The Null Device Blog

By now, most people with an interest in the music industry have seen David Byrne’s article in Wired.

He makes an awful lot of good points,  but I think he misses the mark in a few spots.  First off, he kind of neglects to mention that one thing the label system – both major and indie – offers the artist is time.  Yes, an artist *can* do everything him/herself like Aimee Mann and Radiohead etc.  But what struggling musician really has the time to write and record, stuff envelopes, design ads and promotional stuff, make contacts with distro networks, handle accounting, and all that incidental stuff all while ostensibly still working a day job to pay for it and maintaining the kind of normal human social interactions required to actually have material to write about?  Sure, it can be done and I know a lot of people who do it, but it really only works well on a small scale.  1000 units, sure.  5000 units, great.  10000?  Suddenly fulfilling orders is taking more time than writing music, but it’s not enough orders that you can quit your day job.  Digital distro takes the edge off there, certainly but it’s not quite a big enough share of the proverbial pie yet to allow a musician to abandon traditional physical media. 

The artists that get away with it have already had the foot-in-the-door exposure and have rasied the capital such that they can afford to hire managers and lackeys (or their bands are big enough that they can farm envelope-licking out to the drummer) and they’ve had enough exposure in the past that they have a name to trade on.  If this were Radiohead’s debut, would the press have jumped all over the fact that In Rainbows was released digitally without a major label?  In short, having a privileged starting position makes a big difference when trying to go it alone. 

My biggest quibble is with the his statement that production costs are “effectively zero” because you can record on “the same laptop you check your email with.”

This is, for all practical purposes, bullshit. 

Okay, for the most basic, basic setup, you can buy a mac laptop preloaded with Garageband and the basic loop/instrument packs.  You can conceivably record an album with just that.  But that is an incredibly narrow, narrow case, since unless you’re really, really lucky it’s going to sound like ass.  Why?  Well, the computer speakers are terrible for mixing music.  So you need decent headphones at the very least, or some adequate monitor speakers. 

Now, what if you want to do something like add vocals or record a guitar?  You need a mic.  You can get a mic that plugs right into the back of your computer.  They even make some USB mics and cables for guitars.  Great!  That’s still greater than zero.  But what if you want to use a better mic than the BigBoxStore USB Gamer special?  Howsabout the industry-standard Shure SM57?  That’s a hundred bucks and…guess what, it doesn’t plug right into the back.  Now you need an audio interface.  These can be had for a hundred bucks at the low end, up to thousands for the high end ones.

And of course, instruments.  You wanna add a guitar, you actually need a guitar.  Unless you think Garageband’s samples do what you need already.

Oh, okay, say you’re a laptop rocker, you don’t need those fancy instruments or microphones or whatever.  Fair enough.  You still need software.  What comes with your brand new laptop will, except in specialized cases, not do what you want it to.  This is where it adds up.  Sure, it’s a lot cheaper than buying a modular synth and racks of effects used to be, but sequencers, plug-in effects, softsynths…even with the plethora of freeware out there you’re going to need to drop a little cash.  Sometimes more than a little.  Sometimes a lot.  (Of course, there’s the alternative of software piracy, but the law looks upon that as “theft” so we won’t consider that a viable option.)

Then, of course, for actually producing physical media, there are some costs.  It’s not terrible, you can get a hundred CDRs duplicated for $100.  If you want it to sound professional you can pay somoene to master it for you, but this isn’t required by the process, it’s just highly recommended.

These are *minimum* specifications, too.  For most people, a cheaply-mic’ed, headphone-monitored, freeware/Garageband-only unmastered digital-only will simply not be good enough.

Let’s look at a more average “bedroom” studio (prices are very approximate averages)…

Basic DAW software (Cubase SE, Logic Express, FL Studio, Reason) : $200
Entry-level (i.e. actually made for music) powered monitor speakers: $250
Shure SM-57 Mic: $100
Decent 2-channel Audio interface: $150
MIDI/Keyboard Controler: $100
Cost to press 1000 CDs in jewel cases: $1000

This does not factor in things like “software for desiging the cover art/paying friend with artistic talent”, hosting an artist website, paying someone like TuneCore or whatnot for a digital distro agreement, printing flyers, and doing all the stuff that accompanies an album release.  In the end it comes to maybe about 2 grand total.  Which isn’t a whole lot, but it’s a nontrivial amount for most people, and it’s also just a base price.  You can spend that much on software alone, a good workhorse vocal mic can run $300-1500, etc.

So while I agree that the cost of making an album has dropped a lot – it’s now in the thousands instead of the tens of thousands, it is not effectively zero, despite what the esteemed Mr. Byrne says.  You could make one for free on your email laptop, but it’s unlikely that it’d be one that an artist would be happy with.

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Yet Another Absurdly-Specific Music Roundup

 

Best Album That I Released All Year:
Null Device, “Excursions”
Seriously, it’s awesome, and if you haven’t bought it, buy it.

Return of the Best Indie-Roc Album
Bloc Party, “A Weekend In The City”
Their debut was pretty damn good, although after a while I started to notice that their songs followed the same patterns.  This time out, though, they don’t fall into that trap.  And the songs are great – both exceptionally catchy and sort of brutally raw in spots, it’s really a triumph.

Best Remix Album That I Almost Didn’t Know About
Hybrid, “Hybrid RE_MIXED“
A few of the mixes are surprisingly laid-back, and one or two have been previously released.  But the Rolling Thunder remix of “Theme from Wide Angle” and the orchestral mix of “Blackout” make the album entirely worthwhile.

Strangest DJ Mix Album Ever
Ricardo Villalobos, “Fabric 36″
When one buys a “DJ mix album” one usually expects it nto be a DJ showing off his mixing skills by blending a bunch of tracks by other people.  Not so with Fabric 36.  Villalobos does a continuous mix of nothing but his own tracks.  His own entirely new, unreleased tracks.  They’re weird, angular, and somewhat dizzying.  But it works surprisingly well and pretty much turns the whole notion of a DJ mix disc on its ear.

Best Album That’s Not True
Burial, “Untrue”
This album came from nowhere – Burial had been a rather anonymous dubstep producer – and somehow it ended up with more hype than any album this year.  Pitchfork needed a change of pants, iTunes New Music featured it, and the music blogs clambored over themselves to get a piece of hit.  It’s a surprisingly compellling album – twisted vocal samples, reverb-washed basslines, twitchy 2-step beats…it’s like someone took the cheesiest UK Garage music, mated it with a horror movie soundtrack, and yet somehow made it uplifting.  And the guy from Burial still insists on being anonymous.

Best Depeche Mode Album That Really Isn’t
Dave Gahan, “Hourglass”
After the resounding apathy of his solo debut “Paper Monsters” Gahan sheds the alt-rock pretensions and goes back to singing in front of electronic music.  It’s much better.  He still lacks Martin Gore’s talent for songwriting, but at least he doesn’t use the phrase “down on my knees” anywhere.

Best Album Made By a Band That Keeps Adding Members
New Pornographers, “Challengers”
As if two lead vocalists weren’t enough, Kathryn Calder comes on board and it’s just that.  much.  cooler.  Kathryn and Neko really make up for each other’s shortcomings.  Calder has the range, Neko has the tone, and old Carl Newman  is along for the ride.  I don’t think the songwriting is quite as catchy as it was on Twin Cinema, but that’s an album that’s hard to top.

Most Surprising Remix Album
NIN, “YEARZERO REMIXED”
(I’ll be damned if I have to type that damned leet-speke album name).
While I still don’t quite get Trent’s fascination with Saul Williams, there are some surprising remixers and some startlingly good remixes on this disc.  There are not one but two remixes by the artists formerly known as The Other Two, formerly known as half of new Order, currently known as Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert (surprising, since Gilbert was essentialy retired from music until now), a really stonking mix by Ladytron that manages to keep all the NIN-noize but add that digital Ladytron cutesy-sheen, and a remix by the goddamned Kronos Quartet.  Seriously.

Best Album With A Chaal Beat
Sukshinder Shinda, “Livin Tha Dream”
While I have never quite understood the bhangra fascination with the aesthetics of the more over-the-top hiphop (the bling, the tag-fonts, the hip-hop clothing, all coupled with a sikh dastar) the artists have been great at slowly melding the beats and pieces of hiphop with the fairly static form of bhangra.  Shinda’s new album, while featuring some inexplicable children’s choruses, features some of the funkiest nonwestern rhythm tracks I’ve heard.  “Wanga” and “Punjabi” have truly cavernous beats.  And it’s one of the few times a harmonium won’t sound out of place in a hiphop track.

Best Album By an Icelandic Pop Chanteuse On Whom I Have A Celebrity Crush
Hafdis Huld, “Dirty Paper Cup”
Now six?  Seven? years after her departure from GusGus, she’s shed a lot of the dance-pop trappings that made her semi-famous and makes catchy acoustic pop.  The leadoff single, “Tomoko” is hook-laden, banjo-laden, a bit odd, and just ridiculously catchy.  Plus she’s still really cute.

Best Album That Doesn’t Involved Projectile Vomiting, but Could
Caustic, “Booze Up and Riot (hangover edition)”
More punk-aesthetic than his debut, better produced, and damned funny in spots.  Best experienced live, though, with copious amounts of cheap beer.  The album doesn’t scale the heights of madness that a Caustic live show does.

Best Unpretentious 80’s Throwback
Tracy Thorn, “Out of The Woods”
The voice of Everything But The Girl hires a bunch of cutting-edge producers to make an album that sounds both retro-80’s and modern, but without the hipster-irony trappings that usually accompany that sort of thing.  And she’s still got That Voice. 

Remix Single I Never Expected to See
Kraftwerk, “Aerodynamik/La Forme (Hot Chip Mixes)”
Astralwerks takes one of their darling bands, Hot Chip, and sets them loose on another darling band, Kraftwerk, and the result is a little of both.  Krfatwerk has always sounded like music from the future, as if the future were the 1980’s as imagined by the 1920’s futurists.  Hot Chip sounds like Music from the past, as if the past were the 1980’s as romanticised by the latest crop of indie kids who are too young to remember it.  So the combination makes an odd sort of sense, even if it seems like Kraftwerk themselves would never have picked it – lo-fi casio-pop meets clinical german electro.  The only downside is that the remixes do tend to go on a bit long – 11 minutes is a bit much even for a Kraftwerk song.

These Guys Really Need a Full Album Soon
Flight of The Conchords, “The Distant Future EP”
While it is worth it for the studio version of “Business Time”, a Barry-White-esque rumination on the sensuality of routine sex (“Wednesday is the night that we make sweet, weekly love.”) and the slowly increasing lunacy of “If You’re Into It”, the deadpan brilliance of the music of their TV series begs that they release full versions of their other tracks.  The live versions of “Part Time Model” and “The Humans Are Dead” are a nice insight into their equally deadpan stage shows, but dammit, I want versions with no audience noise.

The “Seriously, What Was He Thinking” Award
Tarkan, “Come Closer.”
This album flopped pretty badly (by Tarkan standards, anyway) when it first came out in 2006.  So why it was re-released in 2007 for the increasingly apathetic US market is beyond me.  It does not help that, unlike his turkish-language albums, it’s…not very good.  An awkward translation of his early 90’s hit “Sikidim (Hepsi Senin Mi)” doesn’t help.  His new turkish album is due to drop next week so maybe that’ll save him for the year.

Meets Expectations
Blaqk Audio, “CexCells”
If this had been made by anyone other than Davey from AFI, this would be the best futurepop album ever.  And in fact, it probably is the best futurepop/EBM album ever, but honestly that’s not setting the bar real high.  It’s catchy, the vocal melodies contain more than the standard 3-note plainchant, and the lyrics aren’t about honor or how he got beat up a lot in high school, so by that token, it’s better than about 90% of what’s come out in the genre in the past 10 years.  But, after the soaring melodic electro-rock heights of “37mm” and AFI’s newer, more electronic stuff, it all seems a bit too much of a by-the-numbers homage. 

Meets Expectations 2
Bjork, “Volta”
Yep, she’s an odd one, that Bjork.  The album is all off-kilter and quirky, and certainly more memorable song-wise than “Medulla”, but I can’t help walking away from it thinking it’s a lot of weird-for-the-sake-of-weird.  Which is much of Bjork in a nutshell, I suppose.

Rave Til Dawn
Simian Mobile Disco , “Attack Decay Sustain Release”
This album made me want to dance again.  And features the best title for a rave track ever, “T*ts and Acid.”

Best Food-themed EP
Bogart Shwadchuck, “Bitch Get Me a Hotdog EP”
The chameleonic Mr. Shwadchuck, who gave us such classics as the videogame version of “Orinoco Flow” and the sultry yet hilarious “I Shaved My Chest” returns with 4 banging dance tracks about a man who is hungry for a hotdog and the woman who inexplicably loves him.  The title track is a great piece of distorted french house, and the sample-heavy “Intermission” sounds like Coldcut got stuck doing the “Let’s All Go to The Lobby” cards for an old theatre.   

Great Tracks From Various Artists
Justice  “DVNO” - it hurts to listen to, but I can’t stop.
Kylie Minogue “2 Hearts (the twelves mix)” - Kylie reinvents again
Gus Gus “Moss” – Detroit house with Daniel Agust on vox.  The way it should be.
Feist “1-2-3-4″ - Apple picks absurdly catchy stuff for their ads. 
Booka Shade “Numbers” – Tech House with a melody.  Who knew?
Kosheen “Overkill” - Only because I don’t have the full album yet.  I love Sian’s voice.
Rubikon “Adore” – it’s like Goldfrapp-lite, with a hint of Orbital.

Albums that I somehow managed to ignore, even if I did actually buy them
Arcade Fire, “Neon Bible.” 
I listened to it once, I think.  It seems good, but I for some reason can’t motivate myself to listen any more.

LCD Soundsystem, “The Sound Of Silver”
Maybe I’m just too old for this album to seem all that original.  I remember both disco and post-punk so this just doesn’t sound new to me.  It sounds like a 38-year-old guy desperately trying to pick up 21-year-old New York hipster girls.

Best 80’s Song That Was Given New Life Partially Thanks To James Gandolfini
Journey, “Don’t Stop Beleivin’”
Hold on to that feelin!   Don’t Stop

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Some good, some bad, some unusual.

After scrambles, delays, scrapped tracks, flashes of inspiration, writer’s blocks, and all that goes along with those, we finally finished and released album #3, “Excursions.”  I’m exceptionally proud of it – I think it’s our best and most polished work to date.  There’s very little on it that I would change, in retrospect (something I can’t say about…uh, anything else I’ve ever written).

I think we’ve finally gelled on a style we can run with, too.

The album came out with slightly less of a bang and more of a whimper than I’d hoped.  I guess it’s going to be incumbent upon us to make a big marketing push after the holidays.  Luckily we’ve got some plans in the works on that front.

With the focus on getting the album done and out, I didn’t have a whole lot of time to put together live shows.  I had to arrange a lot of new material to work with the live band, which took time I didn’t exactly have, but we got it together in time for a very sweaty performance at Reverence.

Reverence was a blast, though.  We had to shorten our set, which was bummertastic, and it was so hot and wet I could barely hold on to the fiddle – or a note – but it was truly fun.  Dropping a cover of “She Blinded Me With Science” with Brian “DarkNES” Graupner had to be one of the highlights of the year for me.  Sadly, it marked the last time I’d get to watch the guitar heroics of Mr. Dan Clark from the onstage vantage point.  He departed our musical company for his other myriad projects this year, and shortly thereafter I began the mad scramble to figure out just how the hell we could replace him.

Well, we came up with something.  Ms. Jill Sheridan, nee Goedken, is throwing down the keys and the ass-kicking vocals.  We’ve played one show with her, and it went pretty damn well.  Still a few bugs to work out, but we’re getting there.  Of course, this meant pretty much scrapping all our live-tracks and re-arranging them again.  This meant we only had two shows this year, which was about 38 less than I’d hoped, but, eh, c’est la vie.

Technically, this was a big year.  I finally got a step closer to the studio of my dreams by…well, actually building a studio.  Didn’t buy a huge amount of gear this year for various and sundry financial reasons (building a studio will do that).  I did upgrade to Logic 8 WHICH IS AWESOME.  I also took upon myself the risky business of instrument modification – I turned a tumbi into an electric instrument, I internally mic’ed a dholak, and I built a set of drum triggers out of some PVC pipe.

So what’s up for next year?  I’m not entirely sure, but we’re trying to line up a few big shows and maybe a festival or two, I’m hoping to get a good start on album #4,  we may release another EP of b-sides and remixes, and I hope to make a few not-so-minor upgrades around the studio.  We’ll take it as it comes!

Thanks for a great 2007 and happy 2008 from Null Device!

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