Four Things #26
Welcome to Four Things #26! Hope you and yours are doing well, and I don’t say this enough but I truly appreciate you reading my newsletter and supporting and sharing it in these turmoiled social media platform times. Been a strange month with some lovely ups (gigs and traveling), some downs (health) and a lot of rising anxiety about the upcoming elections. Deep breaths.. I guess.
A screenshot I had saved to my desktop contains an unattributed quote from a writer who advised to ‘actively pitch ideas you believe in to publications you want to see your name in, instead of waiting for them to find you’ and I think that’s something you can apply to every creative discipline. So I asked Todd Burns if he’d allow me to write a little piece for his awesome Music Journalism Insider newsletter, about the Dutch music documentary maker Bram van Splunteren and his work, and he said yes! Read it here. On a music tip, my friends at Mechanical NYC made a tape containing a vintage Martyn drum ‘n bass set from 2005, featuring a lot of my own productions, you can find that here.
Now on to this month’s Things.. Your thoughts, observations and feedback are always appreciated! Feel free to pass on the link to your friends, and check out my newsletter archive if you haven’t done so before. Wishing you health and kindness..
Martyn
Nov 7th, 2022
FIRST THING: EVERYTHING MERGED
Last year’s three-part compilation series on 3024, “It Was Always There”, featuring a host of artists from the 3024 Mentoring Program signaled the very first time my mentoring activities had bled into my label activities. One of the write-ups for that release stated that the Mentoring Program had become a community of its own and, while I’m hesitant to throw the word ‘community’ around for every endeavor including more than three people, it made me and Jeroen (Erosie, my partner in 3024) think about how a record label could perform that function. Instead of only being a one-way intermediary between an artist and a record shop, a label in 2022 can facilitate interactions between artists, supporters, and other creative people, all going in multiple directions. A couple of weeks ago, I got to meet some of my mentees in real life at Nowadays for a mentoring session. We played new unfinished music on the system, discussed its progress, who knows maybe prepare a future release, and then later that night had a rave where all that energy comes together! A variety of activities but all under the same banner - Everything Merged. That’s the theme of this year’s new compilations, with fresh new talent on 3024 such as Guava, blu-e, No Sir, Hatterii, Adam 2 and many more. Very proud of this release, and really stoked for you to hear it!!
SECOND THING: TUTTO MOLTO BOLOGNA
If there’s one important thing I learned about documenting culture in recent years, is that you just have to start with something you’re passionate about, and its relevancy may well reveal itself at a much later time. Laurent Fintoni, who has been writing about music and culture since the early 2000s, for outlets such as Fact, RBMA and Bandcamp and author of the incredibly thorough instrumental hiphop compendium ‘Bedroom Beats & B-Sides’ (a TIP if you haven’t read it), started taking photos of wall writings in the Italian city of Bologna in late 2019 and all throughout the pandemic as part of a Master’s degree at the University there. Contrary to graffiti, these writings have various themes, sometimes funny, sometimes political, mostly hyper local, and they serve as a sort of vernacular memory for the city and its inhabitants. Laurent collected photos and a map of all its locations and titled the project ‘I Muri Non Finisco Mai’ ('The Walls Never Finish’) Find a thread explaining the project here, more info here, and the maps are here.
THIRD THING: RE-EVALUATING PROMISES
For my NTS show The Darkest Light I recently interviewed Washington DC-based french horn player Abe Mamet. I also asked him to pick some of his favorite music and he picked the piece ‘Movement 6’ by Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders from their ‘Promises’ album (on Luaka Bop). When that record came out I bought it but only sat with it briefly, and to be honest spent more time reading the (wide ranging) reviews. But Abe’s words about why he picked it made me revisit it. When most of the world was locked down, Abe said, he was mostly immersed in his own music and music made by friends. ‘Promises’ was the first sort of ‘global’ release that a large part of the (jazz) world was talking about. A major release like that also made him reach out to friends and share that listening experience, which made this particular piece of music so special to him. Now that Pharoah passed away and we know this was his final recording, it would be a good time to reset opinions, much in the same way a lot of did with Dilla’s Donuts. In both cases I don’t think it’s the respective artists’ greatest work but certainly says something about their superior creativity and tendency to follow their own paths.
FOURTH THING: HAMMERED HULLS
Last but not least, some punk and hardcore news - check out ‘Careening’, the new album by Washington DC band Hammered Hulls on Dischord. Kind of a DC supergroup featuring there-since-day-1 Alec MacKaye (Faith, Ignition), Mark Cisneros (The Make Up, Des Demonas), Mary Timony and Chris Wilson, and engineered by Alec’s brother Ian MacKaye (yes). This was the very last album recorded at Don Zientara’s Inner Ear Studios, in Arlington VA. Since the early 80s, Zientara’s sound defined punk and hardcore, and Inner Ear is where he recorded legendary bands like Bad Brains, Teen Idles, Scream and of course Minor Threat and Fugazi. There was a great episode of Dave Grohl’s HBO show Sonic Highways that features the studio (Grohl started his career with the band Scream before moving to Seattle). But all the factoids aside, this album stands firmly with one foot in local music tradition and with another in the present, and I love it! Buy on Bandcamp or stream in nice quality here.