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Amidst all the praise and recriminations regarding the release of Radiohead’s new album is the tacit admission of the inherent bankruptcy at the heart of the music industry. If Radiohead, first among bands of their era, have put the price of music in the digital age somewhere around ‘what ever you fancy’, how much less the ocean of mediocrity clogging up digital stores and ‘priced about right’ torrent sites around the world.

The value of music in a digital environment is pretty close to nothing, save for conscience and convenience. In a spooky echo of some of the things we have been talking on-Radiohead seem to think it’s more about packaging and performance.

Seems like a pretty good bet.

In a culture which, as any good media studies student will know, the medium and the message are so inextricably linked-the leap from vinyl to cd to mp3 has been a thorough education in the law of diminishing returns.

For the consumer the ‘industry’ part of that most tragic of all non sequiturs ‘the music industry’, has been tirelessly and ruthlessly exposed in hideous antipiracy campaigns, DRM deals with the devil and crazy, suicidal lawsuits.

For the artist, trying to make something meaningful in the an environment where the delicate balance between creativity and fiscal reality (which at one time seemed so easy) has long since tipped in the favour of accountants and endless middle management.

The untold value of context.

What price a chance to wipe the slate? No more protest songs from multinationals, the radical edges of our lives long since outsourced and needlessly spent chasing teen demographics.

No coincidence perhaps that ‘In Rainbows‘ is Radiohead’s strongest album for ages. It sounds like a body of work, rather than a collection of difficult (if often beautiful) excursions beyond their comfort zone. More importantly, by providing a model for ‘artisian musicians’, Radiohead have found themselves in a position few artists can rightful claim.

At the start of something new.

And it’s worth buying just for that-the thrill of something new and the sound of castles burning.

It’s the most vital cultural event of the decade.

Get the whole thing here

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Checked out waajeed at the jazz cafe last week.

It was all kinds of ropey.

Just a lame-assed dj set-if I had paid the £16/£20 door charge, I’d have been mad.
Some guy in a big gold chain wheeling out tired hiphop plattitudes. 45 minutes of ‘this one’s for dilla’ (can’t we let this dude rest in peace) followed by a shocking ‘party set’;'funkin for jamacia’ into ‘running away’ into ‘billie jean’ (!) on tuesday?

Damn.

The guy’s from detroit, he should know better.

Also in the house was someone who certainly does know better, producer of some of the edgiest/heaviest music of the last 10 year3- Kenny Dixon Jr. He was a courteous and charming dude, full of stories and the kind of generous soul you secretly hope all your musical  inspirations possess. We talked about Prince a lot and I bugged him about releasing ‘freaky motherfucker’, a track he’s played live a few times, which he recorded back in the 90’s but has never made it to vinyl-it’s sort of shit that Prince would be making if he’d hadn’t lost his way sometime in around 1989.

He’s playing with gilles at the brownswood birthday party on saturday-reach.

Also showing up the main event was the support act-mile-end’s finest, ‘Yes King Soundsystem’ who destroyed it with their fine blend of ragga-hiphop-soul. Not sure when they are releasing something, but as a live thing it’s definitely worth checking.

I hope waajeed was taking notes.

Yes King-Elevate

ps for all the moodymann you will ever need check out this selection from our mate matt

last week was a fallow week for my horse latitudes uppage.

late to bed, early to rise. undoubtably there’ll be tears before bedtime.
for a while, i wondered what happened to my purple prose. but since its a week since i heard a song all the way through (with the exception of a sublime gig by the ukulele orchestra of great britain when i got twelve or so) maybe i was missing fuel to my fire.

but you know how you turn to old habits when things hit a tired, milky dusk - so is it a suprise that i’m posting a cover version?
a damien jurado cover version?
of a j.tillman song?

sounds like home before you’ve gotten your key in the lock.

i do love friends covering friends - rarely self-referential enough to be elitist, it’s a proud to call you mine moment caught on tape or on stage.

so thank you to the brilliant hard to find a friend for posting the whole kexp set, and j.tillman who loved it enough to call damien an asshole. since we’re sending you out of the latitudes for a minute to follow that link, do check out the several new tracks he and jenna also played, it’s little surprise that i can’t wait for the new damien jurado album.
and tour.

yet more from the future.

damien jurado - when i light your darkened door

Took some time out to see the mighty jon bibrough playing in hoxton last night. It was a good session, made infinitely better by the heady combination of brooklyn beer, edgy sampling and a really indepth discussion about the relative merits of kraut rock and 80’s jazz fusion.

One day disco jesus and that man quaid will get together and make the most amazing/ridiculously obscure track and the world will be returned (for approx 9 minutes) to a warehouse in new york in 1979 populated entirely by middle-aged german men with moustaches and a no tops on.

It’ll be heavy (and left)

But mainly left.

We’re deep into the long promised (ever postponed) site update, which is hopefully going to be triumphantly revealed over the weekend or sometime early next week.

It’s both a joyous and a frustrating experience.

Joyous cause it forces you to sit down and work out where you’re at and where you want to go.

Frustrating cause it takes ages to get it how you want, and it distracts you from the writing and the things that make you do it in the first place.

Anyway-whilst I chisel away at html and php I tend to listen to music like this.

Artfully compiled and mixed on the sun-kissed shores of southern spain.

A selection of celestial soul from firemusic heavyweight Man From Atlantis.

Man From Atlantis-Odyssey

ok, it’s getting boring.

how tired i am.

how busy i am.

and now too busy to post or listen to music. not much longer now.

in the meantime, keep tuning in.

great lake swimmers - i will never see the sun

another week nearly over and i was determined not to let you off without a little something for you weekend.

while i do spend a lot of time listening to what might be termed airy-fairy acoustic music, every so often a little crashing cymbal and thuddering bass drum gets into my day and puffs up my chest.

admittedly i was attracted to this track by its title (who says i think too highly of my intended?) but the resulting download of a band i’ve sort of been purposefully ignoring in the whole pitchfork breaking bands saga is the sort of white stripes meets the walkmen-esque garage-noise it’s sometimes good to end a week with.

a little stomp stomp crash for a saturday night.

cold war kids - saint john

its turned chilly again here. not that it really got hot this year. walking home in a borrowed sweater with the hood pulled tight around my face i notice i’m crunching through brown leaves. i don’t remember them falling. perhaps last night’s fireworks left me with a november cordite memory.

still, this turn in the weather; turn in the season feels like the start of comfortable twilight for this year.

as blankets unfurl over bedspreads then; as cocoa steam curls me to sleep, some music to dream to… my log cabin in the mountains feels closer than ever. the dog’s in the yard and kids by the hearth not so much a distant idyll any longer. a crunch of tyres on gravel track, squeals as children run to meet the man we all four adore. and what’s on the set? fleet foxes.

we’ve j.tillman to thank for these guys. for introducing us to their manager, the utterly beautiful and delightfully talented aja. fleet foxes shouldn’t be able to sound like they do, since by all accounts these songs have been basking in the low evening sun in southern california for the past forty years.

fleet foxes are the all enveloping harmonies of crosby stills and nash, the soporific, rolling timpani of sunflower-era beach boys and that late winter sunshine which fractures into swollen beads of light on a camera’s lens. they’re northern european folk stories, snow shoes and moonshine. they’re heart broken times-a-changing, the music that robertson, manuel, hudson, danko and helm didn’t get onto acetate and a book of british birds.

i’m more than a little bit in love with this band and it won’t be long till you are too. go listen to more on their myspace page until they release a record for you to chart a new period of your life by.

Fleet Foxes-white winter hymnal

the horse latitudes are looking for a new home at the moment; a real, four solid walls and well appointed roof terrace type home.

when we do find it however hopefully the moving process won’t be quite as traumatic as swapping servers (i’m not sure jak could cope with that). and while the all new hl towers’s precise location and number of bedrooms has yet to be decided the fact that we’re moving out of familiar digs into some place is becoming more real by the second.

when horse latitudes moved virtual house late last month we left a fair amount behind which means we get to repost our favourites from the last year. no surprise i’m going for a j.tillman re-uppage then.

i stumbled across josh’s music on gorilla vs bear last march and snapped up a first run of long may you run j.tillman. since then he’s put out two new records, answered our questions, come out for a beer, dedicated a song to us and even trusted his utterly gorgeous girlfriend to us for a night out in london. turns out, he’s as lovely a man as his voice is honeyed.

every time i’ve posted on him it’s been a struggle to choose one single track so i’m taking a revisionist stance by posting something i’ve not shared before but keeping the home theme alive.

as you know, we’re all for sharing music and the inevitable creation of the less industry more music-led music industry but do please go out and buy his music. from the utterly beautiful album, minor works

j.tillman - crooked roof

and read more of my unabashed tillmusings here:

joshua its not my fault

horse latitudes *loves* j.tillman
it’s popular with the disco dancers

i’ll tell you how the darkness feels

out of the strong came forth sweetness

while i’d like to think i’m unpredictable and kinda hard to read, two things this weekend proved that absolutely wasn’t the case.

jak’s friday post pre-empted by a few short hours me mooching round a marylebone bookstore with a copy of updike’s ‘the women who got away’ in my hand which i’d picked up because i loved the cover but put down again because i wanted all the books in that series since they were all so well designed.

and over organic chorizo & butterbean soup (feel free to roll your eyes right now) at work an engineer who knows his stuff mentioned a band i might like. often, i approach recommendations begrudgingly, which has a little to do with my own personal brand of competitive, search & destroy new music hunting as much as it does to do with years of disappointment and mild disgust at the idea that your friend’s had your taste sooo wrong.

which brings me to the heavy (and how jules really didn’t get me wrong at all).

pah.

headnodding rhythmic hooks, fuzzed out brass sections, led zep-esque waves of sound and with the filthiest recorded drum sounds i’ve heard since ?uestlove, the heavy’s debut album ‘great vengeance & furious fire’ drops on bonfire night on ninjatunes counter imprint. they’re playing a week of pan-london gigs later this month (see their myspace for details) and i can only imagine how huge they sound, not that i’m planning to imagine it as i’ll be there.

with only one seven inch under their belt (not that impressive i know…) here’s a sample of what they’re due to drop later this year.

the heavy - coleen

(Image via)

Chris at ANOE has sparked an interesting debate amongst the collected beards at DJ History (who’s name might prove a bit too apt for some) by linking to this article on little white earbuds which takes a look at the arguments surrounding the rights and wrongs of mp3 blogs.

Obviously, as people who write for a blog or two, it’s a subject which we have given a lot of thought and hopefully what follows won’t just read like somekind of lazy justification.

The vinyl age is over. It’s not that it wasn’t fun or that for two or three generations we were so sold on the idea of music packaged as a 12″ cardboard and plastic artifact that we forgot that this wasn’t music’s natural state. And cd’s, which were a nice postscript to the vinyl age, had there moments too-but in being less of ‘a product’ they were far less able to disguise the fact that what we were buying wasn’t ‘the music’-it was just a means to make ‘the music’ into something that could be mass produced and sold.

I’ve got nothing against that-I love a dusty record shop, the feel of a think cut cardboard sleeve and heavy cut vinyl. But let’s not confuse this object (beautiful as it is) with the thing itself. Music was only a ‘business’ for the time it could be commoditized and that commodity could be effectively controlled (via distribution). That day has passed and music is evolving to new state, the economics of which are yet to be defined-but certainly won’t serve controlling interests of the ‘music business’, rather will return the age old dictum of supply and demand.(with supply increasing based on things like performance and controlled access to the artist rather than on ‘product’)

Within that context the discussions on mp3blogs are sort of missing the point. The question is more about managing change, finding things you love and telling other people about them, trying to build a community that will one day help support artists you admire however things pan out. If you want to be part of that then you can, if not there are plenty of other ways to express a love of music.

moodyman-technologystolemyvinyl