Thursday, March 04, 2004
An imaginary letter of intent from an imaginary FACTOR application for an imaginary CD that I'm imagining making.
You can hear some of my disco-punk music at http://members.rogers.com/trevorcoleman/
To the members of the Jury:
I realise as you listen to this demo CD, you are probably asking “Is this guy serious?,” and I assure you I am. Serious like a heart attack.
I appreciate that the music is quite simple, and I tell you it is intentionally so. In the current musical climate many people feel as though music is a strange and arcane art, best left to specialists and artists, whatever those strange and wonderful beasts may be.
The truth of the matter is that music is all around us, and that we don’t even need to do anything to make it happen. John Cage tried to show us that with his work 4’33”, and the futurists tried to show us that by incorporating the sounds of typewriters and other machines into their work.
In my music, I try to follow the same path incorporating supposedly non-musical sounds, and non-musical people and making music with them. The drums in payless for everything are actually the sampled sound of gunshots and electrical crackling. Half of the shouting is done by my roommate, a self-professed non-musician.
Buzzers and alarm beeps also feature prominently. I’m fascinated by the sounds that used to catch our attention. I try to incorporate as many of them into my music as I can.
My creative strategy is to tear away any sound that is not music, and to leave the seams showing. Whatever is left must be the song. I also attempt to include as many non-musical sounds in the work as possible. Most of my exploration happens in the grey area between music and noise.
I also try to allow randomness into my creative process. Randomness, in my mind, is a pattern much larger than we can see. Divine or not, there is some greater order in this universe than we humans have access to. By allowing some of that randomness into my work, I am, in a way, allowing God to do some of the writing for me.
Or as someone once said it’s not the notes, it’s the space between the notes. It’s clichéd perhaps, but clichés are just great truths we’ve grown bored of hearing.
The lyrics feature advertising slogans and other short simple statements that we hear a million times a day without noticing. This is to draw attention to the messages that the media and advertisers repeat to us over and over, day in and day out. By taking these messages out of context we reveal them for what they are, and uncover the subtext that is so ubiquitous that we barely notice it anymore. You are not worth anything unless you are consuming something.
So much of the music on the radio today is really just a commercial for itself. Songs are just tools to drive album sales, when really the focus shouldn’t be on the songs or the albums, but really on the ideas that the music is advancing. These songs are just saying the same thing as everything else, except they’re saying it loud and clear, making the dialogue itself the subject of discussion, rather than trying to hide it under pretentious, self-important navel gazing on Behind The Music.
The planned process for the production of this record is far from traditional. Because of the nature of this type of music, most of the production will be done in my home studio, during what would traditionally be considered pre-production. Tracks will be sequenced using a rented Roland SP-808 sampler, which will be more than adequate for my needs.
The work in the studio will be about using the equipment I don’t usually have access to, not to get “better” sounds, but to get more sounds. The spontaneous nature of the composition and recording process, and the availability of easy-to-use digital sequencers and samplers both vastly reduce the amount of time required to complete this project
Another important part of this style of music is leaving some of the loose ends showing. Have a few seconds of people talking before the track begins. Let the breaths, giggles, and coughs come into the music. Let the audience hear that it’s not a machine, it’s a person making the music. Let them hear how much fun you had making it. That spirit is contrasted with the mechanical repetition of the sequenced drum sounds. It’s not the sounds that make music, it’s the people. That theme cannot be re-stated often enough.
I call this type of music Disco Punk. It doesn’t sound like disco or punk, but that’s the whole point. It embodies the spirit of the two movements. The whole point is that the music isn’t about what it sounds like, nor whether it sounds “good” or “bad”. It’s about the idea that makes you want to make the music in the first place. Disco is all about “Fun-fun-fun! Party-party-party!”, and punk is all about “Get the theory-bound capitalist pigs off the stage, and lets get some real people making real f**king music!” Disco Punk tries to unite those two movements, because there is common ground there: both are about being unpretentious.
Contradictions in life are the most interesting parts. Anyone who comes to Disco Punk has to confront their own ignorance of the genre right off the bat, so any preconceived notions of what they thought it was going to be like are proved wrong right away.
Well there you have it, you like it or you don’t, you buy it or you don’t. This scene is happening it Toronto, it’s our grunge. It has the same roots, but this time it’s got the Internet, so it won’t get strangled by the traditional media. There’s something new and different about to happen here. Something completely outside of our current conception of art and commerce. This album will sell, not a lot perhaps, but enough to make back what I spend. I have complete faith in that. People are looking for something different, and this type of music is it. Just show up at Wavelength in Toronto on any given Sunday night and you’ll see the market for this.
-Trevor Coleman
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To the members of the Jury:
I realise as you listen to this demo CD, you are probably asking “Is this guy serious?,” and I assure you I am. Serious like a heart attack.
I appreciate that the music is quite simple, and I tell you it is intentionally so. In the current musical climate many people feel as though music is a strange and arcane art, best left to specialists and artists, whatever those strange and wonderful beasts may be.
The truth of the matter is that music is all around us, and that we don’t even need to do anything to make it happen. John Cage tried to show us that with his work 4’33”, and the futurists tried to show us that by incorporating the sounds of typewriters and other machines into their work.
In my music, I try to follow the same path incorporating supposedly non-musical sounds, and non-musical people and making music with them. The drums in payless for everything are actually the sampled sound of gunshots and electrical crackling. Half of the shouting is done by my roommate, a self-professed non-musician.
Buzzers and alarm beeps also feature prominently. I’m fascinated by the sounds that used to catch our attention. I try to incorporate as many of them into my music as I can.
My creative strategy is to tear away any sound that is not music, and to leave the seams showing. Whatever is left must be the song. I also attempt to include as many non-musical sounds in the work as possible. Most of my exploration happens in the grey area between music and noise.
I also try to allow randomness into my creative process. Randomness, in my mind, is a pattern much larger than we can see. Divine or not, there is some greater order in this universe than we humans have access to. By allowing some of that randomness into my work, I am, in a way, allowing God to do some of the writing for me.
Or as someone once said it’s not the notes, it’s the space between the notes. It’s clichéd perhaps, but clichés are just great truths we’ve grown bored of hearing.
The lyrics feature advertising slogans and other short simple statements that we hear a million times a day without noticing. This is to draw attention to the messages that the media and advertisers repeat to us over and over, day in and day out. By taking these messages out of context we reveal them for what they are, and uncover the subtext that is so ubiquitous that we barely notice it anymore. You are not worth anything unless you are consuming something.
So much of the music on the radio today is really just a commercial for itself. Songs are just tools to drive album sales, when really the focus shouldn’t be on the songs or the albums, but really on the ideas that the music is advancing. These songs are just saying the same thing as everything else, except they’re saying it loud and clear, making the dialogue itself the subject of discussion, rather than trying to hide it under pretentious, self-important navel gazing on Behind The Music.
The planned process for the production of this record is far from traditional. Because of the nature of this type of music, most of the production will be done in my home studio, during what would traditionally be considered pre-production. Tracks will be sequenced using a rented Roland SP-808 sampler, which will be more than adequate for my needs.
The work in the studio will be about using the equipment I don’t usually have access to, not to get “better” sounds, but to get more sounds. The spontaneous nature of the composition and recording process, and the availability of easy-to-use digital sequencers and samplers both vastly reduce the amount of time required to complete this project
Another important part of this style of music is leaving some of the loose ends showing. Have a few seconds of people talking before the track begins. Let the breaths, giggles, and coughs come into the music. Let the audience hear that it’s not a machine, it’s a person making the music. Let them hear how much fun you had making it. That spirit is contrasted with the mechanical repetition of the sequenced drum sounds. It’s not the sounds that make music, it’s the people. That theme cannot be re-stated often enough.
I call this type of music Disco Punk. It doesn’t sound like disco or punk, but that’s the whole point. It embodies the spirit of the two movements. The whole point is that the music isn’t about what it sounds like, nor whether it sounds “good” or “bad”. It’s about the idea that makes you want to make the music in the first place. Disco is all about “Fun-fun-fun! Party-party-party!”, and punk is all about “Get the theory-bound capitalist pigs off the stage, and lets get some real people making real f**king music!” Disco Punk tries to unite those two movements, because there is common ground there: both are about being unpretentious.
Contradictions in life are the most interesting parts. Anyone who comes to Disco Punk has to confront their own ignorance of the genre right off the bat, so any preconceived notions of what they thought it was going to be like are proved wrong right away.
Well there you have it, you like it or you don’t, you buy it or you don’t. This scene is happening it Toronto, it’s our grunge. It has the same roots, but this time it’s got the Internet, so it won’t get strangled by the traditional media. There’s something new and different about to happen here. Something completely outside of our current conception of art and commerce. This album will sell, not a lot perhaps, but enough to make back what I spend. I have complete faith in that. People are looking for something different, and this type of music is it. Just show up at Wavelength in Toronto on any given Sunday night and you’ll see the market for this.
-Trevor Coleman
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