Audio Journal: 01/11/2013 - MuteResponse

MuteResponse #1 - artwork by Espen J. Jörgensen

The idea for MuteResponse came to me more or less exactly twelve months ago.

I was sat in the Curzon Cinema in Chelsea on 24 October 2012 listening to a talk as part of David Byrne's How Music Works book tour. Byrne had selected a different musician each night to join the debate, which for London was curated by Sean O'Hagan. His fellow debater on the health of music and the 'music industry' as we might have once called it, was Matthew Herbert.

The talk was a mix of interview and discussion. Both Herbert and Byrne made entertaining speakers, each possessing an authoritative viewpoint on just how dire it is for musicians trying to earn a crust in today's digital era. In spite of each speaker's self-deprecating mannerisms and an honest raking through of their individual paths to becoming musicians, the evening was a sobering one, and if it wasn't for a call to arms at the very end, I would have left thinking that all was doomed.

In the concluding moments, Herbert emphatically stressed that the future success of music depended on allowing the smallest scenes to thrive and develop. It was delivered with such passion and gusto that it was difficult not to feel compelled to do something with that. But, as people began to file out of the cinema, I stayed back a few moments and wondered how to do my small bit to protect the art form I enjoy so much.

In about half an hour I was stood at Sloane Square Underground station mulling over what I could do. I was listening to, and reviewing, the album Mind The Gap by Metroland that day and had sent over my finished piece to Sven from the duo earlier. Metroland's album reminded me principally of the work by Mute Records stalwarts Komputer, and the confluence of making that connection and Herbert's insistent request for participation came together somewhere on the Tube between Sloane Square and South Kensington and the idea for MuteResponse was born.

My thought process was simple: I already am part of a small scene, though not a musician; that scene consists of a bunch of people who are fans of Mute Records, the independent record label established by Daniel Miller in 1978. I already support Mute's legacy through my website Documentary Evidence which I started a decade ago as a place to write reviews and interviews with Mute artists or those connected to the label; Documentary Evidence was never supposed to be anything other than a place to post my personal views and opinions on whatever Mute release I was listening to that day. I had no aspirations to become a fully-fledged music critic, and I didn't really care if anyone was even reading the poorly-scribed stuff I was sticking up online.

By 2013 I seemed to have accumulated a number of fellow Mute fans who were similarly smitten by the label, but something about what Herbert had said made me feel like I needed to do something more, or, more specifically, to provide a different sort of tribute to the legacy of Mute. So I decided, between those two Tube stations to put together a compilation of artists influenced by the label. The title MuteResponse came to me almost as soon as I came up with the idea for the album. Never let it be said that inspiration doesn't lurk in the dark tunnels under London.

Helpfully, what Documentary Evidence covers has meant that lots of like-minded people send me their music for review. It's a nice problem to have. That made the selection of tracks from some recent releases relatively straightforward, but I also wanted to secure some exclusive tracks, or things that I'd had the privilege of listening to that had for whatever reason never seen the light of day. So I set about a process of asking for permission to use tracks from releases I'd been sent, inviting artists to send over a track for consideration, or trying to persuade people who were sitting on unreleased tracks that were unlikely to ever get released to allow them to be used. That so many people wanted to see their tracks included was a pleasant surprise and consequently the album came together far easier than I ever expected to; so much so that it became evident that it would need to be a double compilation. The first track I received was 'Clues In The Rain' by Espen J. Jörgensen and Rupert Lally, and so, appropriately enough, it is the opening track on album one.

Securing an unreleased track from Vic Twenty was, on a personal level, one of the most pleasing events in the development of MuteResponse. Vic Twenty, originally a duo of Adrian Morris and Angela Penhaligon (Piney Gir) were the first group I ever wrote about on Documentary Evidence after the single 'Text Message' was released on Credible Sexy Units, a new label Mute founder Daniel Miller set up after his main concern was bought by EMI. Adrian sent me a CDr of unreleased Vic Twenty tracks while I was undertaking one of two interviews with him, and I always hoped that 'Christmas In Korea (New Year In Japan)' would see the light of day one day. Now it will, and just before Christmas too.

People have asked how I managed to get producer Gareth Jones on board with an exclusive track, 'Summer Solstice 2013'. I first spoke to Gareth (and also Olivia Louvel, and Paul 'PK' Kendall) about the project in the bar after a Simon Fisher Turner and Factory Floor concert at the ICA in March. I've spoken to Gareth a few times over the past ten years but even so, asking him if he was interested in participating was a nerve-racking experience. Nevertheless, he seemed genuinely enthused by being involved. His track was a real surprise - a carefully constructed, many-layered audio collage of London atmospheres - and it is indeed a real coup to be featuring a piece by someone who's name has been attached to many of my favourite records.

It occurred to me early on that one relatively straightforward way of offering a tribute to Mute would be by asking for cover versions of songs by Mute artists. In the end it seemed like the most obvious way to approach it, and therefore the least appealing way to do it; after all, if the whole point of this was to show Mute's influence, it needed to illustrate how Mute's early aesthetic had crept out to infiltrate how people made electronic music; just putting out covers seemed to undermine that somehow. There was just one exception to that rule - an instrumental cover of Depeche Mode's See You' by Dave Fleet. Fleet first sent me a demo of this about two years ago and I was pleased to have been able to encourage him to finish it. We both tried to find a vocalist for the track but finally decided it was beautiful as it was, being a mixture of sensitive orchestrations and whirring electronics. Fleet proved to be one of the most important creative consultants for the project, giving me his opinion on tracks I wasn't sure about, sourcing tracks from Jay Mass / Andy Clark and Simplicity Is Beauty and securing the services of Chris Sharp to master the overall project. In fact, without Dave's support and guidance MuteResponse would have been just another idea that never went anywhere.

Another pivotal figure in the genesis of MuteResponse was Procedure, whose 'Isbjörn' is one of my favourite pieces from the entire project. One day he emailed me asking if I had ever tried contacting Simone Grant, who designed the first sleeves for Mute and whose creative insight informed the distinctive imagery of releases by The Normal, Silicon Teens, Fad Gadget and others. Within 48 hours I'd made contact with Simone and she'd agreed to design alternative sleeves for the project. Other alternative sleeve designs came from Espen J. Jörgensen, p6 from Security, Olivia Louvel and Dylan Fleet.

Let us return to the original reason for doing this in the first place. The idea was to further encourage the development of a small scene, namely artists influenced in whatever bleak way by Mute Records. That was its original stated purpose and I believe it does that effectively, albeit as a very narrow snapshot. However, for me it also highlights more clearly that while the music industry might be broken beyond repair, originality exists in greater abundance than ever before. There are amazing artists out there producing many, many great tracks that deserve far greater exposure than they get, but don't because they're not on a label with a huge marketing budget. It was that realisation that there was music out there that I'd never heard of that made Mute so appealing to me in the first place.

I hope above all that MuteResponse contributes in some small way to raising the profile of the very talented artists who contributed to this project, and whose music deserves far wider appreciation.

MuteResponse is released via Bandcamp on 4 November 2013.

Track lists, artist biographies and the alternative artwork can be found at www.muteresponse.com

- MJAS, Woburn Sands, UK, November 2013

Audio Journal: 30/08/2013 - David Byrne & St. Vincent, MuteResponse

David Byrne & St. Vincent, The Roundhouse 27/08/2013
Source and copyright: Rachel Lipsitz for Clash

One recurring artist throughout the history of my Audio Journal blog has been former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, who I even went so far as to say I had something of an 'artistic crush' on, a comment that I'm still reluctant to retract.

Byrne was in London earlier this week for a one-off show at the Roundhouse with St. Vincent (Annie Clark), with whom he recorded the brass-soaked Love This Giant released by 4AD last year. Despite a couple of previous attempts on my part to catch Byrne in concert, for one reason or another it's never happened. The closest I've come to seeing him in the flesh was last year at the Curzon cinema in Chelsea where he and Matthew Herbert engaged in an earnest debate about the health of what we used to call the music industry; prior to that it was a live video-link chat with Paul Morley from Brixton to accompany a screening of his Ride, Rise, Roar tour documentary, which I watched in a tiny room at Leicester Square's Odeon. Finally getting to see him singing this week was therefore something that I was starting to believe was never going to happen.

I was fortunate enough to review the Roundhouse show for Clash. My review, accompanied by some rather excellent photos from Rachel Lipsitz, can be found here. Byrne and Clark have released a free EP to accompany their tour, featuring some live tracks (including the Talking Heads classic 'Road To Nowhere'), remixes and an unreleased song from the Love This Giant sessions. The Brass Tactics EP can be downloaded below in exchange for your email address.

A few posts back I mentioned that listening to Byrne's conversation with Matthew Herbert had inspired me to start a project called MuteResponse in tribute to the influence of my favourite record label (Mute) and to celebrate ten years of writing my Documentary Evidence website.

MuteResponse will take the form of a twenty-two track double download compilation and will be released in the Autumn. Earlier this week I premiered the first track from the album, which will feature a number of artists similarly inspired by Mute's legacy. 'Clues In The Rain' by Rupert Lally and Espen J. Jörgensen - the first track that I received for inclusion on the project after a campaign for contributions - can be heard below, or head here if you're reading this on email. The full tracklist for MuteResponse will be announced soon.

Audio Journal: October 2012

David Byrne, How Music Works

In October I attended a talk by former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne and electronic musician Matthew Herbert at the Curzon Cinema in Chelsea. Herbert has been churning out electronica since the Nineties, recently made a record comprised entirely of the sounds of a pig from birth to bacon, and was recently installed as the director of the Radiophonic Workshop, a venerable BBC institution best known for producing the early electronic theme music for Doctor Who. Byrne, on the other hand, has just published a book titled How Music Works, and this London date was part of a small global tour to promote the book.

At Herbert's suggestion,the Curzon debate was titled Do We Need Any More Music?, and began with a stark statistic from a friend of Herbert's who works at Apple that 75% of music released on iTunes has never been downloaded once. Not once! The pair then began dissecting music's current ease of production owing to cheap and ubiquitous software, often including so many preset sounds, rhythms and styles that Herbert said it was akin to 'shopping', while Byrne countered that it was more like 'spellchecking' in the way that the software encourages everything to sit neatly on a grid. Herbert somehow kept steering the conversation round to the topic of food (he was clearly hungry); in contrast, one tedious question in the audience Q&A afterwards pondered on the fact that 'Byrne will collaborate with anyone for a packet of Doritos'.

One of the topics that the pair kept returning to was the economics - of lack thereof - in music today, turning their focus on the hairy topics of copyright, declining incomes and illegal downloading. Byrne cited a book by someone I've never heard of, who downloaded his way through college until an epiphany struck him at the Brooklyn coffee shop he worked in once he'd graduated. He began to notice that many of his customers were from local bands like Yeasayer and TV On The Radio, much-feted bands that he'd seen on TV, in the press, heralded as cool and whose records he'd downloaded - for free. He couldn't get his head around why these people had no money, until someone explained that they made no money from record sales as no-one was really buying music, tours rarely broke even and that the financial realities of being a musician today were pretty stark. Byrne never managed to complete the anecdote, but Herbert said we all had a responsibility to encourage scenes to develop.

At some point in proceedings my mind started to race, and I came to two conclusions:

1. Though I write about music pretty much every day, either for my own Documentary Evidence website or for the magazine Clash, I'm not doing enough to support the artform I love the most; and

2. I feel a need to expose my two children to as much varied music as possible.

In response to the point Herbert made around encouraging scenes to develop, I realised that I'm already part of a small scene. Documentary Evidence is a website devoted to the music of one label, Mute, a label that released music by Depeche Mode, Moby, Nick Cave and countless others, whose Blast First sub-label first brought Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. to the UK, and who played an integral role in dance music's development via the Rhythm King and NovaMute imprints, releasing genre-defining works by S'Express, Bomb The Bass, Plastikman and Speedy J. My site has a small and ardent following of like-minded fans, and so I've decided to do something within that scene beyond writing reviews and conducting interviews.

I haven't worked it all out yet, but it's called MuteResponse and I'll post details soon.

As well as curating my own site with more or less daily reviews, from February this year I've been writing occasionally for Clash's website, covering gig reviews and interviews. I've tended to focus on Mute acts because it's my main interest, and that's lead to interviewing people like Dave Gahan from Depeche Mode, Jon Spencer from the Blues Explosion and Chris Keating from Yeasayer. My good friend Andy put me in touch with Clash and through that connection and the stuff I've done since for them, I think I can now legitimately call myself a freelance music journalist, particularly after my review of Yeasayer's gig at The Lexington made it into the magazine edition of Clash in the summer. It doesn't pay a penny, but it's a lot of fun getting to talk to your musical heroes and being on guest lists, and I've learned more about the music industry this year than I ever knew before.

Andy and I have worked on three gigs together - Barry Adamson, Inspiral Carpets and, at the end of October, Crime & The City Solution at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. A few weeks back I got to interview Crime's frontman Simon Bonney. Links to both can be found below. Hopefully it goes some way to allay any concerns that I've simply stopped writing.

Crime & The City Solution: Queen Elizabeth Hall, London 26 October 2012

Crime & The City Solution: Simon Bonney interview

Yeasayer, mentioned above, are masters of songs that I described to the band's Chris Keating as being 'balanced precariously above a chasm between joyous and miserable'. He didn't disagree, and more or less took it as a compliment. In the last week I've found myself listening to Robyn's 'Dancing On My Own' far more than is good for me. I'd never heard the song before, but it was played in a particularly and unexpectedly moving scene at the end of an episode of Girls, a programme that I fully accept is not really designed for me and possibly highlights that I'm far too prudish.

In the scene, Hannah is mulling over a tweet that she intends to send about having caught an STD from a former partner and finding out that her ex boyfriend is gay. She sends a pithy melancholy message and Robyn's song starts playing in the background. She begins to dance - pretty badly, even by my standards - and her flatmate, Marnie, returning from work, joins in. The scene has that joyous sense of expression mixed in with a pretty depressing backdrop. Robyn's smart song straddles that same chasm as Yeasayer in a much more overtly display of visceral, intelligent and savagely addictive pop. It joins the playlist I've yet to make - stuff like MGMT's 'Time To Dream' (a song that eulogises having sex with models and shooting up smack and which leaves you unsure whether you're celebrating that, condemning it or regretting that you can't join in), most of Polly Scattergood's work and loads of other bittersweet songs I seem to make a habit of collecting.