the day before the Brooklynites come: Basilica Music Festival in Hudson, NY

Hudson NY: the day before Basilica Music Festival, a set on Flickr.  For best results, view this set as a slideshow with captions on (click "Show Info"). One of the more interesting new festivals to launch this year is the Basilica Music Festival. Running three days starting tomorrow in the Hudson Valley city of Hudson, in upstate New York, this is a tiny event by concert industry standards. Organizers have said that no more than 1250 tickets will be sold; that's probably the room capacity for the Basilica Hudson, the event's primary venue.

Yet Basilica Music Festival (BMF) has the distinction of being sponsored by the kingmaking indie-rock blog Pitchfork, with the organizers seeking more of a curated approach. The lineup is chiefly composed of solo performances (by some well known indie musicians, e.g., the main guys from black metal groups Liturgy and Krallice), art/noise projects, and DJs specializing in unconventional club styles — hardly the stuff of high-ranking searches on the Pitchfork website. The spirit of the 3-day affair seems strongly informed by the fine and performance arts, with a final event designated for an offsite tour/panel discussion of artist Marina Abramovic's proposed Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art. At the less refined end of the spectrum, a riverboat has been chartered for a "sunset cruise" on the second day, while campground lodging in nearby Ghent has been incorporated into certain admission packages.

In keeping with the high-art currents, there further appears to be a site-specific ethos at work at BMF. No doubt performers and attendees alike will be struck immediately by Basilica Hudson's raw yet engaging post-industrial space. Originally a 19th century factory, the venue is located across the road from the Hudson River waterfront right next to the city's railroad station and still-operating industrial facilities. Inside the space, weathered brick walls, dusty concrete, the ceiling scaffolding's geometry and the odd broken panel on massive windows create an exciting ambiance for those not expecting the usual concert-hall amenities.

The architectural texture of distressed brick can be further seen throughout the city of Hudson. A small rustbelt city (2010 pop. 6,713), Hudson is one of the Hudson Valley's handful of cities set along the riverfront, industrial gateways to a largely rural area. Deindustrialization beginning in the mid-20th century hit Hudson particularly hard, and it still shows, with vacant factories and apartments dotting the city. Basilica Hudson's creative director Melissa Auf der Maur (former bassist of Hole and Smashing Pumpkins) has described the city's atmosphere as

the best of a picturesque historical antique town mixed with industrial wasteland, framed by Hudson river skies. It's a real urban mix set within a rural landscape, with a lot of Americana Lynch-ian charm. A cool melange of small town characters and big city visitors—totally nuts and beautiful. Best of all worlds combined!

But Hudson is no Brooklyn, no Wicker Park. Neobohemian "grit as glamour" (to quote sociologist Richard Lloyd) has emerged out of real rustbelt decline, indicated most notably by a population decrease of 10.8% from 2000-10. Economic distress registers in the socioeconomic conditions of Hudson residents today. In 2010, median household income in Hudson was $40,203, about a third less than the national figure. 21.8% of the population, and 39.3% of children under 18, live on incomes below the poverty level, which again exceed the national statistics (of 14.4% and 20.1%, respectively). 54.8% of the city's adults haven't attained an education beyond high school.

How has an indie-rock/high-art event like BMF come to a city like Hudson? It's a fascinating story too long to tell here, but the short version is that the hipsters have followed the trail blazed by metropolitan restructuring and shifting leisure/consumption patterns based in the New York City area. At some point in the late 20th century, Hudson's Warren Street changed from a down-on-its-knees commercial center to a thriving retail district for antique furniture and high-end design. Prices at these boutiques are well beyond the range of your average 20-something Brooklynite, never mind most Hudson locals. Commerce here is aimed largely at affluent metropolitans who make daytrips up to furnish their nests back in the city or in the swath of vacation homes from the Catskills across the river to the Bershires in the east.

If the pattern in Hudson is similar to most "quality-of-life destinations," the local Chamber of Commerce probably had little to do in initiating Hudson's transformation into an antique/design retail center. But who can blame them for urging on this transformation? Not that Hudson's boutique economy is the kind to generate much employment for the city's working class; entrepreneurialism and retail jobs of this nature require education and metropolitan savoir-faire. But the transformation does fill vacancies and boost rents, and so city boosters can only celebrate the aesthetic turn in the city's economy. Even more, they can designate Hudson as "the next Music Mecca."

I'm referring here to the slogan on Hudson Music Fest, which runs concurrently with BMF. 2012 is the second year for this annual event, which is mostly a free affair —local bars, coffeeshops, and outdoor tents hosting performances by bands and musicians whom (I'm hypothesizing) are local talent. Interestingly, the schedule for Hudson Music Fest includes listings for BMF, suggesting that there has been some coordination between the two events, perhaps even a civic gesture on the part of BMF's organizers to lend their support with a new high profile event. But that's an open question. BMF's website and promotional press has made no mention of Hudson Music Fest, whose online schedule clearly states, on the eve of the events' first day:

We are in the final stages of putting the schedule together. 75% of the musicians confirmed with 25% of those needing to change performance times along with the 25% who have not yet confirmed so the process is still in its fluid stage.

Thus, between BMF and Hudson Music Fest there seems to be an asymmetry of acumen about event organizing and promotion. Hudson Music Fest offers a wide array of musical styles, including the venerable nightclub genres of jazz, blues and rock, while BMF is going for a musical niche that will almost certainly alienate the average listener.  Some questions I'd like to investigate further are:

1. To what extent will the concert-goers of BMF catch some of the events associated with Hudson Music Fest? Basilica Hudson is located within easy walking distance of downtown Hudson, and Hudson Music Fest seems to have made some effort to schedule music outside of the nighttime blocks when BMF's main programming will be held. In short, there's going to be a lot of music downtown this weekend trying to reach the ears of BMF attendees — will they catch some of it in the public space of Hudson, or will they stay in a BMF bubble?

Just what is the relationship between BMF and Hudson Music Fest, specifically between its organizers: influential music tastemakers versus local music/business boosters? Did they coordinate the scheduling of their two events? Can the two parties gain something from each other?

Finally, how does BMF change the caché of Hudson, NY, to the metropolitan population whose economic weight is, for better or worse, driving most of the change in the city and throughout the Hudson Valley? As I've argued before, 20- and 30-somethings are in short supply throughout the Hudson Valley, celebrations and alarm over "the Brooklynization of [insert your favorite small town here]" notwithstanding. One indicator I've always looked to in this regard is the quality of indie rock (and other live music aimed at discerning music fans younger than baby boomers) to be found in the region; outside of the area's colleges, there's generally nothing to speak of. But just this last year, Club Helsinki in Hudson has been booking some really great acts (I caught a fantastic performance by Wye Oak last month). Is the Hudson Valley starting to establish a significant populace of (for lack of a better word) hipsters — or at least the destinations and designations of metropolitan cool that might attract them?

the dull ubiquity of placeless music festivals

Some questions for investigations here, presented in the form of a rant. As part of my research in musical urbanism, I consume a fair amount of music coverage in print and online. Jesus Christ, all I seem to find these days is "writing" about generic touring festivals headlined by Coldplay/Metallica/Fiona Apple/Beach House/you name it. News about new music festivals. News about cancelled music festivals. News about how the concert industry, which has put so much of its eggs in the festival basket, now outpaces the recording industry. And the evergreen question, what's the line-up for Coachella 2013? Look, I fully support the right of youth to indulge in the mass communion of bad sightlines, expensive food, sunburns and portapotty stench for the romantic pursuit of sex, drugs and [insert any pop genre here]. I've indulged in that myself.  Coachella, Glastonbury, Sasquatch, Werchter et al—by all means, let them be the gateway drug to a rich life as a music listener. But it's interesting and, frankly, discouraging that the generic, touring festival seems to be the end game for live music these days, with generally no thought being put to how live music might be presented more imaginatively and meaningfully for listeners and musicians alike. And, conversely, little attention is given to those more imaginative and meaningful festivals.   Place is an especially important concern here. While geography is what ostensibly differentiates one Live Nation mega-event from the next, inside the venues the performers, the lineups, the layout, the vendors etc. are generally undistinguishable and internchangeable across the events. They're carefully themed spaces that are paradoxically placeless, at least beyond the conceits of the event. The rise of generic touring festivals don't yet make me worry for the fate of cities, urban economies, or local music scenes. But I sometimes wonder if the dull ubiquity of big-money touring festivals makes younger audiences eager for the theming of their everday spaces: the commodification of colleges and universities, the insularity of the hipster neighborhood, and so on.

It's understandable why 'independent' music, which at one pre-ironic point in cultural history was opposed to such commodification, increasingly hitches its wagon to corporate music festivals today. Although touring the music-festival circuit can be a draining, exhausting slog, the promotional opportunity can't be beat, at least when these events are all any music publication or blog wants to write about. I suspect it also helps that "indie rock" is now mainly the purview of 20- and 30-somethings without dependents to tend to.

This is something that the EDM industry has especially figured out. The facts that this music thrives in nightclubs and other smaller venues, and that rock music has long dominated the festival circuit, make me think there's nothing intrinsically "rave" to the big-field setting for EDM festivals today. EDM has more likely thrived because the barriers to entry for performers are low. Bringing along a laptop or (for the old-school purist) a crate of records is all it takes for most DJs to hit the stage—no long load-ins or soundchecks necessary. Perhaps this infrastructural advantage is the real basis for the recurring rockist insult that "no talent is required to play electronic dance music."

At least those are my hypotheses. Here are a few more.

1. The context for this state of affairs isn't live music itself. Obviously, this is what happens after the recording industry loses its profit model. Live music is what David Harvey would call a spatial fix—a secondary circuit of accumulation that capital taps into when profits in the primary industrial circuit dry up. We're simply seeing the next iteration out from the recording industry's abandonment of artist development and its short-sighted embrace of the quick-profit singles market.

The above means let's not celebrate the initiative and entrepreneurialism of the "concert industry" just yet, since the high rate of event cancellations suggests they're still largely throwing business models against the wall to see what sticks. An important question for further investigation is, Just how distinct in name/experience/profile are the players and financial backers in the "concert industry" from the rest of the "music industry"?

2. If we might expect the bovine migration of the corporate sector to the music-festival sector, I'm more disheartened by the failure of imagination on the part of the music media to write about anything else. Their rote, uncritical coverage isn't limited to summertime, when festivals generally overshadow the release of noteworthy albums and (another dismaying phenomenon) the TV season for Idol, The Voice, etc. How many freakin' tweets have I read about Coachella: the bands, the fashions, the line-up for next year, the threat of its cancellation, yada yada yada? And South By Southwest... thank god for the SXSW tweet-blocker. I think at least three factors could be culprits:

a) the collapse of the publishing industry, which has shrunk staff, dried up money for original reporting (i.e., news that isn't "researched" via Twitter or a YouTube livestream), and made it hard for remaining music/arts & culture reporters—particularly at weekly alternative newspapers, still the source for the best local music coverage—to keep their ears to the local ground and make a living;

b) the tail-wags-dog rationale of bigger publications covering "what younger readers want." So Spin Magazine calls its July/August edition the "Outside Issue," etc. Implicitly, this further yields the album market to older/occasional listeners who (it will be assumed) want "the next Adele."

c) the convergence of culture reporting and business reporting that has been encouraged by the dominance of Richard Florida's creative-city paradigm. While the shrewd promoters will spin a line about how their event borrows from the SXSW model, city papers can now rationalize their arts coverage as a means to a more 'legitimate' end.

3. What's perhaps most surprising is the absence of traditional urban business community involvement in the music-festival sector. Why is this? The rare "post-rave growth coalition" notwithstanding, I suspect the players in most urban growth machines rarely overlap with the world of festival promoting. This may be because many of these events are held in big, exurban fields, which suggests that large-scale property owners will be the main node of connection. But so far I don't see much active participation (as opposed to passive profit-making) in festivals that happen in city environments either, short of a few notable exceptions—Austin, Berlin, etc.

Traditionally, being an urban booster on the chamber of commerce has been the antithesis of hip. Historically, this has been the basis for criticism of its philistine Babbitry. In these ironic, hipster-saturated times, it's a rare source of integrity for the urban business community. I happened upon a rare music event organized by a urban business improvement district recently: the Downtown Albany Blues Music Competition. Evidently the Chamber of Commerce even got to select the line-up of performing. How "hip" is that?

swimming in the indie music ecosystem: an interview with Scott Reitherman of Throw Me The Statue

Scott Reitherman is the singer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and main guy behind Throw Me The Statue, an indie-pop band based in Seattle. They have two albums out on Secretly Canadian, an independent label based out of Bloomington, Indiana, and are currently in the studio recording a third one. Their 2007 debut Moonbeams got a warm reception in indie-music blogs and end-of-year lists, and since then they've managed to maintain decent if not vast interest in various North American cities where college kids and 20-somethings are into music like the kind made by the Shins et al.

I first met Scott at Vassar College, where he was a student in my Intro to Sociology class in the spring of 2001. Let the record show that Scott got an A- in the class; he did nicely in the sections on Marx and Weber, although he could have done a little better on Durkheim. (Actually, so could a lot of American sociologists.) After he declared Sociology as his major, I became his adviser. There were several meetings in my office where conversations drifted in and out of college issues, and soon we discovered a common obsession with music. I told him about various bands I played in after college, and he revealed that he played guitar and wrote songs. I imagine I signed off on the Electronic Music Production class he mentions below, but I never suspected that music would be his post-graduate pursuit.

In the spring of 2004, I got rid of all my old cassettes that I had been lugging around for twenty years. At the time I was living right off campus, so I put a crate of tapes out on the street and shot an e-mail to a few music-minded students. The tapes were gone in an hour, and years later Scott told me he scooped up most of them. If anyone detects the influence of the Fuzztone's 1985 album Lysergic Emanations in the music of Throw Me The Statue, I'll take the credit for that, thank you very much. Scott graduated from Vassar College that May, and we lost direct contact for awhile.

Fast forward to 2008, and I found a message on my office phone from Scott, too late: he was in Poughkeepsie, playing with his band, and could I make the show? This was probably the first I learned of his musical career; another student informed me that Scott's band was called Throw Me The Statue, and they were actually pretty good. I downloaded the albums—yes, they were pretty good, quite accomplished even. We got back in touch, although I'm still waiting to see the band play.

Making no aesthetic judgements about their music, Throw Me The Statue are clearly a 'real' indie-rock band. They're fortunate enough to have a label that distributes their music and sufficient attention to get them covered in Stereogum and other niche media. However, like so many other bands buzzed about by discerning young listeners, Throw Me The Statue has yet to reach to the next stage of success whereby their momentum becomes self-sustaining in even the medium term. The band can continue as long as they keep recording and playing to audiences, but any pause in this activity quickly renders their livelihoods precarious.

Knowing about my interest in the economics of musical creativity, Scott wanted to share his view on the subject. "More and more, it's harder to keep four people afloat with a band," he said in a phone conversation last July. He pointed me toward a Pitchfork interview with David Berman, who broke down in clear numbers the imbalance between expenses and revenues that characterized the Silver Jews (an apt comparison to Throw Me The Statue, insofar as both are similarly ambiguous as one-man projects fronting as bands). "One way for a band to support as a functioning ecosystem is to only support one person, the principal songwriter," he told me. "You need to take a significant leap in how successful you are before you can support four people."

Very intrigued, I proposed that Scott write an essay for the blog, but eventually the format evolved into this e-mail exchange, which began in earnest in January 2012 while Throw Me The Statue were entering the recording studio. As will become quickly clear, I'm no music journalist. With these questions I wanted to draw out the basics of Scott's situation, including many that go unasked in typical music-press interviews, in as much detail as necessary, much like I would approach any extended informant interview. Scott politely indulged me as I elaborated some of the more esoteric sociological and geographical implications of his responses, none of which is out of line with the recent scholarship highlighting the networking and organizational recycling that make musical scenes cohere. If Scott's experience in the Seattle scene isn't necessarily a unique one, his responses nonetheless illustrate how a musician can shift in and out of this musical ecology at different stages of their creative activity and personal life. (When we began discussing this interview, Scott was living in Los Angeles; by the end, he had moved to his hometown San Francisco before returning to Seattle.) He betrays a note of worry that he may soon be reaching the ends of how much more personal and geographical flexibility he wants to give to his music.

* * * * * * *

To begin, tell me about how Throw Me The Statue got started. Was it originally a band, or just you plus whomever you could find, or what? And where did Throw Me The Statue finally get off the ground?

Throw Me The Statue was born out of the Electronic Music Production class at Vassar that I took as a senior. It was a year long course, and halfway through it I decided to focus on songwriting and used the last couple projects in that class as the "debut" recordings under that new alias of mine. After graduating I moved to Seattle with some Vassar friends and Sam Beebe and I started a record label called Baskerville Hill with the intention of releasing our own music. Sam made music as Black Bear and I as Throw Me The Statue, and pretty soon we met people in Seattle with whom we collaborated and began to promote their music as well. It was really fun, equal parts elaborate art project and pseudo-company. Sam and I both released our first records on Baskerville along with a compilation of music by us and our friends. Sam moved to Germany, and about a year later I got Throw Me The Statue signed to Secretly Canadian Records, at which point I let Baskerville Hill gently fall to sleep and focused entirely on my new opportunity with Throw Me The Statue. I got some musical friends together to help me pull off some shows and touring, and the first year or so of promoting the Secretly Canadian debut was this familial version of a band.

What was your original vision of how much Throw Me The Statue would be a recording project versus a touring entity?

At first it was only about making recordings. Live shows were intimidating to me, I needed to work up both the nerve to sing in front of people and assemble a group. So at the beginning I was completely content just making recordings and demos. But once I got a taste of pulling off a good show I was on to that thing. How do we do this more? And linking up with a real label put us in touch with a booker, and from there it felt much more real and financially viable to be able to do both recordings and tours.

Why Seattle? Was this a place where you recognized like-minded musicians and receptive audiences?

Really dug the Northwest music of The Microphones, Modest Mouse, Bobby Birdman, Little Wings, Built To Spill, and record labels like K, States Rights and Marriage. We knew when we graduated that we wanted to start our own label so we plopped ourselves down there in the hopes of I don't know what, just proximity to what we though was cool I suppose. In hindsight it was a great city to stake our claim in, but a bad city to try and do tours out of. The East Coast is far denser and easier to tour within.

You left Seattle for Los Angeles recently. What happened to Throw Me The Statue along the way — did any musicians move with you? Did the concept of the band evolve at this point?

My girlfriend and I moved to LA by ourselves in order to see something new. At the same time Aaron Goldman, one of our original members and a friend of mine from high school, finished his Microbiology PhD at UW (which he'd been working on throughout his Throw Me The Statue tenure, including everyday in the van on tour!?!!) and took a job at Princeton. The other two remaining members of the band — Charlie Smith and Jarred Grimes — stayed in Seattle. Those two are still in the group, yet in some ways the identity of Throw Me The Statue has shifted back a bit towards its solo project origins. It's clear that after doing this for 5 years now, it can only reliably sustain my livelihood. The other guys have jobs and other pursuits, for me Throw Me The Statue is basically all I do. In LA I started tutoring high schoolers on the side, but mostly I focus on TMTS and can draw a living wage from it most months of the year. The move was basically a life change that Jess and I wanted and the band was both at the end of a promotion cycle and not lucrative enough to stay planted indefinitely in Seattle.

As for the concept of the band, yes it has changed a bit. Without going into all the details of how we divide our money and royalty percentages, I write the songs and then bring them to the group, and in that dynamic it can be a very large commitment that you ask of your bandmates without enough financial return for everyone. If you're in your early 20s and/or making oodles of dough then perhaps it is easier for the folks involved to drop everything whenever it's time to get back in that van, but for us we're getting a little older and we've started to move on from that model.

If I recall correctly, you're a native of San Francisco — by birthright, a sworn enemy of Los Angeles! But seriously, how amenable has LA been to your relocation of Throw Me The Statue? Have you played many shows there yet, or found studios to rehearse and record in? Or at this stage are you still mostly writing songs in your bedroom, the way we think how Joni Mitchell used to do in Laurel Canyon? How much do you need to interact with other people in LA to do your music?

In LA we rented a small one bedroom apartment in Echo Park and were there for 15 months. I needed additional space to set up my studio, so after looking around unsuccessfully for unique spots I had to get your basic band practice space at a rehearsal facility. In Seattle I had paid $450 a month to live in a house with my bandmates, and the basement of that house was our musical playground. In LA, Jess and I were renting our apartment for $1550 a month and then my music studio cost a little over $400 a month. So the cost of doing my thing was significantly higher in LA. My system was go to the rehearsal space in the morning and write songs. The bands wouldn't be there then, most of them showed up after work hours around 6 pm and onwards. So if I was out of there by then I could usually avoid the ungodly, soul-crushing din of umpteen bands all practicing around your room. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. The rooms range from somewhat soundproofed to not all, which is why I actually had to move my studio three times before I found the best space at a decent price.

As far as meeting other musicians LA was pretty ok. I met lots of people in groups, but I was in a writing phase while I was down there. Throw Me The Statue had just finished a round of touring and supporting our last record before we moved to LA, so at that point I was really only focused on writing new material.

While LA is a very big city, the indie music ecosystem seems pretty contained to the Silverlake / Echo Park area around where we lived. All the venues are for the most part around the Eastside as well. But now that it's time to finish our next record and play live again it makes the most sense to go back to Seattle, where the band is from.

I realize I haven't explained the last 6 months or so. I am actually in Half Moon Bay now, where I grew up. I left LA in May, to move home. My parents got divorced early this year and I had the flexibility and felt the need to come home and be around, spending time with both of them, etc. Then in the early fall I went back to Seattle to begin recording on our next album, and I am moving back there for the year in a few weeks. So LA is effectively a closed chapter for Jess and I now.

Awhile back you sent me that interview with Dave Berman, who really broke it down in terms of how economically difficult it is to keep Silver Jews happening. He of course has some unique circumstances to deal with (grad school, rehab), so let me ask your perspective on the economics of being an indie-rock band today. First, tell me what a "living wage" (your words) means at this stage in your life. What are your living expenses like? (BTW, is LA more or less costly to live in than Seattle?) Do you have health insurance, school loans car payments, other long-term expenses? Remember, I'm a sociologist, so by asking all these questions, I don't assume your personal situation is all that unique; I suspect a lot of other people of your age doing all kinds ofcreative pursuits face similar situations.

A living wage for me is probably around $25,000-30,000 a year. Over the last five years of my music career there have probably been a couple years I didn't earn that much. I pay auto insurance on two vehicles, my own car plus the band's tour van, about $120/month. I pay for basic health insurance, at about $130/month. Good music equipment is expensive. I don't go out to bars that much anymore. LA was more expensive than Seattle, but not as pricy as San Fran or NYC would be in my opinion. In Seattle you can rent a small house for about $1000 a month and that affords you the space to have a home studio. In LA those places are harder to find at that price. And as I said, down there I had to find a separate space to have my studio, at significant extra cost. Had we have not lived in a fun part of town we could have found a small house I think for about what you can in Seattle, but we chose not to make that sacrifice. In LA I took a job tutoring high school students to bring in a little extra money while Throw Me The Statue was inactive and not earning much except the occasional royalty check.

One of the most interesting challenges to making the finances of indie rock work out is the money schedule. You can go a while without receiving a check, and then one day a company will finally decide to pay you for a license agreement you made with them months or a year ago. Or perhaps a new licensing offer will fall from the sky and land in your inbox. This feast and famine cycle is not very different from other forms of freelancing. Being on a legitimate record label certainly helps in instances where you need someone to go ask nicely "hey by the way, where is Scott's check?"

Basically when you make the transition from regular job and regular paychecks to pursuing music full time because you have the opportunity to have a real audience for your work, it can be a tricky financial adjustment. It is always tough when you're in the famine part of the cycle, but I am also very fortunate that I have a partner and a family that really support what I do. Probably that more than anything is the most important element in one's ability to stick around in the business of making independent music. If you summon the guts to go follow your passion you just need to be dead set on it. And it helps to have a good support network. But if you work hard at it and you're kind and you have some talent then you'll probably convince some people along the way. If you want to make the best loot travel back in time to the late 90s and become an internationally renowned house or trance DJ. Ride that wave into the sunset, that is my advice.

You talked about getting a little older. What, are you 30 years old by now? How far ahead are you able to envision your life into the future, in terms of, gosh I don't know, marriage kids house the whole nine yards?

I turn 30 in a couple months, thank you for that reminder. Yesterday Jess teased me that I was 30 and I said "Hey I'm in still in my twenties!" She said, "Scott, you're in your twenty-nines." Yes I want kids and the whole deal. If I can pay for that future with my music career I would be a very happy person. I don't know if I can realistically afford my share of the pricetag of a family in my home-state of California. Sometimes I think about where we could live that we could both pursue our careers (Jess is a freelance graphic designer) and be happy at a lower cost of living. Go live in Austin, Nashville, probably a lot of parts of the South and Midwest. Maybe upstate New York. But I don't know. My family is here on the west coast, this is where I'm from, so I feel that magnetism and someday in the next few years I may really have to move music to the side of my life and get a better paying career so that I can afford that future. Which by the way, I am totally fine with, it's just not Plan A.

You said that Throw Me The Statue can "reliably sustain" your livelihood, but only yours. How does that happen? What have the records and the tours brought in?

The tours last about a month each and bring in about $2,000-8,000 grand usually. It depends if you're headlining the tour or on as a support slot. So we've always split that evenly amongst the band. Best case scenario we're looking at coming home with one or maybe two months of rent for each of us. The records have earned between $10,000 to about $30,000 in profit. We split that with our label 50/50. ASCAP Royalties are something but they're also hardly much. Maybe at best a few grand in a year. Licensing agreements are really the way that I've been able to stay afloat, and those at times have been a $10,000 dollar bump in a year's earnings to about $30,000 in a good year.

I'm getting the picture of how these revenue streams let you avoid getting a steady wage-paying job and get on with the business of making music full-time. To be awkwardly sociological, I would say your musical career is sustained by mobile assets (the profits/royalties/licensing/merchandising checks that find you, the supportive partner who lives with you, maybe support from your parents) and then geographically fixed assets (the money from gigs and the merchandise you sell there). Does that sound about right?

Yep.

Just as a parenthetical, I recently read in Simon Reynolds' book Retromania about Tim Warren, who runs Crypt Records and releases these Back From the Grave compilations of ultra-obscure garage punk. He put in a ridiculous amount of work trying to track down the members of these no-hit wonder bands from the 60s, digging through Library of Congress file cards that match his vintage singles then searching through archived Yellow Pages directories for matching names, just so he could cut these guys some royalty checks. It really highlighted how in a pre-Internet world, bands could lose their economic renumeration once the members drifted apart and moved away from the town listed in their pubishing. Never mind the professional mindset that a DIY career like yours requires; the technology that lets you be contacted at any time no matter where you are seems to be the invisible link in this contemporary music system.

Let me ask you about Throw Me The Statue's profile as a band. Last year I noticed that a lot of my favorite indie-rock albums — by artists like Kurt Vile, EMA, Marissa Nadler, Cass McCombs, Luke Roberts — consisted of a style that some might call folk-rock, at least insofar as (a) they were essentially solo artists and (b) their music was clearly composed on acoustic guitar or other instruments they could accompany themselves with. And many of them took it further to a Laurel Canyon vibe, i.e., an intimate conversation with the listener, via first-person confessional or visionary revelation. Obviously these artists might go out on tours backed by a group of musicians, but it seemed interesting that several of them used to be members of formal bands (the War on Drugs, Gowns), and now they're not — they're going out solo. Initially I thought that was kind of a cultural zeitgeist thing for this moment in music, but your responses make me wonder if this is also a reflection of the new business model for DIY music.

Well yes there is absolutely a vibrant trend of folk-based confessional music out there now. And I think that you see some bands do quite well when they participate in a nostalgic, yesteryear aesthetic. Part of this is an artistic community reacting to widespread hipsterdom, where identities are purchased from Urban Outfitters and all of that, and songwriters retreat from that and attempt to poetically mine their unique experiences. Also, a big part of this is due to baby boomers, who — god bless em — still pay for music. I don't know how many people in this demographic are buying Kurt Vile and Cass McCombs, but you bet they're buying big numbers of records from the more well-known and well-polished acts like Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver. And don't forget Adele, that billboard juggernaut who eclipsed 6 million sales on her latest record at last count! [Make that 20 million records sold worldwide as of April 2012 - ed.]

But to your point, yes I think artists like some that you mention who have a similar aesthetic (confessional, with a classic folk-y core) absolutely find their way to that sound in part because of the finances involved. Many-membered bands like Arcade Fire, Sufjan Stevens, or maybe a Polyphonic Spree, these are the successful exceptions, and they really have to know the size of their audience before they trot out on tour with an entourage of that size. I believe the Bon Iver tour these days is close to ten musicians on stage as well. So you see that organic model at work, guys like Sufjan or Bon Iver start as solo artists, and then bloom out on stage and subsequent records as there becomes an audience that can support that. That's a romantic and classic arc for a songwriter to take — start small on the debut, and then as an audience embraces your music you show them what you can do with a bigger canvas on your follow-up effort. But it's often inherently tied to an economic event that opens the door to that opportunity, and the guys that tour around solo now would probably more often that not flip the switch on the backing band as soon as they could afford to.

I'm usually interested in a maximalist approach to songmaking, using a lot of instruments in the mix. So on stage it becomes "how can we pull off these tunes with as few people as possible so that they still sound as full as they do on record?" Sometimes you just cut certain parts out, but sometimes we rely on laptops and samplers to fill in the musical elements that we don't have enough hands to perform. And that's not always ideal, but when you can eliminate the need for paid musician on tour you can make your bottom line balance out more sustainably.

To be explicit about my interests behind earlier questions, I'm always curious about the many ways being in a city is important to a musical project like Throw Me The Statue at this stage. Now you're back in Seattle making the new record with Charlie and Jarred. Has anyone else joined you in the studio?

Yes we've hired some Seattle drummers to come and play on the record. We've had James McAlister (Sufjan Stevens), Michael Lerner (Telekinesis), and Tyler Swan (Truckasauras) in.

And these are other Seattle musicians? How did you come across these folks?

We've known each other via other Seattle musical friends or shows we've played together over the years.

So does that make you the migrant in the band, so to speak? Have these guys played in other Seattle bands while you've been gone?

I suppose it does make me the migrant as far as returning to Seattle, although these guys also tour and play with different people in different configurations and bands all the time too.

What studio are you recording in? Are you working with someone you know behind the boards? Are you hoping they'll help you acheive a certain "Seattle sound"?

We have done some tracking at Avast and some at Robert Lang. We did exclusively drums at those two spots, and we were working with Cameron Nicklaus who we had known from before when he was one of the house engineers at Avast. Then we have been doing the bulk of the recording at Charlie's Studio Nels/Bart Radio. By day they work on commercials and by night or their off-days we sneak in and overdub vocals, guitars, keyboards, etc. It has become the homebase of the record making, and it's a huge plus for us to get to work freely there. Charlie has been there for a few years now and this is really the first time we've spent a serious chunk of time there, but it has been really wonderful. Charlie has been doing a ton of the producer work on this record and he really understands his own studio, so we've been getting a lot of good results from the extended time we spend down there.

L-R: Cameron Nicklaus, Charlie Smith, Scott Reitherman

Photo by Tae Rhee

I don't try to attain a Seattle sound, and I honestly don't think that one really exists. Or if it does, I think it might define other genres of music better than the kind of thing I'm working on. But that may be for residents of other places to judge. I do hope that people in Seattle dig it though!

The Seattle scene has been witness to so many disparate sounds and success stories over the past five years. There's a legitimate movement in hip hop here, there's the folk revival thing, there's still always going to be pop rock bands and hard rocking bands. The people here are into a lot of different kinds of things, it is a musically enlightened and receptive population. And 90.3 KEXP is a fantastic resource for the city and keeps people up to speed with a lot of different sounds. It's one of the only places I know about where the radio station still plays a vibrant role in the community.

This may seem like an odd angle, but another way I think about the whole flexible/solo nature of music today is in the way musicians go about naming their projects. Not to date myself too much, but I came of musical age in the mid 80s when people talked about "forming bands" — and they usually meant just that, bands whose musical identity would somehow be tied up with the specific combination of musicians and integrity of the line-up. They didn't necessarily pick a name that followed the "plural noun" format (most recently revived in the early 00s: The White Stripes, The Strokes, The Hives, etc.), but it always seemed understood that this was a collective undertaking. You could see this in the music press of the time, I think, where a common angle for an article about a band might be how this member chafes under the dominance of another member, or how an obvious bandleader expresses their commitment to the band process (an example being Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders).

I'm interested in why so many solo projects in indie rock today adopt what could be interpreted as a "band name." Throw Me The Statue is as good an example as any. You talked earlier about choosing this name as an "alias." Have you thought about this larger trend in music today? I asked some friends of my age about examples from the 80s, and we couldn't really think of many (The The and the various Foetus projects being two better-known exceptions).

I think young people and the people in new bands of this decade are hyper aware of their image and conscious of how important (unfortunately) it is to their reception. When we're able to spray our thoughts across the internet, whether it's to build ideas up or to tear ideas down, we see how powerfully important it is to craft our message. So I think when solo acts attach themselves to aliases it's to both protect themselves and to engage in myth-making. You remove yourself one small step from negativity and judgement when you make art under an alias. Maybe you can temporarily forget about your worry that nothing getting made today is truly as interesting as things that came before you. You can make it bigger than you. You can dress it up and make it more interesting. It's almost like an imaginary friend. And in that self-made myth you can slink into a place where you take risks you might not have otherwise been brave enough take.

remembering the serious triviality of pop music

Something left unelaborated in my review of Echotone (from the last two posts: here and here) is a larger uneasiness with the instrumentalization of independent or underground music — the reduction of pop music culture from an end in itself to a means for other ends.  Although this isn't a new critique of post-punk music (i.e., music groups inspired by the DIY ethos of recording and distribution and/or the modernist impulse to push the envelope artistically and expressively), Echotone specifically highlights a quite contemporary context: indie-rock groups' affinity with "creative city" economic development schemes. 

But there's another context, also related to the so-called creative economy, and also urban in its manifestation, but maybe more pervasive across pop music culture and the generational zeitgeist.  It can be gleaned by comparing Echotone with another recent film about an urban music scene: The Beat is the Law, a 2011 documentary directed by Eve Wood about Sheffield, England. 

The Beat is the Law is the sequel to Wood's 2001 documentary Made in Sheffield.  Whereas the latter documents Sheffield circa 1978-83, focusing on post-punk (in the narrower, generic sense) groups such as the Human League, Cabaret Voltaire, Vice Versa (who went on to form New Pop icons ABC) and the sadly forgotten Artery, The Beat is the Law picks up around 1984 to tell the story of the Cabaret Voltaire-inspired groups like Clock DVA and Chakk; the acid house crews centered around FON Studios and Warp Records; and on into the mid-90s Britpop era with local heroes Pulp and the Longpigs.  This period specifically reflects the dismal depths of the Thatcher era, when the Miners' Strike tore Sheffield apart, and the effervescence of the New Romantics and the New Pop gave way to the kitchen-sink non-glamour of the Smiths and the C86 indie-pop shift.  The contrast to the subsequent euphoria of British acid house and then New Labour's electoral victories is stark, and it gives The Beat is the Law an emotional arc that its highly worthy prequel maybe lacked.

Watching the documentary, I was struck by a peculiar juxtaposition of sentiments concerning the role and value of music as recalled retroactively by various Sheffield musicians.  On the one hand, they refer to "all these dark, intense people making music in nightclubs" (to quote Pulp's Russell Senior) during 1980s Sheffield.  To some extent, this conveys the proto-industrial aesthetic of groups like Chakk, with their early attempts at "found percussion" (used more successfully by contemporaries like Test Department and Einsturzende Neubauten) and an earnestness toward their art that precludes crass rockstar ambitions (of the kind observed, say, in Liverpool groups like Echo & the Bunnymen or The Mighty Wah!).  Sure, such seriousness could also just be another word for youthful pretensions.  After all, take away the artistic adventure found in Cabaret Voltaire and its ilk, and you may be left with a lot of dour young men in their 20s expressing their dourness to other dour young men (and women!) in their 20s.  However, The Beat is the Law suggests this attitude is of a piece with the cultural climate in Sheffield at the time, particularly its tradition of labor militancy and its wide local support for a socialist welfare state.  This is a seriousness that draws on longstanding modernist impulses, found within art and politics, to cast out the old and usher in the new.

On the other hand, Jarvis Cocker remembers how Thatcher's neoliberal government and the sober Victorian ethos which it sought to resurrect viewed musicians at the time: "To be in a band in the mid-80s was, I guess because most people were on the dole, you just should have had 'loser' tattooed on your head, you know.  There was no respect."  This official dismissiveness suggests the limits of the seriousness described earlier could go.  Playing in a band is a trivial hobby, properly confined to leisurely pursuits and abandoned once work and duty call.  And Thatcher made the call for work and duty very loudly and clearly as she sought to eradicate the permissive "dole culture" and compel Britons to fend for themselves as individuals in the neoliberal labor market. 

I'm struck by how the serious triviality that Sheffield musicians understood their art to represent during Thatcher's England contrasts powerfully with the trivial seriousness that pop music seems to embody in the present day.  In 1980s Sheffield, the idea that music could be a dignified calling, much less a foundation for economic development, is completely absent.  And if punk and other underground musical expressions rejected the restrictive dictates of traditional authority, it's not clear that they necessarily challenged the limits between work and leisure that Thatcher emphasized; if anything, they sought to extend the boundaries of leisure over the domain of work in an undefined and, admittedly, not always thought-out way.

Chalk this contradiction up to the inconsistencies of youth if you want, but other musical forms have also asserted the centrality of everyday life (into which 'leisure' can be fit, although doing so highlights the fact of alienation along the way) over the demands of work and duty.  Think of folk music in the sense of people's music, or performers of religious music.  Composing and performing music can be the basis of a sustainable livelihood in these and other musical traditions, but rarely do they constitute the relations of production for an ascendant economic class as they do in the creative economy today.

And so we come upon the greater context for the instrumentalization of independent or underground music today.  Sheffield of the 1980s was very much part of an industrial economy.  Austin today, by contrast, is very much part of a creative economy — or, if you're skeptical about the spirit of empowerment that the term implies, then an economy in which the production of entertainment, design, and services are the chief value-added activities in highly developed nations, regions and cities.  Music has been swept up in this economic shift, with little critical awareness or effective response by musicians on the whole.  Indeed, indie rock musicians have especially let the 'serious' task of making a living colonize their music, lifestyles, their generational references, even their affective repertoire (melancholy, irony, nightlife exuberance, etc.).

It's in this context that we should be troubled by the otherwise sensible priorities of many musicians today to make musical creativity their full-time job, for instance, or to protect their intellectual property from piracy.  Not to keep the finger pointed solely at musicians, of course.  To return to a conclusion from my last post, so long as the entertainment industry and other sectors extract surplus value from musicians' creative activity, such priorities can make sense in some circumstances — they can even have the whiff of "fighting back against the corporate machine" about them.

It's an axiom in economic geography that, in their form as material, empirical activities, economies don't magically encompass the whole of a nation-state; economies are always unevenly developed, which among other things opens the door for talking about regional and urban economies.  To extend the example I used earlier, if Sheffield of the 1980s was very much part of an industrial economy, London at the same time was already part of an emergent symbolic economy.  Of course, the production of culture has always been a key role for cities, like London, so prominent as to be deemed cultural capitals.  By the 1980s, London's music sector had already been well integrated into a broader industrial commodity-producing economy, a point that's evoked in Paul Morley's response to a question by Simon Reynolds (in the latter's 2010 volume, Totally Wired: Postpunk Interviews and Overviews).

OK, Paul, now you have to explain to me that Manchester jingoism thing you all go in for, the absolute contempt for London!

London is a metaphor.  It represents everything that's conservative about that business approach to culture and art and entertainment.  A laziness.  Back then it was so pronounced, you really felt like the country was slanted, physically slanted at a gradient, so that everything slid down to London.  You did feel annoyed about it.  I've never been as vociferous about it as Tony Wilson.  I wasn't so much pro-Manchester as anti-London.  I often say, 'No great band has come from London,' and then people say, 'The Stones and The Who.' But I say, 'Since then...'  And it's sort of true, when you think of the bands that came out of London, like Spandau Ballet.

There was something about the favouritism too.  You felt like if a band came out of London, they'd be signed.  In Manchester, the sense that you could do it yourself led to a greater amount of independence.  The Buzzcocks doing Spiral Scratch on their own label New Hormones was quite a stalwart thing—you thought, 'My God, what an astounding thought' (pp. 326-7).

This suggests the setting in which musicians might challenge the economic overdetermination of their art could be urban in nature, pursued in the geographic pockets left behind by the creative economy.  These spaces and communities can be found all over, albeit beneath the global complex created by musicians selling music (which conceivably can be "made anywhere") in the global commodity market.  All of this is to say, musicians creating in these places probably won't make a living off their art.  

But is that such a bad thing?  In the era of Occupy Wall Street, should we direct music to the 'serious' undertaking of careerism?  Will the solidarities needed to mobilize against unfettered financial capital and growing social inequalities necessarily originate out of the trivial commonalities of lifestyle and sensibility?  Perhaps we can commit art once again to express and inspire the particular experience of life — as it did in Sheffield 1980s and, obviously, so many other places — rather than heed the call of value-adding and economic development in a creative economy.

creatively exploiting the Austin scene: a review of "Echotone" (pt. 2)

[This is the second part of my review of the documentary "Echotone" (2010, dir. Nathan Christ).  For the first part, go here.]

Technically, no one in Echotone ever says the phrase “creative class.”  However, the filmmaker’s marketing materials invoke it regularly, starting with the DVD’s back-cover description: “Echotone is a cultural portrait of the modern American city examined through the lyrics and lens of its creative class.”

Of course, the creative class doesn’t just refers to the workforce of artists, musicians and other cultural/knowledge producers.  It’s also the title of the economic development paradigm advanced by Richard Florida that counsels cities, states, and other growth-promoting entities to build the physical, organizational and amenity infrastructures needed by this ascendant post-industrial class.  Florida gave a lecture as part of the city’s South By Southwest Arts & Music Festival back in 2003; more generally, he has long cited SXSW as the kind of synergistic, value-creating development that can arise when cities embrace and promote their creative advantages.

I have no idea how familiar the filmmakers are with Florida’s ideas, but certainly their attitude toward SXSW indicates they would take issue with his celebration of what by now is literally a block-busting event in Austin.  Echotone presents SXSW as a massive headache for most Austin bands, who regularly find themselves excluded from the official events and have to scramble together unofficial, off-site events in order to catch the attention from the thousands of attendees.  If the distaste expressed by local musicians and promoters isn’t clear enough, the film includes a surreal on-the-street segment at a recent SXSW that gives the impression of a garish college spring break event set up by music merchandisers.  Here then is another unanticipated hazard of Austin’s prosperity — the mega-event equivalent to the high-rise condominium construction on Congress Avenue. 

Echotone thus emphasizes the conflict of interests between local bands and SXSW, as at least an implicit rebuke to the coincidence of interests that Richard Florida or other economic development planners would expect.  Surprisingly, no one offers the third view: that Austin musicians aren’t either (or only) the beneficiaries or victims of creative-city development, but actually (or also) comprise the very aesthetic landscape sought out by creative-economy employers, real estate investors, gentrifiers, Starbucks, Urban Outfitters, and so on.  To be fair to Florida, his writings signal he’d anticipate anticipate this kind of ecological dynamic of creative-city development.  However, his work is generally so instrumental and growth-minded in mindset, he’d likely describe this pattern as a good thing, a virtuous circle.

Elsewhere, Echotone shows the political efforts by local musician Troy Dillinger and other music-scene advocates to push back against the noise and nuisance complaints made by a growing number residents.  These advocates find it strategic to embrace Florida’s kind of rhetoric: “Music is economic development and growth,” Dillinger says.  It’s uncertain whether these efforts, which in the film are made by folks in their middle or later age (possibly once their own music careers have slowed down), are shared by the 20-something musicians featured in the documentary.  What is certain, however, is that Echotone’s filmmakers seek to secure the connection between indie rockers and political advocates as a result of their film’s message and (in case the course of action isn’t clear to viewers) the “get involved” agenda presented as the last title of the end credits. 

 

The number of new-economy buzzwords in this statement (at the moment, I couldn’t tell you what “aggregate your audience” means) suggests the differences between the creative-class agendas of Echotone and Richard Florida maybe aren’t that great.  Both seek to arm local musicians with a shot of careerism and a rhetoric of economic productivity to counter residents’ NIMBYism and other threats to the scene.  They also give political urgency to statistics such as the one Echotone reports: 70% of Austin musicians make less than $15,000 a year.

Look, no question it sucks when profit is extracted from musicians by corporate record labels, big festivals, or real estate developers.  (Not that any of those larger entities should be considered secure in the creative economy; what once was a smart investment five years ago is often an inevitable financial morass from today’s perspective.)  But for once, let’s ask ourselves: does urging musicians to treat their art like a business really help a music scene?  In almost the same breath that musicians’ advocates express alarm at the precarious balance that the Austin music maintains, they acknowledge that an economically vibrant scene will attract more musicians to the city — of both the touring and full-time migrant side.  How likely is ratcheting up this creative-economy agglomeration going to benefit any one struggling local band?  Musicians might think about that separately from the question, how likely will ratcheting up this creative-economy agglomeration benefit the scene’s professional services — the city’s music venues, promoters, graphic designers, lawyers, landlords, etc.  (Just because many musicians have a foot in both camps doesn’t make it any less of a contradictory position to be in.)  If we consider the latter question a little more carefully, then maybe the imperialism that SXSW exerts over the scene will start to appear a little overstated.

Here’s a timely thought.  Want to help the 70% of musicians who make less than $15,000 a year, in Austin and no doubt many other places?  Then go occupy Wall Street and join the fight against broader socioeconomic inequality and the weakening of the social safety net. 

The point is that Austin musicians’ vulnerability isn’t fundamentally a consequence of their occupation; to believe so only naturalizes the neoliberal ethos that people are essentially defined by their contributions to the labor market.  (This is why the so-called dilemma between a day job and full-time devotion to one’s art, as depicted in Echotone and so many other creative-class manifestos, has always struck me as problematic.)  However, musicians’ vulnerability is, among other things, a consequence of their locality — specifically, of living and making music in an urban economy heated by creative activity, population growth, and urban development.  A city like Austin should make evident that local music is a force for “competitive” urban advantage and broader uneven geographic development.  These are political economic games that the creative class didn’t create, and that they can’t mitigate if they choose to play them.

It might seem a strange argument for a blog about musical urbanism to make, but the problems represented in and by Echotone suggest maybe we should rethink the “natural” relationship between musical activity and places.  Particularly if (as I discussed in pt. 1 of this review) the relationship is an aesthetic one filtered through indie-rock solipsism, with no genuine participation in the collective practice of a local style — maybe the musician’s creative relationship to place is primarily one for the extraction of inspirational inputs, analogous to a sampled found sound, the profits of which can follow the musician should they ever leave for another creative hotspot.  Treating music like a business doesn’t necessarily soften or mitigate this symbolic exploitation of place; it doesn’t necessarily make the city more livable for musicians either.