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Tape Op - Bill Bottrell Interview
StoreTags: bill botrell, tape op, industry
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I get the free subscription to Tape Op. Usually there's a killer interview somewhere in the middle (last issue it was Matthew Herbert). I make no pretenses at being a producer or engineer or anything, I don't really even understand the distinction really. So most of the magazine is stuff I completely don't understand (what the fuck are you going to do with 48 bits and 24 tracks of audio?) or just can't qualify (do people really care what mic you use on that snare?). But some of those interviews have some serious insight.
The May/June issue came in the mail yesterday. I started reading it on the bus and when I got home, I laid on my side to read it while my infected ear absorbed the sterile otic suspension I'm taking twice a day for a week (seems to be working well so far but still no treble in that ear since Saturday  ). I flipped over to the Bill Botrell interview and it seemed a little too long so I just kind of skimmed it, then I saw the caption: "There's a concept that's kind of been lost in the last fifteen twenty years where hierarchies and pyramids do exist, and if you're at the bottom and you want to move up, you've got to eat it a little bit. You don't walk in at the bottom of the pyramid and start making demands." Damn. Should probably go back and read the rest of this.
I was already feeling pretty existential since I got laid off from my (other) job yesterday, and I just started questioning the value of what I have to offer, with programming, music, writing, photoshop, any of this stuff I know how to do passably. And while the interview was pretty gloomy, it brought to light a lot of things that have kind of been bugging me about where music was going. Because we all love music, but it's kind of time to start thinking about what it's really worth now, as it sounds like it's hard to sell music even online anymore. For what it's worth, this is a guy that worked with Madonna, the Jacksons and Sheryl Crow, probably not the favorites of too many people on here, myself included. And I don't think he even mentions the internet, which obviously most of us depend on for everything from distribution to even the acquisition of our tools. But some of what was said seems very important to me.
Anyway, you can't read this online as far as I know. If you're getting a subscription, you'll probably end up reading it anyway. If not, borrow a friend's. If you can't do that, well, here are a few choice snippets:
I can't negotiate with the business climate anymore ... It's absolutely hopeless. Nobody is stepping up with any courage or dealing on behalf of the music or the musicians. Everybody is out for a killing. Everybody's trying to hook on to something that seems like it might be cool or profitable and everybody's guessing.
As the public's distaste for music grows, the record companies have to increasingly shove it down their throats and that costs money, and that gets counted against the producer's recoup.
TapeOp: Where do you see the music industry going?
I see recorded music being free. I see it going to live performance, which in this world is the only thing that can truly be owned anymore, and the only thing that doesn't require a big corporate infrastructure to present to the people. That's where I'd like to see it go.
The techniques were to break everything down as much as possible, keep recording one thing at a time, make slaves on analog, endless slaves, and pile them up in a locker somewhere and hire a professional to come in and just throw stuff down and sort it out later.
TapeOp: Sounds like now.
It is like now. These things come and go and I thought, "All the great records in a hundred years of recording weren't done that way" - at least the great bulk of them. They were done where you could hear the poeple in the room. You could hear that it was a moment in time. The record industry had caught the movie industry disease of "bigger and more manipulated is better" and stopped telling human stories.
Limiting overdubs, letting all the instruments bleed into each other - the most essential component of it is to stop controlling everything. Lack of control is the essence of rock and roll.
[A]s time went on, the tools became more about control and people in general became more intrigued with technology in the arts - the number of people who talk like the people behind the glass started growing. Pretty soon you had the producer in league with the engineer about the drum sounds or about getting it perfect, about controlling things and controlling wildness. By the time we got to the mid-'80s, the musicians were starting to agree. "This is what we want." They would come in and join in the chorus of people saying, "Let's make it tighter and cleaner." ... [B]y '96 we have the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and we have Clear Channel taking over such a high percentage of radio and the obvious need for them to standardize everything, and then you have radio on the wrong side of the glass, but you still had the public who love wild, free music - human beings aren't going to change. They are going to love free expression in music if it can get to them, but without radio it can't get to them, or so the record companies say.
I think anybody should get their tools together and stick with them - tools they love and sell off the ones they don't love. If they love it they should stick with it, whether it's through five years or three decades. If they stop loving any of it, then sell it off and replace it with something new that they do love.
Everyone is a producer now and so be it. It's the democratization of music and it's worse on a lot of different levels. Everybody is also a rock star now. I don't know who all these engineers and producers are going to produce because everyone is already a rock star and I don't know if it's going to become where everybody has got their CD, or let's say three quarters of the houses on any one block, the people have their own CD and they give it to the other people on the block. The other people on the block love it because it's their buddy that they see every day. This is the sort of vibe that I'm getting. It's just ultimately democratized. | |
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05/17/07
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nagrom
we need another futurist movement.
one which will scare the fuck out of everyone, make fascism look like fascism made nationalism look like. one which worships the global arcology anthill and the demolishing of the personality.
they should look something like the process church of final judgement did.
It's called transhumanism. link
05/17/07
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nagrom
Oh, and I agree that "Daydream Nation" is boring. Their early stuff is much better. "Confusion is Sex" and "Washing Machine" are art-rock at its best.
05/17/07
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Roshi
Transhumanism was started by a guy who is afraid to poop.
I'm not kidding.
05/17/07
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delete
of course music is dead. i can't place the time of death, maybe some moment in the late nineties, maybe a lot earlier. i think that people who claim to have found some type of next shit are usually just rediscovering the wheel nowadays. of course there's still lots of inspiration out there, it's not new inspiration though, it's been had before (the guy who invented 3/4 some centuries ago felt the same urge that snares feels when making 7/4 tracks). also, there's lots of pleasure to be had from sounds, but it's always going to be something between 20hz - 20khz and this range has been widely explored by now and feels like our backyard - electronic music is the key factor to this familiarization. however, music had a very interesting life with a huge variety of different experiences. that's why we all feel that there's always new stuff and that music is like a living organism. it's like going through a photo album / reading the diaries of a dead friend and finding out things you never knew about him/her.
on a more philosophical approach, this also happens on every aspect of life. we always live in the past. the stars we look at are dead and gone, yet we see them blinking and like them. we hear cars on the highway but they're gone before we turn our head. the moment we look at something, we see it's state on a previous moment (it takes time for light to travel from an object to the observer, sound is even slower). we perceive everything after it has existed.
05/17/07
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astroid
so, the "death of music" coincided with a couple of hipsters leaving their adolescence and getting fed up with the idm scene. what are the odds!
05/18/07
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astroid
some things to consider about musical terretories that have yet to be thoroughly explored.
1. ratios contain the intersection of timbre and tonality. a stack of sine waves with odd harmonics becomes a square wave, and our harmonies tend towards approximations of the smallest ratios. the sound of bach, and actually of most of music since him has been the music of one simple solution to the problem of spiral harmonics vs. linear melodies, also known as "modulation". another solution would yield another music.
2. our rythyms tend towards the simplest rythyms, mainly 2,3,4, and multiples of those. again, an expansion of those elements would yield a new music.
3. our understanding of the interaction between vibration and matter is hitting some major milestones. look at "sonoluminescence", for instance. our current theory of everything involves vibrations. i'd think that musicians would be quite interested in the interaction of vibrations.
4. human/machine interaction is just hitting its infancy, and there are increasing numbers of programs being released which are pushing these bounds.
i could go on
and
on
if music is dying, its only to make way for a greater unification of art and science, that you ungrateful bastards will surely sit and mock. and then, some kid from sao paolo will grab some cheap technology, make you dance again. hopefully.
05/18/07
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jdg
assface said: "what are the odds"
win place and show!
05/18/07
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delete
1. agreed. what about the sonic result then? will the combination of frequencies used in the sound produced with those methods blow our mind?
2. minimalists used all kinds of weird time signatures (or no time signature / changing time signature) and they produced beautiful strange stuff.
3. sound has always been vibration and nothing else.
4. again, what does this mean in terms of sound itself?
i could also go on & on
it's not just music that is dead. all forms of art are dead. they're slowly being replaced by modern forms of art, i'm not so sure (or am too narrow-minded) to see a bright future to any of these new formulas.
05/18/07
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deltasleep
I appreciate TapeOp for their ability to interview people like Bottrell and Walter Sear about an older style of recording which still has a lot to offer. The guys that ran studios like that have SO much to teach if you're willing to learn, not just in a direct technical sense, but also in terms of their philosophy about recording.
I don't care if theres money in music, or not. Look around, all you see is people constantly coming up with new ways to listen to music ALL THE TIME- shower radios, phones that DL music, phones the identify songs, mp3 players get bigger and bigger.
Obviously somebody is making a lot of music that somebody wants to listen to. This level of musical stupidity and complacency can't help but cause something great and rebellious to happen- just you wait.
edited: May 18 2007
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astroid
minimalists distilled something which had existed before, also. it was still original.
yes, i think exploration of any area of music could be done in a mind-blowing way.
better interaction between man and machine means faster decision-making.
i am sorry you dont see a bright future. i don't know if it's some philosophical stance or just ennui.
05/18/07
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license
Cool, I made myself look like an ass but also spurred some pretty inspiring comments. Thanks especially to astroid and ricemutt here 
Maybe my problem isn't the music but all the stupid words I read about it. The untapped universe music that you are referring to, John, at least the pieces of it that you have shared with me, are very inspiring indeed and I'm a fucking ingrate for not considering them in these silly moments of hopelessness I get sometimes. And I've still got unborn music in my head that sounds exciting to me at least. Too bad the shit that has been coming out lately has been pretty pale comparitively. Oh well, I'm not dead yet!
But I do think the industry is fucked, not that it's news to anyone. I was mostly whining that there's not much money in it anymore, especially, yes, in IDM, something I've been ruminating on a little since Merck closed.
05/18/07
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ricemutt
haha, astroid, most of that stuff you're talking about is what the program I'm at, DXARTS, is obsessed with, and fuck... I hate that shit!
edited: May 18 2007
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astroid
i'm just getting carried away here. i was not being serious when i called anyone an ingrate.
obviously that list is for me, that's why music isnt dead for me. i look up to some of the people here, and it breaks my heart, honestly, when people try to knock the wind out of the whole community. maybe they're just being cool, but it's awful.
oh yeah something else i was thinking about. there was maybe 300 years between the first uses of the string quartet+tonality and ligeti's second string quartet. that piece has a lot of life.
or how about bach's 12 fugues and shotakovich's? what's that, 350 years?
and how long has the personal computer been around? a tenth of that?
i think you were referring to me, my name is actually scott.
lol ricemutt. i'd hate it if i were studying it in college, too;)
05/18/07
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everamzah
license said: "I flipped over to the Bill Botrell interview and it seemed a little too long so I just kind of skimmed it"
btw, it was at this point that i started scrolling down the page.
but then saw
astroid said: "so, the "death of music" coincided with a couple of hipsters leaving their adolescence and getting fed up with the idm scene. what are the odds!"
and totally cracked up HAHAHA ... i love it
05/18/07
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crabster
I didn't crack up because it's true.
Nagrom: The only reason mp3 compression makes music "unlistenable" is bcause you have your head so far up your ass I'm amazed you can hear anything at all apart from your own heartbeat.
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