Melodic Guitar Music by Adrian Holovaty is a good album of retro acoustic instrumentals. I like that there is a distinctive personal style that isn’t too derivative. Also, the mood of the pieces is fun and the execution is tight.
In terms of the independent web of musicians, I appreciate that the landing page for that album is a standalone thing owned and controlled by the musician, rather than one owned by Bandcamp or Spotify or another transient business. Similar to my own for there is only or the web site for Ear Reverends.
When a world music playlist on Spotify picked up “For My Wife” it was a clue that the slot to pitch my music into was *world*, not ambient, Americana, or ambient western. That same day I went looking for playlists along the lines of world+electronic or ambient+Indian.
Playlist pitching is always always always a brutal experience. You can’t find the authors, or you can’t contact them, or when you can contact them they want money just to pay attention. But I was fired up and inspired and I spent a whole evening drinking wine and hunting for contactable musical humans in the endless vacuum of the Internet. Three days later, wham! A musical human got back to me!
And there I am in all my angst that morning, playing furiously and morosely in my 5×7 foot office, sandwiched between Amun and Weathertunes:
It’s by a German electronic label / production team called lemongrass:
Lemongrassmusic is an eclectic, independent music label that produces high-class genre-bending music releases, widening the scope of the Lounge genre by exploring Chillout, Ambient, Lofi, NuJazz, TripHop, Electronic World Music, Deep House, Soul and more.
Which makes me realize that *lounge* is another direction to explore. As Calvin and Hobbes said, the hard part isn’t selling out, it’s finding a buyer. The thing about being forced into a box, as a creative musician, is finding a box that wants you!
My collab track with Fastus was added to SeeHear Recording’s “World Fusion” playlist. I thought of this as Americana + ambient rather than “world”, but those are my own blinders. Listeners know what they are hearing!
Their email to me:
Hey Lucas, we listened already in May and really love it! But we had no playlist available to feature it - but now, finally after 2 months, we've got the time to set up a brand-new playlist where your track collaboration with Fastus is a perfect match.
I don’t know what my tiny-scrap miniatures will be good for. One possibility is bumpers in between segments of a podcast, radio show, or film. Another is little palette refreshers in the middle of a playlist, like pickled ginger between bites of sushi.
I came across another musician who prefers to live on the open web, outside of the clutches of the silos: Ether Diver.
Here’s where you’ll find the music of the Ether Diver. For the time being it is (essentially) Bandcamp exclusive, with a few preview tracks and music videos here and there. YOU WILL NOT FIND THE MUSIC OF ETHER DIVER ON SPOTIFY, APPLE OR ANY OTHER STREAMING SERVICE. (Sorry about the shouting, but the feelings are strong.)
People tell you they don’t like a piece by ignoring it. Reactions to release of my ultra-short music video yesterday were non-existent, and I promoted it pretty hard.
One close friend who I really pushed for a response asked if my intention was something like a super trendy restaurant that serves you a big plate with a single pea on it. The Youtube video has only 10 plays, and this is a video that needs to be watched 3-4 times by any one person.
Maybe it’s a fail for musical reasons. Or maybe because of the shortness. Or both. But it’s definitely a fail.
I think if the music was good enough the length wouldn’t matter, so that’s the most likely explanation. I should make a few more of these pieces before I decide the length can’t work.
One of my favorite feeds is California Landscape Bot, “a real time portrait of California brought to you by the alertca.live network,” which generates GIFs from video cameras monitoring landscapes for wildfire. The GIFs are super short, less than ten seconds. I picked one I love, all 8.1 seconds, and soundtracked it.
Like any miniature, you have you give it full attention. Full screen the video and give it a few replays to absorb the story of the moon and the star.
This isn’t the first time I have recorded that tune. 14 years ago I did two versions on guitar. The second one is better: Horace Weston’s Celebrated Polka (version 2). That makes this recording Horace Weston’s Celebrated Polka (version 3)! Over this time I have learned to let music breathe. I am after texture and mood now, instead of going after a tight ball of ideas.
I came across another openweb musician blog today, nnnnnnnn.co. It is also a landing page for a musician with a taste for abstraction and background in open source engineering.
What keeps me out here beyond the wall, no matter how isolating it is, is an aversion to the controlling ways of businesses like Soundcloud. It’s good to see more wildlings.
My favorite tune there is file/nts-2303. It has a slow burn that peaks around the 22-minute mark. See https://nnnnnnnn.co/ for the source of the link.
I did an acoustronic jam in the park in Beacon NY today. My jam partner was Ben Sergentanis. He played a well worn Roland 404 sampler and a pre-production Chompi looper. I played resonator guitar through a Hologram Microcosm.
Ben’s set was built around beats sampled through the 404. They were well curated – clever and flavorful. He was using the Chompi to manipulate them in real time.
It was a sunny pleasant day. We were playing through a PA, but not loud. After I had done a particularly peaceful and abstract segment, a woman in the park came up and said: “That made me happy.” It was my favorite complement ever.
