The digital marketing of this album has frankly been a bit baffling.  In an effort to return listeners to “the album experience”, the itunes and amazon versions of These Hopeful Machines comes as two 50-minute tracks.   While it’s laudable that as an artist he’s insistent  in his artistic vision, it feels a little misguided.  For one thing, there were few albums that ran 50 minutes a side back in the glory days of the LP.  Additionally, these are still essentially distinct pop songs, and despite a continuous mix, there’s no obvious need for a complete lack of track breaks, especially given that digital music can be gaplessly played back, and that one of digital music’s strengths is that the song information can be embedded in the track itself.  One 50 minute track doesn’t indicate easily where one song begins and ends, and while that may be partially the point of his single-track efforts, even the LP had band indicators so the listener at least had a reference.  (As an aside, I got around this by importing the files into my studio software and splitting them into the individual tracks).  As it stands, it’s like listening on cassette – you’re pretty much stuck rewinding and fast-forwarding to get to a specific point in the album, and while BT may want you to listen to the whole thing, it’s a good bet that not everybody is going to want to listen for 45 minutes to get to the one song they like.  A multi-track version is supposedly available, but neither iTunes, Amazon, nor eMusic seem to have it, leaving those who’ve abandoned the physical CD little of the consumer choice that’s coming to define the modern music industry.

The cover art is a little strange too.  It’s apparently a huge oil painting, and on the CD and the accompanying singles, the detail is visible, rendering the whole thing a Bosch-gone-to-Ibiza feel.  Digitally, though, only the front panel is visible, which is just a painting of  an anime-haired BT surrounded by roses, which in isolation looks a bit like something you’d find drawn in an artistically-talented 11th-grader’s notebook.  Thankfully, cover art is rarely the defining aspect of any album.

Disc one kicks off with “Suddenly” which is another in BT’s continuing efforts to make synthesized pop music rock out.  The programming on it is unsurprisingly beautiful, intricate and detailed.  Everything from the chunky guitars to the zillions of vocal layers is microquantized and digitally edited, and sounds pristine.  That’s both the song’s genius and its ultimate downfall – it’s sort of the Platonic Ideal of an electronic rock song – it’s a bit too clinical in many ways to really rock.  From an electronic standpoint, though, there’s a dizzying array of hooks, coming at the listener from various places in the soundfield.   It might not be a headbanging anthem, but it’s never a dull song.

From there, the more traditional dance music kicks in – The Emergency, Light in Things and Rose of Jericho all feature a more standard trance beat, but this being a BT record it is also filled with sweeping ambient passages and granular soundscapes.  Rose of Jericho is a deceptively complex song, which at first listen sounds like a standard tech-trance track but once again there’s a few thousand super-edited things going on in the background.    The non-dance track “Every Other Way”, featuring Jes (formerly of trance hitmakers Motorcycle) is a more subdued affair, although it too is filled with electronic craziness percolating just below the calm pop-ballad surface.  Disc one finishes off with another synth-rock track – this one a little less overwrought than “Suddenly.”  The song closes out with BT’s 5-year old daughter singing the main melody, which is touching if you’re familiar with the family backstory, but if you aren’t it could come off as a bit bewilderingly precious.

Disc two features the pre-requisite appearance by Kristy Hawkshaw – I think there’s a requirement in every major-label dance music contract that specifies at least one Hawkshaw guest vocal.  It’s a more straightforward trance track, and likely to be the one that shows up on every “Trance Smashes 2010″ and “Ministry of Ultra Ibiza” compilation this year.   “A Million Stars” hits every major trance note – the angelic vocals, slightly nonsensical lyrics, 4-on-the-floor beats, breakdowns/buildups and enormous hands-in-the-air club hooks.  Oh, and the 12-minute running time.  It’s still clearly a BT song, but it’s one of his less dramatically trademarked tracks.

“Love Can Kill You” is another electro-rock anthem attempt, and suffers from the same over-egged pudding problem as “Suddenly.”  ”Always” features Catherine Wheel frontman Rob Dickinson, which gives the track some rock bona fides, and while the track is again quantized within a sample frame of its life, Dickinson’s voice has a more emotive edge than BT’s, and the wild electronic effects settle more comfortably behind the singer, rather than dominating the song.  It’s a strong candidate for the most radio friendly single on the album.

Despite the title, “Le Nocturne de Lumiere” is not an ambient ballad, but a surprisingly aggressive dance track.  A heavy thumping beat is paired with bouncy glitched synths.  There’s not a whole lot in the way of explicit melody – you can tell there’s a song in there someplace but it’s been granularized and hocketed to the point where the listener is left to fill in the blanks.   It works surprisingly well, and there’s some nice ambient textures in there as well.  It’s as if he took “Flaming June” and ran it through an electric fan (Until it briefly switches to 6/8 time at about the 7 minute mark, which would be the place where everyone on the dance floor either really grooves out or falls over).  Rob Dickinson shows up again on “The Unbreakable” which starts out subdued, and slowly builds to a more epic track, again walking a finely balanced line between a rock song and an electronic dance track.

Everything closes out with an unusual twist – a cover of Psychedelic Furs’ “The Ghost in You.”  It’s a quiet, intricate affair, luckily not over-produced (although the occasional granular tweak shows up).  It’s a nice, chilled way to end the album.

Overall, it’s hard to find much fault in this album in terms of its ambition or technical prowess.  While some in the press are hailing the album as some sort of groundbreaking bridge between experimental electronic music and accessible pop, it’s not quite to that point.  The album is still heavily geared towards the dance music audience, and isn’t going to somehow become this Prokofiev-like monument of avant-garde music, especially since a lot of its electronic avant-garde-ness tends to erase the kinds of song elements that help embed a song in the pop music canon (would “Smells Like Teen Spirit” have been a monster hit if the signature guitar riff were ultra-quantized and overdubbed 20 times?)    That said, it’s loaded with pop hooks, even those mangled and twisted by bleeding-edge software.  At the very least, this album will stand as a peak in BT’s development as an artist.  Only time will tell if this is some sort of first shot fired in a software-as-instrument revolution, or simply a refinement of BT’s particular sound.

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: Goths on a Boat, Nerds in a Van

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: The Exchanging Recipes Tour

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: I Think We Left The Bassist at a Dunkin Donuts in Somewhere in Ohio

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: We Were On Time for Sound Check, Even Though Nobody Else Was

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: 100% Grass-Fed, Free-Range Organic Band Members

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: We Hope The Venue Has Enough Outlets

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: Hey, Douchebag, All Our Female Band Members Are Spoken For, So Stop It
Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: If You Don’t Like The Music, Eric And Dan
Could Talk About Microphones For An Hour Instead

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: Completely Oblivious to Your Scene Drama

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: Gassiest Tour Vans In The US

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: Sorry, We Don’t Drink Rail

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: WTF Is a Dholak and Where The Hell Is New London?

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: Increasingly Inappropriate for Goth Clubs

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: The Only Reason We’re Playing This Town Is Because Eric Heard There Was a Great Vietnamese Restaurant Here

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: We Brought Our Own Beef Jerky, Thanks

Some things have gone quite well, of course.  I’ve re-engineered backing tracks to make them cleaner and punchier in the live environment.   I’ve been able to do this quickly and efficiently with the new machine, since I don’t have to freeze tracks to be able to play back my mixes.   I’ve also got a new rack of DI’s en route, thanks to a lovely tip from Mr. Wade Alin.  They’re not Radials or anything, but they look to have better build quality than the ones I’ve currently got.    Also there’s a new ATA rack to put them in coming.  I decided that the 6-unit full-depth rack I’ve got is entirely unnecessary for my 3 units of shallow-depth gear, so I’ve got a 4U Gator on the way.  Also, being ATA, I feel a little safer about it than I do about my current rack.  Plus that extra space leaves a little room for expansion.

The things that haven’t gone right?  Well, yesterday I opened a newish track that I had recently transitioned over from the old system.  I hit play and…it sounded really weird.  That wasn’t right.  I popped open a few of the plugins I was using and noted that every.  Single.  Instance of PODFarm Plat had switched back to its default setting, which happens to be an emulation of a Fender Jazz amp with reverb.  Basically, the entire song sounded like each part was being played from inside individual cardboard boxes.  And I used PODfarm a LOT on this track to get grungy synth distortion, so the track was pretty much hosed until I could fix it.  I spent much of the afternoon switching as much as possible over to Logic’s native Amp Designer.  It doesn’t always sound quite as nice as PF for some of the emulations, but I can at least be assured it’ll work next time I open it.  I get to look forward to the next few days of recreating settings and rebuilding tracks.  Grumble.

A nasty headcold coupled with my usual overactive sinus-based ick has kept me from recording any vocals for the past week and a half.  This is particularly annoying, since I have stuff stacking up I want to record/rerecord/fix.

Aaand finally, I plugged in my MOTU 828 (mk1) yesterday, to test out my backing tracks and…kernel panic.  I rebooted, and…kernel panic.  I unplugged it and…kernel panic.    Some online searching demonstrated that hey, whaddya know, the new MOTU drivers under snow leopard don’t like the old 828 all that much.  I dug out one of my archived installers and put an older driver on, and it seems stable.  For now.  Nonetheless, this makes me kind of twitchy about relying on a nearly-10-year-old audio interface.  I do have plans to get a new one but…not for a while yet.    I just bought a new car, I’m a little low on petty cash.

Sigh.

We played some shows.  We played some really, really fun shows.  The band is working together pretty damn well these days, and I’m really pleased with that.

We took a few breaks for various reasons.  Chuck got married.  Elizabeth got married.  I tried desperately to finish up “Recursions” – and in fact, did.

That was the other big deal.  We released Recursions, which on the surface seems like “just another remix album” but it’s one where we decided to kind of dive into the wide world of “new media” – fully electronic distribution, multiple formats, etc etc.  Rather DIY, but it’s the first album we’ve ever had that recouped its production costs in a matter of weeks.

Also worked with a large number of very talented people this year.   Some of the usual co-conspirators were involved for remixes and randombess – Mr. Shwadchuck,  Dan “Shred, Dan, Shred!” Clark,  Matt Fanale, and some new ones – Ryan from Stripmall Architecture, Shawn and I-Li from Bloodwire, and the cats from Claire Voyant.  I also finally managed to wrangle the talented Raya Merenkov into the studio to record things in a Arabic and classical Greek (because she happens to speak those languages).  I’m really excited that we’ve gotten to work with these people.

Things continue on our next release.  We’ve got about 6 tracks in the can, 3 more nearly done, and plenty of ideas.  We’ve already booked a few shows for 2010, and we’re trying to put together a tour for mid-year.

It’s been a good year.  2010 looks pretty excellent already.

Happy new year from Null Device.

Download it! – as one big mp3 or a bunch of little ones that you can gaplessly play back.

This year:

1) Midival Punditz – Atomizer
2) Bassnectar – Churn of the Century
3) Gusgus – Add This Song/Simian Mobile Disco – Audacity of Huge
4) Crystal Method (feat. Emily Haines) – Come Back Clean
5) Deadmau5 (feat. Rob Swire)- Ghosts ‘n Stuff
6) Mark Knight & D. Ramirez (feat. Karl Hyde) – Downpipe
7) Flight of the Conchords – Too Many Dicks (On the Dance Floor)
8) Empire of the Sun – We Are The People
9) Royksopp (feat. Robyn) – The Girl and the Robot
10) Orbital – Halcyon (Tom Middleton Re-model)
11) Bell X1 – The Great Defector
12) Nadia Ali – Fine Print
13) Metric – Help I’m Alive
14) IAMX (feat. Imogen Heap) – My Secret Friend
15) Stripmall Architecture – Stop Thief
16) Bear McCreary – All Along the Watchtower

Best Underworld Track That Wasn’t By Underworld: Mark Knight and D. Ramirez feat Karl Hyde – Downpipe
Seriously, a complete banger of a track.  Hyde’s strange cut-and-paste lyrics nicely complement an already pretty decent progressive house track.

Scandinavians Attack, pt. 1:  Royksopp – Junior
A more focused effort by Royksopp, despite the presence of all sorts of different guest vocalists, it seems more cohesive than previous outings.   Some truly catchy, albeit slightly off kilter, tracks define this album, and there’s a noticeable lack of the kind of jambandish meanderings than marred their earlier releases.

Scandinavians Attack, pt 2 The Revenge: Gusgus – 24/7
GG gets their old lead singer back and finds a home on Kompakt, which seems a good fit.  Daniel Agust’s distinctive voice grounds their new album in a way their non-Agust albums couldn’t quite manage.  Their minimalish, Detroit techno sound fits well with the Kompakt family as well.  The main criticism of this album is the same as many later Gusgus releases – the songs go on too long.  “Add This Song”, the single off the album, works great as a 4-minute pop song, but gets annoying after the 7 minute mark.

That Weird Girl You Knew In High School Award: Imogen Heap – Ellipse
Imogen Heap has become the darling of new media as she twittered and vlogged and 12seconded her way through the production of the new album.  She also became the poster child for the DIY artist, writing, performing and engineering nearly everything on her album, earning her feature interviews with the likes of SoundOnSound and Electronic Musician – no small feat for someone who is essentially a singer-songwriter at the core.  So, media aside, how’s the album?  Well, it’s good, and it’s beautiful, and it’s intricate, and it’s enigmatic, and it’s everything you’d expect from a hardcore tech-nerd who also happens to have wacky hair and a penchant for wearing fake feathers.  It does, however lack some of the immediacy and emotional impact of her previous efforts.  One gets the distinct sense that everything on this album is intricately crafted with forethought, which robs some of the tracks of resonance.   It’s still gorgeous to listen to, though.

Shuffling On This Mortal Coil (parte the firste): Claire Voyant – Lustre
I know how irritating it can be as an artist to be told your music sounds like something out of the 80’s.  Certainly, I struggle with that a lot.  In the case of CV, I can say it sounds like something out of the 80’s in the absolute best possible way.  In the mid-late 80’s, that swoony, melodic, shimmery 4AD sound began to take hold…before it was entirely obliterated by shoegazer and grunge, so it never really got its day in court.  Lustre brings that sound back in full force, making you understand what would’ve happened had it been allowed to progress over a decade or two.  Still the glimmery guitars, still the majestic synths, still the dreamy vocals, but with ballsier production and less of the twee-pop sound that those early 4AD recordings often had.

Shuffling On This Mortal Coil (parte the seconde): Stripmall Architecture – We Were Flying Kites
Another band in the “what would happen if Ivo Watts-Russell and Jon Fryer were still doing that thing today” category.   Stripmall Architecture takes a slightly different tack, with a bit more of a rock edge and some sonic nods to the glitch-pop sound, like if Jimmy Tamborello and Dean Garcia suddenly joined the Cocteau Twins.  Sharp songwriting and incisive lyrics elevate this beyond the “conceptually interesting” level to something that holds up extraordinarily well to repeated close listening.

I Did Not Expect This To Be So Good: Metric – Fantasies
It’s hard for me to listen to this album all the way through.   Not because it’s bad, but because I’m completely enraptured by the first track, “Help, I’m Alive” and I want to put it on repeat.  The song switches back and forth from ominous to spunky on a dime,  and is filled with monster hooks.  The rest of the album is kinda like that too, but “Help” is so damn good I’ve almost entirely forgotten what comes after it.

New Zealand’s Fourth Best Comedy Folk Album: Flight of the Conchords – I Told You I Was Freaky
Nothing on the album quite measures up to “Business Time” or  “Bowie”, there are still some fabulously funny tracks on this album.  “Too Many Dicks (On The Dancefloor)” is a prime example of what FOTC do so well – they ape a style without directly parodying a song.

My Alt-Country Girlfriend: Neko Case – Middle Cyclone
This time out, her songs are a little less straightforward, and a little more fleshed-out than her previous works.  Given how well that Spartan aesthetic has worked for her in the past, it’s risky for her to layer instruments and production over her voice.  But it works.  Boy does it work.  Her voice still soars over strings and bells and helicopter guitars.  There are still a few tracks of her trademark sparse country-noir sound.  And that voice.  That voice!

Kingdom of Welcome Followup Albums: IAMX – Kingdom of Welcome Addiction
It’s pretty much what we’d expect from IAMX – enigmatic, bombastic songs of loss and addiction. It’s a bit more emotional than “The Alternative” and it feels slightly more harrowing to listen to.

Almost, But Not Quite, a New Order Album: Bad Lieutenant – Never Cry Another Tear
It’s hard to have much of an opinion on this one.  Bernard Sumner and the non-Peter-Hook members of late-period New Order (well, occasionally – Stephen Morris isn’t on every track).  It sounds a little like New Order without Hook’s high-fret basswork, but not quite.  Maybe like a set of B-sides from Electronic’s second album.

Daybreak: Bear McCreary – Battlestar Galactica Season Four Original Soundtrack
A sprawling 2-disc sequence featuring music from the fourth season, and the series finale, in which McCreary pulls out all the stops.  More ethnic instruments, more orchestra, more electric violin, more taikos.   Every theme from the series, and some from the original series, seem to come into play, overlapping and interplaying.  Whatever opinions critics may have had of the finale or even the final season, the soundtrack is fairly unimpeachable.

Back to the Roots: BT- Rose of Jericho
While I have this sinking feeling, given the title of his upcoming album (“These Hopeful Machines”) and the pattern he’s taking for his new cover art, that BT’s next full-length may devolve into over-produced synthesizer acrobatics rather than accessible songs,  “Rose of Jericho” is a smashing trance track, full of bleepy hooks and a solid four-on-the floor rhythm.   Oh, sure, it’s rife with stutter edits and meticulously programmed effects, but it’s still a dance track like he used to write, not some attempt to be a rmicroquantized rock god or a modernized Wendy Carlos.

Change of Direction: AFI – Crash Love
AFI ditches a lot of the bombast and sing-along choruses of Decemberunderground for a more traditional punk-pop structure.  But…well, it doesn’t quite work.  It’s not bad, but after the soaring hooks of DU, it all feels a little forced.

What Is The Deal With Australians?  Empire of The Sun – Walking on a Dream
It’s perplexing, given that their single was also the title track of their first album.  It’s also perplexing that a band with a distinct visual concept of “bad 80’s scifi/fantasy film” and a sonic aesthetic to match, and a lead singer who sounds like he’s being pulled through Limahl’s nasal cavities would be so…good.   The chugging retro synths, the 1980’s drum machines, the jangly guitars the falsetto choruses, all belie a sharply modern edge in the production and songwriting.

Best Crackhead Rant-based Song: Bogart Shwadchuck – Ben The Rat
What can you really say about a dubstep wobbler featuring a sample of a deranged crackhead repeating “Butt-naked wonda, big brotha thunda, and the master blaster!” among other bizarre nonsequiturs?  It’s just ridiculous and fun.

Wait, What?: MIDIval PunditZ – Hello Hello
I’d heard MP ages ago.  They were okay, one of those Asian Massive bands that threw drum-n-bass beats over tabla.   They didn’t really do a whole a lot for me.  One a lark, while browsing the CD racks at a bookstore, I saw this album and gave it a listen.  I was quite frankly stunned.  Tracks like “Electric Universe” and “Atomizer” are grungy electro, rife with vocoders and strong tech-house beats over the Indian roots.  I know from experience that it’s hard to make that work – when done wrong it can be a complete trainwreck.  This manages to work.

Most Egregious Use of Peter Hook:  The Crystal Method – Divided by Night
The latest entry from The Crystal Method crew isn’t a bad album by any means.  It’s not as edgy as their earlier works, but it’s a pretty decent album.  Peter Hook, now that he’s free of New Order, seems to be showing up everywhere, and he shows up on a few tracks.   He seems to show up, cash a paycheck, and then go home – his basslines are his usual high-neck bass-noodling, but without the grounding of a New Order song structure it sounds more like he’s just doing finger exercises.

Ludicrous Earworm: Das Racist – Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell
Dear god, this song is ridiculous, and catchy.   It’s dumb, dumb music, but completely manages to hook itself into your head.  It’s practically a cultural phenomenon.

I’ll admit know that I’ve written some bad ones.  I’ve certainly read some bad ones, and some even worse ones.  I have also read some good ones, and what follows are some tips I’ve gleaned from those.  I don’t know if I’ve written a good one yet, but I’m trying.  I’ve written a lot of resumes, though and the same sort of tips apply.

1. Be direct. You’ve got a page, tops, to say who you are, what sort of music you make, maybe a few press clippings.  If you spend half of the page exclaiming that you’re the most awesome band ever before anybody has a clue why they should even care, you’ve lost.
2. Good grammar costs nothing. Seriously, people, do you want the primary representation of your musical endeavor to read like it was written by a 7th-grader?   You may be tempted to pepper it with l33tspeek or try and sound like PsychicTV by using “thee” and “ov.”  Don’t.  It’s not cute anymore.  It might be genre-appropriate to use some colloquialisms or slang – if you’re a dubstep act, using the word “wobble” is fine, for example, or if you’re Dizzee Rascal, you can occasionally use the word “wiv.”  Still, it’s dodgy.  Some promoters and the general public may catch on, others may just think you can’t use a spell-checker.
3. You are not a genre-defying, uncategorizable, one-of-a-kind band. Nobody, nobody believes that when they read it, so don’t bother to write it.  Even if, on the off chance you are a genre-bending totally unique act, it’s just not something you can come out and say.  You are not redefining anything, recontextualizing anything, or reinventing anything.  You can describe what you do.  If you can describe your sound well, that’s a stronger advertisement for your work than any “reinvention” BS.
4. Nobody cares who mastered or engineered your last album, or what gear it was recorded on – unless of course those people or gear are coming with you on tour or are always going to be working with you.  This is a reasonably new development, and I’m not sure where it came from.  I’m starting to see a number of acts who spend far too much time detailing exactly what sort of mixing board or synthesizer or producer or engineer was involved.  Trainspotters like me may think it’s cool, but unless it somehow contributes to the overall perception of your band, it’s not worth the space.  The rare exception to this is the producer, since they can have a direct impact on your sound, but even then they have to be established enough for it to make a difference.  For example, if your producer was, say, Brian Eno or someone of that stature – those guys don’t need your money, they have to like you first.

   Basically, you don’t sell your house by listing the plumber.

5. An aesthetic is a tricky thing to work with. If you’re a band with a specific visual identity, you have a tough line to walk.  What a band looks like won’t sell records, and while a stage act may bring bodies to a show, it’s really hard to sell that line to a promoter who’s only got a demo CD and a single photo to go on.   It’s even harder if your look doesn’t match the music – if by design you’re a techno band that dresses up in 14th-century Italianate costumes, well, that may be your thing but an unfamiliar reader is going to just see “schtick.”  Some descriptions are going to sound played-out or bandwagon-y no matter what you do, or no matter how true they are, too.  It’s best to leave that for later.
6. Who you’ve opened for needs to be relevant – and true. If you’re going to say you’ve played with U2, you’d better have opened for U2 and not just played the “Bob’s Grocery Local Talent Stage” at the same enormous music festival  as them.  It’s ridiculously easy to look this stuff up, and if someone can call bullshit on any small part of your presskit, the whole thing gets tossed.  Similarly, even if you did open for someone reasonably respected, it should likely be something that has some cache – opening for the “Pet Sounds” Beach Boys is a vastly different thing from opening for the “Kokomo” Beach Boys, for example.
7. If you’ve been a dick to someone, leave their name off your presskit. If you played a gig with another band, if you didn’t get along or they wouldn’t remember you, don’t namecheck them.  Unless we’re talking about the Rolling Stones, a promoter in your genre is probably going to have the ability to call up and check.  “Hey, yeah, Tom…these Null Device guys…oh, they’re asshats?  Thanks.”  Or worse “Hey, Tom, these Null Device guys…Null Device.   With an N.  No, Device.  So you don’t remember them?  They claimed to have played with you…huh. [click].”
8. Be consistent. A well-written onesheet can serve as a promotional tool in a lot of situations.  If you use the same, or at least very similar, language and content on your website, your myspace, your facebook, your demo, etc, you’re going to put forth a nicely professional and hopefully well-thought-out image.  Obviously certain media will require some tweaking, but the point is simply that tying it all together means you don’t ever have to worry about contradictory or confusing information anywhere a promoter, label honcho, distributor or even a fan might look.  It also saves you a lot of work.
9. A little informality is okay. While this is like a resume, this isn’t a resume.  You don’t have to write it like an insurance policy.  That said, you don’t want to go too far in the other direction.    You’re still trying to sell something, in this case your music, you’re not trying to get a pen pal.
10. Try to focus on the now. This is a tough one, since by definition your previous glories are what are making you attractive to a promoter or label.  There is, however, a limit.  It’s one thing to talk about your last album, or your last two albums.  To reference something you did 15 years ago?  Unless it was something massive that still has repercussions today (or this is a comeback tour for a band that was huge in the 80’s) it’s going to give the distinct impression that you’ve not done much noteworthy since.
11. Edit.  Edit, edit, edit, edit. Pretend this is your final term paper in high school.  It’s got to be spot-on.  Check it over a zillion times.  Have a friend read it.  Get opinions from people you trust.  Anything awkward-sounding, or poorly-written, is going to jump out and distract the reader.  There are still enough grammar fascists and orthography tyrants in the world that there’s a not-insignificant chance that one of them may be on the receiving end.  A misplaced comma or [gasp] quotes used for emphasis instead of facetiousness is going to jump out and be the Thing That They Remember.
12. Don’t expect everyone to know what the heck you’re talking about. While you can assume a certain level of commonality and familiarity on musical genres, if your references and definitions are so obscure or bleeding edge – or worse, you un-ironically coin a genre name for yourself – you’re going to get the promotion equivalent of a blank stare.  It’s the trickiest part of writing up self-referential press; you know what you do, but you have to write for the perspective of someone who has no idea who your references, influences, and baselines are.
13. Go easy on the comparisons. A few are alright, and in fact probably necessary if you’re just starting out.  It’s okay to say you’re influenced by Depeche Mode or Kraftwerk or the Beatles or whatever.  But don’t go nuts.  This is still about you, so a paragraph of your influences is probably overdoing it.  If your sound-description is clear enough,  you can reign back even further – everyone can pretty much take an influence to kraftwerk as read if you describe yourself as making minimal techno.  Too much and you’re wasting space that could be used for your own stuff, and additionally it could be setting the distinct impression on the reader that you’re just not that original.

Anyway, they posted a challenge: if it’s so easy to record these days, then record a song in a weekend.  They issued the challenge on friday afternoon, and closed it sunday evening.

Surprisingly, I decided to give it a go.  This is surprising because I’m usually the kind of guy who will spend weeks tweaking a track, and certainly several hours re-re-re-recording vocals.

I pulled it off.  The track isn’t great – the lyrics are awkward, the vocals aren’t especially strong, and it needs a bridge, but it still sounds recognizably Null Device-y.  I’m kind of astonished that I pulled it off.

Whether it’ll ever see the light of day beyond this “challenge” is another matter.

Ordinarily, a Friday night gig would just mean “sleep late on Saturday.”  This however was not an option, because bright and chipper on Saturday morning I had a carnatic classical trio coming by to record.  It was an unusual configuration, too – saxophone, mridangang, violin, and the omnipresent electronic tampura/sruthi box.  (I offered to delve into my surprisingly vast library of tampura samples, but they opted to pass.

Over the course of two days, we recorded well over two hours of music.   They played as an ensemble, which meant I had to be diligent with my microphone choices and positioning.  Also, because there were six inputs and my ULN2 only has,  well, 2, I had to do some fancy routing and device aggregation in order to get everything set up and sounding good.  These guys had to play as an ensemble, so I couldn’t simply isolate and multitrack them as I do with my own stuff.

These guys came in from parts distant – the sax player was from north Chicago, the violinist from west Chicago, and the mridangam player was from Washington DC.  I was referred to them as someone who could record carnatic music for a reasonable price and not screw it up, I guess, but I had to keep asking in slight disbelief “uh, you guys know that this is just a room in my basement, right?”  I can see people coming from, say, Milwaukee to record in my basement, but Chicago?  DC?  They apparently were fully aware of this and wanted to go ahead anyway.  It could be my remarkably affordable prices.

What follows is a technical description of what went down, merely because I lack the appropriate music theory to describe what happened musically.

I slaved my old trusty MOTU 828 to the ULN2’s clock, which significantly improved the performance of that box.  I also attached by dbx tube pre to the ULN’s SPDIF and clock-sync’ed that too.

The mrid got a pair of 57’s, run into the 828.  57’s are always reliable of percussion instruments.  They were perhaps a little dark and dense on the treble head of the drum, but they still got me a reasonably decent fidelity on the attack/decay range.  And because they have such a forward pattern with good side rejection, I didn’t get much crosstalk between the two mics, or from the other instruments.

The sax got the Oktava.  Sumanth had specifically requested a rather dark sound on his sax, so the combo of the Oktava and the dbx tube pre was a natural fit.  It was pretty warm and punchy by the time it was all recorded.  The mic was a little gainy, so I did get some “room sound” off the mridangang too, but that was to be expected.  If I’d had a good ribbon mic, that probably also would’ve worked really well.

The violin was the toughy – seeing as it’s a much quieter instrument than a saxophone or a drum, and full of all sorts of crazy harmonics, I had to be pretty careful where I put the mics.  I used the pair of Pulsar II SDC’s that I keep around for just such things.  Since I happen to have a violin, I did some experiments with configuration, and skipped doing my initial x/y stereo placement in favor of an almost guitar-like arrangement – one mic pointing at the f-holes, and the other aimed towards the neck.  The biggest challenge was keeping the mics far enough from the violinist so he could actually play, but close enough that they would get good signal and not pick up every stray noise in the room.    I ended up with a bit of a compromise – I got strong signal but still got some spillover from the sax.  There’s only so much I can do about that, short of throwing up some gobos – but then the instrumentalists wouldn’t be able to see and hear each other, which defeats the purpose.  I ran the mics into the ULN so I could up the gain pretty high without too much noise.

Some of these pieces ran upwards of 20 minutes, one coming in close to an hour, which meant to fix things there was a lot of punch-in/punch out and clever crossfading between takes.  They specifically requested a spacious sound, so I’m judiciously adjusting the panning and reverb settings to get it nice and concert-hall-y without being swamped by deep ‘verb.  I’ve still got some more engineering to do on this yet, but it’s sounding pretty good so far.  These guys were pretty serious players, so that helped an awful lot.

I also learned once again that curious kittens often hamper the recording process by headbutting microphones or deciding to get chummy with  the percussionist in the middle of a take.

Interesting film.  It’s quickly very clear why those particular three guitarists (Jimmy Page, The Edge, Jack White) were picked – they each represent a different era of guitar heroics, and they’re also the kind of guitarists who are known for their sound as much as any guitar heroics.  As much as there are many super-shredders out there who could outplay all three of them, probably only EVH would have the appropriate amount of crossover appeal.

It’s also clear what these guys did, in terms of their places in their respective bands – Page was a consummate Musician, joining bands after long stints as a studio musician and arranger; The Edge was a hardcore technician and sonic architect, showing up with a guitar and 4 giant racks of effects gear; Jack White was…well, Jack White’s a douchebag.

Okay, maybe that’s not entirely fair.  He has a very distinctive sound and manner of playing, and he’s probably the one of the three who’s got the closest ties to old blues, so there’s that, and he’s  admittedly a reasonably iconic axeman.  But he was also the only one with a lot of conceits – he had his special outfits, he had a sidekick of “12-year-old Jack White” which was a mini-me version of him, and he was busy showing off his playing in some tumbledown old Tennessee house as though he were some backcountry bluesman, and not the $37M-valued rockstar he actually is.  While Page and Edge were pretty frank about what they did and how they did it, Jack White spent about as much time espousing his personal philosophy about vintage gear, recording a song on a battered old plywood guitar into an ancient reel-to-reel (I noted that he  *was* using a like-new $3000 Coles ribbon mic).  He was frankly pretty annoying.

The Edge was, to me, fascinating.  He was pretty spare with words, but he was also surprisingly humble.  He fully acknowledges he’s not an incredible player, but he also displayed almost boyish glee showing off his electronics gear and effects processors.   It was also interesting to see that a good portion of his “U2 sound” was in the way he voiced his chords.

I’ve never been a big Zeppelin fan, although I acknowledge their impact on the development of rock and roll.   And Page was a capital-M musician.  He certainly makes playing look effortless.  His callbacks to those heady, experimental days of the late 60’s when Zep recorded in manor house stairwells with cables running out to a mobile truck were fascinating.  It was also interesting to note his early career – as a kid in a skiffle band, then as a fill-in session musician, then a regularly gigging studio aguitarist doing everything from rock songs to muzak before he finally got fed up and joined the Yardbirds.  He also seems to be the godfather of Rock Face.  Most intriguingly he said he wept while watching Spinal Tap – not because he didn’t think it was funny, but because he said it was hardly parody, accurately portraying the ridiculous excesses of the 70’s rock band.

A lot of the actual music in the film was surprisingly sub-standard.  You’d think that three iconic players in one room jamming would lead to some crazy sessions, but it was really just three dudes sitting on couches halfheartedly strumming their way through the Led Zeppelin backcatalogue, each with a wildly different guitar tone clashing with the other two.   The exception was when Page played something by himself, and it was obvious that neither the Edge nor White could really conceal their joy at watching Jimmy Freakin’ Page cruise through a legendary rock song.

Overall, from a music-nerd standpoint, it was a fascinating film.  Other than U2 I can’t say I’m a big fan of the artists involved, but they did represent three very distinct points of view and approaches to musicmaking.  Also, the “early years” footage of each of the bands in question was often hilarious.  A big-haired, macho-rocking embryonic U2 from the early early 80’s was hysterical, and a 14-year-old Jimmy Page playing “Momma Don’t Allow No Skiffle” on British TV was rather cute.  Footage of the White Stripes obviously doesn’t go back as far, although what was most interesting was how much Meg White’s drumming has improved in the intervening decade.

Sadly, during the film, it never really did get loud.   It did get interesting.