After crashing and Jay and Lori’s house for a few weeks, my first living arrangement was in the basement of a vet clinic. It was an unfinished basement, and I lived with pet food and other assorted equipment. There was a shower, microwave, and plug-in kettle for instant coffee, and all in all, it was a pretty cool basement as far as basements go – because if you opened the double doors at night, it would land out beside this shipping dock where those gigantic international freight ships would sit in the ocean, with their cinematic, thousand watt lights blaring into the sky.

There was a vintage X-ray unit in this basement, and Jay let me set up all my equipment on it. First to go on the X-ray table was the relic of our times – the digital Fostex recorder, produced in the late 90’s to early 2000’s. It worked fast and quietly at a time where average PC’s were slow, noisy and expensive. The ghosts of old X-rays must have permeated the old school digital Fostex, because years later, we found some older tracks buzzing out of the fostex’s hard drive that sounded better than they should have (some even made it onto our new LP). Behind the x-ray table, I put the drums, then ran wires to the kitchenette, which became the vocal booth and mix down room. I put up some curtains on the basement windows, so no one could peek inside.

About once a month, there would be a new ebay’d microphones arriving at the clinic. I’d find all these vintage, less common (and cheap) German, Russian, Chinese and U.S. manufactured microphones. Most microphones, up close, look like something out of THX 1138. Is this why engineering is such a male dominated profession? I’d stick mics everywhere and record anything, from the pitter patter of vancouver island rain on tin roof tops to slugging my way through the instruments that I was slowly acquiring. I was incrementally learning these tools, but didn’t know how to put everything together yet, and you could hear that in the music. All my recordings that summer were disappointing – the kind of thing that friends would smile at to be kind, but you knew that the real connection to be made was not there yet. The slightest ability to do something new was enough of a reason to keep going with it thought, and with every place I moved to, something got better. Although I couldn’t articulate it back then, what I was doing was figuring out the necessary pieces to create a pallet; sorting through the infinite availability of equipment and software that the net provides, to focus on the best representative sounds.

I began to write short, biographic stories to wring out ideas. I’d just heard from an old friend, Jen, who I hadn’t seen for many years, and I’d write up these short stories to show her where I’d been. I’d put these stories to music in the months that followed, and recorded them on the X-ray table. I made most of the noise and recordings overnight or on weekends when the clinic overhead was closed. Although the place was made of thick concrete and had good sound proofing, I wondered what the locals and tourists thought of all those muffled drums beats coming out of the vet clinic. The sound of a cheapo pawnshop keyboard and pump organ also blared out of the vet clinic for a few months. I had no experience with keyboards, until a classmate named Laura left her Casio at my place a year earlier while working on a song of hers. I plugged the Casio into this cheap little tube preamp, which resulted in a fuzzy tone that I got excited about.

Once in a while, Tash would knock on the basement door. I think she heard all the sounds coming out of the basement. She worked in the clinic above, and we became friends. We’d get popcorn, and started watching movies on occasion. She would listen to some of the demo’s I’d made (a lot of them were probably vocal-less, rambling jams, since I didn’t know how to produce myself at that point), and would give me the thumbs up nonetheless. Being a small, island town, people would talk, and rumours would fly. Sigh…I never saw her again after she left town a year or so later.

I moved out of the basement, and my next place was going to be a weeks stay at Trish and Scotts house up the road. Their beautiful home used to be a hostel – it even had urinals in bathroom. I had just received a pair of Russian, pencil bodied mics, and I planned out 4 or 5 songs I wanted to do that week…

addendum….so many mic’s, trails of wire and so many places have left their mark on this album. Some of these mics would not look out of place orbiting the planet, when viewed up close and personal. The telenfunken stereo basket mic, when it worked, showed up on various vocal or acoustic guitar tracks on ‘the plan’. The cello was recorded through just about everything. The blackfire mic came with its original box, which featured 70’s musicians with disco bell bottoms. The microphone featured up top, with its multiple grills, was what Dareck sang ‘got a new kitty’ through.

Spreading the word about something within the digital saturation is deceivingly tricky. It seems like there are a lot of opportunities, and if you get all your clicks in a row, you can spread all the words you want, and make some kind of ‘impact’ for what you are offering up. However, if you’ve been with us for a few months, you know that most of those opportunities are actually advertising and promotion ideas that have come out of the machine – the methods developed during the heyday of the marketing industry. Those strategies are experiencing new life online as people throw them your way as an ‘indispensable blueprint to promote your work”. They are strategies that try to put you in the drivers seat.

The main insight is this – if you have truly innovated in your work, then you have to be comfortable with destination unknown. You ain’t in the drivers seat, but along for the ride. People will sacrifice their time to experience your art form, and tell other people about it on their own terms. When we signed up for CDbaby (an organization that will broker your album onto Itunes), the months that followed found our inbox brimming with promises. Online services that bragged about maximize our exposure to hundreds of ‘relevant’ sites, including exposure to “industry professionals”. Sign ups for banner ads on websites that get a million clicks a day. Invites to web based artist platforms that proudly boast that they cater to “thousands of artists” and promised to distribute our music to everyone known to mankind. Publicity outfits that wanted to broker us to traditional mass market print media, mass media radio, and DIY info on how to make a “street team”. I think all of those things actually represent the way to stay anonymous to those that need to hear from us the most. The cultural conditions required for those methods to work are rapidly fading, if not already gone.

I was driving Jen to work a few months ago, and CBC radio broadcast a spot for a local band that Dareck and I had saw at the Mercury lounge in Ottawa. They’re similar to us in that they are a new, pre-critical mass group, probably on the verge of finishing their first album. We thought they sounded pretty good, and had a promising vibe especially when the female guitarist took some of the vocal duties. Anyways, it was a popular morning radio show, and they described the band a bit, played some of their songs, and advertised their gig, which took place later that evening. The spot ran at least a few times in the day. I wanted to know what the effect of this mass-media coverage was, to see if the ideas about spreading ideas that i’d been reading about held up. I also wanted to know, because if you go by first instinct, you’ll hear that radio spot, and feel like “we should be doing that too”, or you’ll start asking yourself “so how did they get on that show…”, and your mind has already stepped onto the path of wasting time and energy were it doesn’t need to go.

Here’s the quick and dirty analysis I did that morning. CBC radio Ottawa has a large potential listening base (close to a million people), given that the city is Canada’s fourth biggest urban location. Let’s assume a very small percentage of the population were listening…maybe ten thousand or so. So, what was the effect of mass media exposure, based on the bands measurable myspace online activity? That day, the bands myspace visit count jumped by fifty. Hey, fifty visits is fifty visits. However, if any money, significant time or effort was spent on that radio campaign, then it was probably wise to recognize that 50 into 10,000 gives a response rate of 0.5 percent. This number is typical for distraction based marketing. The hypothesis behind those kind of response numbers is that people have learned to tune out unsolicited messages. Obviously this isn’t a scientific analysis, nor is it intended to reflect badly on this band. We’d probably be trying at the same things twelve months ago, undoubtedly with the same result. Was there at least a persistent effect – did those 50 visits or plays on their website, regardless of an initial, dismal response rate, turn into anything else? The next day, the bands myspace plays dropped to three, which is a typical, baseline level of not much happening on myspace (I should know, because that’s where our own useless myspace site stayed for a long time after we set it up). In twenty four hours, their page visit counts returned to what they previously were before exposure to thousands on thousands of people.

So, I think Godin (2003) has got things right – the resources and energy previously placed into advertising and marketing art/literature or any creative work must now be funneled into creating innovations within it. This is essential, because if you are average or exchangeable, then you are effectively invisible. The idea is that you must take your innovative work of art, and connect with passionate people who are already looking for what you have (consciously or unconsciously). If you’ve got a few right people on your side, you’ve got a shot at creating an environment that supports the continued growth of your work, basically.

A bands ‘fight or flight’ response is to ‘create or captivate’. And this only seems to happen within a reciprocal relationship. That inner drone that disposes us to music also says that without people to share it with, it begins to feel like an insular endeavour. It becomes an undertaking that is too much about ‘me me me’, which feels non-adaptive and vestigial. So, as a band, in the process of supporting our first LP, we are on the first date. We see you standing there, and it makes our palms sweaty, breath rate fast and shallow and heart rate rise. Now, we can date promiscuously, or we can put up our dukes with those who are also looking for answers, companionship, or a way out…

According to Goding (2003), the key to understanding how music or works of art gains awareness in today’s culture is by realizing one thing – you will only be sought out by the innovators and early adopters. These people are not average, nor are they interested in actively seeking things designed for the masses. Early adopters and innovators are not looking for inspiration within ‘average consumer products’. So even though early adopters and innovators represent a fraction of the population, they are everything and the apple of our eye, because we rarely hold court for strangers that we think are average, do we? We want those who want us as well.

As Godin loves to point out, the largest audience you think you have access to, is the very one that will be the best at ignoring you. It’s the classic Hollywood motion picture theme of unrequited love – spending all your time and emotions trying to get noticed by someone who barely notices your alive, while the one who really wants you is getting sloppy attention seconds. It is important for us to get real comfortable with that idea, because it implies that to plan the introduction of our music to everyone, is to actually introduce it to no one. If we spend all our time and money trying to reach the masses, chances are that we run out or resources, momentum and motivation before we can find those we can hold a litter closer…

ok…those of you looking for it…your going to get all of our attention….if we are not what you need, we can’t help it at all…

(previous post in this series:  swivel)

My body doesn’t want to change. It’s sabotaged me, and got it’s ducks in a row. If you align the right muscles, and twist them so a knot appears, then charlies your uncle if a nerve get’s caught up in the fray. Ha ha it says- your destined to record in a messy bedroom forever….

The messy bedroom phenomenon began to show its limitations a few years back. Basements and bedrooms formed the staple of our songwriting and recording environment. You don’t really see the clutter when the clutter is all you have to work in – but even more importantly, the state of the space is just not a priority when most of your effort is spent in just trying to get something started in the first place. Dareck and I spent a lot of time in Guelph a few years back, and that’s also when we got our first taste of multitrack recording. I was learning how to record, and Dareck had just found a way to translate his ideas into arrangements that flourished in this format. I’d go to school in the day, and sometimes Dareck would stay in the apartment, spending the day with congo drums, two mics, a guitar and bass to record. The big dejembe drum, when miced up from the bottom, served as the kick sound. Sometimes, when I got back from classes, Dareck would have this dazed look, and he wouldn’t have have too much to play back on the multitrack. He would just point to the “recording room” (the bedroom in disarray) with an exasperated look. Now that I’ve got my own place, it’s time for the messy bedroom/apartment/basement concept to be supplanted. My place is definitely better than the old basements and bedrooms, but it’s unnecessarily utilitarian. The kitchen cart on broken castors, which formed the hub of our music making system, wants to retire.

So all of January, I’ve just been feverishly working on the environment. My arm has fought back in the form of a squeezed out nerve, but no matter, it’s going to get finished. The process of massaging the equipment, colours and furnishings into a new state is akin to mixing music – much of the intended effect comes down to the arrangement, the focal point and intent. I’ve ripped out cubboards, painted out dark colours (dark things are readily found if you go looking for them – i don’t need them staring me in the face all the time), and refinished/upholstered the greatest of MCM thrifty finds. This weekend, I watched Dareck improvise and build a kitchen island in the same way he might write a song. In his new balance running shoes, dareck trudged up a country hill covered in 4 feet of snow, and we took some 30 year old barn boards from Jen’s old horse barn. We then bought some steel bars from gargantuan depot. Dareck brought his laptop and we streamed lots of music from spotify; but I just remember yoko ono. She’s still at it, which is impressive. While Yoko filled the garage, Dareck would take a piece of steel, or whatever, and would start working on it – if that tool didn’t yield the right result, he’d drop it instantaneously (they are rubber coated, and hence bounce off the floor), and grab the next one on the roster until he got the effect he was looking for. We had to stop a few times to move things when the sparks from the steel cutter bounced off a gas can, or into the electric heater. The nerve in my arm turned me useless – I was an ok clamp though – I just held onto stuff real tight.

Dareck cut the barn boards at the side of the road so it would fit in the toyota. People stopped to see if his car shut down. He said no, im cutting wood.

Cutting out metal for the frame makes for the coolest garage band lightshow…

putting the frame together…

put dowels in barn boards, then push them together…

just about finished;

We’ve built a cooking nest in the kitchen at Roncesvalles.
After having watched “Julie and Julia” an inspiration came
over the two of us to recreate the warmth of Julia Child’s
kitchen that now adorns the Smithsonian. The freezing
temperatures were the perfect backdrop to bake banana
bread and get the fireplace going to warm our toes.
The bottle of Bailey’s kept the power tools primed and
before long the pots were hanging and the cupboards now
had the room to organize themselves.

Now that the album is out hanging on the Masonite, next
to the spoon and measuring cup, we can finally start
cooking. We can share the creative meal we’ve made with
friends at the kitchen table.

There is one empty chair and a decade of distance
between us. My step-father passed away. Interestingly
enough I learned of his death after building the kitchen
workshop. Neil Diamond’s “Hot August night” on vinyl
was playing. I thought of Reg and the turntable that only
I was allowed to touch. I found the strength to look him
up on the internet. Maybe I’d go visit him. Play him the
record. He’d be proud of me I think.

Reg passed away in April of 2009 at the age of 57.
He taught me how to throw a ball. How to make
a bow and arrow. How to shoot a camera. He taught
me how to drive a car though he clung to the dash-
board. He could outrun me when I was in my teens.

We do things for the ones we love. Sometimes its
not until after its done do we know how it functions
and recognize its purpose.

Don`t scratch the vinyl.

Hold it like this.

Place the needle down gently.

Close the lid.

Lie down
…and Dream.

]]> http://www.lnoyl.com/2010/01/04/roncesvalles/feed/ 0 http://www.lnoyl.com/2009/12/18/quattro-rock-o/ http://www.lnoyl.com/2009/12/18/quattro-rock-o/#comments Sat, 19 Dec 2009 00:04:15 +0000 Dareck http://www.lnoyl.com/?p=988 Oh my…tuning this thing is next to impossible. I have to balance the wrench on the neck then use the pliers to twist the string with my left hand and then use my right hand to tighten the Robertson screw tight. I know it isn’t E … that doesn’t matter… so long as nothing breaks and I don’t lose an eye.  The whammy works although I worry what given the sounds of cracking and all.

I’m actually surprised that the neck action isn’t all that bad. The nails work awesome and theres only one spot on the 4th string that needs adjusting. Hmmm. I just might write something with this.

Love D

I was going to write a congratulatory note in here stating all the many wonderful accomplishments we’ve managed to achieve this year but its too soon. There’s still two weeks left in 2009 and I’m not ready to stop just yet.

I’m not all that happy because as productive as we’ve been what with the vinyl and the book and the C.D and the shows, I still feel like it hasn’t been enough. I haven’t written enough. There was a time when I’d get home and just write songs. They weren’t all that great but I was doing it enough that sometimes there would be a diamond in the rough. Something I’d be proud enough to share.

I was really into keyboards. I had loads of them. I taught myself MIDI and learned the joys of sequencing with early 80’s technology. What a nightmare. I did it though. There were some pretty interesting accidents that I know Kris wishes I could remember. Serendipitous adventures in cable knotting.

I’m craving the exploration. I can’t handle the PDF manuals anymore. It got too clinical and too cold.

I’ve got all this wood in my basement. Fragments of discarded shelves and drawers from forgotten dressers and furniture. I’m fastening the pieces together into a voice. Bits of aluminum to tighten the strings, a stained handle is a bridge to grip the body.

The Quattro has a whammy bar. Its fastened to two tongues on the inside of the box. The fret board is completely handmade with finishing nails. The neck is drying now. I haven’t been this excited in a while. Even if it sounds horrible. I just want to write a song. Maybe its charmed. Maybe it’ll come back to me. Maybe I’ll be inspired.

Love D.

- records on etsy -

http://www.etsy.com/shop/lnoyl

ETSY

We currently have our records, books and CD’s on etsy. We chose etsy because a) I lost patience fiddling with the wordpress e-cart plugin and associated html, and b) etsy seems to largely support independent artists who produce their own things. When I took all the boxes, bubble bags and records to the post office to get them weighed and measured to figure out shipping costs, the clerk wasn’t to impressed or as helpful as when he was calculating shipping quotes for the young lady he was assisting. Next time, im taking a blonde chick with me to the post office…

- Free mp3’s -

Our full album is now available as a free download (http://www.lnoyl.com/order/). The mp3 files have metadata, meaning that when you stickem in your ipod, the artwork shows up.

- Live E.P. –

Our tracks from the Nov 28th live show just arrived, and I’ll be starting to get down to business mixing them this weekend. The late night mixing sessions will be illuminated and inspired by the 5 inch black and white TVO radiation…

- Cardboard -

Linda, I don’t live amongst cardboard boxes, really. Every time Linda drops by, which is annually and usually around December, the landing and living room is a sea of cardboard boxes. She must think I am a suburban squatter or shanty aficionado, or an afflicted hoarder. As it currently stands, you can’t walk in here. You can only walk over, through, then shift to the left because of all the cardboard. When my stuff shipped from Vancouver two years ago, Linda dropped by and saw 40 or 50 large cardboard boxes all over the place. I had been living with those Uhual boxes for 3 years. In one place on Vancouver Island, I actually built walls with my filled up Uhaul boxes to construct a make shift studio and living quarters.

I eventually got rid of the Uhaul’s in Ottawa, creating the space that became the breeding ground for all my modernist furniture hunting exploits. Things looked cardboard free, until my sisters belongings were shipped here, resulting room to room cardboard boxes again. I didn’t mind, but it was perfectly timed for when Linda arrived to see them all again the following year. It took a few months, but those boxes are all packed away in a spare room now. This week, everything arrived, within a few days of each other. There is a gigantic box of Unline bubble wrap, record mailers, CD mailers, books, and half a pallet of records. Although I missed her visit this morning, Linda dropped by…

- YOW and the records -

Getting the vinyl records turned Wednesday into a whole day affair of travel, pout and phone calls. My tracking numbers showed that the records arrived (albeit late, thus missing the release show) to YOW. YOW is Ottawa airport. So I went to YOW. Now, before going there, I checked the websites of all parties involved, and no one will tell you anything. The manufacturing plant won’t say where to pick up the records, and nor will anyone else. I figured actually going to YOW would be my best bet in getting accurate information (or any information). I first showed up at YOW cargo. The man behind the counter gave me a funny look, put down his newspaper for a few keystrokes, then said, nope, records not here. Maybe you better check the “airomat” -- circle the airport, then right, then left. I drove around the airport, looking for a sign or something called “airomat”. I checked the YOW website on my phone -- which of course says nothing about anything called an “airomat”. I parked the car, and went to the one and only information desk on the first floor. Interestingly, at YOW, there is no permanent airport information staff. It’s run by volunteers. The very polite volunteer hadn’t heard of the “airomat”, and wasn’t sure where my cargo could be. She told me to call the airline, British Airways in Montreal. We called, but there was no answer (at 10am on a Wednesday!). She then said to try Canada Customs, and pointed down the hall to the ‘going to get into trouble and deported’ part of the airport (its customs and the police office). I walked into customs, and the room was empty. Vacant chairs, and a phone on the counter. I picked up the phone, and up popped the service representative. I explained that I was trying to pick up a cargo shipment -- was it at customs? He said hmmmmmmmm, then gave me a number to call for help. The automated, generic, national Canada Customs general info line was not very helpful. I walked out of the airport, somewhat dejected. There wasn’t even a British airline counter to make any queries at. YOW stands for “You’reOurWhore”, so don’t expect too much.

I drove back home, and called British Airways home office. They told me to call the trucking company (yes trucking, even though it arrived by air). The trucking company transferred me to some other division. The lady at the end of this line was able to give me a phone number for the one and only “airomat”. I asked if she knew where it was, and she laughed -- she was in the US, and had no idea! I called the “airomat” number, and the person on the line answered as a representative for “BD”. I said err..umm…is this airomat? He says, yup, “BD”. He told me he had my records, and gave me the address (it’s in the same vicinity as YOW, but off site). When I got there, I couldn’t find “BD”, so I walked into the main building, and a customs officer informed me that they might be the place near the end. I went to the absolute end, and found “BD” (there was something else on their sign. Im pretty sure it wasn’t “BD”) The guy gave me some paper work, and then said I had to go to customs before I could pick them up. I went back to customs, and the officer, upon hearing my request to pick up 1000 vinyl records, asked If I had a broker. I did not (I guess it’s not like ordering something vie Ebay or UPS, where they do all the brokerage for you). But I did have a business number, so I could get started. She presented me with a booklet, form, and counter with a calculator and reference texts. Ok, multiple choice, just like school, I though too myself, I can do this. I can broker this deal! After close to an hour of struggling through it (just like school), she must have took pity on me, because she came over and walked me through the rest of the form. There is actually a section in this triple phone book sized manual that has codes and tariff’s and all that stuff for importing gramophone records. She buzzed right through it, and in 10 minutes I was paid up, and out the door, heading back to BD-Airomat-YOW. Why can’t all border agents be like her? At BD, we packed a toyota corrola with all the records. 15 cases of cardboard later, the body of the car sunk close to the wheels, but the suspension held up…

- TEST PRESS winner -

To keep things objective and unbiased, everyone’s name who entered into the raffle was assigned to a number, which was subsequently printed on the back of our cards. I randomized these cards on the floor, then went one step further. We removed all human interference from the process. Not by using a computer. No, that would be too easy. We used Felis catus. I stuck on piece of kibble on each card, then released the cat. First time, he flew over the cards and didn’t notice the food, which is very uncharacteristic of him. He must have known he was in an experiment like setting. Scientists would call this biological noise in the data. The second time I released him, Felis catus made his choice:

#5 is Jeff & Lori -- congratulations -- test pressing coming your way.

- Slides -

I picked up a modernistic slide viewer at the thrift shop today. A few months ago, Dareck and I were looking for older video gear to create some filtered shots. At one thrift location, I picked out this functional metal box. There was a collection of slides inside. They belonged to an Ottawa resident, who took a trip to California in 1959 (there are pencilled descriptions written on the cardboard). He took snapshots from the plane (the plane must have been relatively empty, because he got shots from both sides of the cabin), streets, and buildings. Letting go of unwieldy furniture is one thing. I can’t help feel a little blue for this person, who has probably passed on (why else would his box of 1959 mementos be at the Sally Anne), and no one wanted to keep his photos. Im going to view the rest of them tonight, and maybe bring a few, mixed in with our own, to the next show…

- Next Week -

Hopefully the live tracks from the release event will arrive for mix down. Then, a download link will be sent to all who signed up for the live EP. I’ve got to find places for all these boxes, get some labels and photo’s done, then the records are finally ready to ship. After that, I’m getting back to writing…

]]> http://www.lnoyl.com/2009/12/05/cardboard-data/feed/ 0 http://www.lnoyl.com/2009/11/29/11-28-09-event/ http://www.lnoyl.com/2009/11/29/11-28-09-event/#comments Mon, 30 Nov 2009 02:28:12 +0000 kristopher http://www.lnoyl.com/?p=736

We had a blast because of all of you who came out to the show – thank you. What a great vibe you sent our way. I’ve got a few pic’s I took during set up, and more will trickle in as the days go by – I saw Aaron and Val clicking away.  The raffle for the test pressing will take place tomorrow, and I’ll email the winner – It will be shipped via express post.  Good luck!  Every one who signed up, and/or purchased the graphic novel will be sent a link for the Live E.P. as soon as the tracks are mixed. Click on any pic below to scroll through the gallery…

Venue was pretty sweet. Thanks for letting us use the place Micheal;

With ceilings this tall, you know the acoustics are going to sound great.

Dareck’s  & Robin’s armoire merch table, next to the phantom limb experiment.

Vira, thanks for braving the alley way.

Opening act was Josh Grant, who gave a great lecture on consciousness and perception.

Soundcheck.

Wearing these and moving side to side in the dim room…are you experienced? Yeah, experienced.

Dareck is on his 30th dremel tool bit. This piece was done for the show.

Test pressing raffle, with its wooden casing.

Our show is on Saturday, and we’ll see you there. Big thanks to those who were able to lend us an ear during the rehearsals this week. Will let you know how it goes…

This morning, while staring upside down over the bed, reading off the Ipod touch, I learned that the record manufacturing plant, located in the Czech Republic, had pushed back our delivery date. This meant our records would not make it in time for our release event. I got up, emptied the bowl of cornflakes they had just peed in, and got to work typing up my “constructive feedback” to the manufacturing plant. Just before I hit the send button, Google auto popped another message on the screen; Jakub, our english speaking contact at the plant, had recalled our release date, and then apparently got together with Jana, our other contact at the plant, to sort it all out. The timing would still be ridiculously tight, but the morning was now flushed out, and optimism remained. This meant that it was time to surf “Used Ottawa” and “kijiji” (not so much craigslist anymore, because you can’t quickly scan through pictures without having to click on every single link).

If you see me scrolling on my cell phone, that’s probably what im doing – checking out “UsedOttawa”. This behaviour materialized because I got tired of dragging the futon mattress upstairs at night for sleeping, the particle board MALM coffee table who’s lower shelf sagged with every other magazine, the Ikea kitchen cart that functioned as a mixing desk (music, not cake mix), and the rest of the cardboard boxes and student furniture I’ve been holding onto since I moved back to Ontario. My sister, who is talented at creating livable and inspiring interiors on a budget, suggested I focus my attention on mid century modern design (MCM). The first time I saw examples of it, my reaction was “70’s furniture, why would I want any of that?” She shook her head, and then explained that yes, when we were little kids, MCM design was popular with mass market furniture manufactures and retailers, and thus could be found everywhere, which is why our generation would think of it as “70’s furniture.” It turns out that while achieving ubiquity in the 1970’s, MCM design can in fact be traced to the 1930’s. There is a classic element to it that if done properly, can appear perennial or indefinite. Check out “Revolution Road” (married couple struggling within the stifle of 1950’s suburbia) or Gattaca (futuristic SCFI, filmed in the late nineties). Both great flicks, and combinations of MCM found within the set design are equally at home amongst these differing environments. I think of MCM furniture as natural shapes, often perched on spindly little legs. Corralling MCM furniture is like collecting spiders.

To further my understanding of furniture and design, my sister then drew an analogy to music. Design in the furniture world is sort of like genre in music. On the whole, there is not infinite variety. There are generalized categories, which have their own history and story of development. Each carries its own message, and intends to get that message across according to it’s own set of rules. And then there are fusions, some of which are considered successful (rap rock a la rage against the machine or bad brains), and some of which are destined to be forever disposable or tacky (bubble gum screamo pop). My view on what furniture was all about changed when she explained this. I guess I wasn’t going to make multiple trips to Ikea after all, because furniture was no longer something I could, or should casually obtain. I had to think about it, then hunt it down. If you are very patient, and very, very persistent with the thrift shops and online markets, then over about a year, you can get sleeper MCM pieces which are usually built to a high standard. You can obtain enough to create a natural and stimulating living area, at minimal cost. This is true, because it just so happens that people who purchased quality MCM designs, 30 to 50 years ago, are now moving on in life, selling their family homes, along with all the furniture that is no longer being used. The abandoned furniture becomes a “a job to get done” by the busy older kids in the family. So to the thrift shop it goes, or put on “UsedOttawa” for bargain basement prices. Older MCM is plentiful, undervalued, well built and designed, and the abundance will not always be with us. In fifteen years time, I can see all the eighties furniture hitting the market in droves…

There was a listing for B&W speakers, going for 40 bucks. I thought they could be a perfect match for a mint, 1972 Sony amplifier/receiver I picked up, for close to the same cost. The amp literally looked like it just came out of its shipping box for the first time. It’s origins were not of injection molded cheap plastic; this machine is assembled from wood and stainless steel, with solid relay switches and levers. Planned obsolescence was not a design goal for Sony in 1972. I called the “speaker guy” up, and found out that they were all ready taken. But, he had this neat, vintage swan-style chair (Arne Jacobsen inspired). When the desirable items show up amongst the plethora of crap on “UsedOttawa”, you’ve got to get your ass in gear and move, once you’ve laid eyes on it. Within minutes. Even after you’ve called, made the deal, and start to drive over to pick it up, other people will keep calling the seller, and ramp up the price by the time you arrive (this has happened to me twice!). At one sellers house this spring, some guy actually pretended to be me, and “took” the Barcelona Ottoman that was being “reserved” until I got there after work. It was going for peanuts, and that brings out the fast and ruthless. The “speaker guy” I talked too said he would be there for at least another hour, and that I could come over now. He lived by the airport, so I figured I could get ready, and be there just in time.

Bungee cords, measuring tape and screw driver must always be kept in the car – or else you will be forced to leave things behind when you arrive to pick them up. It’s always hard to tell the scale of furniture on the pixelated “UsedOttawa” photos, so the corolla sometimes needs help staying closed on the highway trip back. After a frantic, ten minute opening every drawer in the house session, I found two bungee cords, jumped in the car, and hit the X. At the gas station up the road, I flailed towards the ATM, but failed notice the amber ‘gas light’ glowing on the dash when I exited the parking lot. I was thinking Arne Jacobsen, not fill er’ up. Three blocks later, there was a traffic accident, and I sat idling for about 15 minutes before I could pass.

I turned off the highway with fifteen minutes to spare, but then I took a wrong turn on Bank Street. As I turned around to head back in the right direction, the corolla sputtered, and then started to coast. The amber light was now dead, because I had ran out of gas. Bank street is very busy at noon, and I was repelled by the thought of being a traffic impediment on this road. Plus, paying for a tow truck would leave no money for the swan styled chair. But the car kept on coasting! We had the alignment done just last week and maybe that’s why it drifted in neutral as far as it did. If I was forced to hit the brake, I was dead in the water, stuck on the road. I coasted an entire block. At the upcoming intersection, the red light turned green ten seconds before I got there – I was able to make it through an intersection! I turned right, and headed into the mall roadway. I had to cranked hard on the wheel to do this, with the power steering disabled. The corolla groaned and coasted on nonetheless, even up the little sidewalk bump. Just like in those fake speeding Hollywood scenes, the cars and people moving in the South keys parking lot were perfectly staggered for my timing. I cranked left, and drifted into the very last spot in the mall parking lot. I probably had about 15 feet of momentum left…

I called the “speaker guys” number, and told him that I was not going to make it, and I apologized for wasting his time. He said he’d be there longer, and I could still show up if I wanted. He was pretty chill about it, and didn’t sound like he was the type to let the chair go to whoever showed up first. So how badly did I want the swan styled chair? My brain did it’s chemical computations – resulting in me getting out of the car, and walking to find the closest gas station. I used to pump gas at Sunoco, and over the years, I became very accustomed to the sheepish look on peoples faces that came before “do you have a gas can we can borrow?” Sunoco, of course, sold them the can for ten bucks. I too could now finally play this role, and complete my circle of life at Sunoco. Up a head, I saw a Walmart instead. Remember that department store Woolco, that disappeared in the late nineties? Well, Woolco bought the farm, and was bought out by Walmart. The year that it happened, I was looking for a summer job, and got hired onto a crew. My job was to smash Woolco parts and shelving and throw them into the dumpster outside. We had to crunch the stuff we tossed into the dumpsters, manually, to save them money on disposal (kind of like stomping on grapes to make wine; except we were stomping on Woolco to make Walmart). I remember sitting on top of a pile of Woolco parts, in a Walmart dumpster, thinking that there had to be more to life than this. Eventually, I was transferred to a crew that unloading gigantic pallets of merchandise onto the new Walmart shelves we had just installed. Since that day, I know where everything is located inside of a Walmart, and I knew exactly what shelf the gas cans would be on. I ran to the back, found the nine litre red can, and made my way to the gas station. The stupid cheap gas can leaked from the air vent on the back, and I ended up smelling like gasoline.

Once the car was juiced the car up, I found my way to the address I was given. There were two streets beside each other that had almost the same name (I missed the “unit 9″ prefix that distinguished them). I went to the first townhouse with the right number, and there was a guy upfront, painting. I walked up to him, and introduced myself as Kris, the guy who was coming to pick up the chair. I explained that I was sorry for being late, and that I smelled like gasoline. He said “that’s too bad eh. Do I know you?” I had the right house number, but the wrong crescent. When I explained this, he put down his paintbrush, and said I should buy a lottery ticket (I guess because I’m a big winner.)

When I finally landed on the right porch, I was met by Micheal. He knew why I smelled like gasoline, and didn’t tell me to buy a lottery ticket. I saw the chair in the corner, but my focus was drawn to a guitar that was perched amongst some unique MCM designed pieces. He picked up the blue guitar in the corner, and he obviously knew what he was doing with the instrument. He mentioned that he built custom guitars. He brought down one of them; a new prototype of his. I saw it as a guitar that could be played with a bow – something I’ve been trying to figure out for a few months now. Uncanny. I left with the swan-type chair, and hopefully within the next few weeks I’m going to bring over a bow and test out Micheal’s prototype guitar.

There is a simple reason why I am explaining all this. As it turns out, I will chase bungee cords, drive on empty, run through Walmart isles and busy streets carrying a leaky gas can, and almost complete my “Sunoco gas station circle of destiny”, all in an effort to obtain something that drives one aspect of my world. When was the last time that new music had this type of influence within our culture? When was the last time you went through hoops to find a new band? What do you do, when the stark reality for any new artist, is that most people will not, or cannot buy your work? What do you do when music, as a whole, fails to drive the culture as it once did in the past? No one will be running with a gasoline can in hand in a search to dig up your latest work. The culture has moved on, and the rate of change has splintered us into small groups that are already content with what we have. If you’ve recognized this, and want to respond to this change in how our culture perceives and reacts to new introductions into their lives, then whats the next step?

When you consider the solutions presented online, like artist centric iPhone apps or the marketing tools that most social media sites offer, you will notice that they often rely on distraction based techniques. Straight out of the TV complex play book. Sure, they’ve been dressed up in a pixelated jumpsuit to exist online, but they are, by definition, susceptible to the very same response that marketers now experience via TV complex efforts. These marketing efforts will be justifiable ignored by most people. According to Godin (2003), the dynamics of marketing, and the culture you are introducing your work too have changed so much, that strategies previously considered “alternative” are the only strategies left. One such strategy, that I believe has particularly strong applicability to what we do as artists, is described as the “purple cow” (Godin 2003). The “purple cow” is simply a metaphor that describes a remarkable service or product that people can’t help but talk about. Remarkable means just that – people make remarks about it.

While that idea seems insular and small, the implications are quite encompassing. By definition, creating a “purple cow” (something remarkable), means you have to stop with the advertising, and start innovating. It means that taking any new album, or work of art that you created, and simply slapping on the marketing afterwards is a recipe for failure. People still have a voracious appetite for new music and artistic work, but they are simply much too busy for the marketing messages that typically accompany those works. If your work is introduced in association with distraction based marketing, then it is simply invisible to most people. Making efforts to generate awareness, so that people can become self motivated to check out what you have might seem like common sense, but what it actually represents is a tactic that the average person will reject early on in their decision making process. Most people really don’t care about the majority of the stuff that is pushed their way, and will ignore it just as if it wasn’t there to begin with. Their time is more valuable than ever before, and you become the petty thief if you seek to take it from them. The implications are that if your method to introduce your work involves trying to get the attention of a lot of strangers all at once, then you will likely fail. Banner ads? Fail. Radio promo? Fail. Newspaper article or advertising? Fail. Magazine write up? Fail. Generic reviews of your work by paid sponsors? Fail. Hanging your work up at any available gallery you can get it displayed in? Fail. Unsolicited mail outs of your demo? Fail. Yes, those things could generate transient interest, or a few momentary “sales”, but transient interest or sales is no longer something that builds the architecture for continued growth of your work. These methods, taken on their own, represent clinging to the past or just doing what we know, because it feels safe. You will be striking out on your own, pursuing what many will perceive as “unproven” or a “novelty”, should you choose the alternatives.

Creating remarkable work implies that you are building things worth discussing, right into what you are creating. By achieving this, you are actually embedding the marketing into what you are producing. In other words, the marketing isn’t the icing on the cake. It’s going straight in into the batter. What you build into your artistic offering must be remarkable, because if it is not, today it will be simply invisible. That is the reality of how our culture responds to the saturation. Innovation and remarkability, as described by Godin (2003), are the new marketing basics for independent artists, and it is imperative to create things worth talking about. According to Godin (2003), the pursuit of something remarkable comes from passionate people, framing an idea or concept, and composing something for themselves. Sounds a lot like what you are probably doing, day in, day out anyways, doesn’t it? So why not structure the process to bypass the drudgery and false hopes associated with old marketing and promotion methods. We shouldn’t “Willy Loman” our work. Accessing our culture and creating attention for new ideas or concepts is a learned skill, and integrating the discussion into the work we are creating is the first rung on that ladder.

Our culture has lost certain characteristics that made it amenable to TV-industrial-complex, distraction based marketing techniques. Those were the old rules that taught us how to gain attention from lots of people when trying to introduce something new. The key to understanding why people reject this, is to get the idea that time is a valuable commodity, and you’ve undoubtedly got to earn this time rather than “steal it” with traditional marketing techniques. As an artist, you do this by building the marketing right into what you are creating. This has absolutely nothing to do with sticking ads, or integrating unrelated, disparate things that compromise or conflict with your work. That’s not what is being proposed here. Instead, this has everything to do with focusing on your art and developing it even further until you have achieved that moment where the innovation to be found in your work speaks for itself.

We now must understand how these remarkable works spread, take hold, or lose traction in a population….

This weeks post is mid-story. To get the backdrop, you can visit the previous entries in this series if you wish:

1. conflict

2. mold and the montage

3. black book

4. default

Tomorrow, we’ll post the latest details for the Nov 28th event. The records are due to be shipped on the 24rth…cutting it real close….the vinyl should still be warm…

How could something so successful fail so quickly? Why did the TV industrial complex diminish, and what were the implications for us? I spent the greater part of the year figuring this out. A new direction revealed itself: we had to become architects for our creative work. The chief builder of all the paths it would follow to and from the public city square, the library, and the Baths of Diocletian. The concept of a TV industrial complex, that shaped and manipulated our attention, and instilled the ‘norms’ for how one could introduce and gain acceptance for new music, trends, or anything else, was eye opening. This dominant system is dying, and currently, there are only individual efforts that exist to replace it. This idea compelled us to concede a simple fact: we had more pre-production to do.

Pre-production is a province one must visit, resulting in the formation of your earliest music. We demo, sketch, create, then tear it down if need be, to get the final creative push right. The final push must be legitimate in all the ways that matter, or you are forced to walk away from that particular piece of music, usually for good. To be architects for our music, we had to forget the common sense instilled within us. The seemingly legitimate instincts that would have you build mini malls around your work must be forgotten, so the blueprint for the mausoleum can be set in its place. Instead of planning gigs, getting management, or tweaking MySpace to amass a billion “friends – thx for the add”, we skittered into deriving solutions for the new, recently discovered structural disputes that we faced. Bracing the individual efforts required from us, because the TV complex tanked.

For the TV complex to work, there had to exist a sea of attention. This attention was for sale. Our attention could be likened to a renewable resource, that could be exploited by whoever paid the right price, or paid off the right people. You could buy peoples attention, and for a time, it was win-win, because we were willing to be attended to in this way. The ability to reliably and regularly capture simultaneous attention from hundreds of thousands of people was a special, and in retrospect, a transient phenomenon, that must at first seemed to be a natural function of an increasingly connected population. However, as it turned out, our increasing ability to connect is also correlated with a splintering of attention. According to Godin (1999), when we use our attention, we pay for it in time. Time is now perceived as a scarce, valuable commodity. We’ve got way more things to pay attention too, a lot more choices to make, and less time to evaluate those choices. This results in a type of social and economic pressure, that has changed our behaviour and expectations with respect to new introductions into our lives. This has direct bearing on how our artistic work should be introduced, and how it will be perceived.

Think about the way people interface with their environment today as compared to twenty years ago. Back then, there was usually one, maybe two phones in the average suburban home, attached to a base with spiral squiggly cord. Juno’s hamburger phone wasn’t just indie quirky cool, it was just common place. The phone sat on the counter, parked next to an appliance, or had its own telephone table; if you search Ebay you will find some pretty sweet mid century modern examples. An essential procedure was to call the big monopoly phone company, and get them to come over to wire in and activate a new phone line into the privacy of your own room. In suburbia, the TV was stuck in the “family room”. If your family didn’t get along a lot of the time, then eventually every room in the house had its own TV, so you could tune out in different rooms. By an large, everyone watched the same shows, and there was a concept of prime time, in which shows would jockey intensely for positions. To be moved up or down by a critical half hour could spell doom and gloom for show ratings. It was prime time, because we were all eating dinner, watching TV by the masses. The newspaper, or local news channel was the major source for up to date news (up to date defined as day old), and if you were into something unique, or some kind of hobby, there probably was one or two magazines dedicated to it, and maybe a store that catered to those needs, if you were lucky. You had to wait one to two months for a new magazine to get published. Slow and steady she went.

Pure hyper-saturation is upon us. I was sitting in Marty’s apartment this past April. We had just run the Vancouver half marathon, and began a weeks worth of post running laziness and sloth. Sitting in his living room, there was a laptop always within reachable distance, and I was scrolling through my email with my crappy HTC touch windows based smart phone in my hands (I almost choked on this phone once – its little memory card slot broke the day after I bought the phone. When you go to tinker with it, there is this little spring that shoots the memory card out at high velocity. Like one of those spring loaded dart guns. Mid-tinker, the memory card in my cell phone launched into the air, and hit my tonsils). It’s a clunker compared to the iPod Touch, which was sitting in my other pocket, loaded with twenty movies, nine albums, and all my song demos, some of which were recorded five years prior. Marty’s got cable, with infinite channels, an X-box, and a Nintendo Wii hooked up to the flat screen. There were two books on the floor. One was the “The Simpsons and Philosophy”, and the other was an encyclopedic examination of the back story of the Star Wars trilogy. Finally, there was random newspapers and magazines strewn around. So, while sitting there, in an exhausted, buzzed, non-moving conformation, I realized that I had about 95% more choices as to where I could voluntarily place my attention, as I would have had 10 years ago sitting in the very same room. No big deal, right? Well that’s exactly it. Its no big deal. Today, you don’t have to be doing anything, or be going anywhere in particular to be saturated with what seems to be infinite attention choices. Dareck does a great parody of the speed of life that this level of “attention choice” allows. He lives in Toronto, and he will make fun of his own Toronto-dude lifestyle thing. He’ll walk, talk, text, comment, eat, drink, then give the appropriate preoccupied facial expression all in rapid fire circular succession. It’s funny to watch, cause its true.

We are a culture saturated with choices, and we have opportunities to make many choices at any given moment in time. According to Godin (1999; 2003), the TV industrial complex and distraction marketing is no longer a model that fits our culture, because time is one of the most valuable resources within our culture today. Since we are increasingly valuing our time, we will automatically assume or evolve certain behaviours to avoid things or situations that try to steal it from us. In other words, the constant interruptions required for distraction marketing to be successful wastes one of our most important commodities, our time, and therefore, in economic terms, the “cost” to the consumer becomes greater than they are willing to pay (Godin 2003). Unsolicited, and perhaps even certain “invited” introductions, regardless of the form they take (and there are many) are now a form of theft. People have learned how to become quite good at ignoring much of the saturation, to keep sovereignty over their time, and thus distraction marketing is failing as a marketing tool. In essence, trying buy attention is useless, unless you operate within a rare situation that can still garner simultaneous attention from hundreds of thousands of people (e.g. the Olympics, Superbowl, and anything to do with the pope).

As artists, we now launch our latest work into a culture that is saturated for choices, and limited in perceived time. Many efforts to introduce our work, that can be traditionally viewed as applications of good old common sense, are now instinctively viewed as a theft of time. This is essential knowledge, because the techniques for generating awareness and acceptance must respect this reality. What worked for artists of the past may have little to zero relevance for what we need to do today. When we figured this out, we got to work on changing out instincts, by understanding a certain metaphor that spelled out the new rules…

Fourth post in this series; hopefully there is some linearity to these posts which will reveal the right name for this manuscript when it goes to print. Dareck, Kirk and I are red lining it this month, with rehearsals, organizing the rentals, incidentals, commutes and people we need for the studio space on Nov 28th. Our record shipments are just going to make it in time…they are printing the jackets this week…with any luck, they used the right artwork (they lost the files!)…

We’ve all got the friend or family member that decided to…well, not decide. They end up living in the world of default. If you are breathing air within the world of default, then “default” is what you need to get by. But it is pure malignancy. This existence nullifies people, and it scratches out vitality and movement found within art. You spend what seems like every waking hour following the muse. To leave the introduction of your work up to fate, or to let it roll down the standard path is to place it into default mode. Your work, on its own, may not have the apparatus or instinct to dig its way out that. You’ll see scratch marks in the dust, just before it is eaten by the saturation and noise. I didn’t want all the music we created to become ensnared within default options. I wanted to understand how our work could access our culture, to find it’s proper place, whatever that would be. Apparently so do a lot of people, because there is an entire industry dedicated to that pursuit.

The “business, marketing and entrepreneurship” section of any retail book store is a unique prospect. The books found there, sitting on their shelves, are no different than in any other row found in the store with respect to weight and dimension. Yet the shelves feel something persuasive, and silently begin to buckle beneath this force. This section of books is clustered in intensity, sensational in presentation, and even sleazy in intent. If there was a red light district at Chapters-Indigo, you’d find it right here. You can feel the solicitation just by standing too close. These rows are filled with publications that sport front covers of “go get em’” faces, complete with the serious looking “arms folded in front while twisting at the waist 45 degrees” pose, or clever art work that convey a sense of success if you believe and apply their teachings. There are a lot of montage phrases, like “playing to win”, “human potential”, and a lot of references to “power”. As in “using the power” or “becoming empowered”. All of these techniques, of course, are adapted to work withing the realm of “marketing 3.0″, so you can become the king or queen of social media influenced transactions. There are hundreds of titles on the shelf, and thousands in the web store. Even the plain yellow “dummies” book looks jaded, abused and confused sitting next to it’s higher priced brethren. After walking away, feeling slack jawed and itching for a yoke-ling, I gave my head a shake, and realized that I wanted to be in a position to understand what concepts I could ignore, and what ideas I should pay attention too. I needed to figure this out in order to rid ourselves of any defaults. The following chapter discusses the initial work that allowed us to do just that. It may sound odd that we start off discussing television sets as they relate to the death of marketing. But bear with me, because it was the application of this knowledge that put our plan on relevant grounds.

In many an action adventure flicks, or even stories found within the Bible, there’s inevitably a scene where one is warned and then educated about the evils of the marketplace. To get where we are going, we’ve got to be schooled as well; we’ve got to learn about the default path. You’ve probably got some ideas about what main stream, traditional marketing is all about. It feels omnipotent in its manipulative capacity, as it seeks to bend our thought process towards that of the ideal North American consumer. It is the catalyst found within Annie Leonards “golden arrow of consumption” (Leonard 2009; http://www.storyofstuff.com./; Skip to the section labelled “consumption”, or better yet, watch the whole thing). In order to better define our marketing and advertising preconceptions, one must first understand a process that Godin (2003) calls the “TV industrial complex”. The TV industrial complex is simply a term given to a particular method by which products were marketed and advertised to the general population. It was a very successful technique. It’s the reason why we all know the same brand names, and why we all bought the same things growing up. The TV industrial complex was developed and rigorously practised during our parents generation, and continues to be a prevalent marketing method today.

Remember the commercial advertising you watched on TV during Saturday morning cartoons? Behind these cereal and toys commercials, or any other viewed then wanted trappings you begged your parents for, was the rumble and grind of the TV industrial complex. Can you still recall all those clever fast food commercials, complete with characters and mascots? Then your mind knows very well the effect of the TV industrial complex. How about those razor blade shaving commercials from the eighties, that aimed to convince you that your choice of razor could result in instant membership to the old boys club, a trophy wife, the ability to spread far and wide into the gene pool because of your enhanced fertility, and increased athletic ability (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgzHu3pxgG8)? It was TV industrial all the way. Did toothpaste and Ska ever go together? It did, to great success, within the functions of the TV industrial complex (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdcVRueT2cw). According to Godin (2003), the TV industrial complex is the established rule of marketing; it’s goal was to “create safe, average products with broad appeal, and then combine those products with a marketing campaign”.

The mechanics of the TV complex were as follows. A company would hire marketers to create advertising. The subsequent advertising campaign was aimed towards the masses of everyday, regular people. The more people that could be exposed during the campaign, the better. This just happened to be effectively accomplished with television, because an increasing amount of people were glued to their TV screens as it became the dominant form of passive entertainment during the 20th century. By purchasing television ads, a company could engineer massive exposure. This level of exposure must have been really been quite influential, because products advertised via television also experienced superior distribution to retail outlets. Increasing exposure, coupled with better retail distribution meant that immense sales could be attained. According to Godin (2003), colossal success was to be had if the profit from those sales were used to buy more advertising. More advertising would in result in ever more exposure and retail distribution, which then resulted in more sales…and on and on the cycle went. Therefore, companies could directly profit by investing into mass media advertising. Marketers could differentiate their products from competitors, not necessarily by being different, better, or offering new features, but by developing a TV marketing campaign that built awareness for their brand. Thus, marketing, in effect, created the brand (Godin 2003). The TV industrial complex created huge growth for the the advertising industry, and produced an exhaustive list of well known brand name items. The products developed under this system thrived, because they were average offerings, made and advertised for normal people that were paying attention to TV. This system showed that you could capture the attention of the masses, and be very influential in getting them to consume things.

At the heart of the “TV industrial complex” system was something called distraction marketing (Godin 1999). This is the method by which the advertising was presented to you. Distraction marketing involves unsolicited and repetitive advertising messages that are designed to interrupt you. The idea is that exposure to repetitive advertising encourages or trains someone to focus on the product that is being sold. Therefore, the objective of distraction marketing (e.g. television, billboards, magazine ads, banner ads etc.) is to find ways to interrupt a person, and get them to adjust their focus and behaviour. Over the past few years, marketers – the guns for hire on the front lines, waging for acceptance of newly created products, have experienced something that has shaken them to the bone. I bet it sounded like grinding gears, and it must have looked like stripped, contaminated metal. The hyper-profitable TV complex, along with it’s distraction marketing artillery, quickly and dramatically broke rank, then broke up (Sheth & Sisodia 2006; Godin 1999). How did this happen? It happened because our culture has changed. When we know the reasons why this is true, then we will know why you, and your creative work, will be ignored.

continued next week…

Venue is booked: “KunstKINO 108″

48 Abell Street, Toronto, ON. Nov 28, 2009. 7pm to 11pm.

LNOYL Vinyl, CD, & Graphic Novella Release. 48 Abell Street, TO. There is no cover or cost to attend. Food and beverages on site.

When: November 28th, 09. 7pm to 11pm. Live recording starts at 9:30…

Where: 48 Abell Street, Toronto, ON. We booked a studio space called “KunstKINO 108″. It means artfilm. See the map:

Details (scroll to the bottom to see the latest):

The night will comprise of a cool gathering of friends. December is soon, and rest assured, stocking stuffers will be provided -- you won’t be going home empty handed.

There is a raffle for a “test pressing” of our new album. This vinyl record comes in it’s own custom wood box. Someone is going home with it on Saturday.

If this event were a food group, it would be granola -- we are adding new ingredients to daily to make it sweet but crunchy. We are literally building everything from the ground up:

This is the floor plan:

This is what we will fill it with:

Here, you can see that Dareck has converted his girlfriends armoire wardrobe into a display table for the records and books:

Once I tried to turn a display box into an armoire, but it didn’t turn out as well:

Dareck has assembled sheet metal into a specialized camera adapter:

As such, we will be filming the events of the night in 3D. For real. The evening will be documented by Val, from RedCat Film.

We will be integrating the release of recorded and published work from LNOYL (Vinyl LP, CD and Graphic Novella) together with a musical performance. We will perform an “unplugged” set as a trio. It will be recorded live, and if you leave us your email addy, you’ll be sent a link to download the Live EP produced from the performance.

Our first performance will be an introduction to the mind. No, you can’t smoke it. Instead of an opening band, we’ve got Josh Grant. He’s the guy that showed the effects of Zen Meditation on pain perception.

He says:

“Our experience of the world around us is the only way we know that we exist. In other words, if you were not able to ‘experience’ there wouldn’t be much of a ‘you’ to talk about. At the same time, the reality that we experience as ‘normal’ day to day is anything but stable, being easily manipulated by things like drugs, mood disorders, diet and certainly music. Yet we know practically nothing about why or how experiences arise in our minds and brains. As technology and knowledge advance we are beginning to scratch the surface of how the mind and brain interact. I’ll talk about (and demonstrate) several scientific paradigms, such as the rubber hand illusion, which will clearly reveal how our experiences, which we normally consider very stable and accurate, are actually very fragile and malleable.”

This is the video box. It’s in development, and a secret. Show up to figure out what it does.

First shipment of Graphic Novella’s arrived yesterday:

Dareck just finished the dimension glasses. You spin the record, then put them on. Sort of along the lines of this: http://whatisupright.livejournal.com/

Scratch your name on the fence to finish this piece. We’ll use it in an upcoming release

I play with this thing live -- an expression pedal. M-audio has constructed the picture perfect definition of “planned obsolescence” in creating their “M-Audio EX-P Expression Pedal”. It broke for the 4rth time yesterday. Using the lid of a “Rudolf the red nose reindeer, abominable snow man” coacoa lid, and a dremel tool, Dareck forever fixed the weak spot of this pedal, by making this metal brace. M-Audio decided that the most important moving part of this pedal should be make out of the flimsiest, lightest, cheapest plastic ever. We’ll see how it works through our rehearsal tonight…

Rehearsals…

See you there,

Kris, Dareck, Kirk

]]> http://www.lnoyl.com/2009/11/04/hello-world/feed/ 7 http://www.lnoyl.com/2009/10/30/black-book/ http://www.lnoyl.com/2009/10/30/black-book/#comments Sat, 31 Oct 2009 02:06:25 +0000 kristopher http://www.lnoyl.com/?p=470

This is the third instalment for this series, and I’ve taken this text from the introduction of the manuscript. It brought back some pivotal memories, and in retrospect, most of them were good (I can say that now, because it’s easy to forget isolation once its gone). In other news, the first proof’s for our graphic novel, ‘The Plan’, are on their way; the image this week is from page forty. We also heard back from the vinyl record pressing plant – they misplaced our artwork, but they’ve got it on the backup server somewhere. I’m going to take that as a positive sign, because it means that they’ve at least put our work on the assembly line…

It’s easier to be honest with yourself when you write it all down. The process somehow makes you disclose the thoughts that galvanize what is truth, instead of shedding pieces of simple wants. Words are transient and fleeting, and get tripped up with emotion before they even leave your mouth. Print will stare you down, face to face, if you choose to be less than honest with yourself. Perhaps that is why I’m committing this to paper. I learned a long time ago that if I wanted to understand change, I had to get it onto the page. During my first year of university schooling, I started carrying around this little black flip book. It wasn’t a cool one, like a moleskin, or filled with numbers related to a progressive social life (that would have just made mine blank). It was a freebie, with vinyl covering, and a little elastic to hold the pencil. I had just started running long distances, and would be spending lots of time through the isolated trails on campus that year. My little black flip book was used for the mundane. Numbers, times, and dates related to trail runs began to fill the even sides of it’s pages. The pencil was rarely sharpened, so the numbers became pulpy as time went on. It was a common occurrence back then to spend what seemed like hours a day, sitting on benches waiting for city buses. If it wasn’t raining, I’d take the little black book out, and would throw a sentence here or there between the pages of numbers. Eventually, the odd pages that separated the numbers started to fill with scribbled ideas. As a year passed, it seemed that these ideas could almost take form as a narrative. An account derived from the part of me that wanted resistance. The fragment that wanted out, to make a principled stand against unalleviated desires. I wanted to fight the useless haunting of my brain – the department that wants nothing more that to keep things in order and check, by scarring out any motivation to stand out of line. I kept on writing, and things kept getting clearer.

I’ve got a real flip book now, and I’m going describe how three people are trying to create something new for themselves. We are musicians, and musicians are a dime a dozen. When your musicianship demands that you swallow the pill, and discover the constituents of the less trodden path, you will look for marks in the fresh earth to guide you. You need them, because you are running out of time. There are less formative years ahead than there are behind. You are one person, and you are over in the blink of an eye. But before the eyelid shuts, you want to go beyond singular. You want to connect with the other shutting lids, and be able to view them as butterfly wings. You are searching for beauty within a mad rush to outrun your territory. We can dispense with naval gazing, because sometimes all that is needed is to chew through the leash. For me, this act would manifest as a search for the right way to focus on our work so it could succeed, and an understanding how we could unite this pursuit within own lives. The methodology is as blunt as teeth grinding on chain link, so I won’t apologize for the pragmatic details you are about to receive.

Today, your work is thrust into a saturated world that clamours for new experiences and art forms. Yet, at the same time, we are all exceptionally good at ignoring the vast majority of what is produced to fulfil those desires. We have no choice about this, because it is a natural inherited response. There is only so much time in the day to sort out all the options vying for ones attention and preference. Therefore, we’ve got to get used to the idea that our work will most likely be ignored for legitimate reasons. The sheer quantity of creative work being produced has forged a saturation effect that will precipitate us out of the solution, regardless of how good or original we are (the specific reasons for this will be explained quite soon). They say that under these conditions, the cream will rise to the top. I think it’s better if we just find a new glass all together.

When you’ve created the work, and it’s time to release it, it needs some space to grow that is free from the pushing and shoving for attention. Does such a place exist? Of course it does. Artists find them every day, and they become credible when you step out of your own shoes, and view your world with a different perspective. Specifically, from those who’s life calling it is to introduce new things into our culture, and to explain the dynamics of change within it. Through their work, we can figure how to access our culture in a way required for our work to take root, develop and find it’s place. I speak of pragmatic, tested ideas, that I have summarized and applied for our own use. The tools to accomplish this have been popularized, more often than not, by forward thinking marketers and economists with a conscience, and journalistic authors.

I know I said marketers and economists. We’ve got to establish something about those words, and what we mean by them. If you read the word “marketing”, your mind probably begged you to think about jingles, commercials, or comments like “help I’ve fallen and I cant get up” or “they’re magically delicious”. However, we are not referring to the trivial and cheesy marketing adaptations found within the golden age of the marketing industry. We refer to this concept instead: “Marketing is about spreading ideas, and spreading ideas is the single most important output of our civilization” (Godin 2005). We are discussing how important ideas, music, trends, or anything else of significance moves through our culture. If you read the word “economist”, and thought of grey business suits and some dude named “Dow Jones”, then let me put you at ease. Instead, think of Emily Oster, an innovative economist that has used her background and principles to impressively challenge and change the way people think about AIDS in Africa (Oster 2008). When it comes to the pursuit of the craft, innovative economists, marketers, and authors who critique and give insight into our culture often have more important things to say about our navigation through it, as compared to those that are firmly entrenched within legacy creative empires. The best ideas come from the outside. To pursue our goals, what we need to do is view our culture from that perspective. I’m going to tell you what we saw.

This is the second installment in this series of posts that pull pieces from the book I’m working. They’ll be new segments posted weekly. I still don’t have a title for it as yet, but since it’s inspired and in part based on current events, it’s really coming along. I’ve got some idea’s for the images that will complete the manuscript, and I think Dareck is going to be the illustrator. The images might have a similar feel to the graphic novel, which will create additional linearity between the two books.

There is folklore, romanticism, and some actual fact all rolled into a single montage that filters one’s understanding of what it is you are supposed to do with your time if you wish to create great music. Furthermore, if you have the inclination to become recognized for what you create, in order to make a living from such work, then your mind can’t help but go overtime, creating intense sequences of hope, fate, anxiety, and faith that fill the empty space between the patchwork. For many people, including myself, it feels like these sequences are born from some type of stereotypical mold that was generated straight out of a mishmash of stories from the seventies, eighties and nineties (pick whatever decade you were a teenager in). Take an excursion to the music isle of your local bookseller, and peruse one of the popular recording artist biographies – perhaps someone that held your attention during your early formative years. When I read the books that I pick up, it says that twenty years ago, I should have been doing nothing but practising and playing my guitar in my early years. Check. Did that. It went sort of like this. I’d meet Marty in the hallway of our high school, that was located way out nowhere, get into his K-Car (he was one of the few kids that drove to school, which meant he was one of the few kids that could escape), and then we’d skip the day to go jam at his place. On the many days we could not skip, I’d bring my guitar to school, with this little mini amp. I sit out on the steps, and play (If I screwed up what I was playing and made mistakes, I’d occasionally hear about it from people sitting in their classrooms).

In the mornings, my bus would get to school really really early, before most kid’s would show up, thus giving me some time to kill before classes started. Of course, having no friends at the time, those empty hallway early mornings were a type of social bottomless pit. There was no noise or backdrop of random people to blend in with. Me, myself and the wall, looking at other early risers with their friends. I figured that I could spend that time away in the library. While awaiting for the library to open, sitting adjacent to the door, there would be another 3 or 4 kids waiting there – presumably all in the same boat; no friends, nothing to do. You’d think we’d band together, or at least talk, but it was eyes towards the ground. No breakfast club scenes for us. Inside the library, I’d sit in a cubicle, listening to Hendrix or Slash lick’s, or if I had my guitar that day, I would play in one of the “study rooms” (which is how I met Dareck, for the very first time – he sat down and starting singing a melody along with my guitar). I didn’t care about song writing back then – I was mostly into improvising, jamming and tones, so it was cool to have someone to play with that had an ear for song structure. When school was finished for the summers, I’d try to find a job, but they were hard to come by, so I mostly hung out in my basement bedroom, or Marties basement, and played guitars. It was a total obsession.

Im back reading that biography at the bookstore. It now says that 15 years ago, I should have dropped out of whatever else I was doing, moved to a larger city, and paid some dues. Then, I could create a titlewave of focused attention on the music I was making, at the expensive of everything else. If I did that, and I was lucky, then the record label gatekeepers, who were in total control of the scene, might listen, make me a deal, and then I got to throw my hat in the ring. There are many variations on this theme, and it is the stuff that the stereotypical mold is made of.

The thing is, your life might not fit the mold of how it is all supposed to work. What if your path is not linear and to a specific point, but feels more like an array? Does that mean that you’ve disqualified yourself? Life is diverse. What if I’m not the blue whale, but instead the plankton? It means I drift with the ocean currents and can swim short distances up and down. But in doing so, I can understanding the fluid motions of the sea. There is immense value to that. I’ve refused to believe it was just one good thing you could do, with everything else delegated to hobby status. I’ll never be that person, so I need to believe otherwise. That is my bias. How does one reconcile that within a world that traditionally favours a linear march towards its end?

Well, as it turns out, when you are perpetually working on disparate things all the time, what you are actually pursuing is something that would be called an “interdisciplinary education”, should it be carried out within the walls of a school. For some vocations, the comparative approach you experience by working this way creates a unique richness in skill. If you combine your talent with those skills, you have a platform to create inspired work. The thing is, this interdisciplinary education actually became the new mold. Unpredictably and unannounced to anyone it seemed, the gatekeepers of the music industry, or any other creative factory have had the rug pulled out from under their feet. All of a sudden, these contrasting skills we scraped up all those years, that seemed only of use to us as individuals, are now relevant to creating the right conditions for our art to develop and grow publicly. Our society has changed, and we function increasingly within an economy of ideas. The skills and attitude we’ve acquired can be tweaked to form the required acumen for getting a start in an industry that we previously have had no real experience with. Chances are, the stuff you’ve been obsessively focusing on, as an interdisciplinary, independent artist, can be understood and tweaked in the very same way, giving you the same authority over your stereotypical mold. Montages are overrated.

If you are stewing in conflict, then know that good things can come from it if it bubbles over at the top in just a certain way. We’ve had to deal with a few growing pains and misunderstandings over the past weeks in order to get back on the same page. Because we are inexperienced, but overtly willing to do things on our own terms, we’ve had to establish some new roles that we are to play, if we are to meet the expectations we have set for ourselves. Dareck’s been working twenty four seven on the set of some national geographic show, and Kirk’s been mixing pretty non-stop. I’ve been writing this new manuscript that has no working title as yet. Maybe as I start posting segments of it, like the one below, some of you will come up with a suitable title. Anyways, the motivation for creating this manuscript was born out of an argument, and I describe it like this:

…When we finished our last winter gig, things definitely felt a little directionless. I suppose we never really clicked with the drummer we had just recruited a few months earlier (we actually never heard from him again after that last gig; I’m sure it was a mutual parting of ways), and our bass player, who was a really good guy, was heading out west – permanently as it turned out. Dareck wasn’t too happy with his performance that night, and he was reaching for ideas, left, right and centre to address what was making him uncomfortable about the situation. He was pretty anxious about it as well, and we ended up having a big argument over what to do, and where to go with things. To make things worse, I reacted badly to some of his suggestions, and Dareck subsequently got even more frustrated and pissed off. None of his ideas made sense to me, and I failed to respond properly, in part because I didn’t have the background knowledge to fully articulate my gut instincts about the situation. I was frustrated and pissed off because we had finally launched this band off the ground, and instead of recognizing what we had achieved so far, and using that as motivation to get the the next spot, we were instantly immerse into shit storm of confusing, anxiety based assertions of what we needed to do next. When we ran out of things to say to each other, Dareck went upstairs, and I just sat at the kitchen table. I could see that our progress was going to quickly grind to a halt, because of these pseudo-issues born from our ignorance.

That argument with Dareck turned out to be pretty important. There is nothing worse than that feeling – when things begin to go nowhere, just when you think they are going somewhere. We needed an antidote. We retreated to our parts of the city, and I ended up reading a few posts from Bob Lefsetz’s blog. Mr. Lefsetz is a music industry critic, and he was pretty much my first exposure to the ideas that explained the changes taking place in the music industry. I really didn’t know jack shit about the organization of this industry, and the current issues within it, until I started reading some of this guys rants. In a few of his posts, he mentioned Seth Godin a few times (I forget exactly what the context was – but there was something intriguing about this guys approach I thought). I downloaded an audio book – Seth Godin’s “purple cow”. When listening to that book, I found that if you substituted the word “artist” for “product”, and “audience” for “consumers”, all of a sudden, there was this whole way of spinning all of our current frustrations and ignorance into a tangible perspective. This was a concept and world that I had never been exposed to before, but it instantly made a lot of sense for a number of reasons. When I got to a point where I was relatively comfortable with all the ideas, I created something along the lines of what your holding now. I called up Kirk and Dareck, and told them that we had a plan, we had a direction…

continued next week…

We’ll there was a few boxes for me when I got home from work the other day, full of our CD’s. It felt good. We had them replicated; when you get CD’s made, you can get them either “duplicated” or “replicated”. Duplicated is what most of us think of when we think of making cd’s – you burn them on cdr’s, then they get scratched and covered with coffee stains so they don’t work anymore. Replicated is when they make a glass master disc first, then turn it into metal stamper, then stamp the bejeezus out of little plastic pellets to give birth to a new CD, like this:

duplication with muzak

Dig the muzak in that clip: It reminds me of high school, watching an educational video in class, but then the canned music would start, so we’d be doing our obligatory 80’s-jive-beavus and butthead dance moves in the dimmed classroom, because the music made us. I wish our educational videos were as cool or freaky as this one:

think about the chromosomes

Yeah, I would have been just as militant about the environment too…

On a whole entirely different note, there is a new book in the works…hopefully finished within the next 6 weeks. The book is an “outsiders” take on how one might make their own way through today’s music industry. But really, it could apply to anyone trying to establish a medium of growth around their creative work. As an independent artist, starting from scratch, I wanted to document how we are going about creating a space for our art to take root and develop, regardless of the crowded saturation and infinite diversions that are prevalent within our culture. This book happened because we happened. We decided to create this work, and like any other band, we want to communicate that work to an audience. We figured out the cultural and economic underpinnings of why certain things (e.g. certain labels, marketing, promotion, advertising, and online efforts etc) don’t often work for new artists, or don’t turn out the way you might think. The book is coming from the perspective that if you know why those things are broken, then you have a chance at fixing them to work for you. Probably the best thing about it is that we learned what we could absolutely ignore and not worry about – all the methods, instructions or advice you think you need, that in reality only serves to make one feel anxious or somehow lost if you cant access them. We haven’t re-invented the wheel, or done anything that you have never heard before – but we put it together in a way that sparked a light bulb moment for us. I’m going to post weekly excerpts from the book as it comes along….

]]> http://www.lnoyl.com/2009/10/08/duplication-and-creating-the-right-space/feed/ 0 http://www.lnoyl.com/2009/10/04/the-plan/ http://www.lnoyl.com/2009/10/04/the-plan/#comments Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:03:52 +0000 kristopher http://www.lnoyl.com/?p=390

This is the second song on the test pressing, “the plan”. Since the story within the song has inspired the graphic novel that accompanies the album, I played with some of the images from the book while the record spun. I stuck images from the novel on the label. Half way through, one of the labels came off, spun towards the needle and there was this huge screech as the needle played the groove-less paper.  Ouch. The swirl is this optical illusion -- if you stare into it, straight on, it will start feel 3D. I video recorded it with my 2001 digital camera, which was budget back then, which means it’s like a super 8 now in digital terms. The frame rate does weird things when I zoom too much with it. The effects are totally early star trek. Out of all the songs on the album, this one’s probably seen the greatest amount of change from early demo to final form, but it feels the same none the less. The squeal and voices at the ending, around the 4:20 mark and onwards are ripped from a scratchy video, of myself and Josh having an argument one night -- we were at each others neck’s, arguing drunken graduate school style about the existence of consciousness, while dareck was laughing/instigating/moderating the whole time. We spent a whole day looking for that clip, then stuck it into the AKAI. I had this little radio that used to wake me up in time for school, and we got it into action for this song. Dareck would play and manipulate the conversation on the 80’s akai, which then went to another effect box i was controlling, which then was hooked up to an FM radio transmitter, then the radio picked up those frequencies and blared the modified conversation out the little speaker that used to tell me to wake up 10 years earlier. It was a blast from the past, which is the sound I think we got for that part of the song…

I unwrapped and just dropped the needle, for the very first time, on the very first test press that we just got in the mail. I decided to record the moment in this video, because out of nothing, finally comes something. It’s been years of hoping and planning…but sometimes things don’t work out the way you want them to. I was just thinking of all the things that I’ve been through in the past few years, and all the days and nights that we had to lash out, or keep our heads low, to make this a reality. All those years have come home now -- etched in this medium -- it’s what people do to remember the things they respect the most. I love this format. It’s done something to our music that I can’t quite comprehend as yet.

Anyways, I just wanted to share this….Im pretty blown away watching all these years spin about in little circles.

I cant believe how good this fisher price turntable sounds. Especially playing late seventies/early eighties German punk.

We are all in Ottawa this week, working on stuff. Dareck is sitting on the couch over there doing some finishing touches to his drawings, and Im typing away about some ideas, and thinking about an approach for a new EP. Dareck’s stuck the story board for the graphic novella on the wall, and it looks very close to being done. The book ties into the album, and visualizes the peaks and valleys for a few songs, most notably, “the plan”. Kirk is going to come over later with the cello, and we are going to arrange these songs on the album for a three piece performance. We are without drums and bass for the moment, but we are going to use this arrangement  to our advantage, and get things as tight as we can as a smaller group.

this was a mini reel to reel dareck designed for a usb drive…