I had a chance to open for Harvey about 7 years ago at this tiny warehouse party here in vancouver. it was really just for this guys 20 odd friends who wanted to go crazy for a night. not even sure how he managed to hook the whole thing up, but i ended up playing for a couple hours and Harvey played for 4. needless to say it turned into a pretty magical evening. thinking back on it now, the whole thing seems rather decadent and i’m feeling pretty blessed to have had that experience. anyhow, i did want to share a real important lesson i learned that night, which was that dj’s don’t always have to play hard for things to be felt intensely. sometimes a slower record can be just as powerful if not even more so. Harvey is a master of taking people on a journey and more dj’s could learn from his poetic musical story telling. this is a great new interview with him and covers all the great stuff that you would expect from someone who’s seen some things. http://finn-johannsen.de/2010/10/27/dj-harvey-interview/
“LIMITATION IS THE MOTHER OF CREATIVITY” DJ HARVEY INTERVIEW
EMS (electronic music studios)
i’ve been researching synthesizers lately and came across this wonderful mini doc for the one of the pioneers of music synthesis, EMS. it’s an inspiring tale of big men doing big things, with very little reward. a friend of mine has one of these and as blown away as i was hearing it, the story behind them is even more amazing. check it out.
francois kevorkian
i read this on francois kevorkian’s blog recently and found it to be so bang on. if i hear another track posted on someone’s facebook profile that they or their circle of half wit friends made the night before, i’m going to start smashing faces as well as computers. if it’s not fit for an official release, it shouldn’t be fit for the internet. just because you get thumbs upped from a few of your reject yes men pals or got charted on some stupid internet song sharing chart, does not make you or it a hit.
“One thing that is seriously getting me puzzled has to do with the trivialization of so many things due to computers and software. Distributed intelligence, that sort of stuff?
Don’t get me wrong, I use the stuff all the time, live it, breathe it… But it would appear that there could be a parallel between the tools becoming so incredibly powerful, yet the content of most music not quite ‘resonating’ as much as it used to anymore, and us as a group collectively becoming less sensitive from the overload?
Is it the sheer volume of new things being posted daily, or the fact that music itself has lost some of the deep and subliminal hold it had on our collective consciousness? Less emotional content in new music because of the tools used to create it? Not sure.
Would love to see translated examples of 20-year old kids rushing to the store to get a certain song, or picking someone’s brain all night until morning to discover more about some producers or groups.
Maybe it used to be that there were a lot of local scenes, with long incubation periods which led to specific styles and genres slowly being created, a differentiation which has mostly vanished with today’s globalized, homogeneous music cultures and planetary-scaled sharing engines?
No more mystery, and quests? Just accelerated, exponential growth with no buffer time to even absorb and digest what is out there. So the qualities that stick are those of a song that can make an immediate impression, rather than from one that might take several rounds of listening to reveal its more delicate and subtle beauty?
Again, parallel to Darwinism, and what it might mean for the evolution of music.” FK
REAL BAD PEOPLE, DOING REAL BAD THINGS.
this article in the new yorker scared the fuck out of me. you hear of shady backroom dealings and dirty money buying influence, but this is some of the worst i have ever read. i had been asking my american friends what the deal with this out of nowhere tea party nonsense is and none of them really had a clear answer. well, this is just one of the many righter than right projects this family has been pouring money into. and for all you anti semitic pyschos who think jews control everything, why don’t you go do something about somebody who actually looks like he does?
