Welcome to Four Things #29. A couple of weeks ago I had a long conversation with Scuba for his “Not a Diving Podcast” in which he asked me about the future of Bandcamp. This was just before the news came out that Bandcamp’s new owner, the publishing/licensing company Songtradr, had fired over 50% of the original staff. A deluge of analyses have since been written, and most writers link this development to the inevitable ‘enshittification’ (or ‘platform decay’) of tech companies. This is the phenomenon that any original, groundbreaking idea on the internet eventually hits a turning point for the worse (for the user). In the initial phase, the platform is good for users, after that it becomes better for investors and much less for users, after that it turns to only enriching the platform itself, and finally, it dies. What bothers me a little bit about this is that surrendering to the inevitable demise of a platform like Bandcamp also prevents us from thinking of ways to save it or even improve it. We should not have to settle for the idea that good, innovative ideas have to keep growing larger to then become investment (exploitation) opportunities for corporations. What if we put our energy not in growth but in working sideways, build multiple Bandcamps instead of relying on just one. Maybe if we'd promote a culture of not just sustaining the artists but also sustaining the platforms they are on as part of the ecosystem, then growth and outside investment wouldn’t be as necessary for survival. The fresh ideas have to come from us! If we keep supporting the Black Artist Databases, Buy Music Clubs, Aslices, and Make The Tings as well as other small but positive tools for change we are more resilient.
Anyway here are the Things! .. I always appreciate your thoughts, comments and observations. 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 love and health..
Martyn
Oct 26th, 2023
FIRST THING: COSMOSIS
3024 is more known as a singles label than an album label, but on the few occasions we have taken on larger projects they turned out very special. There was my debut album “Great Lengths” in 2009, Leon Vynehall’s “Music for the Uninvited”, and my project with Steffi as Doms & Deykers “Evidence from a Good Source”. This week we announced another addition to that list, Otik’s beautifully immersive debut album “Cosmosis”. Ashley (Otik) made this record early on during the pandemic, initially without an intent to release it - as it reflected a period of extreme creativity while addressing a fragile struggle with personal ethical, religious and philosophical questions. This resulted in a set of songs that convey a sense of immersion and then reawakening. After reflecting on that period for a while Ashley finally decided to release the music into the world and sent it to me. With the help of the 3024 team we sculpted the set of songs into a finished record and now it’s time for people to listen to it and enjoy it! Check out “Rebirth” on streamers (don’t forget to add it to your playlists) and/or pre-order the record both digi and vinyl on the 3024 Bandcamp.
SECOND THING: Wallpaper vs. Message
The other day I came across a great post on Giulia Blocal’s Substack. Giulia writes about travel and street art, and was visiting Rotterdam’s All Caps mural festival, where she pondered the disconnect at these types of festivals between those artists that paint pleasing, ‘pretty’ imagery (large flowers, hummingbirds etc) and artists such as the Brazilian painter Eneri whose work has a strong political message combined with more jarring typography. Rotterdam residents complained that Eneri’s anti colonial messaging wasn’t what they expected from the festival. I had to think back to Jeroen Erosie’s ‘Horror Vacui’ piece in Poznan Poland of which i used a photo for my Ghost People album back in 2014, which depicts the constant graphic overload in our society and how it diminishes our ability to discern what it is we’re looking at. I love that piece, but it is not particularly ‘pretty’ or mood-setting as say a giant sunflower on the side of an apartment building - almost like a graphic equivalent of ‘chill lo-fi beats to study to’, a pleasing but unadventurous vibe for in the background.
The analogy with electronic music is not too far fetched, there’s plenty of music around that checks the right boxes, is satisfying and pleasing, ‘does what it says on the tin’ and fulfills the expectations of the rave. Yet a lot of that music drowns out those sounds that may be slightly more jarring, or questioning. I feel the best musical experience has to have some sort of challenge to taste or expectation, something that surprises you and you’re not sure whether you like it, that is what widens your musical scope. Or, as a friend of mine once said ‘It’s nothing if it doesn’t make your brain itch’. Check out Giulia’s post here, follow Eneri, as a perhaps musical equivalent of Eneri’s work check out or revisit the works on Colombia’s Insurgentes label.
THIRD THING: SLOW ASTRO
A couple months ago I sat down for a longform interview with Charlie Fieber aka dj Fracture about his “0860” project, an homage to the early jungle scene and in particular to the role of pirate radio in it. He told me about the value of ‘artifacts’ in sampling, small additives to a clean sound that stem from random sources or technical processes that provide color and character and are often lacking in a ‘clean’ sample. Examples of artifacts are desk saturation, vinyl crackle, radio channel interference, they can be little ‘tails’ from prior sounds, accidental occurrences or strange harmonics that appear when you speed up or slow down a sound. Fracture went down that particular rabbit hole a little further and started to take an interest in playing entire tracks a lot slower. He discovered a more sluggish, lo-fi sound with more bottom end and heaviness and this led to the Slow Astro project, a series of mixtapes made up of back catalog material from his Astrophonica label, but with all the music severely slowed down. The mixtapes are really amazing, like listening to everything at 33 instead of 45rpm, the morning after the rave, like discovering almost an entirely new genre of music. I’ve started to record some of my old dnb records at 33 and then sampling them and it opens up a whole new range of possibilities with sound. Check out Slow Astro right here.
FOURTH THING: Nicholas G. Padilla
Miami as a hotbed for electronic music seems to always come with the caveat of brilliant artists operating in their own little separate universes. Be it the house legends Murk, breakcore madman Otto von Schirach or the gritty low-fi house producer Greg Beato ; to the outsider it never felt like all these brilliant artists were part of a singular scene. Danny Daze’s Omnidisc label feels like an attempt to bring both genres as well as generations of Miami artists under one umbrella, most notably on the excellent compilation ‘Homecore! Miami All Stars’ which featured the aforementioned alongside leaders of the new school Nick Léon, Coffintexts, INVT & Bitter Babe. Another one of the standouts on that comp was Nicholas G. Padilla, who now has his own EP on the label, lots of disjointed synths and echoes of the bass continuum. The download comes with several PDFs of ancient gnostic texts (!). One of the most exciting releases for me this year:
A number of years ago I made a “Screwstep” mix of early dubstep 12s played at 33 instead of 45...not all tracks worked but the ones that worked really worked well with the swing stretched out and the bass overwhelming...