New Music 2010 #21 - Youth is the future of music

The reason I started this post is more 'Thoughts On Music' than you might suspect.

At the end of the week just gone Rob Dickins, former head of Warner music UK, suggested one possible solution to the complex problems that have resulted in rampant illegal downloading.  It is a very divisive suggestion, but I don't think that it makes it any less worthy of consideration.  That he presided over the rip-off years, when new CDs were £13+, is a fair criticism indeed: on the other hand the converted can become the most evangelical and also the most successfully so.
The fact of the matter is that, whatever I think in the week that Sir Cliff Richard turned 70, we are not the ones that dictate the future direction of music.  To be quite honest I'm fine about that: I am happy listening and doing some inconsequential reportage. The future is more like this and it belongs to the young.

Amplified Silence - Acoustic+, Frome, 15 October 2010.

Nancy Black, Acoustic+, Frome, 17 September 2010

Everyone is just going to have to become used to it but that is not to say that it will come as a nasty shock.  They may never sign to a major label - for there may no longer even be such things - but there will still be music; of that I'm pretty sure.

Acoustic+ 17 September 2010

Time to stand back from EOTR and the festival scene for at least this one post.  Frome has a very active music environment of its own and one of the planks of that is an (approximately) monthly event called Acoustic+.  The event takes place in the Cheese & Grain, a converted former market building in the centre of town, and typically consists of four artists (not always acoustic, it has to be said) each playing for 35 - 40 minutes.  Entry is £4; the venue has a café (until 9pm) and a bar serving Milk Street Brewery's splendid beer (all evening).  For those of you lucky enough to be at End Of The Road 2010 (EOTR) last weekend you might already have discovered that as 'Funky Monkey' and 'Cobble Wobble', both Milk Street brews, featured in The Black Crow's (rather successful) first beer festival!
Anyway, the music at Acoustic+ is pretty varied and yesterday evening was launched by a set from Mpe-asem.

The band members are local but the music, and the instruments, most certainly are not.  This music, presumably originally intended for dancing, was entirely acoustic, instrumental and percussive. Some of it was original, some unashamedly derivative, but all of it based on the traditional music and instruments of Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire.  If you thought xylophones were simple instruments, for use at elementary school, these require a major re-examination of that concept!  The microphones are not close to them and it does not matter - they are loud in their own, un-amplified, being, which is important as in their traditional environment there would be no external amplification.  Beneath the bars are dried gourds, with holes cut in them, that act as sound boxes.  If I had a little more foresight then I would have asked to take a picture or two of the underside of these instruments when they were being carried off stage. Isn't hindsight a wonderful thing!?


Next, and this shows how Acoustic+ functions in a telling way, was Bristolian singer-songwriter Daisy Chapman.  She did her set solo - just singing accompanied by herself on electric keyboard - but she also used a trick.

The trick in question - and she did it very subtly - is to record oneself live and then loop it as backing. In a wider sphere, and notable as she is just about to release her third album, KT Tunstall is particularly good at this, often using multiple loops at the same time.
In a way something I wrote is coming back to haunt me: luckily only in a good way. I said that some songs are almost too dangerous/sacred for a cover version.  I am absolutely delighted to have been wrong - and twice in just five days - and this time it was Daisy Chapman's cover of Rihanna's 'Umbrella', with judicious use of the above-mentioned effects!


To be fair, and I'm not really being so here, Y?4 didn't really do very much for me. I feel a bit like Simon Cowell - minus the pay but at least he is older than me - saying that.  Quite listenable-to? Yes, very much so, just not particularly special. Perhaps that is merely the inevitable result of having seen so much, often rather special, live music in the last ten days?

Nancy Black @ Acoustic+  17 September 2010.

On the other hand this was amazing;  I could pigeon-hole her music influences if I really wanted to do so but, as it happens, I don't feel that it is necessary or helpful.

No place like home?

Well it's a big claim but I sometimes wonder...

Black Is The New Black

Note added 18 May 2009:
***Nancy Black live in Frome - 5 June 2009 as part of Acoustic Plus at the Cheese and Grain***

Yesterday I mentioned the part that traditional music shops still have to play in the current music environment. One aspect that has changed immeasurably in the digital age is one that is as new and as revolutionary as downloading and yet less often mentioned in wider circles. What is that?
Well, for better or for worse, you are reading one of many manifestations of it!
User created digital content has just made the sharing of music easy and global, it has done the same for the sharing of information about it. Barely a decade ago the truism was that 'everyone is local to somewhere' now, thanks to the internet, it might better be summed up as 'anyone is local everywhere', or at least have we have the means to exploit that potential if that is what we want to attempt.
If you hear a band or album that surprises you can review it for an audience of millions - almost instantly and for next to no cost except your time and effort. The obvious question I think is this: "Isn't that too good to be true?"
"Yes and no" is my unhelpful but considered answer. If I can have my opinion I have to accept that you can have yours too, that you can let me know it, and that we might not agree. That is part of the bargain and why I will publish comments to this blog even if I don't actually agree with them. One outcome that critics levelled at this explosion of content, be it MySpace or customer reviews on Amazon or blogs, was that it would create homogeneity based on the lowest common-denominator. It might not be thus if I were a music critic by profession, but from my point of view it has been anything but that way. Everyone is still local to somewhere, just now I know about artists that in the earlier situation I would almost certainly never knew existed.

Add to that is the fact that there is plenty of local live music worth hearing. I have mentioned Bristol-based Phantom Limb before and their gigs at the Griffin Inn are already local legend and they play there again on 2 April 2009.
The previous evening, and just a couple of minutes stroll away, is the opportunity to see another local act that is gathering good reviews from further afield:

www.myspace.com/nancyblackmusic

Is the hype justified? I'd say that it is.

On the subject of hyped artists or acts one that most certainly has been so in recent months is London's Florence and the Machine, so you might think that new releases are easily available in the UK. Well that is not quite so, and another example of the fact that it has not become a case of one-size-fits-all globalisation. I have the A Lot Of Love, A Lot Of Blood 12" EP on pre-order...

...and while it is from Puregroove in London, is a US import item only!