Pete Ashton’s Blog

I linked to The Metasciences yesterday because I like their music - kinda quirky anti-folk which reminds me of Jeffrey Lewis’ solo work and the stuff my mate Steve Ball has been recording in our living room (more on this later…) - but how they bubbled up into my consciousness is, I think, interesting.

Warren Ellis runs a podcast called The Apparat Programme comprised of mp3s sent to him by unsigned bands which he edits (with no speech) into a half hour show. Feedback implied that a lot of people though the Metasciences were the standout act so he gave them a plug which I took him up on.

This is interesting because of the combination of randomness and curatorship along with Warren’s uncanny feel for how the internet works. On the one side you’ve got this chaotic mass of music out there with no easy way to navigate through it without some serious commitment and on the other side you’ve got people who recommend stuff based on their own point of view and singular experience. Neither of these are optimal, the former being too wide and the latter being far to subjective. To put it another way, if you’re listening to music chosen by Joe Muso as part of the Joe Muso experience then that’s great, but if you don’t really care for Joe or 90% of the music he recommends then you need to do some filtering, and if you can’t be bothered then you’re going to miss out on that 10%.

What we have here is a middle ground. Unless I’m horribly mistaken, Warren isn’t wholeheartedly recommending all the music in the Apparat Programme, merely filtering out the dross and leaving in stuff that has a certain spark. A kind of “not shit” criteria if you like, acting as a primary filter which will lead to other things. He then notices chatter about one of the bands (which he might not even have paid too much attention to when putting the show together) and gives them a blog entry with all the weight of his endorsement that implies, allowing those who can’t be bothered with the podcast itself (I’ve got about five of them sitting there unlistened at the moment) to cut right to the good stuff.

Certainly, this kind of swarming recommendation is nothing new - the del.icio.us popular aggregator works along these lines - but it’s the human hand involved that interests me. Maybe it’s nothing special and goes on all the time, but there’s something about Warren throwing a load of music at his readers and getting them to sort through it swarm-style that appeals.

I’m now wondering if something like this for Birmingham unsigned bands would work, but in the meantime go to The Metasciences MySpace page, scroll down a bit, and download their album. It’s very good.

Popped down to the Flapper last night to take some photos of An Untitled Musical Project (GDFAF report) with their blessing in return for free entry and a pint of beer, my going rate at the moment. Didn’t stay for the whole gig but I did have a nice chat with drummer James and inevitably we got talking about MySpace which was apparently responsible for everything they’ve achieved of late, from gigs to getting a manager. What was interesting was it required no effort from them on the networking front. They just uploaded the songs, filled in the info and kept the gig listings updated - everything else just happened. Which sounds a little too good to be true for a band that’s only been around for 9 months or so but the proof is there.

Despite a tiny crowd they were still tight and highly enjoyable, which was nice as I couldn’t remember exactly what it was I’d heard before with all 14 gigs merging in my mind, so go check them out when they’re next playing. And they only live around the corner from me which means I can deliver the photos bike-courier style. Magic.

All my UMP photos.

All week I’d been hearing reports of snow in parts of the country surrounding Birmingham but nothing here and it was getting rather annoying. Birmingham traditionally gets the mediocre weather, rather like merging a bunch of lovely paintings together to produce a grey splodge, and it seemed like again we’d miss on the beauty.

But lo! Lunchtime today I noticed the clouds had a yellow tinge to them followed by a brief flutter, which turned into a heavy flutter, which turned into a storm. So, as per usual, it’s out with the camera and on with the coat…

The storm stopped and the settled snow started retreating and I thought my plan to go out again with the camera at night would be ruined, but come dusk the snow picked up again, and it’s still going. It’s my intention to pop out about midnight and see what’s what…

I was trying to remember when I last did a real zine and without digging them all out I think it was around 1998, so today was rather momentous as I printed out and stapled (with my dusty but trusty long-armed stapler) the very rough draft of the GDFAF zine in all it’s 44 page glory. Mainly this was so I could check the layouts I’d done on the computer actually worked on paper but I was also getting impatient and wanted to hold it in my hands, no matter how unfinished (and in the case of the last seven pages unwritten) it was.

As expected, the whole experience is kinda strange. Firstly it’s interesting how web-based my design thinking is these days. I’ve structured the reviews as one long flow of text rather than making each post an individual item, which works because that’s how they were presented in the first place. Originally I tried breaking them up but it just felt wrong. I’ve also inserted the photos in the same manner as the posts with each band having a photo at the point where they’re talked about. Again, this works but it does mean the layout of each page isn’t consistent and is probably something I’d have avoided back in the day.

Another weird thing has been going back to DTP. Back in the 90s the most advanced I got was using WordPerfect to lay out the text in columns leaving spaces for the images which would be stuck on with glue later. Now I’m using the Apple Pages package for the whole thing and producing a PDF (using the excellent CocoaBooklet to paginate everything properly). Again, it’s really strange coming at this from a web design perspective. The whole concept of objects not flowing with the text is really odd along with the fact that inserting or deleting a sentence will mess up all manner of things further down the document. And there are some limitations to Pages that I can’t find a way around (not helped by Pages being a fucking stupid name for a program when it comes to Google…). In fact, unless I’m just doing it all horribly wrongly I’d say Pages is not a robust DTP package by any stretch of the imagination. It’s very user friendly but that’s probably its downfall. But I also suspect a lot of this is me really wanting to just print out the text and break out the glue.

And then there’s the photos themselves. My zines were usually about comics so the artwork was easy to get down to stark black and white for photocopying but my gig photos tend towards large patches of colour, usually red, so I have concerns about the zine being populated by black rectangles. Some experimenting did reveal the Halftone Pattern filter in Photoshop which is pretty crude but seems to do the job, though I’m not overly happy with seeing my lovely hi-res photos reduced to the resolution of a cameraphone. But then I am going for that photocopied zine aesthetic…

The weirdest thing, though, is how long it is. 15,000 words doesn’t seem that much when you’re scrolling in a browser but spread over 35 pages it’s most impressive. I look at it and think “I wrote that”.

I may have gotten my zine bug back.

This is a first draft of the introduction page for the Going Deaf For A Fortnight zine.

A bit of background, then, to put the rest of this zine into some kind of context, just so you know where I’m coming from and that.

A few years ago, circa 1998 or thereabouts, my friend Susi was writing gig reviews for some university newspaper in Birmingham and was getting bored of seeing the same old bands again and again, so to bright a sparkle of light into the proceedings she began dragging me along. For some reason I wasn’t gigging a whole lot so the prospect of seeing four blokes on a stage making an unholy racket with their guitars was pretty novel. I started looking forward to these evenings bathing in waves of distortion as the stresses of the working day were blasted from my inner being and I saw some pretty decent bands along the way. Novak stuck in my mind, playing some solid tunes but adding the flute and toy xylophone to the mix, and Quickspace made a solid impression.

About the same time a guy at work mentioned he was in a band who were playing a gig at the Flapper. We all liked Perry so a bunch of us bimbled along expecting the usual guitar-based rock thing. What were saw were Avrocar and Magnetophone at one of the legendary We Brought Our Friends nights, filling the stage with complicated pieces of electrical equipment which produced beautiful ethereal music like nothing I’d heard before. Most of the audience sat on the floor, which I thought was marvelous, as did Magnetophone during their set. It struck me that the Birmingham music scene was flourishing in obscurity. No-one knew about this stuff and that was what made it work.

After this discovery I moved to London for a few years and attempted to keep the gigging thing going, but it never really came to anything. Finding the good stuff was too much effort (despite Susi also moving down to further her Theremin playing career) and every support band seemed to be wannabes desperate for a record deal. It wasn’t cosy and nice like Birmingham so I stopped gigging.

And then, in 2003, I found myself living in Brum again. Some things had changed (what is this Academy all of a sudden!) but enough was the same and I started putting out feelers amongst my old contacts. Some excellent gigs were attended, notably Misty’s Big Adventure and gigs put on by ColdRice, and all seemed to be well, but I had a nagging feeling I wasn’t seeing enough. I seemed to be just seeing the same bands over and over, only discovering new bands if they happened to be supporting. Then at one gig I had an idea. I turned to my chum Tom and said I was going to go to fourteen gigs in a fortnight and write about them in depth on my blog. He grinned the insane grin of approval and it was set in stone. I even came up with the name of the project that night - Going Deaf For A Fortnight.

And so it came to pass on November 4th 2005 that I went to the Jug of Ale in Moseley to begin the marathon of thirty six acts at fourteen gigs in eight venues. Each report was written that night and posted on my blog along with photos in time for breakfast. The result was a personal overview of the Birmingham small gigs scene from the perspective of a paying punter. All opinions are my own and are as wrong as they might be right, filtered as they are through an increasingly fractured mind. Enjoy.

Brain still not working properly but here’s some thinking. Actually, it’s more an expression of the fecking obvious but nice to see.

Some research into p2p file sharing indicated that sales are depressed for top selling artists while niche artists benefit.

Which explains why the record industry is so rabid about file sharing. What strikes me is that the system whereby a small number of musicians are incredibly successful while the majority can’t pay the bills is unnatural. Back in yee olden days each town would have its musicians and performers who would be famous only in their area. With the advent of travel and recording (audio and print) you start getting stars who can cover a much wider area but only a few can succeed. And so on.

But what we’re finding now is a return of sorts to that earlier age only it’s not defined by geography any more. A real level playing field is emerging where the superstar artists have to compete with the unknowns on ability alone, which, for some of them, must be kinda scary. Bring it on I say.

This is a rough draft for the back cover blurb for the Going Deaf For A Fortnight zine.

For two weeks in November 2005 Pete Ashton set himself a challenge - to go to a randomly selected live music event at one of Birmingham’s small venues every night and then write about it in depth on his weblog.

The subsequent reviews give a snapshot of the live music scene in Brum, from touring international bands to unsigned local talent, all experienced by a paying punter answerable to no one but his own sanity.

Thirty six bands in eight venues over fourteen nights.

I did say “rough”

I should, all things being equal, have recovered enough to start going to gigs again in December and have a few mapped out.

Dec 6th is the A Different Kettle of Fish night at the Flapper with a bunch of bands I’m not familiar with. It’s organised by Phil of Danger High Postage and should be fun. £3.00 in.

Dec 10th is Noise Noise Allore! at the Hare and Hounds. I saw them supporting Melt Banana and liked them a lot so this is a no-brainer really.

Dec 21st is the Capsule Xmas gig with Pelican, Mistress and Una Corda at the Medicine Bar. Flatmate Andy Zoop is in Una Corda and I still haven’t seen them play so again, a no brainer, but Pelican are apparently the premier post-rock band around at the moment so should be good. £5.00 in.

Dec 23rd is Misty’s Big Adventure at the Jug, the final gig in their Xmas tour which should be stormingly good fun.

All this is assuming my employment doesn’t wind up as insane as last year of course…