Holy Cities
So, the past year I’ve been working up a set with a new band, Holy Cities. It’s kind of an electro-pop post-rock thing. It’s pretty challenging for me because I have to think about all the nuances of playing: technique, dynamics, inflection, intonation, feel. That kind of thing. In the past with this kind of thing, I’ve thought about some of these things, but mostly it was about dynamics and playing a lot of notes and technically fast fills. With Shiplosion, I started bridging the gap–I wish I could have continued going with that, too–but I ran out of time. But with this band it’s about a lot of nuance, and I’m really enjoying it and really liking the music. The arrangements have an epic quality, my favorite, and it’s earnest. It’s pretty, but maybe also a little lonely and stark, and perhaps a little foreboding? We’re an odd bunch, from different contradicting background, but we’re coming together and it’s working.
The other day, we gathered some equipment, and borrowed a little, and then assembled in a warehouse in Sodo and recorded some DIY tracks. Hey, they are turning out okay! We are starting to put them up online. Give us a listen and tell me what you think.
We’re gonna play our first show on Saturday, at the Josephine. We’ll by sharing the stage with some friends. I hope you can make it. We could use your encouragement! Oh, and let me know if you have ideas for bands or shows to play with. :)
Playlists
Hey, I’ve been making a bunch of playlists of various tunes that are rad. I’ve been listening to a lot of moody synth stuff and post-post-rock/post-black-metal goodness, but there are a lot of other nuggets mixed in.
You can check out my Spotify profile, which has the long list of playlists in the series “Melancholy Mondays”, as an alternative to all the happy Friday playlists that everyone makes all the time. You might need to install something to see my full profile, but you don’t need to install anything for the direct playlist links below, and this is all free and stuff.
The latest playlist is Melancholy Mondays 18.
Previous playlists: Melancholy Mondays 17, Melancholy Mondays 16, etc.
Oh, and I’m also collecting some good songs for 2013.
Enjoy.
Trying to make quality art
As Bob Lefsetz points out regularly, rock stars are not rock stars any more. It’s technology entrepreneurs that are the new rock stars. (And so are chefs.) So, what makes entrepreneurs our new heroes?
In the software world, you sort of have two approaches. You can be b2b, or “business to business”, where you sell products and solutions to businesses (the large ones being called “enterprises”). Or you can be b2c–“business to consumer”. You might consider Microsoft to be more of a b2b type of company, where they get most of their profits from enterprise customers. And you might consider Apple as a b2c type of company, where individual consumers drive most of the revenue.
In the b2b model, you are more focused on scenarios that get stuff done. You are not going to be a rock star. Your customers are businesses, not end users. Most people have not heard of you, or care what you do–but you still get rich. Businesses use your software to make money, and it’s just your business-customers that adore you. The end users in the business get a paycheck, and they just need to accomplish tasks so they can get paid.
On the other hand, b2c companies focus on making the end user feel delighted and at peace. It’s about the journey, about feeling part of something important, about feeling special, about being pleasantly surprised, about being entertained, and ultimately it’s about feeling like the product has somehow intangibly improved their lifestyle. The b2c companies get all the fame, as they inspire the end users. When you’re really great, people forget that they are paying for your product–they really believe that it is being bestowed upon them.
You get loyal customers by consistently exceeding their expectations. And so you need to deliver a quality product. In the b2b model, your quality is measured against the ability to accomplish tasks. In the b2c model, your quality is measured against warm fuzzy feelings.
In your art, your goals are different. Hopefully your goals are not related to making money (let’s be realistic here), but are instead focused solely on music quality as a means toward inspiration. But how do you ultimately define quality? Probably in a different way. Perhaps it’s by inspiring an emotional reaction. Perhaps that reaction could be a positive one, in the case of b2c, or it could also deliberately inspire a negative one. If you’re inspiring discussion, then perhaps that is the result of the quality of your art. As they say, there is no such thing as bad press. Banksy comes to mind.
Bad quality can have a backlash, as we see with the latest iPhone that isn’t flying off the shelves due to its disorienting display. People grow accustomed to a lifestyle, and they expect you to deliver. Much like with art, the negative hype can often just come from the critics, the squeaky wheels–like with Miley Cyrus who is doing just fine financially. You have to understand who is your audience, and how the critics affect broad opinion–if at all. Critics may actually not matter, or perhaps certain critics don’t matter (a consumer focused critic isn’t going to hurt your company much with a bad review if your business is a b2b).
How do you measure your progress in reaching good enough musical quality? This is trickier. So here’s a method to consider.
In the software world, the latest thing is to follow a SCRUM process. You can search it up online, but to summarize: you divide up your project into short, manageable sprints. After a couple of sprints, you have a minimal viable product (MVP) that you can pass around and get feedback. But even sprints are viable in their own way, in that you end up with something that works at every step. As you reach the end of each sprint, you look back and figure out what went well, and what could be improved. You adjust your schedule, you improve your processes, and then you go to the next sprint. This way, you are constantly correcting course and staying agile.
I would wager that we could consider sprints to be like writing songs. You keep writing songs over short periods of time until you get one that is good enough, from your own point of view. That means you’ve reached an MVP. You’re not working on the same song–that’s not the point. You’re working on your ability to create great art. Maybe you take another sprint to polish the MVP-type song. Then you share that song with a small group of “early adopters”, as they’re called in the software world. The early adopters are passionate about you. They want to consume everything you make, and they are unafraid to criticize you with wild abandon. And, in fact, you highly respect their feedback–perhaps they are friends, or members of a song writing group. Often this is all done confidentially. You take all the feedback, and use that to improve your quality. They’ll never hear the bad songs, which is fine because no one will ever hear the bad songs. You are not married to your songs. They are just sprints along the way to an MVP.
Then you repeat. You’re building up your experience, your expertise, and your intuition. You’re digesting feedback, and integrating it. And the next MVP, you give it out to a wider audience–maybe publicly this time, but still on a limited basis to, perhaps, just your die-hard fans.
Repeat some more. The number of sprints between MVPs is decreasing. You’re constantly writing songs, but people don’t hear every one. You are only focused on writing over and over until you finally write one that is good enough quality. Lastly, release your MVP-level song(s) to a wide audience. Include all those critics. You’ve learned how to over-deliver consistently and with high quality. You are inspiring people. You are a rock star.
~
(follow up thought: at what point is a song good enough? Die-hard fans do want to see your tender moments and your screw ups. Hmmm… perhaps it’s time to show them some of your horrible songs after all, to give them a glimpse of your process?)
(follow up thought, part 2: music quality leads to emotional reaction. That’s why I play music, and it may be your reason, too. There is no better feeling in the world than to inspire someone–to be in the right place at the right time, where you have inexorably changed their life. I have no idea if I’ve ever done that, but I hope to some day.)
(follow up thought, part 3: Melt Banana is touring the US right now, but they are down 2 members–likely due to the government shutdown. But tonight, seeing them at Chop Suey, we aaaalmost didn’t notice. They have written so many songs, performed so often, gained so much experience, that they just rolled with it and totally brought the energy. Two people taking up the space of four. I’m sad their drummer and bassist are left at home, but I aaaalmost didn’t notice. Why? Because their music inspires me.)
Trying to know what’s possible
When you’re starting out in your art, you might want to learn from the masters to get some credibility while you find your voice. It’s a smart thing to do, rather than reinventing the wheel. The greats that came before us perfected techniques that lead to highly regarded art. Might as well pick up where they left off, in order to save ourselves some time. Each technique was a reaction to the one before it–either in embrace or rejection. We learn the history, and gain wisdom, perspective, and experience. We learn the map of the land, prior to venturing forth into uncharted territory. They already made the map of the known universe–we just have to learn it and then go explore further.
Marcel Duchamp is a perfect example of this process. He learned from the masters before him, and contemporary to him. By mastering classical and expressionist techniques, he became well respected in his community. Early on, his avant-garde interests were largely kept to himself and his closest friends, from what I understand. But he dabbled enough that he became director of the Society of Independent Artists in New York, which I think was an avant-garde arts festival that pretty much allowed anyone to submit art for a small fee. So there were hundreds of submissions every year.
And then one year, he submitted The Fountain. It was just a urinal. The board of the SIA was so shocked by it that they actually went so far to take the unusual step of rejecting his art. He immediately resigned, and then dove headfirst into the Dada movement never to look back. Perhaps I’m mistaken, but he must have been one of the first artists to successfully use found items in his work.
Was it a huge risk on his part to submit a urinal as art? Or did he have plenty going on at the time that he was confident in thumbing his nose at the so-called open Society? Perhaps as director, he knew he had enough clout that he wouldn’t completely fall out of favor and instead get even more respect for making a strong and shocking statement. Or perhaps, he just had the conviction to do whatever he felt like doing. I hope it was the latter, but nothing wrong with it being the former. But today, we see similar actions by famous artists. In music today, we see Miley Cyrus going from innocent schoolgirl, to overnight punk rock sexual millennial icon–and shocking those in the established music industry. She paid her dues, building up a strong reputation as a safe tween icon, and then she (or her manager more likely) made the decision to shake things up with a strong statement–just as the pop icons all did before her (Lady Gaga, Madonna, etc.).
But starting out… we learn from the masters before anyone will bother to notice any strong statement we would care to make (“Who’s this joker? Why should I care what he has to say? He’s a nobody.”). But here’s the scary part: which masters do we focus on? We can’t learn everything from all of them. We have to prioritize in some way. Certainly our interests will help guide us, and we can learn from those who inspire us. Yet, here’s the scarier question: From any particular master, what do we attempt to learn? By nature, the masters are super-human. Not only were they in the right place at the right time, but they were ready to take advantage of those opportunities with their superior intellect, creativity, and coordination. It would take me two lifetimes to learn to play like Buddy Rich, and then I’d just be called the Buddy Rich Ripoff. Not only do I have to learn some sweet techniques, but I have to also leave time to find my own voice. How do I do both?
So, you have to figure out what you can actually learn with a reasonable amount of effort, or you have to be willing to take the risk.
A mentor will help you prioritize these things. Did you ever have a moment–I certainly did, when my mentor told me that I could learn the push-pull technique in a year–when you suddenly had clarity that you could actually learn something that in the past seemed unattainable?
Being in the right place at the right time
It seems like you can capture a person’s heart and soul by being in the right place at the right time. There is certain art where I not only remember when I experienced it for the first time, but also the whole context around how it specifically spoke directly to me.
There are little vines of memory that replay in my mind. A song that my mom would sing to me when I was 4. The Nutcracker, while watching the Christmas Tree miraculously grew on stage. That scene in Raggedy Anne and Raggedy Andy when they came to life. A painting of the barn in my backyard, and the barn collapsed days later. A Reading Rainbow episode with the little sign language interpreter bubble in the lower right of the screen. Watching 2001: A Space Odyssey when I was 9 and being exposed to a film ending that made absolutely no sense to me and being mystified and changed by that. The impressionist oil paintings in my grandparents guest room, depicting cobblestone streets in the rain; people running for shelter and the light reflecting off the stones. Various low budget or poorly written shows, film, and music that I grew up on and will never leave behind. Depictions of the Santa Ynez Valley by Eyvind Earle, a trip through which I would make with my family almost every year. Tron, and later the TV series Automan that introduced a yearning optimism about the future. Dune, directed by David Lynch, which played on HBO on repeat for what seemed like an entire summer, when I was just old enough to grasp the plot by the end of the season, and by which I learned important truths about life. Reading the Chocolate War and I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier, which reassured me that the cruel nature of human beings can be overcome and that everyone feels lonely sometimes. Reading Enders Game by Orson Scott Card, which taught me in a strange roundabout way the importance of truly being understood by another and of truly understanding someone else on a deep level. The book Cosmos (I didn’t see the series until much later), which inspired a love of cosmology, astronomy, and science in general. John Zorn’s Naked City, which introduced a completely new concept of music and art, opening my mind to a new dimension in creativity. An unrecorded song, sung at a memorial service and indelibly stamped on my brain. All of this just a random brain dump of what comes to mind this evening as I write this. Likely many others experienced these things, but the timing was wrong and they just scoffed. I don’t relate, but some people feel like Insane Clown Posse speaks to them. To each their own.
If you’re in the right place at the right time, you become part of someone’s identity for life. When were you in the right place at the right time?
Writers block
Well it finally happened. I’ve managed to stay a few weeks ahead for a year now, but I’ve finally run out of words. Bear with me while I come up with some more ideas….
Trying to trust
I was brainstorming with BDT’s coach (yes, we call her Coach), and she mentioned the importance of feeling like you can trust everyone in your group. And that totally reminded me of a bunch of stuff I’ve learned about trust over the past years! So this week’s post is about Trust.
Ross Smith, a Director of Test at Microsoft, took a bunch of theories about trust and now regularly puts them to the test. I had the good fortune of working in his organization for a short time, and it was pretty amazing to see the transformation he achieved in a short period of time. Ross is tricky. He uses crowd sourcing and game techniques to improve results. In other words, he turns things into games that encourage people inside and outside his organization to play and compete. The genius of it is that people end up spending extra time on projects that they aren’t even responsible for–because it’s so fun and personally rewarding for them.
Here’s an article about when Ross first created a game framework that encouraged trust behaviors inside his group. Click the link, and then first scroll down to Benefits and Metrics and read that dense paragraph. Here’s an example of some of the results:
“Our retention numbers were 20% to 50% higher than our historical numbers”
“We saw between a 10% to 60% improvement in productivity, as measured by a number of different metrics”
Okay, now go back and read that dense article to learn the specifics. Since we’re talking about software here, it was all done in a systematic way that he could measure. Out of the process, his group came up with a list of 150 trust building behaviors that they would track and turn into a game.
In another interview, Ross lists the sources of his inspiration on Trust. Scroll down to the very bottom of the interview for the list of sources.
So as musicians in a band with a couple members, we probably don’t have to be all systematic and scientific about it. My only reason for linking to those interviews is to build the case that organizational trustworthiness has been measured and it’s a huge pile of awesomeness. You can even take the next logical step: an increase in productivity should help make an increase in income. Of course income doesn’t matter so much if you’re stressed out and burned out–but again the numbers show that happiness increases just as much on average.
So it’s pretty clear that Trust is going to make a significant impact on the success of your band.
And by the way, back when I was working for Ross, he created the environment that produced a tool called the Conversation Analyzer. It analyzes your IM conversations (using a communications program called Lync) for trust building language, and gives you a score. You can track how you progress toward being someone who is trustworthy and encourages trust building.
Now, go back to that list of 150 trust building behaviors and actually take a look at it. It’s something we could spend the rest of our lives working on. So, in addition to everything else we’re working on, let’s just spend the next year focusing on maybe one or two off that list. And then move to the next, and so on. As the data shows, we’ll be happier and more productive.
August news, 2013
I’m looking forward to doing some new things in the upcoming months.
I’ve been putting together a set with a group of good friends and we’ll likely start playing some shows in November. Stay tuned for some announcements. I’m really happy with the direction this group is taking. I get to focus on playing some rock in a more subtle and mature way, and I’m really proud of the music we’re making.
Related to that group, I’ve been putting together Spotify playlists of music both new and old. Just different tunes that I’ve been listening to, as I think about how to approach this new project. When I gather enough songs, I’ll post the playlist on the next Monday. There may be some clues about what we will sound like. I hope you enjoy the playlists too. Spotify has a web player now, so I don’t think you have to install anything anymore if you don’t want to. The latest playlist is there already, but I won’t be posting the link on facebook until this Monday.
I’m also sitting in with a Klezmer group, the Debaucherantes, so stay tuned for a date or two with them. Looking forward to that!
Gamer Jam is set to continue, even though we announced that it was over. Sean is just too busy, but the rest of us want to keep it going. Let me know if you have any ideas!
As you know, Shiplosion is winding down. Our last show is in the woods at the end of the month. And Bucharest Drinking Team continues strong! It’s amazing to look back over how far we’ve come over the past couple years, and we have so many more great ideas!
Lots of fun stuff. I hope to see you around sometime real soon. Check out my calendar for dates. Thanks for reading this blog! As always, let me know what you think, or anything else that’s on your mind. –Kai
Music recommendations, August 10, 2013
Well, I wasn’t able to articulate any deep thoughts this week. So instead, it’s time for some new music recommendations!
Skies Below -This is a metal band from here in Seattle, that includes the drummer from the late Consulate. They are in the studio right now at Magnets Large & Small, so keep an eye out for their debut album. I think this is a new band to watch. Maybe check out their next show? I couldn’t find anything about them online yet, other than facebook. But their description, “heavy mellow”, is apt.
Thine — The duo just finished mixing their first album, but it’s not quite out yet. You can find some previews on soundcloud. This is another project involving the prodigious Stuart Dahlquist. If you’re aware of his other projects, Burning Witch, Asva, Sun O))), etc, then you might find this to be a little more accessible. I think fans of Kao Dot would be interested, as well as Asva fans. Thine has that signature Dahlquist organ sound–so hypnotically minimal and so stunningly colorful. Then add the lush voice of Joel RL Phelps. I don’t know how to categorize this, but perhaps you could include the Norwegian group, Ulver. The dynamics are all over the map, and often kicking into a groove at rare and distinct moments of resolution. But more often than not, the music is rubato and full of suspense.
Asva — this isn’t a new band, but I’m pretty excited that they are releasing a live album soon. Go and try to preorder it.
Free Salamander Exhibit — Members of Sleeptime Gorilla Museum have started afresh. I just caught them tonight in Seattle at the Mix. They are prog, but with heavy influences of funk, wicker, and burlap. It’s very heavy, very abstract and modern, and very entertaining to see live. I caught their 3rd show ever, so you still have a chance to hook up with their tour somewhere.
Update: How could I leave this out?? Kao Dot is coming out with a new album, Hubardo. You can pre-order it, so go do that. I pretty much agree with the NPR review, so I won’t be reinventing the wheel. Suffice to say, this is a group that plays with dynamics, concepts of time, textures, and colors. Expect pleasant surprises.