from Ander for your ears
That’s it, I’m off to Portugal for the next two weeks, to finish my programming work on the Knoepfli prototype. Learning how to write a program on Mac OS X is not very easy. I hope getting some sun and rest will help me. See you in May with a fresh audioasyl remix.
Minimal electro? Electrotechno? Who knows. This time its 60 minutes, lots of rattling and some bouncing. Enjoy my new broadcast at audioasyl.net. Listen to the show in the player below, download the show or go to my page on audioasyl.net.
Last weekend I went to the m4music-festival in Zurich, looking forward to the demotape clinic, where I actually had been nominated. Expectations were high, of course. With one of Switzerlands biggest music festivals for Swiss music as a host, I imagined some serious competition. Well, it was rather disappointing. Every participant that was called to the stage got about three and a half sentences of feedback from each one of the jury members. Most of it consisted of comments like “I like it” or “I don’t like it” (which does not really help you a lot if you are the artist). The most important property of a song seemed to be whether it could be played on radio or not.
Some comments were worse. A rather nice track from David Tones was commented with “this is way too monotonous”. Anybody heard about minimal techno? And the ubiquitous piece of advice was: “just add some vocals, then this track will be really nice”. Hmmmm. After 90 minutes or so the feedback did get a bit more detailed, but I was surprised that a jury in an electronic music competition could state something like “this track is quite boring, why don’t you add a sample?”.
Out of the 25 people nominated in total for the session, 13 did not show up. This could be a sign that the audience is having problems taking the whole event seriously. I really like the idea of the event. Get some new artists with their songs, present them publicly and give them some feedback about their music. But next time, please add some more detailed and substantiated feedback. Give the artists and the jury on stage some good monitors to listen to the music. And please do not advise a minimal techno producer to “just add some vocals” to his track.
