Took a bit of mixing and I have already had complaint from the Bongo department that the bongos are not loud enough, a suggestion from our beloved mixing engineer Ben that I really ought to consider external mastering services...(sigh)..it's not that he's wrong it's...well...it's...different now.
It prompted some thinking, and as it has been said by wiser minds, when you're explaining, you're losing.
In this case it's more a moment of reaching my own understanding.
Thoughts on the self propelled artist:
Imagine a picture made up of lots of dots, or pixels, or lego blocks. Each thought is one little pixel, let's see what my lego oracle tells me
Online pal MixEngineer believes we're in the midst of a massive change as Robot service providers replace manual effort for some functions. Things that could never be automated, are now automated. He reckons he's gonna be out of a job shortly. Tell me about it...
Over the years we have worked with really talented engineers and masterers, and yet the responses I am getting for 'Basilisk' are amongst the most favourable we have ever had. I used every robot thing I could.
And don't think songwriting is immune, but no matter what the robot does, it's not 'us' and it doesn't do things for the reasons we do them. That's Art, baby. Robots are yet another tool, and they shift the environment and the marketplace so yeah we gotta be present in thinking about it, but they're only as good as the user of the tools. Ask an iguana to use a slide rule and see how you go.
The commercial value of recorded music is heading towards its lowest possible access cost. For scale, plays on Youtube, supported by Advertisements are a net $0.0003 a play. Live shows are seeing the same $ as 50 years ago.
The eco system of Pub/bar/festival + Aussie Media that produced the best music in the world, the days when Aussie songs were King locally and across the globe, is, dead. Alcohol won't furnish the funds. Punters havent heard of the local bands because there is no connective media tissue, no incentive for there to be one and under the reign of the Single Source platforms such as Yt/Fb etc every act is now a competitor in a giant advertising sink hole.
The world wide marketplace as it stands is doing cartwheels in abandoning Legacy/Corporate/NepoMedia for the new 'freedom' of systems controlled by even fewer oligarchs. Can you hear The Who singing right now? Here is the new boss...except now potentially even worse than the old boss.
And yet - to borrow, nay steal from Mark Twain, it's a city filled with people rubbing the lamps to spur on their genie, and that to visit it is to see it change from moment to moment.
The evil empire of the 20th century Murdochian media chain is reaching peak form and then, calcifying and dying.
Radio? HA! Free to air TV? Who? People don't even wrap fish and chips in newspaper. It's buggy whips all the way down kids.
A myriad of microbubbles and microworlds served by a small screen in the palm of your hand. An ever shifting landscape populated by fleeting fish-like mind creatures, who school and bob about in their own way.
Methinks even the wisest of TechoWizards wind up with that Frankenstein moment when they realise that free will departs from the creators vision. Oops, sorry Google, go have a chat with the Almighty, he's been flooding and plagueing us since ancient times precisely because we're such an annoying species and simply won't do what we're told.
Thus the Apocalypse is upon us musicians and has been for nearly two decades. The empire fell and no one told us. The Romans and their Labels packed up and left to become shareholders in micro-oppressive systems while they subsist on a slowly fading back catalogue. No one wants to develop a market, ye gods the horror. We'll wait until the dust settles and harvest the survivors.
And so we are left with our costs and 0.000sweetfa per transaction to pay for service providers, managers, roadies, art suppliers, website hosters, and all the stuff that goes into existing.
They say if your ship doesnt come in, swim out to it. Sometimes ya just gotta start walking towards where you need to be.
Whether we like it or not, to exist as a functioning artist in 2024 means having to take on the roles that you cannot afford to outsource, or not getting it done.
That's what it means to be a self propelled artist. You name it, you gotta do it.
And so I don't hate on the robots. They may be the thing that saves us, by allowing us to get done what we need to do, when there is simply no other way.
MixEngineer set me on the path of 'top down mastering' where the Robots help you to hear what a finished product will sound like. With the new tools, I made an album I would *not* have made in the studio cos we are just too damn frugal. But with the time and freedom? New ideas and styles.
We joke inside the band 'one day we'll have roadies' ;P Never forgetting the service of our mate Carl for several glorious years.
It's the 21st century, and much like the change from the Silent era to the Talking Picture era, not everyone makes the transition.
And yet here we are, Australians, we were borne into the world of Mad Max, 'On the beach' and the concepts of this vast alien shore and its post apocalyptic wasteland vision,The Great Southern Land as sung of by Icehouse, the droughts and flooding rains of Mackellar, except sparely populated by the last wandering feudal survivors.
TWO BANDS ENTER ONE BAND LEAVES! the crowd screams at our gig underneath the milkway, surrounded by the skulls of previous contestants on The Voice.
Superhumans are not coming to save us, let's sing and dance until the robots replace us. Long live the self propelled artist, and start walking kids, the crowd drained all our guzzolene between shows and it's a long hike to the next encampment.
