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We Love Space 2020Vision Summer 2010 – Mixed by Ralph Lawson

Monday, June 7th, 2010

Perfect vision

As always we love to spread the love. This summer a free compilation album will be handed out to visitors in around our venue to showcase talent and tunes from the formidably enduring label 2020Vision. Based in Leeds, owned and operated by Ralph Lawson, his team of dedicated and genuine music lovers have shaped the imprint into one of the most respected house labels in the world. Since it’s inaugural pressing in 1995 the label has achieved it’s status of quality and consistency from the point of view of both artists and the record buying public alike. At We Love we are delighted to have not only a talent such as Ralph, with a label so prestigious as 2020Vision at our disposal to compile this compilation – but also from a promotional point of view being able to provide you, our patrons, an objet d’art at no cost to yourselves is such a simple but effective way to give something back. As Mark says: “Simply the best promotional tool we have used in years, a back page advert in popular monthly music press is around £4000 and 10,000 fully finished CDs costs around £3500 delivered. Do the math.”

Ralph will be playing for We Love on the renowned Space Terrace in Ibiza on June 20th, July 25th and September 12th. There will also be a special appearance from Ralph’s live project when he will roll into Space along with Danny Ward, Fernando Pulichino and Julian Sanza in the form of 2020Soundsystem on the 22nd of August. Their album Falling released last year struck the demanding task of a cross-over electronic album being a clear picture, a representation of the artists involved, a “thing-in-itself” and balancing that with enough dancey, trackey elements for the underground to fall in love with it. We’ll leave it to Ralph to explain how the We Love 2020Vision mix came about and his thought process behind the selection…

“The label mix album came about as an idea from Mark Broadbent from We Love last year with the first one featuring Steve Lawler and Viva. It worked out well for everyone as it profiles the DJ who mixes, their label and also provides clubbers with a soundtrack to their night at Space as a present. I have worked for We Love for many years but in the last couple of years it has really started to click for me on the Terrace. I think firstly there was a move towards my style of House music in recent years and secondly I have enough experience under my belt now to know how to play it and get it going off. It is always a high pressure gig playing at We Love and it takes quite a few attempts to learn how to do it right.

Label compilations are very very hard mixes to do. For a start there are fewer tracks to choose from on a normal mix and also you have to represent as many of your artists as possible which further tightens the selection. Then they have to be put together into a smooth flowing mix! Not an easy challenge. I also wanted it to be as fresh as possible so I chased up producers for exclusive up front material. I also had the idea to include a couple of my favourite remixes from Blaze and Layo & Bushwacka so I had to ask permission for those. As 2020Vision is all about having ‘perfect vision’ we include many styles on the label and I needed to highlight this. The CD starts with Nu Disco from 2020Soundsystem and Crazy P which is actually much slower than House so I worked in tempo changes. It then picks up the pace into House and some more techier moments before leaving people with ‘Lovelee Dae’ by Blaze as a kind of happy last tune to go home on.

That was from the label perspective. I also needed to keep an eye on what works for We Love so I had a rule that all the tracks had to be playable at Space on Sundays. I picked a couple from the last year or so that were big for me on the Terrace last year such as Art Of Tones – Call The Shots and Mark Broom – People. Then I included ones I know I will be busting this year that aren’t out yet like Audiojack – Motion Sickness and Simon Baker – The Trick. I Imagined arriving at Space and heading upstairs to the top floor for a drink on the roof before where I could hear a tracks like ‘Ocean’ and then ‘Love on the line’ before heading down to the covered Terrace as the House starts to thump. A big turning point in the mix is the Radioslave track which is an epic production under his Panorama Garage moniker. As I was mixing the album I visited Berlin with Mark and Sarah Broadbent and we went to Panorama and Berghain. As luck would have it Matt Edwards (Radioslave) delivered his track for the album as I came back to the hotel and I put it straight on the headphones in my hotel room. After a night at the infamous club it totally hit the spot and I listened to it about 5 times in a row enjoying it more each time. Of course it had to go the CD and it marks the moment at a night at Space when the crowd is now ready to go and needs the beats tougher. The strings give a classic feel to the mix and really stand out.

I have a rule that I have to DJ my mixes live. I just feel they are more spontaneous and have a more natural feel that way. I can always tell when they have been pieced together one track at a time. I used Traktor Scratch pro to try mixes and then used Ableton on an Allen and Heath 4D to do the final mix but on the jam page so I could still DJ it. I did it like that so I could edit afterwards. It was recorded at 2020HQ in Leeds.” Ralph Lawson

Tags: 2020Soundsystem, 2020Vision, Berghain, Berlin, CD, Ibiza, Leeds, Mark Broadbent, Mix, Promotion, Ralph Lawson, Sarah Broadbent, Terraza
Posted in Ibiza, Music | 1 Comment »

Bill Drummond – A History Of Music: Part 19, 4 of 4

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

Here is the fourth and final part of a transcripted lecture Bill Drummond gave on the state of music to BBC Radio 3. You can find parts 1, 2 and 3 here.

The relationship that a listener might have with any piece of recorded music was always the same, be it a middle aged connoisseur listening to Herbert Von Carugen’s recording of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. Or a 13 year old girl in 1996 listening to the first Spice Girls album. We built and bought shelves to keep our collections of vinyl and CDs on. We took pride on what these growing collections that we had, invested our money in what it said about us, in the same way that the content of bookshelves did. There was no reason that this should ever stop. By the time the new century was dawning the iPod was being launched along with iTunes and numerous file sharing sites. This changed everything. This was the biggest development in the history of music in the past 100 years. We could now download from the internet with a few clicks from the mouse any piece of music from the entire history of recorded music we thought we might want and plenty more we didn’t want. All of this could be stored on the iPod in our pocket to be listened to whenever, wherever while doing almost whatever. The album as a format was now meaningless.

A graphical representation of a bit-torrent swarm

This thing that we had used to measure and judge the music makers of the last five decades no longer had any real purpose, other than historical. The music that we owned no long said anything about us as we could now own everything without investment from ourselves. The groaning shelves of vinyl and CDs were redundant. Music was just something that made the bus ride to work or the jog round the park more bearable. Something used to fill in the uncomfortable silences or block out the racket of real life. The breadth and depth of meanings that music once contained was fast draining from it. Art, like religion exists to give life meaning. When any art form loses its meaning it no long has any real worth. No long has a function other than something to gather dust in the museum. There are those that have thought of the iPod as little more than the modern equivalent to the wireless set. They are wrong. The wireless unwittingly promoted the sales of records. The iPod does away with ever having to buy music again.

A museum piece

There is another facet to my argument. Recording technology has so evolved that any kid doing a GCSE in music can record an album and stick it up on their Myspace for the whole world to listen to. The holy grail of the recording contract and all the validation that comes with it is a thing of the past. Every busker in every street has a CD to sell you. The democratisation that some so longed for has undone the whole thing. The business model that has sustained a world wide record industry is imploding faster than the cultural commentators can write their blog on the phenomenon. All of this is great news for the forward thinking music makers working in the next few years.

The flip side of all I have just gone on about in the last few minutes means music is now in the process of being liberated from the shackles of the recorded music genre. These forward thinking music makers will not want to make music that can be downloaded off the internet or listened to at any time, any place, while doing almost any thing on a future version of the iPod. They will want to make music that is about time, place and occasion. They will want their music to reach parts of the soul that words and images have always failed to do. Nothing can commune the unknowable like music. But most importantly they will want their music to have meaning beyond sometime to fill in the background while people get on with the drudgery of life.

KLF – Official Website

BBC – Radio 3

Tags: BBC, Bill Drummond, CD, File Sharing, iPod, iTunes, Meaning, Music Industry, Spice Girls, Vinyl
Posted in Music, Technology | No Comments »

The MP3 Generation

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

The evolution is here

The MP3 has become synonymous with downloaded music. But there are still people who refuse lossy digital downloads and would prefer to buy CDs to rip at optimal quality. MP3, AAC and other audio formats were designed to reduce the amount of data needed for a file to provide an accurate representation of an original recording. This enabled files to be sent over a low bandwidth 1990’s internet or packed onto the earliest low capacity MP3 players. They all use a form of compression through perceptual encoding – analysing the uncompressed waveform and using a model to work out which bits will be beyond the capacity of most human ears. This information can be reduced or discarded, resulting in a smaller file.

Listen 'ear

People who have naturally sensitive ears and/or who have trained their brains to recognise slight differences in audio quality (e.g. audio technicians, classical musicians) may spot flaws in MP3 tracks that most people would not. This is where lossless compression formats come in, for example FLAC which compresses audio without losing any data, so you can maintain the 16bit depth and 44.1kHz range of CD audio. However the results are considerably larger files than even the highest quality of MP3 (320kbps).

There is an argument that the MP3 and by extension the iPod, iTunes and Beatport et al are changing our perception of music itself. Thomas Edison promoted the original phonograph by demonstrating that a person could not tell whether behind a curtain was an opera singer or one of Edison’s cylinders playing a recording of the singer. Students of audio engineering and psycho-acoustics are regularly asked to take part in “double-blind” experiments, where even the person conducting the experiment does not know at first the MP3 from the file of higher quality to avoid subliminally passing the answer to the students. Each year preference for the MP3 format rises. Students prefer the quality of that sound to music of a much higher quality. The “sizzle sounds” of the MP3, it is a sound they are familiar with. It is perhaps comparable to a generation of people preferring the artifacts of vinyl – the crackles and pops. It was familiar and comfortable to them. Is this now the same with iPod lovers? Listening to music on your iPod is not about the sound quality of the music, and it’s more than the convenience of listening to music on the move. All that “sizzle” is a cultural artifact and a tie that binds us. It’s mostly invisible to us but it is something future generations looking back might find curious because these preferences won’t be obvious to them.

Of course, pandering to the market has influence here: If you are a sound engineer mixing for a mass market, these days you’ll tend to assume crappy reproduction environment for your target audience and you’ll mix accordingly, with lots of brutal compression and tricks to give the vague illusion of real bass. The resulting recordings do sound better in the MP3 formats on inferior equipment – not that they sound especially good anywhere. It’s the reason for the popularity of Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” which sounded substantially better on transistor radios than music from other producers.

Ye olde headphones

Time for a bit of history… Apple (and Microsoft) chose poor quality encoders with low quality defaults in both their respective media players of iTunes and Windows Media Player. Apple sold low quality sound files with Digital Rights Management, to stop people sharing the music. This encouraged people to burn the tracks to CD and re-encode them to remove the DRM thus reducing the quality further. The music industry has effectively encouraged the P2P file sharing networks where often the quality and encoding is unknown. Now an entire generation think this is how recorded music ought to sound. There is a comparison to fast food, such as McDonalds with the wide variety of low-bitrate music. A McDonalds hamburger has very little in common with a home-cooked meal. People are trained by exposure to expect certain sets of flavours or textures and will dislike anything of a higher fidelity (a meal made from scratch). Until people are exposed to higher quality music, and an appropriate environment to enjoy it in. MP3s will do enough to get the basic flavour of a song across. We don’t adjust our taste to that which is best, we like what we have already grown to like.

For most listening purposes, with most equipment and most ears, MP3 is perfectly good enough. Sure, use FLAC for archiving purposes – it makes sense to have a lossless master of your CD – but if you’re clogging up a portable player with FLACs or Apple Lossless files, then either a) you have superior ears, a headphone amplifier and seriously high-end headphones or b) you’re lacking in common sense. However, it’s not all about which sounds better, it’s which sounds different – how does the music make you feel?

FLAC

MP3

http://mastering-media.blogspot.coml

Tags: Apple, Audio, CD, DRM, Encoding, FLAC, iPod, Microsoft, MP3
Posted in Audio, Technology | 2 Comments »