Russell Davies

Slow and low

With Easter and 'everything' I've had a few more stuck at home opportunities to make music than I was expecting and I've ended up making some very long, very dull bits of ambient-y stuff.

The first is an Elite Panic track based on the sounds that the Bulb folks recorded in the Gola rainforest. It was intended to be that sort of yoga-inducing ambient that sometimes gets welded to forests, but the actual nature sounds get quite sinister so I found it taking a slightly more anxiety-making turn. If you've not been having enough stress dreams this is the bedtime track for you.

The other one is something I've been wanting to make for years; a bedtime track that goes beyond ambient to almost entirely inaudible. It's explicitly designed for me to fall asleep to. It has to be just loud enough that I can hear it over the sounds of the street and the flats falling apart. And it has to have enough discernable harmonic content that I can distract myself from my brain. On the other hand it has to be playable at the absolute minimum volume on the single speaker at my side of the bed, so it doesn't disturb Anne. So it's not very subtle. A few, very simple sounds, moving slowly. And, because, it 'quotes' rather extensively from a favourite sleep-inducing piece of copyrighted content I've decided it's not an Elite Panic track, it's by Complicated Air.

Data pour

I made a new track last Saturday. Decided to call it Her Immunity. I may regret that, but it sounds like 'a song' doesn't it?

Quite pleased with this one. Of all the things I've made I think it sounds most like something a proper musician would have made. It's on bandcamp and soundcloud now. Will be on Spotify on May 1st.

Which means that Billion Sex (another song title to regret) is now live on Spotify. Listen! Playlist! Share!

In music marketing news, I got an update from Spotify in my inbox:

Given that, presumably, an enormous number of their artists must have similar listening figures I think they might want to tweak their copy-delivery filters. Maybe something more like your Mum or your primary school teacher might say: 'The important thing is you're trying' or 'Well, I like it, and that's all that matters'. Or maybe channeling an actual music professional: 'Are you sure you're really cut out for this? It's a hard life you know'

Anyway, digging into my profile reveals some bigger numbers:

41 listeners! Thank you so much. That's way more than I deserve.

Though this isn't good:

 

100% male? 100%?! That's depressing.

I might try an instagram campaign for Billion Sex and exclude all the 100% males from the targeting, see what happens then. Though instagram campaigns have been useless in the past.

 

March 2020

March 2020 from russelldavies on Vimeo.

No tips from old men

No one needs remote working tips from old white men in large, comfortable homes. But I have enjoyed picking a single album each day and listening to it all the way through a few times. It won't, I suspect, aid my productivity. But it's been nice.

Join me at WFHrecordclub

Billion Sex

I came across this list on twitter; the UK Top 40 as imagined by AI. Apparently. Clearly, clearly, the best song title on there is Billion Sex so I thought I should do a track called that before someone else did. So, yesterday, I did.

(Loosely. It doesn't actually contain the words 'billion sex'. I'm an artist.)

I quite like this one. It's got a good beat. And a good bass line.

Since my release policy remains that there's a new track on Spotify etc on the first of every month you can't hear it there yet. It's programmed for April 1. But it is on Bandcamp and Soundcloud and you can watch the highly engaging video on instagram. (Highly engaging culturally, not statistically)

It means I now have four tracks so I'm wondering about compiling them into an EP. Maybe on vinyl. Does anyone know how to do that?

I'm also gutted to learn that I've missed the inaugural Minidisc Day because that would have been right up my street. Maybe next year.

Audience-wise things seem to have peaked. I'm down to 13 monthly listeners on Spotify. (Is that because it's early in the month? Is it a calendar month or a rolling 30-day period? It's unclear.)

I don't even attract much attention from the spammers on Soundcloud with the word 'sex' in the title of the song. Just three in 24 hours. I'm beginning to think that the RSS massive isn't as dense with promotional opportunity as it once was. Are none of you lot influencers? Maybe I'm going to have to tweet about this stuff. Oh God.

 

I forget what goes where

I have this infrequent newsletter. You can sign up. But why would you? you're a blog-reader, a member of the RSS massive, you don't need no stinkin' newsletters. Though that would mean you'd miss some primo mundane content.

So, just for you, here it is, copied and pasted like an ill-gotten essay.

<begins>

the chickens followed, they are not mine

We've just come back from a holiday in America, using up the last of the air miles from all those years of flying for work. It was fantastic, but it felt like the end of an era. I was reading What We Need To Do Now and ‘fly to Florida and drive around in a convertible’ are squarely not on the list. This is a bit OK Boomer isn’t it? Have a life of flying and then decide to give up right at the end. Sorry about that.

1. A thing I like about holidays is the way you hear different music floating around. Such as, for instance, 10,000 Hours by Dan + Shay and Justin Bieber. Did you all know about this? Should this not have been talked about more? Are there any other pop sociology/science theories/myths that have made it as pop lyrics? There's a band called Skinnerbox. But, apparently no songs. There are loads of songs called Prisoner's Dilemma. You can imagine how those go. There appear to be no songs called You Only Use 10% of Your Brain. There is only one song called Money Ball. I'd have thought there'd be more.

I also note that some of the lyrics of 10,000 hours seem to be based on standard internet security questions. I presume someone was trying to re-activate their online banking while bashing out the second verse:

Do you miss the road that you grew up on?

Did you get your middle name from your grandma?

When you think about your forever now, do you think of me?

2. I was also struck by the way El Cantante by Marc Anthony shares a little brass figure with The Floral Dance by The Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band. (You can hear in at 1:12). Perhaps that's a job for Mike 2600.

3. As I get older I get more used to having events I remember recounted as history. It's strange, but it's sometimes lovely. This is one of the lovelies - Nabihah Iqbal's NTS special about Tears for Fears. I've grown in and out of obsessions with Tears for Fears. I guess, right now, I'm slightly out, but this is a magnificent reminder of how good and important they are.

4. Frank Lantz invents games, he's very good at it. He's invented an Alexa-based game called Hey Robot and in this tiny two-tweet thread you can see him demonstrating his understanding of the way games work on people, gems of insight about motivation and body language. (You do need to read the tweets and watch the video. You should.)

5. Pome is the best thing on the internet of newsletters. (Short modern poems for your inbox, because it's dangerous to go alone.) This poem arrived a while ago:

explain yourself

my life was like this when i found it.

so i walked with it the entire way.

the chickens followed, they are not mine.

It made me seek out more andrew michael roberts (he appears to favour lower case) and eventually a slim paperback arrived in the post. It contained this one:

the moon

all the other moons

get their own names.

I like that. (For instance)

<ends>

 

February 2020

Music: Bosses Time - Elite Panic

Bleep notes

Here is some news from the music hobby industrial complex.

Song two from what-can-you-do-in-an-afternoon, take-less-time-and-spend-less-money-than-if-your-hobby-was-angling, dance-music-experimentalists Elite Panic was released to all major streaming services on February 1st. 

According to DistroKid, this has now brought us to a mighty 58 streams on Spotify - broken down like this:

And the Spotify app now reports this:

Most thrillingly, Elite Panic has now dipped it's toe in algorithmic curation and has been served up to Phil like it's a real piece of music you might listen to. This gives me the same little buzz I got when I saw Egg Bacon Chips and Beans in an actual bookshop:

 

Over on Apple Music the story is purer, with a total of 1 stream in the last 365 days, broken down like this:

(I think, to be honest, that was probably me.)

While at bandcamp, well-known to be a significant element of any future monetisation model for modern musicians, the commerce wheels are starting to turn with sales for this period now totalling £2.83. (Thanks Iain!) 

Once again, I seem to be the lone follower.

The marketing department has not been resting on its laurels though and, this week, Specialist Equipment rolled out its first Above The Line advertising campaign with this 'box ad' in The Wire. £130. Again, a tiny chill to be inside something I've read for so long. It's not a big ad, right at the back of the magazine, but I suspect that people who read The Wire read all of it. Thus far any effect on sales, visits, streams, conversions, brand awareness or image attribute shift has been undetectable but, hey, it's early. ZTT wasn't built in a day.

Because that ad points at Bandcamp I thought maybe there should be more than two tracks there so I rushed out a new one and put it up. Therefore, Bosses Time made it's debut yesterday. Here's the instagram video: (Keynote + iMovie is all anyone needs for modern music promotion.)

(Yes, I know it should probably have an apostrophe, but I didn't like how that looked. I'm an artist.)

Bosses Time won't be on streaming services until March 1st so that's an exciting exclusive for all my Bandcamp followers (i.e. me)

Finally, and most excitingly, Mark honoured me with a 'dub edit' of Shaky Debut. It's far superior to the original. Mark can do modern music rhythms in a way I just can't figure. I tried to upload it to Spotify and Bandcamp but the algos rejected it. Soundcloud appears to be more tolerant, however.

January 2020

January 2020 from russelldavies on Vimeo.

Music 'Alan' by Elite Panic available on Bandcamp, Spotify, Soundcloud.

Adventures in modern musicing

Work was pretty intense in 2019, I didn't get to do much else, so when resolution season for this year rolled around I wanted to make sure I carved out some time for hobbying.

And the designated hobby is music. My plan is to make one piece of music per month. And because I'm the opposite of a completer-finisher I gave myself the additional rule that I have to put that piece of music out in public. It has to be available for public listening and purchasing. That means something has to be finished.

That's led me down all sorts of interesting rabbit holes because making music public is different.

And on with the music

First, the actual music. The point here is not for it to be brilliant. It's for it to be done. I'm thinking of it as a bit like blogging. I'm going to make stuff quickly, put it out in the world and see what I learn from it. Consequently I set myself a strict constraint for making the first piece. I wrote it on the M1 one Friday evening, while driving to Derbyshire. (I wasn't driving). I did it all on a Volca Sample and then added a bit of delay and did some mixing in Ableton Live. 

To further prevent myself procrastinating I vowed not to tinker too much with mixing and mastering. So once it was all in the right order I just uploaded it to Landr for mastering and did whatever they said.

The finished track is well minimal. Very little happens. But I like to tell myself it fails to happen in a slightly charming way. You decide. I've decided that the 'record company' is Specialist Equipment, the band/artist will be called Elite Panic and the first track is called Shaky Debut. Here it is on bandcamp/soundcloud/spotify.

Right now I have 2 monthly listeners on Spotify. And they're both me. Add me to your playlists!

And on with the promotion

As well as making the music I also want to understand more about how the modern music business works. So I'm keen to try different promotional ideas and for this month I've been playing with instagram. This has been fascinating. I spent £28.20 on promoting this post to a UK audience, 13-65, interested in electronic dance music. Instagram make this very easy to do (once you get past the data-doubt of connecting things to your Facebook page). The audience I reached looked like this:

Instagram clearly have a lot of kids they can serve you.

All that resulted in 778 likes, 5 bookmarks, 0 comments, 0 follows, 0 visits to bandcamp, 0 sales. That's a lot of barren likes. Interesting!

Next month I'm going to try something more old fashioned. I'm going to put an ad in The Wire.

Anyway.