Tonight we released our second Dåbermix. It is pretty different from the first one, more calm. We don’t speak about what music we should do. It just comes out naturally, so this is where we were during the last 3 months of 2009. Happy listening!
Back in the days I always thought, that it’s a drawback to not have a certain direction in my music. I was mixing up styles and thought that was not right somehow. I made excuses: “I am still searching for something, that is ‘my style’, that i can call mine.”
Nowadays that feels kind of wrong. I am a person with a variety of interests. And this is also reflected on my musical output.
So instead of marking a place somewhere in the musical landscape, i will go on being the explorer. But this time knowing, that this is the right way.
I love the sound of electronic music and the aura of acoustic music. I like rhythms as much as harmonies.
And the binding element will always be a general appreciation of sound.
You will find different styles here. Different projects, or maybe just experiments.
But this is right.
I now know.
Ambient-artist Darage Bang started a new post-series to feature appreciated artists he found through Soundcloud:
Darage Bang presents Cloudy and Pleasant
With my piano piece Ursulurn, I happen to be one of them. Thanks a lot, Frank!
The music over there is somewhere between ambient, downtempo, drone and experimental. If you’re interested give it a listen through my Cloud-Playlist for an uninterrupted playback. (you’ll need a Google-Account, though)
I like and support the idea not just because the underlying thoughts are quite similar to mine, when I started ‘Found in the Cloud’. It is good to see Soundcloud evolving, being a platform driven by people. And with applications like The Cloud Player build ontop of the infrastructure, it has the potential to be Spotify for independent artists.
I just removed Mixed Sessions from the internet. It is really old and has nothing to do with what i’m up to musically. I don’t want to get connected to this Garageband-approach of making electronic music. There are better things to come…
If anybody still has the desire to listen to the tracks, shoot me a message, I’ll pass you the files.
In my last post I wrote about how today‘s over-availability of music leads to a switch in music-listening. One of the commenters suggested to try listening to ambient music. Actually i don‘t like the term ,Ambient‘. I don‘t know where these associations come from, but I then have people in my head, who normally don‘t listen to this kind of music and label everything as ,ambient‘, that is slow, has no beat, is melancholic and/or laid back. Often these people equal Ambient with background music. I more like to call it ,silent music‘, since – yes – it can serve as a background atmoshphere to tasks you do, like working, writing. But good silent music also invites you to come closer and listen carefully. The elements don‘t scream at you, they want to be discovered. Maybe more like paintings. You can look at them from greater distance, just to grasp the atmosphere, but also come closer and discover details, that weren‘t imminent at first.
One of the musicians who do really great in painting these pictures is Pascal Savy, aka Static. Don‘t know anymore how our paths crossed, but I found his pieces to be really ,well-painted‘. They create a really dense atmosphere – dark, drony and sometimes even a bit creepy. He has a blog over at blogspot, where he describes his concepts and thoughts driving the creative process. Reading through them, you can say, that he already dug deep into the matter. Learning about sonic concepts, he tries to incorporate them into his music. In his blog, I first read about the phenomenons Microsound and Granular Synthesis. Touching these now would go beyond the scope of this post, but still interesting concepts, worth exploring. You can hear, that elements in his pieces are deliberately placed, and not just got there per accident.
Vortex (above), one of his last pieces utilizing Granular Synthesis, brought up a memory of my childhood. We often did summer-vacation in countries you had to cross water to get there. As a child, spending a night in a ferry, there is not too much to do, so you just walk around the ship and discover things. We sometimes did a dare: what would be the deepest floor we dare to be for more than just a second? In these ferries, the deeper you go, the creepier it gets. Corridors get uglier, the sound of the engines gets louder and louder and – since you are below the water suface – the doors start to be heavier. They then have these big opening wheels on them. For a kid, this was really creepy. And I remember I couldn‘t stand this for long.
And this static piece reminds me of exactly these moments: Like in the bottom floor of a big ferry. Water leaking in somewhere near. Astonishing if you keep in mind, that most of the sounds are synthetically created.
Disclaimer:
the idea of this series is to have a conversation. On single pieces of music and through them on musical aspects in general. Imagine the time you were putting up vinyl, drinking red wine, discussing with your friend about things you hear at this very moment. When was the last time you listened to music and did nothing else? Really concentrated?
So if the tracks above trigger anything, just share it. A picture, a small thought, a general impression you have, please share it in the comments. If not, maybe next time. It’s an experiment, I know. Thanks again!
There is a strange unbalance between the effort you put into your music to merely get noticed, and the reward you get (speaking of attention, not money). Through a Spotify-Premium membership i have access to more music than I, my children, grand-children and all their relatives will ever have time to listen to. When I read about an interesting artist, I do a quick Spotify search and put him in my Inbox-Playlist. This is getting overwhelming. I’m at a point now, where I feel I want to listen to music, but don’t feel a connection. Like when you’re bored. “I could do this and that… naah, to boring” etc. Of course I could listen to the mixtapes some of my friends have made, listen to what people in my Soundcloud network recently uploaded, could listen to the people that added me on MySpace, and I just went by, heard the intro of the first track to say “Hey, nice stuff”. But I don’t feel like. I feel satiety. Ate enough.
Like with your parents who get really nice, after you moved out; like with your ex-girlfriend you start to miss when you realize she’s not there, like maybe you first start loving your hometown, when you moved away – I decided to do an experiment: cut out the music. What will everyday-life feel like, if you cut out the music? Don’t listen to it at home, don’t go anywhere, where you expect music to play (cafés, bars, clubs, concerts). How long can you stand that? And what feels important to me: Will there be more music in my head? Who will be the artist I first turn to, when I finished the experiment? Which track? I want to miss music again, not devaluate it by flooding my brain with input.
I can’t do the experiment right away, but It will happen and I’ll tell you about results…
How do you deal with more and more music being available? Do you notice a difference to – let’s say – the music-listening 3 years ago?
Imagine the words “What have I become?” out of Johnny Cash’s mouth. This is what’s left of my thoughts after one wonderful concert: Peter Broderick and Nils Frahm. Again, just as with Hauschka’s concert, it took me down to earth. Being there, sucking in the atmosphere it makes everything else so obsolete.
Music is about people. Music is between people. Real people. Music is about moments. Creating moments, sharing moments. Recordings are the attempt to capture the moment. Fail.
All the “the-internet-is-so-great-for-musicians”-evangelists have all one big, big misconception. The same way as good music comes from the countryside and is performed in the cities, good music comes from no-internet-land. (yes, well… and distributed over the web)
The internet, with all its “hello”s, “have you seen”s and “*ping!* you’ve got a new ***”s, eats up your mind. Or lets say your creativity. Or maybe just your intrinsic motivation expressing yourself through music. It’s not good to see, that there are tons of guys all making the same stuff. It’s not good to see your idea being around everywhere else. It is just not good being referenced all the time.
After a Broderick/Frahm concert I accuse myself. You are being a person, that spins his activity around the net. You were a person spinning your activity around music. What have you become?
I am a little proud of this one. Yesterday we released our first Dåbermann-Mix. Give it a listen and download here:
“Now wait!”, you might ask. “What is Dåbermann? Who is ‘we’? And why proud?”
Okay, I’ll do some clarification:
We, that are Chris, Hamer and me. We met earlier this year to mess with 3 laptops using Ableton. The only thing we knew was, that we have a great overlap in musical interest. Didn’t know what will happen when we start out a jam, also didn’t expect anything. Dåbermann was born.
After the first session we were really surprised. In a positive way. Right from the first minute – it seemed – we had found our sound and roles for each one. Also interesting to see how 3 approaches to Ableton melt down in one atmosphere. Chris, with his trackpad-rocking chaos-style, does all the groove and beat. Hamer is most likely the guy who does strings and ambiences. I focussed so far on live-sampling: playing guitar, sometimes trumpet, a bit voice and making general noises.
Improvising with Ableton is really another paradigm than improvising in a band. While in a band, there is just the moment, you always act “now”. With Ableton, it’s like you create a big and heavy ball and give it a push, so it starts rolling on its own. Once in a move you can start change its colour or shape, give it a little more movement or make it pause. But it is still that big monster being hard to handle, since it’s the child of three computers.
After the first sessions we had plenty of material. Several hours. And we didn’t really know what to do now. Make tracks from it? No we couldn’t. No way to reproduce the sounds. They got lost on the way. So we decided to chop up the sessions and glue them together in a digestable way. So out of 3 hours of improvised Dåbermann-sessions emerged 32 minutes of Dåbermix.
And this is one of the reasons I’m really proud of this: the source material is improvised and still it sounds great (in my ears). This is the inversion of the usual process of producing tracks. Normally you have an idea, and shape it until you like it. The actual work you do is pushing boxes on a grid in a program. Not very musical. This time we just jammed out. And it worked.
I once again felt what’s so great about making music with other people: the outcome is always more than the sum of its elements.
It is most likely, that you will hear more of us in the future. We plan more sessions, but also performing live someday. So stay tuned…
PS. Actually, all three of us don’t like dogs. There are exceptions, but you know in this ever-going “dogs vs. cats”-fight, cats will always win. Find us on Soundcloud and MySpace.
Now I want everybody to take out their mobile phones and take a picture of me.
Now I want everybody to take the person next to you and send him a text message.
Now I want everybody to take the person next to you and kiss.
1… 2… 3… kiss!
Now make a bass sound!
Yesterday I attended Frankfurt’s Club “Robert Johnson” to be part of Matthew Herbert’s next record. Working title “One Club”. It will be made entirely of sounds collected yesterday evening. Everyone attended will be in the booklet and receive a copy of the album. I’m really excited and looking forward to the result.
Oh, did I mention that Herbert has always been a big inspiration for me? This guy somehow opened my ears to the music and rhythms surrounding us everyday. He has always been innovating and keeps on doing so.
Another next album of his will be made entirely from sounds of a pig. It was born a month ago and he will record-follow it through its life. Crazy person! In a good way !
It happens that you randomly browse the web and find nothing but crap. And it happens that you make a discovery: In an interview, I read about Peter Broderick contributing a track to a Belgium label called Slaapwel (“Sleep well”). This label releases only music to fall asleep by. Interesting, I read further. I discovered that the label owner releases music under the moniker Wixel, which lies somewhere between calm Post-Rock and Electronica. Currently he has a project going, what he calls an “Awesome Stupid Project“: he is about to release 12 records in 12 months. One record per month in 2009. Hehe, funny concept. Awesome, because this is a really challenging thought: Can you release that much music in that short time? And stupid: can you keep up with quality? Won’t you lose your artistic integrity?
As far as I can see, Wixel didn’t. (Only heard two albums yet). Give his Slaapliedjes a try. When you need a rest, or while studying or working. He has a very, very nice warm guitar sound.
Now, what I also find interesting is the way he releases music. All of this can be downloaded via Bandcamp, which means people can either give their email-adresses away and get a free download, or they pay as much as they like. Pretty straight forward approach. Additionally, each album is available as a limited edition self-made CDr. This was the first time I saw this combination and I’m clearly excited. I like it so much, I guess I will use it for my next EP.
The internet-evangelists always refer to free-downloads as an economic force. Digital music is no scarce good, it can be copied and distributed without cost, thus price has to approach zero. I mostly agree with them. For me it makes no sense to put price barriers between me and my potential listeners. At least as long as I have no existing reputation. Then, selling hand-crafted self-designed CDrs works as a balance. By doing so, you create a scarce good, that people are willing to pay for. (At least when you manage to make a good package design). Look at Wixels 2009-CDs above. I think they are adorable. Will wait for the September-issue and place an order.
