Posts by Russell Brown
-
Hard News: Christchurch: Square Two, in reply to Martin Lindberg,
My bad. He did. That settles it once and for all.
Heh.
"I'm still expecting a bit of earthquake risk around, or on, Monday to come from that in the Christchurch to Wellington region, plus or minus a day or so."
Roughly.
-
Hard News: A Century Since, in reply to recordari,
A tui clucked, shat, whistled thrice.
A line both documentary and onomatopoeiac. Simply wonderful.
-
Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to recordari,
Since it seems to get mentioned fairly regularly here and elsewhere, albeit in relation to one remix or other, isn’t Adele’s rise to global uber-stardom worth a mention?
Since it seems to get mentioned fairly regular here and elsewhere, albeit in relation to one remix or other, isn’t Adele’s rise to global uber-stardom worth a mention?
Been meaning to. I suppose Jarod Lanier would regard Adele as a revival act, but she’s also very novel. The Guardian named “Team Adele” at number one in its Music Power List recently.
XL Recordings is a really interesting label. It started out as a label for 12” dance records in the late 80s in partnership with Martin Mills’ Beggar’s Banquet, but is now home to an amazing, genre-defying roster: Adele, MIA, the Xx, Beck, Dizzee Rascal, Gorillaz, Devendra Banhart, etc, etc. They were where Radiohead took In Rainbows for a commercial release. Label boss Richard Russell is responsible for Gil Scott Heron’s final recordings.
Their roots as a dance label show up in the way they’ve opened up a whole new side to Adele’s recordings by encouraging remixing. The stems of her tracks seem to be available to nearly anyone who wants them. As you note, I’m generally more into those than the original recordings. And they vary hugely.
In the recent series of Later With Jools Holland, there’s a fascinating contrast in a show that features both her and R Kelly (and also, for that matter, James Blake and Metronomy).
R Kelly is horrible on the show – an empty vessel. Adele is bustling and authentic and can’t just be read at a glance.
Anyway, she got on her way in 2007 with a three-song demo on MySpace (which got the attention of XL) – and this BBC performance of ‘Hometown Glory’, as a 19 year-old (uploaded to YouTube by digital agency Urban-Unsigned), which is still striking, 18 million views later:
-
Hard News: A Century Since, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
Excellent Media 7 last night, Russell.
Thanks Geoff. I thought I wasn't quite on form personally, but Jose's two tracks were brilliant.
-
Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to BenWilson,
But that feeling of unusually innovative times earlier is unfair. It’s like saying Columbus was unusually explorative. Yes he was, but so are many people today – however America has been discovered now, so what people do discover now tends to seem dwarfed by that.
And also: who says we have to put a clock on genre innovation in popular music anyway? There's not necessarily anything wrong with working with something from the 1950s -- it's but a second ago in the context of the span of human popular culture.
It was interesting that Adam Curtis chose Burial to score All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. If Burial and their peers are in fact the music of theirtimes, then we;d have to conclude these are pretty creepy times.
Anyway, thanks Gio for introducing Lanier to the discussion. Even if we think he's wrong, it's an interesting subject.
-
Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to BenWilson,
Once again – dubstep. it’s transformed and penetrated the way popular music is made, both inside and outside it’s own narrow genre.
Yeah, I’m not really in disagreement, and certainly when I hear pure dubsteb against even quite closely related electronica, it does have a very different sound.
It's quite odd. On one hand, dubstep really has opened up new vistas. On the other, it's about 90% shit. As a friend pointed out to me yesterday, most of the people leering it up to dubstep in the clubs are the kind of people who'd have been partying to Limp Bizkit a few years ago.
-
Hard News: Christchurch: Square Two, in reply to nzlemming,
heheh For the young among us, I was, of course, referring to this.
Which is not a particularly accurate account.
The police action started around a very small incident where a couple of morons on the roof of the walkway by the post office building, some way away from the main crowd, tried to piss on people passing below.
The police, still in riot-cop mode from the Springbok tour, grossly over-reacted and sent in officers in riot gear, sealing off the main exit from Aotea Square – and then ordered DD Smash to stop playing. But people physically couldn’t leave, because the police line blocked the exit, and the riot began from there.
Charging Dave was really only ever a way of trying to shirk blame for an idiotic piece of policing.
-
I was going to suggest I could write this up as tomorrow's music post, but it seems wrong to ask everyone to stop ...
-
Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to giovanni tiso,
It's like dubstep never happened! ;-)
But this is making me think ... Perhaps the big change is that genre isn't such an important demarcator any more. If you look at Hype Machine, you'll see folky singers and dancefloor bangers right next to each other, being listened to by the same people. Strict genre divisions have always been more important in the US industry anyway, as a way of dividing audiences for commercial purposes.
-
Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Twenty years without a new genre. If you listen to him.
The thing is, the last three major new popular musical genres — modern dance music, hip hop and punk rock – didn’t come along at evenly-spaced intervals. They all emerged in a single period of remarkable ferment and, to some degree, in a single place: New York City. It had been a long time between drinks before they all turned up.