A new dining experience - Snake, Deep fried whole baby Pidgeon (with inners) and Steamed Oyster were all actually quite nice. I struggled with the Sea Worms in jelly though, salty and gritty. Desert was just pure vile - Peanut Soup, doesn’t sound that bad but it finished me off, couldn’t even finish my beer.
When I landed in Beijing Twitter, Google+ and Facebook all worked OK, now that I’m in Xiamen all the usual social networking stuff has stopped working.
I remembered my Tumblr blog posts to twitter and so far I can access Tumblr fine, although I can’t actually load my Tumblr blog http://blog.mattculpin.com - anyway hopefully it will post to twitter.
Beijing from the air is a sprawling mass, it seemed to go on forever, not just regular buildings but metropolis sized buildings with tower blocks uniformly laid out. It appears to be on a flat plain surrounded by snowy peaks. I could see what looked like the Olympic stadium which looked pretty impressive. The airport caters for the westerner fine as everything is dual language, there’s also the regular brands that you probably see at most international airports so no major culture shock.
I was pretty hungry when we landed so ventured to the food area, I was intrigued by the KFC but hate being the typical foreigner abroad looking for home comforts. Thankfully the menu looked nothing like the UK version and I was glad to see chicken feet on there, hence my KFCF post although I didn’t try them.
The plane to Xiamen was rammed and pretty much a free for all when boarding, it was freezing in Beijing so I was glad to get inside the aircraft after the 10 minute wait to walk up the steps. A couple of Germans were arguing with the stewardess as their bags wouldn’t fit in the overheads, they had to check them which is probably what caused our initial delay. When we finally taxied we were behind 20 others all waiting for clearance, at least 5 747’s a few A330’s and 2 A380’s Air China and Emirates, this place is huge.
It was night time when we finally took off so didn’t really get to see much during the flight to Xiamen. It was a 3 hour flight due south and Xiamen is sub tropical, it’s now the rainy season here so coming in to land was mostly through cloud, the final part of decent was over a very crowded city and we seemed to skim the roof tops.
First major language barrier was with the taxi driver to the hotel, I had the Hotels.com print out which had the address in Chinese and English, it became clear he probably couldn’t read in his own language. My livescribe pen has the ability to audibly translate into Mandarin anything you write in English, unfortunately it wouldn’t translate place names so that was going to be useless. Google wasn’t working on my phone either but fortunately the phone number for the hotel was on the confirmation sheet. I called them and they kindly spoke to the driver to give him the address.
As we got into the city I started to get excited by the scenery, just what I wanted to see - densely packed streets, food vendors, amazing signage and even better it was raining - very Blade Runner, I really hope I get time to get out and experience it at night. The 20 minute cab came to a total of 20 Yuan, about £2, I gave him 30 Yuan ( I was feeling generous).
I arrived at the hotel at 8pm (12pm GMT) I hadn’t slept for 30 hours so it didn’t take much to fall asleep.
Woke up at 7am to the sound of rain, thought I’d catch a few people still awake in the UK but the wifi in my room was intermittent, they have a wired connection but my MacBook air has no RJ45 port. Had a text from o2 saying I’d already spent £20 of my data roaming allowance which is capped at £40 so need to be careful, what did we do before the internet?
At breakfast this morning there were a lot of smartly dressed Italians, I noticed they were looking through garment sketch books so it’s likely they source their manufacturing here in Xiamen. In the late 80’s it was designated one of the first areas in China to open up to foreign investment and is also a major shipping port.
Had a call from my contact here in Xiamen so off to the printing plant to check on everything, fingers crossed.
Matt
I was dubious about Frankmusik as the producer, I’d heard of him when it was initially mentioned but I couldn’t name any of his tracks, I went and had a listen to his material but nothing really grabbed me about it.
I often wondered what the role of a producer would bring to a project, but that really depends on the producer (obviously). Frankmusik may well produce his own music but primarily he’s an artists with a specific sound.
I’m not privy to the exact process of how this album was put together, but drawing a conclusion based upon the news and tweets I believe Vince & Andy wrote the tracks over a period of time in their traditional way of guitar and voice. Vince then did his thing by building the tracks using his vast array of synths. Andy came in and sang his parts. Then Frankmusik took everything thing away and did his thing. I remember reading somewhere that Frank only went to Vince’s place for week.
Looking at previous Erasure producers and knowing their work from other projects you can see what impact they had on the various Erasure records. Vince is obviously a capable writer and arranger but probably isn’t a recording engineer, someone that can technically record and mix, it’s also something that he probably doesn’t enjoy. I don’t particularly savour it either.
Maybe there wasn’t enough budget to warrant a full blown producer to be involved through the whole process, maybe Frank didn’t feel comfortable working in an unfamiliar environment, maybe Frank was brought in after the songs were already written and semi complete, who knows.
Whilst there’s no problem with this way of working, it’s clear that the end result isn’t a true collaborative process, to me it feels more like a remix project. What’s here is not quite an Erasure record, it’s a fusion of styles, Erasure v Frankmusik and not the realised potential of Erasure on it’s own.
There are without question some overused bits of production technique that really turn me off to repeat listening. Namely side chain compression, which should be kept to the dance floor if you ask me. This is where a compressor is used to give a track or particular part of a track that pumping sound you get typically in trance or techno. The technique is to use the kick drum to activate the compressor effecting another sound, usually a rich pad sound or even the whole track.
It’s used on half of the album…
Be With You - subtle but still there
Fill Us With Fire - far too much effect and spoils the track for normal listening.
A Whole Lotta Love Run Riot - works better with this track and actually there are some places where to me it sounds like it’s working on just the reverb for some parts which is pretty cool, however for the main chorus it seems to be on the whole track.
I Lose Myself - subtle but still there
Then I Go Twisting - the use is more prominent in the choruses
So personally it’s an overused technique and appears to be part of the “Frank” sound which isn’t particularly original and makes the tracks sound like late 90’s dance. Don’t get me wrong I love some of the tracks that came out during that period. Chicane and Paul Van Dyke are in my CD collection somewhere. But on an Erasure record, I’m not so sure.
Melodyne - Yes there’s tons of it on here, obviously not there to correct Andy’s vocals but to add a creative effect. I dunno about this, it’s a personal thing. I like it in some places but not others. I feel for poor old Andy singing some of these bits live.
So do I like it? Yes I do, in-fact I think I love it. Underneath the washes of over effected production are some really good songs. You can hear the Vince parts there and I’d say they’re classic VC. Frank has probably dumbed down much of the parts which would have been complex sequences that interweave throughout the tracks and create the trademark VC wall of sound. But what it’s been replaced with for me doesn’t detract from some really stand out songs, It’s a modern Erasure record.
I have to admit I was disappointed after hearing it on headphones last night. I’m glad that I waited to write a review this evening though, because after I played it in the car this morning, I realised it’s really a disco record and needs to be played at volume to be appreciated. It changed my mood and that’s what I love about music.
Stand out tracks - Be With You, Fill Us With Fire, A Whole Lotta Love Run Riot, I Lose Myself and Then I Go Twisting. So all the tracks with that overused sidechain compression - go figure!
I am slightly kicking myself for not getting tickets to see them live next week in Leicester - bugger.
Thank you Ditto (finally) and thank you Twitter once again for demonstrating customer power works.
I finally now have a comparison between Spotify and iTunes, as a true indie DIY artists any avenue for getting royalties is a godsend. It keeps my NK bank account topped up for buying new toys for the studio and pays to release physical formats.
We added WIRED to Spotify in September 2009, for me this was a trial to see if it had any effect on increasing our profile and of course if it would would provide a revenue stream. Ditto music charge a monthly subscription of £2, this is never going to break the bank but in return I would hope to at least see some kind of stats, finally they provided these today.
Deep down I knew Spotify was never going to be a viable route for an artists such as Northern Kind to see any kind of revenue from, for me I treated it as a promotional tool and always will do.
However we all read sensational claims by artists over how little they earn from the service. I’d now like to share with you the stats for WIRED: for the 2010 on Spotify.
We received 10,447 full streams of individual tracks, not bad actually. We earned a grand total of £12.39 as the image below shows. Now if we had received this many downloads on iTunes we would have earned £4074.33 (10,447 x £0.39)
With revenues so low I fail to see how record companies will continue to use the service as a viable source of income. For NK we’ll continue to release on Spotify simply because I like the service as a user but I’m sure glad I’m not a full time musician.
Link to image here
After months and months of trying to get Ditto Music to give me stats on our release that’s been on Spotify for a few years, I’ve given up. I’ve emailed, called and always get the same response. “Our system is being updated your release will be on there, just give it a few more days”. We may be owed £££’s or nothing at all, but the problem is I have no way of knowing. They have been happily taking my money each month for the past two years but seem to provide a shockingly bad service in return.
Fortunately AWAL who release our music to iTunes now offer a Spotify channel. So we’ll be adding both Wired, 53˚N and our new single release ASAP. Apparently it does take a while for Spotify to get material on their platform so watch this space.
Software.
I was recommended Evernote yesterday, after a quick and simple install to the desktop and iPhone/iPad the app was ready and syncing immediately.
For ages I’ve used an App called Yojimbo, this is for general note taking, gathering thoughts, passwords and clippings from the web etc. I got quite excited when they bought a version for the iPad out, but alas no version for iPhone and also the iPad version is just a passive client so no ability to add content.
In fairness I emailed Bare Bones yesterday to simply ask if they were planning to launch an iPhone version that could add content and sync. They answered and said “sorry not yet”.
I then thought long and hard about switching simply because I’d be transferring 4 years of content from one system to another, fortunately both applications support automator tasks in AppleScript so I should be able to write a script for this task.
So what made me switch apps, functionality wise they both do pretty much the same thing. OK, the syncing thing is mildly important now but my main reason for actually switching is the look, feel and experience of using the new software. It’s not better, it just feels better.
I sat in a meeting today and the subject of user experience came up. Personally for me this is a huge deal, software companies should always be pushing the envelope on the design of their UI. Yes functionality is important but it doesn’t necessarily sell software, the user experience does.
Remember Netscape Navigator? Well it was killed off on the mac when Microsoft had the ingenious idea of getting a good design agency to design the UI for Explorer. Explorer for the mac was terrible, it had it’s own special way of rendering HTML that meant we would almost double the front end development time just getting it to work on a mac properly. Thankfully Apple launched Safari which in turn saw the death of Explorer for the mac. My point I guess is that each of these seemingly similar bits of software became successful purely because of their design.
It’s superficial I know, but it just makes me feel better.
Who else forgets about the various blogs etc that they have? I’d forgotten about tumblr might have to start using again.
So PING sounded great, one of the first headlines I read was “Ping, final nail in the coffin for Myspace” I hate Myspace so couldn’t wait to download iTunes 10 and get cracking.
First of all it didn’t like my photo, a jpg on my desktop. OK so many people wouldn’t necessarily like a picture of me but I’m sure Apple aren’t that biased. No matter what type of image file I gave it, all I kept getting was, Error uploading image. The next stage I completed was my music genre preferences, after completing this I made my profile live. The first artists that PING recommended where Lady GaGa, Yo-Yo Ma (a cellist), U2, Jack Johnson, Katy Perry and Linkin Park. Now I’m pretty sure none of those are Electronic artists so this is yet another way of being force fed who we should be following.
It appears that artist profiles are currently by invitation only, I spoke with AWAL our aggregator for iTunes and they informed me that they would be getting access to create profiles however Apple are limiting the numbers and will only initially be for top grossing artists. This hardly allows true discovery potential that us indie artists so desperately need.
Alan Wilder emailed me to ask how he could create an artists profile for Recoil, like the Muse one he used as an example. This is what he had to say when he learnt of the process. “seems they all threw teddy’s in the corner and pulled the facebook links at the last minute. And where’s the Artist page function? Only for the big boys for now - typical elitist shite from Apple”.
The fact they have already screwed up the Facebook share thing makes me wonder if this is really going to work. Already they are favouring the most popular artists so at the moment I just don’t think we stand a chance. Shame.
