update folks. Plenty to write home about from Hi-Sonorous HQ. First up, some of you may remember a few weeks back we linked you to this video. Well the man behind it all, our good friend and fellow producer Mr Gregory Felton organised a hip-hop orchestra show featuring Tommy Eye yesterday in Southampton. Which basically was amazing. [I wanna say it rocked, but that would be imprecise stylistically. Sadly there's no urban equivalent I can think of right now. At least not positive equivalents... Hm, significant?]

Tommy Eye made his best effort at getting the west quay shopping zombies to remember that life exists beyond retail, and a good few hundred were reminded and all the more healthier for it. Big up to G Funk for an amazing job...too cool.

Back in the studio, we've been writing a good deal of worship stuff for a future hip-hop project (Yes, I did just use the words worship and hip-hop in the same sentence) which is turning out to be a huge challenge, but one we are totally pumped about. We're also writing for this guy, and this guy, and this guy. (ok that last one is...let's say, aspirational.)

Sanj has been on particularly fine form on the beats and I've been jangling the guitar strings in between hourly sittings of this...

Sorry, that had to go on the page, I love it so much.

I'm generally finding the ebb and flow to be a little unorthodox. Staying creative is a discipline in itself. One it takes to time to learn. I'm realising more and more that you don't always just instinctively do great things. More often than not, you work for them. I sat in my snug (my house is too small for a lounge) on Friday for an hour and a half and produced two lines of lyrics.

So working is sitting and thinking. And it's an incredibly intense process sometimes. Always, always, always, lyrics come last after chords and melody. I wish it were the other way round, but the others are a piece of cake to me and words are nearly always a slog to the finish. I can sit in complete silence for a while, perhaps 10-15 minutes and just churn rhymes and ideas, ways of sayings things over and over, and get increasingly more impatient with myself. Sometimes the wall comes down before I pull myself out, and then the confidence is too low to carry on. But if not, eventually I just start to strum the chords and sing all vowels on the tune I have. And it's in this kind of spontaneous speaking tongues moment where I might randomly pull out a word or a phrase or occasionally even a whole line and it just fits and feels good, and right. Sometimes it's very closely related to the ideas that I've just been chewing on, and sometimes it's totally different. But what does seem consistent is the feeling that it's a process I have little control over, which is both exhilarating when I hit on things I think are good, but frustratingwhen I can't just get something out. It certainly increases my envy of artists like Tommy, when they freestyle all these complex rhymes and meaning and humour just totally off-the-cuff...

Anyway I said this would be mini. And now it's not.

Chris

Ps. Also shout out to the tireless independent music promoter Nick Tann who played us on his podcast show "Is this Thing On?" this week.

 

Inspired

Read this amazing piece by Jon Foreman today, whilst listening to the latest Switchfoot album, "Vice Verses". Man, can this guy write.

Whilst his words and the strength of his vision make powerful, thought-provoking reading, the really amazing thing for me is hearing how well he expresses all of this vision and attitude in his band's (and solo) music. He's so on it.

Makes me really want to practice more!!!

 

Genius

 

From our wonderful friend G Funk. What a legend.

 

Chris

Coldplay - Myloxyloto, the scissor tool and how to be relevant.

Ahhh, there's nothing like it when you're a closet rock fan in a rap world. The way the cymbals sparkle, the way the vocals soar, the teles crunch through vintage valves, the melodies...oh the tunes!! Yes sir. Nothing like buying rock music after a month of producing hip-hop.

So I've been eagerly awaiting Coldplay's new album since their glasto set back in the summer, and it's great to finally have it on the stereo. It's a great listen - full of hopeful, uplifting tunes and none of that default mid-tempo stuff that put so many people off.

Anyone who's familiar with U2 will instantly recognise the influence of Brian Eno, not just for his trademark keyboard/sampler sounds that litter the soundscape but also the tightness and variety of the arranging which is the new album's greatest aspect.

So it seems whilst epic music (aka The Big Music) is very much alive and well, the days of the 70-minute epic are over. No one has the attention span for it any more. Even Radiohead's latest album was, by conventional standards, EP-sized. People just aren't keen for more than 45 minutes of one artist in one go.

But this may be no bad thing in general, and I definitely think in Coldplay's case, it's a great thing. In the space of three albums the band have learnt how [slash been forcibly made...] to massively reduce the amount of time it takes for them to say what they need to, and in so doing, learnt to say a lot more to boot.

This is something I greatly admire in an artist - the abililty to be concise and to be articulate, which often requires a willingness to strip things right down to their core - a producers' job that artists often squirm at and requires a huge amount of trust to even begin. You see nothing is a given in the music world. You're only as good as your last single. You have to keep ahead of the pack if you want to stay in the race at all. Most bands fade away into obscurity after 3 or 4 albums because they stop saying new things and stop reaching out to an audience beyond their committed fans. Chris Martin said recently he's not interested in being 'relevant', and that may well be the case as far as he's concerned. But his band have done exactly the thing they needed to do to remain so and I expect the album sales will reflect this come Christmas time.

And I reckon there's something profound here... Music is a very revealing art form. People need no formal training to appreciate it or to criticise it, and can see through any kind of fakery. They can tell if you're lying because the music instantly loses its credibility. They can also tell when you're trying too hard or trying to pull the wool over their eyes. You can't fake this stuff. The only way you stay relevant is to stop trying to be relevant and just be yourself. Find whatever it is you were trying to say all along and then say that and do that with every ounce of your energy. Then the music reveals the honest artist behind it and draws you in, which, especially in this obsessively inquisitive age, is what the punters want.

But here's the crunch. In our time-concious, attention-deficit-disorder world, who has the time to wait 5 albums over 11 years for an artist to find their voice? You need a lot of people on your side if you're to be given that opportunity for that amount of time. Chris Martin can count himself blessed to have been given that chance when a huge number of other bands have found themselves dropped from labels or been bound up in crazy licensing fights or had albums shelved indefinitely like diamonds to stop them saturating the market before they ever got a chance to move on from their one top 10 single. And in some ways the worst offender of all is the listening public themselves, where music is like fashion and its a fad one day and old news the next.

But it's encouraging to me that there are examples at the very highest peaks of the music industry of this kind of trust and endurance, development and redefining in bands. It keeps me determined to follow in their manner and to try to be every ounce the only thing that offers me the chance of thriving in this world - myself.

C

Best drum video ever.