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- New music: Tracey Thorn – You Are A Lover (Clock Opera Remix)
A track from one of our favourite albums of last year gets the 'chop pop' treatment
Released last year, Tracey Thorn's second solo album, Love and its Opposite, detailed the break-up of other people's relationships in excruciating detail. Over longing piano chords and Thorn's beautiful shrug of a voice first single, Oh! The Divorces, featured the amazing line "he was a charmer, I wish him bad karma". To help celebrate Record Store Day in April, Thorn will release another track, You Are A Lover, which also features this brilliantly layered remix from Clock Opera, pioneers of what people genuinely seem to call "chop pop" (ie splicing and cutting sounds together to make something new). So, the plangent guitar of the original – itself a cover of a song by The Unbending Trees – is replaced by cut up piano chords and drum splashes, while Clock Opera singer Guy Connelly adds additional backing vocals. "Guy Connelly has a great voice, and I just like what he does with sounds, cutting things up and clipping them together," says Tracey. "There's always a very human emotional element to their music, alongside the clockwork-y sounds."
You Are A Lover is released on 10" vinyl on 16 April on Strange Feeling Records, with a download version out on the 18th.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Behind the music: the red tape that stops UK bands playing SXSW
It's tough getting an invitation to play the Texas festival, but visa procedures are forcing some British bands to withdraw
This has been a good month for UK artists aiming to break the US. For the first time in 25 years, UK acts occupied all three top slots in the US album chart, with Adele grabbing the top position, Marsha Ambrosius (interestingly, this Brit is far from well-known in her native country) at number two and Mumford & Sons in third place. Meanwhile, more than 140 UK acts performed at this year's SXSW music and media conference in Austin, Texas, one of the most highly regarded events in the US music industry calendar. But some of the acts scheduled to perform at the festival were forced to withdraw due to complicated and prohibitive visa procedures. Now, a group of managers has come together to lobby officials, hoping to put pressure on the US and UK governments to make it easier for British artists to attend trade events such as SXSW.
Just getting accepted to play at SXSW is difficult, with thousands of bands applying for the coveted gig slots. Performing for some of the most important music industry people from all over the world can lead to record deals, tours and, in the case of Sheffield's Rolo Tomassi, getting Diplo to produce your next album (the producer first came across the hardcore band at the festival in 2009).
Artist manager Peter White, of Fear and Records, says the process of getting visas to play events such as SXSW and CMJ (another major annual music trade event that takes place in New York) can be quite confusing. Simply having an invitation to play does not guarantee you a visa; you also have to prove that you're a professional band, serious about its career. According to White, there doesn't seem to be a set formula for demonstrating this. He says one UK band who have had quite considerable success were recently denied US visas after they were deemed insufficiently famous. Meanwhile, American bands playing events such as Brighton's The Great Escape have no problem getting visas, unless they have criminal convictions.
The price of obtaining visas can vary considerably depending on when you apply and how many members the band has. As some bands don't get their invitation to SXSW until a month or two before the event, they have to pay an extra fee to expedite their visa applications. Organisations such as PRS for Music's British Music Abroad and UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) have helped fund these applications, but the cost of visas can run as high as £2,500 for a band, says White.
This cost didn't put off UK act Frankie & the Heartstrings, who were over the moon when they were invited to play at this year's SXSW festival. They attended the obligatory visa interviews at the US embassy, booked and paid for flights for the band members and their manager, booked hotels and were all set to go when, two days before flying out, they were told their visas wouldn't be ready in time. They were devastated.
It's understandable that applying for a temporary work permit in another country takes time and that the US authorities want to make sure applicants are not taking away work from US citizens. Record labels and managements accept that the cost of work visas is a necessary part of the budgeting when booking US tours, but the majority of bands playing at trade events such as SXSW and the annual CMJ music festival in New York don't get paid, unless you count getting a free wristband to attend the conferences attached to the festivals. As a matter of fact, they contribute to the US economy by spending thousands of dollars. According to White, a four-piece band can spend up to £10,000 on playing an event such as SXSW. (Even applying to play the festivals via Sonicbids, without any guarantee of being accepted, carries a fee.)
The managers from Fear and Records, ATC Management, Dice Management and Connected Artists are proposing that there should be an exemption from applying for work permits to enter the country for artists playing trade events, as long as they don't get paid. I'd say such an exemption would be a win-win solution for both the US and the UK.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - What Rebecca Black's Friday says about the state of pop
Is 13-year-old Rebecca Black's instant fame just harmless pop fun – or is something more sinister at work?
In less than a week, Rebecca Black's debut single has been called the "worst song of all time", praised by Simon Cowell ("Anyone who can create this much controversy within a week, I want to meet"), received over 26 million hits on YouTube and lead to her name trending globally on Twitter (above Charlie Sheen, no less). Appearing on Good Morning America last Friday, Black read out a post that had appeared online in the aftermath of the song in which an anonymous commenter said, "I hope you cut yourself and I hope you get an eating disorder so you'll look pretty, and I hope you go cut and die". Oh, and Black is only 13 years old.
The reason for all the attention is Friday, an inane, illegally catchy ditty sung in an oddly detached monotone (with the help of auto-tune, natch) with lyrics about how Friday comes after Thursday and before Saturday and is, like, totally a really fun day to be hanging out with your friends and stuff. It's accompanied by an equally mind-bogglingly literal video, the highlight of which is a bit involving her (hopefully older) friends deciding which seat to take in the car to school.
The speed with which the song and video went viral is an astonishing snapshot of how things work in the Twitter era. Comedy blog Tosh.O featured the song under the headline "Songwriting Isn't For Everyone" on 11 March, before Gawker got hold of it, calling it the "worst music video ever". From there the video spread across Twitter, with commentators referring to Black as the new Justin Bieber and various news shows quick to label her the latest "pop phenomenon".
The problem is that it all has very little to do with pop or music, or indeed Black herself. The merits or otherwise of the song have been lost in a whirlwind of misplaced vitriol. The song was written not by a 13-year-old but by two adults, Clarence Jey and Patrice Wilson, who own and run ARK Music Factory, a label set up to support (usually very young) budding pop stars. Reportedly, Black's mum paid $2,000 to Jey and Wilson so her daughter could record and release a single with an accompanying video.
The unfortunate outcome of all this is that ARK Music Factory have inadvertently shown Black that being a pop star isn't just about having a catchy song and a cheap-looking video. It also involves dealing with abusive YouTube comments (Black has said she feels she's being "cyber-bullied"), awkward interviews (one radio station asked her directly if she was making any money from the single), mocking cover versions and po-faced, long-winded blogs (guilty!). For Black, it was a chance to record a single, star in a video and have something to show off to her friends and instead she's become the butt of a joke inadvertently instigated by others, which has led to her having to defend herself in front of millions of people on primetime TV. So far, Jey and Wilson's only contribution has been an email in which Jey states that Black "is actually [an] amazing singer" and that "the concept ... seems to have crossed a lot of boundaries, for the better or worse".
Black's not alone on the ARK Music Factory roster. There's also CJ Fam, a 10-year-old girl whose single Ordinary Pop Star is a post-modern masterpiece of misplaced irony, with Fam singing about wanting to be "an ordinary girl for a while" while starring in a music video paid for by her parents in an attempt to give her a taste of what it's like to be a pop star. It's like an accelerated, pre-teen version of Britney's Piece of Me, a single and video released in the midst of her breakdown which detailed exactly what it's like to be a pop star in an age of ridiculous scrutiny and 24-hour paparazzi surveillance. That Britney barely made it out the other side should be sounding alarm bells.
So is the Rebecca Black phenomenon another example of a harmless novelty record getting some good old-fashioned "LOLS" in the digital age? Is it, as Rolling Stone suggests, just another example of "teen-orientated pop in 2011"? Or is it something slightly more sinister involving a self-styled "music factory" and some misplaced dreams?
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
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