Oxjam

Just got back from Kilburn with Toys With Knives. I'm a little bit drunk right now... Free cider all night! Anyway, we were the second band on at the Powers bar, which meant we could spend our time in the "green room" at the back of the pub, available only to artists.

The only downer of the night was the timing of the overground trains from Brondesbury to Richmond, which meant we didn't have time to see Spring Offensive (who we'd previously seen at The Hobgoblin in Staines earlier this year). I guess we're going to have to wait for them to tour London again, which isn't looking like it's going to be soon.

On the bright side, we made a few new friends, did some great work for charity and got loads of free stuff that we wouldn't usually get at a free gig like this.

Highlight of the night definitely has to be Phantom, a two piece band consisting of a guitarist who sings with a guitar through a vocoder and a drummer who also acts as a middle man between the band and their sampler. Really surreal sound, kinda like a mid-point between Chromeo and ELO.

Although in my eyes, Toys With Knives is a joke, I'm going to milk it for what it's worth. Which should mean some kind of EP release and maybe a short tour to promote it. We usually play venues in the Shoreditch area, but recently we've been branching out to North London, and I don't think it's half as bad as people make it out to be!

Cycling Around Town and The World of Music

Well, as part of my plan to "get organised" in two weeks, what I've done is started cycling somewhere every day to see where I end up. Like, today I went visiting friends. I started by cycling to Walton-on-Thames at around 8:30 just to wake me up. I don't usually get up that early, ever. It's weird, that little slot of time in between when people wake up and lunchtime. Nobody seemed in a rush to do anything, everyone was just going at their own pace.

Traffic wasn't bad, but for a good chunk of my journey, coming up to a roundabout on my way to Lower Sunbury, I was on the right hand side of the road, which apparently isn't the norm in England. I'm one of those nightmare cyclists, I cycle on the pavement, knocking innocent pedestrians out of the way on my bike. I passed my cycling proficiency test ages ago, but I don't really care about regulations as long as nobody gets hurt. I mean, being a cyclist is a lot like being a teenager, where people don't want to treat you like a child, but  they also don't want to treat you like an adult. Sometimes it gets confusing, should I act like a pedestrian, or like a car?

Anyway, I've never really cared about cycling. It's just not interesting. There's lots of things I love in the world, but two things stick with me: design and music. On the way, I managed to listen to an instrumental of A Day In The Life by The Beatles, I was thinking, like, what made them such a great band? I think, like anything, they can't take all of the credit for their huge success. Sometimes when a band gets big, things just snowball and they become something greater than what they set out to be.

Recently, music has branched off into two different templates. The first, where an act gets big and then continues to thrive on their success. This is the Lady Gaga's and Justin Bieber's of this world. For most people, music is an afterthought.  In some cases this is because they don't have the interest. It's hard for people to find new music that doesn't have some kind of marketing scheme behind it. I mean, this is fine, but what it means is that only marketable music makes its way to the top, leaving a lot of great acts out of the spotlight. This is a great thing really. Some artists are marketable and some aren't, that's just the way it is.

I often get people complaining to me about how bands are underrated or unappreciated by the masses. This is with good reason, but I don't see how things are going to change any time soon. People are always going to listen to pop music in one form or another. I guess you could describe some people's attitude towards music as passive. The other way music survives, is on a much smaller scale. This usually happens when there is a kind of music that is in a niche, or music that is part of a new wave of artists. Because there isn't much money in these artists for the major labels, it leaves a void in the industry, that is filled with self promotion and DIY culture. Indie labels are a great way for these artists to get their stuff out there without a great deal of artistic compromise.

Usually what happens, is a movement will start out small, and then find its way gradually into mainstream music, as new sounds are gradually accepted into the culture. This has happened to all music at some point, from The Beatles through punk fast forward to now. I guess, music breaks out because artists are trying (or not trying at all) to break out of convention in an effort to be noticed in a sea of musicians who are all tending towards the same artistic point. A very wise musician once told me that although new music is great, it will never be marketable, because people don't like hearing things that are entirely alien to them. People like it when music invokes nostalgia to any extent, because they're comfortable with that.

I'm sure taking this into account will give you the upper hand when songwriting with marketability on your mind. This is what music is about to me, it's like a language. Where new ideas are like new slang, and words you're already familiar with help make the musical sentences easier to understand. Much like reading A Clockwork Orange in Nadsat, when I hear "art music" I don't really make the same connection as I would with a blues artist for example. It's the humanity in the music that makes it worth listening to for me. I'm a massive supporter of people who make music because they love it, no matter what form it takes.

Sufjan Stevens - All Delighted People EP

Yeah, it’s true. Leonardo DiCaprio is hiding in the artwork for the new EP by Sufjan Stevens. I’ve drawn a big red circle around him. Most likely an Inception reference! Well I finally finished listening to it. Some great tracks. The title track was really good, as was the clever classic rock version. The second of the two 11+ minute songs “Djohariah” was a great way to end the EP. 

Listen to it here http://sufjanstevens.bandcamp.com/

Who Moved My Cheese?

I read this book last night, my friends mum lent me it along with a few other books designed to help entrepreneurs and businessmen get the most out of life. I started reading at about 22:00 and finished by 23:00. I think I learned a lot from it, although to some extent it felt like it was stating the obvious.

Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life, published in 1998, is a motivational book by Spencer Johnson written in the style of a parable or business fable. It describes change in one's work and life, and four typical reactions to said change by two mice and two "littlepeople", during their hunt for cheese. A New York Times business bestseller since release, Who Moved My Cheese? remained on the list for almost five years and spent over 200 weeks on Publishers Weekly's hardcover nonfiction list.

There are two ways I make money. The first is through design, both graphic and web deisgn, where I create an invoice for an agreed amount and ask for the first half before I start a project and the other half when all the work is completed. The other way I make money is through producing music, both for myself under Toys With Knives and through producing other bands in the studio, where I use what I know about sound engineering to make them sound better.

About a month ago, the computer in my studio's motherboard fried. This means that for the last month I've been working a lot differently than how I usually would. Much like in the story, I'd become secure working with the tools I had at hand (Photoshop, Ableton Live, Pro Tools ect...) instead of considering work without these tools an option. As a result, my habits have changed. For the design work I've been doing, since it has been harder for me to gain access to a computer, I've spent much more time planning my work, and really thinking about the work I want to do rather than the usual trial and error approach I usually take to my work, where I try out new ideas on-the-fly as I'm working on a project. I guess, putting more care into the work I do has meant that I'm finding the work I do more intresting. Because it's much easier to pour your personality into a project when you care about it, the results have been greater, meaning my quality of work has improved.

The other massive change to my workflow is music. Usually what I'll do, is I'll have some free time where I try out song ideas on a synthersizer or guitar and then I'll record that into my studio PC and add layers until I have the outlines of a song and then I'll go back and fill in all the transitions. Not having the chance to record every idea I think of means I've had to rely on my musical memory a lot more. So my songwriting style has changed. Instead of the loop based, disco influenced music I was making a couple of months ago, my songs have been turning out to be more complex. With many layers all there in my head, but none of it down, it gives me freedom to change things before I write stuff down as notation by hand. Writing music by hand differs from plugging in MIDI notes because you really need to think about the relationships of one note to another rather than the individual sounds that each key makes on a synthersizer, or each fret on a guitar makes. Of course, to get some of the fiddlier virtuosic bits of guitar down takes more time than just recording it improvised, but this itself helps me what works and what dosen't musically.

The White Stripes use only 3 different musical elements at any one time in their songs. Usually vocals, drums and guitar. Due to Jack White's obsession with the number 3.

I'd seriously reccomend thinking about your creative ideas, and getting a good idea of what you're going to do, and when you're going to do it before you actually get down to starting any official work. Also, depriving yourself of technology can sometimes be a great thing, especially for musicians. Jack White of The White Stripes limits the amount of musical elements in any song to 3. This usually includes vocals, drums and guitar. Holy Fuck decided to see what would happen if they only used cheap vintage analog hardware and recorded it on the fly in one take to see if this kind of restiction would help the creative process. This minimal kind of thinking is really healthy if you're finding having too much stuff in the way of the ideas you really want to develop and put forward.

If you have any further thoughts, send them to me on twitter.