American Artifact: The Rise of American Rock Poster Art

“Finally, a true American form of artistic expression is given the long-overdue credit it deserves!”
- Scott Mantz, Access Hollywood

I’m excited to announce that two of my songs have been featured in American Artifact, a documentary by Merle Becker about ”The Rise of American Rock Poster Art”. It premieres on June 20th in San Francisco at the Red Vic Movie House.

Also, there’s an awesome website at www.americanartifactmovie.com with screening schedules, message board, info about the artists, artwork, and links to press items buzzing about the movie (such as the USA Today Pop Candy blog by Whitney Matheson). Check out the trailer:

“American Artifact: The Rise of American Rock Poster Art” movie

Here’s the description from the website’s About page:

American Artifact chronicles the rise of American rock poster art since its birth in the ’60s.

Director Merle Becker crosses the country interviewing rock poster artists from the different eras to discover that America is currently in the midst of a 21st century “rock poster art movement”, where thousands of artists around the country are doing silk screened rock poster art inspired by their local scene, the music of our time, and the spirit of our era.

The film features interviews with renown artists including Stanley Mouse, Victor Moscoso, Frank Kozik, Art Chantry, EMEK, Tara McPherson, Derek Hess, COOP, Jay Ryan, and more, as well as fans, collectors, and musicians.

New Version of Fell (free mp3)

Here’s a new version I recently did of Fell, for my new album, to be released this summer (left-click to listen, right-click to save):

Fell (Acoustic-Electronica-Shredder Version)

This is inspired by how I perform it in my live solo set, which includes a few guitars and a laptop. In this version there’s also some violin (performed by Emanuel Ban). Enjoy and, as always, feel free to share.

More updates coming very soon…

The Abbey Pub - Sunday, April 19, 2PM

I’ve always wanted to play at the Abbey Pub, and I’ve always enjoyed doing Sunday afternoon shows, so I’m excited to do both on April 19th as part of the 12th annual International Pop Overthrow Festival. Here’s an entry about it by Jim DiRogatis in his Chicago Sun-Times blog (includes complete festival schedule):

http://blogs.suntimes.com/derogatis/2009/04/international_pop_overthrow_co.html

Here are details on the show, hope to see you there:

Sunday 2pm, April 19, 2009: Abbey Pub, Chicago

3420 W Grace, (773) 478-4408
2pm - $8 - ALL AGES

I’ll be playing a 20 minute solo acoustic set as part of the International Pop Overthrow festival. I hear the food at the Abbey is good, so bring the family for lunch. Here’s the line-up:

1:00 Leah Stargazing
1:30 I Fight Dragons
2:00 Dan Wallace
2:30 The New Diet
3:00 Otter Petter
3:30 The Blissters
4:00 The Laureates
4:30 Robot Love Story

Free MP3 Download From My Next Album: “I Want to Be”

Here’s a pre-mastering preview track from my as of yet untitled album due out this summer. The song is called “I Want to Be”, and is about my day job. The stream-of-consciousness arrangement is a metaphor for the dazed daydream quality office life induces.

To listen, left-click; to download the MP3, right-click (or use the music player in the right side-bar): I Want to Be (no longer available)

It originally appeared on my 2007 album Culture of Self with a very different arrangement, vibe and singer.  The vocalist on that version was an opera singer who used to work in the exact same job I’m at now, at the same desk and everything. This updated version is sung by me, and has a whole new instrumental middle section.  Enjoy and share :)

Composer Dan Wallace Seeks Eccentric Wealthy Person to Fund Next Project

I always hoped I’d be the eccentric wealthy person to be funding my projects, but seeing how I’m neither of those things, I’ll have to look elsewhere.

Before I break down what kind of money is needed and for what, there’s the big question:

What do you, the eccentric wealthy person get out of it?

- A monetary return on your investment, for one thing (details negotiable).

- But that’s not the best part. You also get to be involved, to some degree (again, details negotiable) with an artist at the height of his artistry. An artistry that can only go any higher with the help of a person such as yourself. 

- This will also get you at least a little attention as a participant in an unusual system of patronization (or matronization; I’m open to all pecuniary fonts). Most journalists fall somewhere in the range of appreciating to loving my music, so it would most likely be in a positive light, but would at least be neutral (the patron angle itself is a pitch).

At the most, you’ll go down in history for this … possibly as another in a line of eccentric things you did, but that’s fine, no? That’s what you eccentric wealthy types are all about.

- Income from previous CD sales during the first year (negotiable) of the release of this CD. In other words: there is a generally a spike in sales of past CD’s whenever a new CD hits a bigger audience. I would share that income.

- Tax write-off.

- You tell me. What do you want to get from funding (executive producing?) a viable music project that is equal parts emotionally engaging, intellectually stimulating and with which many existing and - more importantly - new fans will fall in love.

Now, the project:

Dan Wallace’s Next Album

Description: Depending on when you read this, it could be the one I’m releasing in 2009 or the one for 2010… they are very different albums, but the numbers don’t change.

About the cost: This is the minimum amount needed to actually see a return on the investment. The amount of return is difficult to predict, but generally with an independent you give it a good year in terms of CD sales, but the more you put up front, the quicker you see a return (new non-independents are often dropped from the label if they don’t show a return in the first 3 - 6 months). Here are the minimum COSTS, preferably starting in January 2010:

TOTAL: $357,069.00

So, where does the income come from?

- CD Sales: if we give away 1,500 CD’s (probably more like 1,000), then sell the remaining at an average gross of $8 each, that comes out to $68,000. Subtract manufacturing costs, postage etc… it ends up being more like $56,631. Note: CD’s sell for $10 at a live show, and generally that money is not shared with the venue. The more sold at shows the better. Anyway, these should be sold out in the first 12 months at the most, 6 if the campaigning goes well.

- Download Sales: the great thing with this is that there is no overhead. It’s also whence most of the sales income derives. Income changes depending on service, but generally you can expect an average of about $7 per album, $.60 per song, $.009 per listen.

- Lives Shows: there is money to be made playing shows, but it has to be done right. My goal for the initial tour would be for the tour proper to pay for itself, and then to result in built up awareness etc… that leads to more sales and a more lucrative tour about 6 months down the road. More details on this later.

There you go! If you’re interested in discussing this, use my contact form to send me an email. Make sure you’ve listened to my music first, of course. I’m not a mainstream pop act. I’m currently working on two albums: one is what you might call “weirder” than the other, but either has the potential for fueling a viable marketing campaign. As for future projects, I have some solid, ambitious ideas. First things first, though. I look foward to hearing from you.

CD vs MP3; Is the Album Dead?

Previously I linked an interview with Seth Godin about the music industry. One of the questions got me thinking again about whether or not there is any point to releasing a physical CD, or is that format on its quick way out?

Here’s what Godin says:

R&G: With the a la carte downloads offered by iTunes, eMusic and Amazon, when do you think we’re going to see the death of the album?
Seth: I spend a lot of time hanging out with teenagers, and I’m pretty sure the album is already dead. We bundle stuff up for economic reasons. Movies are the length they are for a reason. Songs are the length they are for a reason. Albums were invented because that’s about as much time as Thomas Edison could put on one piece of recording. But in a digital world, there’s no reason that you can’t have a six-hour product or a three-minute product. So anybody who says it has to be 46 minutes long because that’s how long you can fit on two sides of an LP, I don’t think that’s a good reason to make that your product.
——————-

Hmm… what do we mean by “album”? In the question, they are referring to the concept of a collection of songs that are meant to go together to form a bigger whole. Godin seems to be referring as much to the physical media - if not more - than he is the concept of “album”.

Godin cites teens as his source. There’s a ton of speculation about why teens don’t buy albums, from youthful entitlement to too many free options to attention span to the kind of bands they tend to like. Teens occasionally email me asking to please send them a CD because they can’t afford it or don’t have a credit card, and all they have are the free mp3’s from my site (I always oblige). The credit card thing may be bigger than people realize: iTunes requires a credit card. Teens don’t have them. Give them a gift card or an iTunes allowance, are they going to spend it all on one album, or on a handful of songs they want?

Not-as-young people tend to still by albums, either digitally or physically. There’s something very rewarding about immersing yourself in the world of an artist for 30 - 60 minutes. Provided you love the music, of course. In that sense, the album as a collection of songs is not dead until there are no more good albums being made, which will never happen.

Also, western music has been coming in collections for a long time now, well predating the recording media, whether it be a suite of etudes, movements of a symphony, or arias from an opera. I think it’s as likely that making a collection of songs will go out of style as it is that live shows will become just a band going on tour to play one song. Some opening acts do only play a few songs, but believe me: they’d rather play more, and only people who don’t like them would rather they play less.

Regarding duration, they were never able to put Wagner operas on a single disc, and Top 40 will always have their singles. Going fully digital would give a lot more flexibility in that regard: multi-disc releases are very expensive to manufacture. Going purely digital, prices would be far more flexible.

Conclusion: releasing collections of songs is here to stay for a good while. Whether to release them on CD or just digitally is the thing I grapple with. Could I pull off a purely digital release? If I were more famous I might try it, but submitting press kits to reviewers without a professionally packaged CD would not make things any easier. Also, it’s imperative to have something to sell at shows. Eventually even that will just involve a transfer of digital files, but for now, it’s essential to have a CD or vinyl platter.

Interview with Seth Godin about the Music Industry

Here’s an interesting interview about the music industry with Seth Godin at Rollo & Grady. Godin is a marketing guru known for such books as Purple Cow and Unleashing the Ideavirus (which I read and liked). His latest book is Tribes.

Here’s the interview: http://www.rollogrady.com/rollo-grady-interview-seth-godin/

What he says isn’t necessarily new to anyone who spends a lot of time paying attention to this stuff, but I do like which points he chooses to bring up and how he gets them across.

Slow Listening Movement

I read an interesting article by Miles Rayner in this week’s Chicago Reader Sharp Darts column. It’s about the glutony that is 00’s digital music consumption, and, more importantly, what some people are doing about it. Like the self-imposed music-listening regimine journalist Michaelangelo Matos calls the “Slow Listening Movement”. The idea is to create a strict diet of music that can be healthily consumed and digested by a single human on a day to day basis (sticking with the food metaphor… the name is a nod to the “Slow Food Movement”).

I’m 1,000% for it. Who needs to download more music than it’s humanly possibly to hear, much less listen to? It hurts me, it hurts you, it would hurt music if such a thing had feelings. Check out Matos’ blog for more details: slowlisteningmovement.blogspot.com

Personally, I don’t listen to enough new music any more, so I’m going the other way: trying to listen to at least a few new albums per week, with an emphasis on nothing. If an album piques my interest but I’m on the fence, I’ll give it a couple more listens before moving on. Recently enjoyed albums have been Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future by The Bird and the Bee, and The Destroyer by Alec Empire. I listen legally at Rhapsody, which costs under $15 per month and provides me with tons of listening options. I highly recommend it.

Timbre vs Melody, part ii: Timbral Listening

I have more thoughts on this that I haven’t sorted out (and all the responses - many interesting one - I got on the original post were at Facebook/MySpace), but in the meanwhile, here’s a fascinating Wikipedia entry on “Timbral Listening”:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbral_Listening

Timbral Listening

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Timbral Listening is the process of actively and correctly listening to the timbre of music, not the musical pitch of harmony

Concept
Timbral Listening is used as an alternative to the standard western way of listening to, and interpreting music. Instead of perceiving pitch and harmony, the ear focuses on texture and colour of music and sound. In Timbral Listening ‘pitch is subordinate to timbre’. Instead, the specific quality of a musical tone is determined by considering ‘the presence, distribution and relative amplitude of overtones.’[1] In Timbral Listening the fundamental frequency of a tone is no longer its defining feature and is of equal importance to its overtones. When using this listening technique/ method of interpretation there is ‘a relation between timbre and spectral content which is analogous to that between pitch and frequency in that one is the prevalent cultural construct of the other’[2] Timbral Listening is currently most prevalent in non-western cultures. It is ‘an entirely different approach to the perception of sound than what you have in cultures where the focus is on melody.’[3] In these cultures the perception of pitch as the primary building block of music is replaced by the perception of timbre.

Nature
It has been suggested that “timbral listening is an ideal sonic mirror of the natural world”.[4] It is often (but not always) used in association with musics that are based in mimicry of sounds in the natural environment. Valentina Suzukei suggests that ‘it was the nomadic way of life and it’s focus on the timbral qualities of natural sounds that created this kind of musicality’.[5]Through Timbral Listening the listener is given an impression of the reproduced timbre of the sound of an object or place such as a stream, mountain, forest or valley. Nature is also a theme that commonly appears in modern timbral electroacoustic music. This is especially prevalent in Canada where composers such as Hildegard Westerkamp apply the thinking of R. Murray Schafer’s World Soundscape Project to their compositions.[6]

Descriptive Language and Notation
As timbre has ‘no domain-specific adjectives’ it ‘must be described in metaphor or by analogy to other senses’, [7]Phenomenological language is often used to describe what is heard by the process of Timbral Listening. There is currently scholarly debate about the use of this language as it fails to acknowledge the interpretive function of the listener and ‘the weight of extra musical association carried by its metaphoric terminology’. The computer may also be used as a tool for analysis of the timbral qualities of music and can provide graphical descriptions of the music in the form of a Spectrogram using FFT analysis. This method also has limitations.[8] There is not as yet an established universal method of notating timbre-based music, and a variety of methods exist in different cultures.

Examples
Traditional music in Tuva and other Turkic cultures of Inner Asia

The composition of timbre-centered music in the nomadic communities of Tuva involves mimicry of sounds heard in the environment.Timbral listening is a fundamental component of listening to, understanding and being able to correctly perform this music using vocal techniques such as throat singing “khoomei” and harmonic producing instruments such as the Jew’s harp, bzaanchy, shoor, qyl qiyak, qyl-gobyz,ku-rai and igil.

Barundi Whispered Inanga or Inanga Chucotée in Africa

This music employs a fundamental drone and overtone harmonics. It consists of “a whispered text, accompanied by the inanga, a trough zither of eight strings. To listen correctly (using Timbral Listening), one must consider “the effect of the combined timbres of the noisy whisper and the inanga” as a whole sound.[9]

Some forms of contemporary electronic music

More recently, computers and synthesizers are being used by contemporary composers to produce timbral-centered music. Contemporary composers state Timbral Listening as the correct technique to adopt in listening to and analysing their timbre (as opposed to pitch) based compositions. ‘Pure timbres’ are explored using methods such as granular synthesis in works such as ‘Dragon of the Nebula’ by Mara Helmuth.[10]

Shakuhachi music in Japan

The music produced by the Shakuhachi end blown flute such as honkyoku, contains timbral variations that are of equal importance to pitch variations. These timbral variations are indicated in Shakuhachi musical notation.[11]

Application
The technique of timbral listening has wide applications:

It is used by those listening to Timbre-centered music as either a conscious, intentional, or natural, intuitive process.
It is used by ethnomusicologists wishing to study the Timbre-centered music of different cultures.
It is used by musicians participating in the composition of Timbre-centered music be it with the voice, acoustic instruments, electronic instruments, samples or recorded sounds in music concrete. Also it is used by musicians in the timbre composition of specific sound objects within Pitch-centered music that are often, but not exclusively percussion based.
It is used by sound engineers to evaluate timbre-difference[12].
It is used in soundscape studies.
It is used by students and scholars of music in analysis and aural skills acquisition.

Some Key Composers of Timbre-centered Music
Barry Truax
GyOrgy Ligeti
Luciano Berio
Glenn Branca
Brian Ferneyhough
John Chowning
Phill Niblock
James Dashow
Giacinto Scelsi
Panayiotis Kokoras
Yves Daoust
Hildegard Westerkamp
John Oswald
Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta
Charles Dodge
Paul Lanksy
Iannis Xenakis
Denis Smalley

Go to the Wikipedia page more references and further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbral_Listening

The Next Album(s): Working Hard for the… how does that go?

I wasn’t planning to release an album this year, but a couple of weeks ago I started working on one anyway. I’m approaching it differently this time. Instead of the usual process of spending a year writing and recording songs, I’ll be doing this one in a couple of months. I’m also giving less regard to whether or not it will appeal to anyone other than myself, and paying no attention to continuity of genre or style. Hey, maybe that’ll actually be a selling point. As Bill Cosby once said “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is to try to please everybody”. I also have some new ideas about engineering and mixing… more on that after it’s released, perhaps.Another thing I’m getting away from is the mostly guitar/bass/drums oriented instrumentation of Reattachment. Last night I was adding some french horns and trombones to a song… so does that make it Chamber Pop? F@%k no. There’s a lot of awesome music that falls under that moniker (or Baroque Pop etc…), but it’s not a sensibility I’m interested in pursuing.

Anywayz, two songs were mixed in the first week, and now I’m working on a song that’ll take a week or two to put together. I’m looking to release before summer. Here are the songs to be included (not in this order):

1. Look at Me
2. Fever (title will probably change because I see there’s a song called this on Neko Case’s new album)
3. Fell (folky electronica shredder remix)
4. Vante Left Them Human (featuring violin)
5. I Want to Be (new parenthetical identifier to come)
6. Spiders in Heaven
7. Snack Time
8. Go Away
9. The Gift
10. Untitled (the lyrics aren’t done yet)

Three of these appeared on previous releases: “Fell” is the live version I do in my solo set plus some violin parts; “Vante Left Them Human” is basically a studio version of the arrangement I did in the live video with Emanuel Ban on violin; “I Want to Be” is a very different, cool arrangement of that song.

Also, “The Gift” once appeared on a Christmas charity compilation. This is a new version. I’ve always wanted to get this song to a wider audience.

After this album, I’m planning to release another one in Jan or Feb 2010. That one will feature songs I wrote back when I was heavily influenced by Brazilian music (especially Caetano Veloso, Jorge Ben and Paulinho da Viola, all kinds of Samba forms et al… ); I was also really into Mexican folk, and on the brink of an obsession with Jacques Brel that lasted about a year and half. I might seek to enlist Heitor Garcia to play some percussion on it, if there’s time. Also, I haven’t mentioned that to him yet either, so we’ll see. He was playing drums with me back when I conceived some of these tunes, so it’d be a nice completion to the circle. The poppier stuff (like “Between the Lines”), I hope to get George Lawler on board for again.

After that, I’ll be ready to do something totally new. I have ideas, such as for a musical/opera thingy (that neither of those terms adequately describe), and I have a couple of album concepts. I also have some ideas for live shows, if I can ever get the funding to pull them off.