MetaChat - I have discovered the tip of the iceberg

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24 August 2010

I have discovered the tip of the iceberg of the culture of people who collect demo sessions, live recordings, obscure remixes and stuffs like that.→[More:]

Talk about a culture motivated by pure joy (of finding, having, sharing.) I'm sure like any other ecosystem it has its own particularities including negative aspects (off the top of my head one problem here is that very few of the people involved actually have copyrights to anything they're dealing with) but I get happy when I find something I'm looking for and see responses by people expressing happiness when they find that piece of audio they wanted for-EVER and so on..

Right now what makes demo sessions special to me isn't just that here's another unmastered take of this recording but when the lyrics or song structure is switched up.. sometimes the changes are very significant and are a time capsule for an era; e.g. I got hold of a bunch of early Kanye West stuff a few days ago and that just drove home how although he re-used some of these lyrics later, the original unreleased tracks are in some cases hotter than the album cuts.. and so on

post by: Firas at: 04:15 | 6 comments

For a time I was really into trading Springsteen bootlegs. People really are quite generous, and quite obsessive. There are all these particular little ethical rules to it, which if you violate, folks get all kinds of GRAR about...using or not using Sharpies on discs, best type of mailer, best type of disc, time between tracks, etc. But it was fun. Love presents in the mail.

posted by Miko 24 August | 08:12

Right now what makes demo sessions special to me isn't just that here's another unmastered take of this recording

Oh, and this is another great point. This was the biggest insight for me, as a musician, from the process of creating a record. We think of "songs" as these definite creations. In fact, they tend to be nothing more than the creative process arrested at a particularly satisfying point, and then embellished and established as the product. The final released version of a song is just a sample from among many samples. There are so many choices that both artist and producer can make, and it's "Choose Your Own Adventure" until you run out of time to work on it, or until you think it's as good as it's going to get this month or this year.

posted by Miko 24 August | 08:14

Yeah that's a perfect way to put it Miko. For some reason my mental muscles for appreciating and analyzing music have really grown by binging on hip hop for the last year or so (probably cause I did a lot of reading/discussing about things I'd been hearing) and this is one issue I pondered along the line: why isn't every verse by a person hot when they have forever to write it? Turns out like the rest of us who get work done they're going for a 'local maximum'; they're in the studio, they need to pick and choose what to say, do some takes and eventually move on. So it becomes more of an innate skill level thing than an iterate-to-perfection thing.

posted by Firas 24 August | 09:14

Outside of that genre when artists are more involved in the actual instrumental aspects I've also mulled the nature of, well, flair and affectation--like they put in a bridge here, the bridge has an echo on this sound--it's not like they sat and checked all the permutations of possible effects and gimmicks each time so it probably ends up having been a collaborative process; someone thought of it, so they ran with it, tried it and decided whether it sounded good or not.

posted by Firas 24 August | 09:28

I did a class project on this ~1996 via WAY more usenet groups than I should have posted to. I had recently gotten into Grateful Dead & Phish concert trading, which was a gateway into getting tapes from other artists I liked. I surveyed people in these communities about their attitudes & practices. SO. MUCH. DATA. I wonder if that dataset is somewhere on an old hard drive...

The study of the etiquettes is fascinating to me. Sometimes I see it carry over into my "real" life even though I'm not active in these communities anymore.

It's kind of lovely and astounding, the minutiae that humans can find themselves excited over.

posted by knile 24 August | 11:30

Along those lines, knile, somebody recently wrote a master's thesis on the tape trading culture of the Grateful Dead:Embalming the Dead

posted by fogovonslack 24 August | 14:04

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