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Regardless of success and its common units of measurement, fame and fortune, there is that enduring aspect of music that is born of love, devotion and in a few cases outrageous natural talent. Bobby McFerrin, who won Song of the Year in 1988 for ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ never came close to the top of the charts again but he has had an illustrious musical career since, including a period as guest conductor for the NY Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Philadelphia and London Orchestras.
Most impressive to me though are his unique vocal improvisations. He has an astonishing vocal range of 4 octaves, he is an expert at vocal percussion and is also capable of throat-singing in which he excites the natural overtones from the fundamental vocal pitch, producing a two-or three-part chord of notes from one voice. Throwing all this talent into an improv session is breathtaking. McFerrin is the guy in the red shirt:
“I pressed the button, and suddenly we were floating. It was an incredible feeling to realise that I now had the means to multiply the aesthetic potential of any situation." - Andreas Pavel
How far we have come. If your iPod is of the Nano persuasion, kudos to you. If you’re packing 6G’s, you rock. iTouch? Awesome. iPhone? Spectacular. Anything electronic that has pinching, flicking and caressing as standard operating procedures deserves all accolades.
What holds all that together though is an enduring idea. One that was laughed off by the likes of Grundig, Phillips and Yamaha. One that plays an integral part in many of our lives - rest, work, play, exercise - you name it. Quite simply, the idea that it is nice to add a soundtrack to real life.
Andreas Pavel created the original portable personal stereo player. He fought court battles for 25 years with Sony who called their dubiously similar version the ‘Walkman’. He was at one point indebted to the tune of $3m in legal expenses. Eventually Pavel was awarded $10m plus royalties on a variety of future Walkman sales. The imagination of a man who wanted to hear his music on the go, no matter how many weird looks he got, is to be honoured. The determination to never let his creation be swallowed up by the power of Sony is inspiring. Pavel’s Stereobelt of 1972, while devoid of MP3, JPEG, WiFi, YouTube and the rest of the gang, represents the official birth of an era defining icon. Surprisingly enough, we couldn't find a digital photo of one...
“Anyone who swims with the current will reach the big music steamship; whoever swims against the current will perhaps reach the source.” PAUL SCHNEIDER-ESLEBEN (Father to FLORIAN SCHNEIDER)
Florian Schneider, along with Ralf Hütter, was one of the founding members of Kraftwerk. If ever musicians swam against some kind of current, it was them. But so too did the other two long-standing members, Wolfgang Flür and Karl Bartos. I’m currently reading Flür’s book, I Was A Robot, because I hoped I might learn a little more about the enigmatic nature of Kraftwerk. And I have done so far, but in the process I’ve discovered a man that writes exquisitely about such things as the imagination, creativity and his own need for artistic freedom over everything else. What’s interesting is that he doesn’t talk quite so much about the music as the kind of human experiences that making music can create. I guess the same goes for any kind of pursuit, anything that takes you on a tangential journey to unpredictable places. Anyway, it gave me a warm fuzzy feeling reading it. Maybe it will for you:
“I had known for a long time how it felt to be on stage. I had also experienced what it was like to be applauded. During my amateur period I had been in many groups, and I had grown very fond of them, even if they were not particularly successful. They were all bands, groups that I had founded. However, with Kraftwerk, the whole world stood open to me, and that was the thing - apart from my discoveries and my minimalist drumming - that most enchanted me through all my years with the group. Human contacts in every nation, countless conversations and the flirtations that often emerged from them, the universal cultural worldview that I was able to form for myself without just getting it from books - all of these things gave me wonderful experiences which later, following my painful separation, also helped me to find a way to myself, to the love and sound of my new music.”
They met on the Isle of Wight in 2007 and self-released their first album "What You See Is What I Sell" earlier this year. The Operators are made up of Owen Taylor on Vocals, John Stevens on Bass, Charlie Westropp on Synths and Guitar and Ben Athey on drums. I have managed to see them live a couple of times so in exchange for my sweat, well trodden-on feet and mild whiplash I thought they owed me answers to some tough and probing questions. Luckily Owen and Charlie could spare a moment:
The Operators are (in no more than 5 words...)
Charlie - A funky, dancey, geeky quartet.
Best on stage Moment?
Charlie - March 12th 2008 , The Studio, Newport , Isle of Wight . Everyone knew the words...
Owen - Album launch November '07, The first pair of frilly white nickers ever to be thrown onto an Operators stage.
Worst on stage Moment?
Owen- Album Launch November '07, they looked well worn.
Charlie - When Owen twatted himself in the face with the microphone resulting in a bloodied moustache. Not an ideal look...
Favourite film character?
Charlie - The Dude.
Owen - Obi Wan Kenobi.
Have you ever been in a fight?
Charlie - Once with a Ukrainian guy called Eugene . He was reading a letter that I was writing 'out-loud' as I was writing it which was quite annoying. I restrained myself until the end of the first paragraph, and then sprung into action. He was bigger than me and I lost.
What angers you about the music industry?
Owen - That we are not major players in it yet.
Charlie - When really average acts appear to be able to sell a huge amount of records. By that I literally mean average acts. If someone's clearly appalling, there's usually some sort of gimmick that explains their success. I can not understand the success of 'Beautiful' by James Blunt. What an average tune.
What are you listening to at the moment?
Owen - The Archers.
Charlie - A lot of Justice (French dance duo hailed as the new 'Daft Punk') and other recent dance acts (SMD etc...). I don't really enjoy the current post-libertines climate of British guitar music.
Do you believe in life after death?
Owen - Around easter I suppose you have to.
Charlie - No.
What is creativity?
Charlie - Somewhere between a means of showing off and something important. Probably more of the former in our case.
Owen - Taking the smallest element imaginable and making it into something enjoyable. And then saying something really pretentious.
Which band or artist do you most like being compared to?
Charlie - Two acts that we all love are Kings of Leon and Justice. A direct comparison is a bit hard to draw because these acts are so diverse, but either would be fine!
Owen - Only the really big bands because I am arrogant and think we are better than everyone else.
Are you booked in for any festivals this year?
Charlie - Yes indeed. The Isle of Wight festival, Festibelly (in Lymington), and Bestival. It's going to be a belter of a summer.
Where will you be in 5 years time?
Charlie - Personally, doing anything musical and getting paid a bit for it would be ace. As a band, world domination beckons...
Owen - Alexa Chung.
I was at Bloc Weekend last, err, weekend. It was a strange experience to say the least: three nights at Pontins, that enduring luminary of British holidaying, with three arenas playing host to the cream of electronic music, both past and present. All in all it was a memorable trip and well worth the large fee, but one thing struck me, and I wasn’t alone: watching a nerdy guy in specks standing motionless behind a laptop isn’t always conducive to dancing. Playing live can mean many things. At one end of the spectrum it can mean bringing along a bunch of synths, a few outboard effects units and even a few ‘real’ instruments and letting loose on stage. And at the other, it can mean doing the aforementioned ‘still’ thing. Some of the people we saw were playing quality music, but they may as well have been checking their emails for all we knew. This is the current conundrum facing electronic musicians today. Often driven by the simple fact that they have rent to pay and mouths to feed, the ‘producer’ is thrust on stage and, for an hour or more, becomes the ‘performer’.
It’s a conundrum that has troubled Robert Henke, a German musician who records much of his material under the name Monolake (see him performing at Bloc above), for many years. He recalls a time when the earliest electronic recordings were played back on tape, but he appreciates that simply pressing play, and maybe handing out information on what people are about to hear, just isn’t an option. Punters want to be entertained. Henke explains the problem:
“If the tape concert is not an option, the key questions are: how can I really perform and interact on stage, and how can I make the audience aware of what goes on without having them read a long statement or listen to a ten minute introduction?” Indeed. So rather than accept the limitations of the innocent laptop (it’s not its fault after all), Henke decided to create his own live tool which has now been updated from Monodeck to Monodeck II (above). It gives him all the live facilities of his laptop but with the added spontaneity and physical interaction that people want to see. And while every other act at Bloc was positioned high up on the stage, Monolake chose to be down low in the sound booth at the same level as the crowd. By all accounts, his was a performance and not an email session. It was an awesome reinterpretation of live performance for the 21st Century and totally unique in its nature.
Nevertheless, it didn’t stop a friend waking up on the last day and remarking sarcastically to the rest of us, “Dammit today’s gonna be good. I wonder if anyone's got the latest Dell...”
For more on the problem of live performance check out Henke’s little mini-thesis here.
He’s called Felix Zenger, he comes from Finland and he can do both this:
And this:
A philistine like me would bring these tricks out at parties and completely devalue them. On the flip-side, a devalued Zenger copy would still take my current party trick (running man into robot-dance into forward roll culminating in cramp) to the cleaners.
“The best thing about Detroit is the people. They have to be some of the warmest people you’ll ever meet, and some of the strongest people you’ll meet.
“When somebody says, ‘W’re gonna do such and so,’ you say, ‘OK, that’s just talk.’ But when you do it, that’s when it means something in Detroit. That’s that working town ethic. It’s a put up or shut up town.” THEO PARRISH
In 1987, a group of street artists in Detroit created posters featuring photographs of various disintegrating downtown structures and attached them to each of the buildings with the caption Demolished by Neglect. Once a glorious metropolis held aloft by a thriving American automotive industry, by the 70s Detroit was in terminal decline; the departure of Motown in ’72 was, to many, a symbol of the impending degneration. Yet, out of the empty boulevards and tangle of desolate freeways emerged musicians whose influence resonates just as strongly today as it did twenty years ago, musicians who epitomise our own belief that it’s not the external resources at your disposal that matter, but what you feel inside: imagination, creativity, determination.
More on Detroit and the pioneers of techno will follow. In the meantime, here’s a great video following Theo Parrish, who moved to Detroit in ’94, around the city with his beloved field recorder.
Digital’s good. Analog’s good. Combine the two, and what do you get? Lots of things actually, among them the various creations of 45 iPod, an inventive little company that transforms old vinyl and cassettes into protective cases for both Classic and Nano iPods. The inspiration came from the realisation that the centre hole on a record matches the dimensions of the Classic touchwheel exactly, and so old vinyl is thus contorted into the shape of an iPod holder, with the centre hole framing the wheel exactly. They do a similar thing with old cassette tapes for the Nano. It’s analog meets digital in the truest sense.
The list of available cassettes and records to choose from is limited - the modest collection includes such luminaries as Pink Floyd, Depeche Mode, Culture Club and Stevie Wonder, to name but a few - so the next step, surely, would be to allow people to send in a record to be reborn as a case. But then, who would be willing to part with those treasured twelves in the first place? Oh the conundrum: to have it spinning on your 1210 or adorning your own digital library?
Stevie Wonder it is then...
Just the other day I came across a copy of Colors magazine. I’d never seen it before. Strange, because it was launched in 1991, and has been published quarterly in multiple languages ever since. Shame on me. Anyway, each issue is dedicated to a particular subject. It was Colors that was responsible for famously doctoring the face of the Queen to look like a black woman in its issue on race in 1993, and it was Colors that caused uproar when an issue on AIDS discussed the disease in the kind of blunt and forthright manner that no one else dared adopt; a picture of US president Ronald Reagan engineered to look like an emaciated AIDS sufferer reflected their approach.
The latest issue is about money. As usual, a new micro site has been constructed online to introduce readers to the subject. Go to www.colorsmagazine.com, (make sure you do) and you’ll be presented with some graphic copy on money and how it forms the subject of this month’s magazine. Of course, they don’t tackle the issue of money as you might expect them to. Instead, they had some bank notes analysed to see what substance they could find. Some you’d expect, and some you wouldn’t, but each discovery corresponds to a different section in the issue, and the result represents a crazy reinterpretation of finance today. It's clear from issues both present and past that whoever conceived the original concept for Colors was either a) dreaming, or b) an impossibly imaginative, creative and determined individual.
The beauty of Colors is that it’s a socially conscious publication dedicated to the world. Sounds a little inflated, no? Yep, but it succeeds by looking at things in an entirely different way to everyone else: by harnessing creativity. Issues that bore us to death on a day to day basis are here reinterpreted and presented in a way that captivates the mind. Hell, just the idea of dedicating each issue to a different topic had me sold. Colors takes a simple idea - dedicating each volume to one subject - and uses it to discuss and raise awareness of globally prevalent issues impacting on the world around us. And, as Reagan and the Queen have shown, they aren’t afraid to put their necks on the line.
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Last month, Colors was dedicated to the blind and visually impaired. Why? Because there are over 40 million blind people in the world. That’s a huge number. Again, it’s about finding a way to talk about things that we’d all rather not talk about. The magazine was packaged in a braille front cover and printed in black and white from beginning to end: Colors without colour, if you will. It also came with a CD containing all content recounted in audio in four different languages, inspirational stories of people who have made something of their lives despite visual impairment. People like Tcha Limberger, the blind violinist who’s short piece moved me to the point that I promise (to try) to never moan about a lack of resource ever again, because we have everything we need. An extract from Tcha’s piece makes the point, I think. Look out for future issues...
“I was born blind and, like my brother, premature. My parents used to give him lots of attention so I became independent. My mother insisted that I study in a normal school. I took up violin when I was 17. It’s a ruthless instrument. It either sounds right or totally wrong. I am constantly researching. I experiment. I try different instruments and styles of music. What matters is to share, to meet other people. I’d like my music to be therapeutic. If I’m not able to find solutions for other people’s problems, my role is to recharge them so they feel inspired to continue in whatever they must do.
“My body is an instrument that allows my soul to express itself. I try to play authentic music with a personal touch. Jazz is music to be worked on. One always has to try to improve his knowledge and skill. I am in a perpetual self-construction process, I don’t want to stop and tell myself I have achieved something. I don’t have a specific goal. I only want to let my music grow. Some people say, “Tcha doesn’t play music, he is music.
“Being blind makes it easier for me to concentrate. I don’t know what kind of musician I am. I play the music I like and that’s it. If I were told that I could recover my eyesight, I would refuse. Learning to see would be too complicated. I don’t feel like I’m missing something.”
I came across a simple yet imaginative little widget for iTunes today, Moody, that lets you add tags to your songs according to their mood. It’s based on a grid of colour squares ranging from calm to intense and sad to happy on the two axis. When a song is playing in iTunes you just click on the square that best represents that song’s mood. Once you’ve done this with enough songs you’re all set...
So, next time you’ve got someone special at home, you’ve whipped out the wine and things are getting just a little bit steamny, you don’t need to go fumbling around making a new playlist to ensure the moment isn’t lost. You just create a shuffle according to which colour square best represents the kind of mood you’re aiming for. The red square top left, for instance: intense and sad. Good luck with that.
Anyway, it’s a cool idea so check out the Moody site and download the application for free. And if you don't quite understand, there’s a short movie tutorial here.
