Ben Neill Blog

The Brooklyn Vegan did some nice coverage of my first curated concert in the Site and Sound series at World Financial Center

Ulrich Schnauss review and pics

Dorit Chrysler review and pics

Guest of Cindy Sherman, the film for which i did original music, is playing at the Provincetown Film Festival this week.

It’s the top pick of the festival in the Cape Cod Times.

Bob Lefsetz has some great insights on the record industry - here is an excerpt of his latest missive on where the music biz is heading…

360 DEALS

Irrelevant. The major labels don’t have enough infrastructure to pull them off!

It doesn’t matter that Rick Rubin was hired at Columbia. Doesn’t matter what Edgar Bronfman, Jr. has to say. Do you read press releases from Rambler? Have you purchased stock in Wham-O? Do you comb the newspaper looking for stories on transistor radios? DO YOU STILL LISTEN TO MUSIC ON CASSETTE?

The major labels squandered their power. It was based on control of distribution. Now anybody can make and distribute their music…have you heard of MySpace and Tunecore? The majors are consolidating their efforts in just a few acts… They don’t understand, the great mass, the minor acts, in aggregate, will end up with the vast majority of the pie. Just like in the TV business. Network share continues to slide… No one cable channel dominates, but all together, THEY DWARF THE NETWORKS!

So what did the TV networks do? THEY BOUGHT THE CABLE CHANNELS!

The only hope for the major labels in the future is to control ALL THE MUSIC! They’ve got to be in business with everybody, involved in every transaction, interested in the act that sells 1,000 copies. Providing services to EVERYBODY, and with this mass, controlling the market…

Look at Irving Azoff and Front Line… Does he sign one act? Or two? NO, 250! And then he leverages these!

Don’t listen to anything the major labels say, they’re on the way to extinction.

The idea of multiple layers of tempos or rhythmic subdivisions occuring simultaneously is one of the key formal elements of music over the last century. It can be seen both as developing out of an African rhythmic sensibility that manifested itself in the polyrhythmic quality of jazz, as well as the natural evolution of post-romanticism into complex serial music that culminated in the works of composers such as Stockhausen and Elliott Carter. Minimalism also frequently worked with the idea of multiple tempos layered together or shifting, as in the phase pieces of Steve Reich.

In popular music the polytempo idea reached a new level with the advent of drum and bass in the 90’s. While the tempo relationships are always 2:1, the music revolves around the use of elements in the 2 different tempos. Timbaland uses a multiple tempo style in his hip hop programming, with his jittery double time beats and synth pulses providing an essential element of his sound. Today, the sounds of dubstep and grime are continuing the evolution of polytempo sounds. Using dub as a starting point, dubstep producers and DJs work with a constantly shifting pulse relationship that is usually 2:1 but occasionally shifts into triplet patterns, 3:2 and 4:3 structures.

Why has the idea of multiple time strata continued to be so important? The abstract language of music serves as an excellent model or simulation of complex structures that evolve in time. In today’s highly mediated world, we all have to function on many more simultaneous wavelengths at once, communicating through various means in what Teilhard de Chardin called the noosphere. Polytempo music is a kind of simulation of that experience that models time into a type of architecture based on resonant harmonics. It makes sense that it continues to be such an important element of the development of musical ideas.

I developed a concept called rhytharmonics in the early 90’s to describe this musical structuring.

Two articles in the New York Times over the last couple of days signal an even louder death knell for record labels as we have known them. For Some Music, It Has to Be Wal-Mart and Nowhere Else discusses artists selling their music directly to Wal Mart, the nation’s largest music retailer. This is after Wal-Mart’s rack jobber called it quits last week - Handleman Exits Music. WalMart To Anderson

Frustration and Fury: Take It. It’s Free.

Trent Reznor’s interview in the New York Times is one of the more interesting statements on the whole subject of music and technology that I’ve seen in a while. In addition to giving his music away for free, bypassing labels altogether, Reznor discusses how he made The Slip in a very short period of time and how he is designing his stage show to be an “interactive instrument”. Brian Eno talked about trying to get U2 to make its last record quickly as opposed to taking years - they didn’t listen and wrote 150 songs over a year period; it’s a hard thing for an artist to do and I admire Reznor for it. It’s great to see artists like him pushing forward into new ways of working.