A Year of Music

Oh, you guys:

Qtrax—the free, ad-supported, “legal” P2P service that launched at MIDEM today—apparently isn’t as ready for prime time as it claims. The company claimed it had licensing agreements with all four major record labels, when in fact it has none.

and

The inconsistencies with its music licensing status is just one of several missteps that may make Qtrax one of most bungled service launches in the history of digital music. The company’s press release and pre-briefings with reporters all pointed to the “live” launch of the Qtrax service. But on Monday the site shows it is only a beta launch, something the company didn’t mention in its press build-up.

also:

Allan Klepfisz, Qtrax’s CEO, says the service will go ahead and launch with the four majors’ catalogs. When asked if he is worried about a lawsuit, Klepfisz replied, “The answer is nobody has threatened us with a thing.”

Meanwhile, back in reality (this article also discusses last.fm’s new service):

Despite a stable of early ad clients signed on for the untested site, Mr. Kent still was uncertain about what the market’s ad model would look like. “I don’t think any music sites can make money on impressions alone,” he said. “You’ve got to get out there to make the advertisers notice you. You have to stand for something and be a brand. Ad money is going to follow a brand over a long period of time.”

I have sort of a disdain-hate relationship with Nick Denton’s would-be media empire. Over the years, I’ve read Gizmodo, Gawker, Defamer, Jezebel, io9, Fleshbot, Kotaku and Idolator. Sooner or later, all of them except Jezebel have started to really piss me off. Denton encourages an irreverent house style that’s reminiscent of a brain-damaged version of British tabloid culture: gossip reigns supreme, sincerity is toxic, and a cheap, facile presumption of auctorial authority oozes out of every page.

Jezebel makes it work. At least one of the editors is like a retarded kitten, and you want to pet her even as you kind of pity her, and the rest of the editors know how to be provocative (and funny) enough to get Jezebel’s thriving community going on a given topic. Their commenters have sort of taken charge of the site’s vibe, and they’re an interesting group. That’s the only reason I still read Jezebel, even though I probably shouldn’t.

Idolator, on the other hand, makes me crazy in the head. Maybe it’s just that they’re treading very close to where I live, but for all of their cheap cracks and flashy insider knowledge, they still come across as no-talent assclowns. They act like they’re letting you in on the scene, but it’s all written from the consumer’s side of the music biz firewall, so they never really offer you the economic analysis or industry context that would allow you to understand the larger forces at work – something I think is critical in understanding how and why we get the music we do. In place of thoughtful analysis (or useful criticism) we get the same tired-ass shallow celebrity gossip horseshit: who’s got beefs, who flashed their beaver in public, which famous person said something dumb or mean about some other famous person, Amy Winehouse is gonna die, Britney’s still alive, etc. And occasionally some totally insipid “pop” criticism from writers who I know are capable of much better.

That’s the thing that gets to me the most, I think: I know that Jess Harvell and Maura Johnston are die-hard music fans with interesting tastes. Anyone who will go to the mat for Scritti Politti is clearly on my team, and Harvell’s recent analysis of what internet hype is doing to the development of new artists was sharply written and perceptive. It’s just when they write to match the Gawker style that they piss me off, because it does a disservice to music, which I fervently believe deserves to be taken seriously, and it does a disservice to their own skills when every sharp insight is immersed in a sea of semi-pointless snark.

I only subjected myself to them (again) because I’m trying to keep a closer eye on the business end of music myself, and it sort of seemed like they might have some insight into deals like the recent flaps at EMI. But they’re using the same primary sources I am, and tossing it into Nick Denton’s Borg processor to be extruded as partially hydrogenated meta-cultural product, and it’s all terrible and makes me sad. Don’t support their asinine bullshit. Even Pitchfork is better, and that’s not something I admit lightly.

(NOTE to Annalee and Charlie, should they ever stop by: I like you guys just fine, and I wish you all the best in your new gig, but trying to read io9 just makes me sigh. No offense. I think I just come at fandom from another angle.)

There’s something vaguely insulting about the widespread conviction (at least among those who care about this sort of thing) that The Tuss is exclusively a secret Aphex Twin project. The Tuss, for those who aren’t obsessive e-music nerds, is a recent RePHLeX signing who claim to be husband-wife pair Brian and Karen Tregaskin. Googling “Tregaskin” reveals only that it is a name that exists almost exclusively in conjunction with The Tuss and RePHLex (it is also a relatively uncommon Cornish surname). So far they – whomever they turn out to be –  have released an EP and a short album of mildly disco-influenced squelchy techno. Everybody’s assumption that The Tuss is “obviously” Richard James rests on the Tuss’s choice of labels, James’ known fondness for one-off aliases and running weird headgames on his cultishly patient fans, and the very real and strong similarity between The Tuss material and James’ recent Analord releases.

People have been wrong about this sort of thing before. In 1996, Warp released a limited edition one-off single by an artist known simply as Woodenspoon, and seemingly overnight it was accepted as fact by a disturbingly large number of people that this was the clever Mr. James releasing a secret followup to his recent Girl / Boy EP and Richard D James album. This is despite the fact that on the one hand, the Woodenspoon single sounded nothing like anything James had released for years, and on the other really wasn’t very good.

The pointless and feverish drama that ensued ultimately resulted in perhaps the most hyperbolic and regrettable flamewar I’ve ever been involved in, and right around then I decided that the IDM list had disappeared up its own ass and stomped off to do my own thing. On the balance, this was a wise decision, because there’s only so many times you can argue over which Autechre album is best before you completely lose all connection to reality. At the time, it was bruising, personal and ugly in only the way that a truly pointless internerd war can be. It was not my finest hour.

Some time later, it came out that Woodenspoon was in fact Mark Clifford of Seefeel and Disjecta, so the whole thing was an early case of Acute Internet Drama based on nothing more than a very small number of peoples’ desperate need to believe that Richard James is the savior of electronic music now and forevermore. Like I said, the Woodenspoon single wasn’t very good, but if I were Mark Clifford, who’s made a lot of very good music over the years, I would have been an equal measure of amused, angry and disappointed.

Back to today. The Tuss material has more than a passing familiarity to old Aphex Twin material, but it’s qualitatively different than anything James has been doing for a while. For one thing, it’s busier. There’s a lot of material in the Analord series (three and a half hours’ worth, in fact), and much of it’s quite good, but each track tends to explore a single idea and use a consistent and restricted sonic palette. Rushup Edge, by contrast, is all over the place, and feels more like the chockablock early UK hardcore tracks (albeit in a stoned and low-key way). In fact, quite a bit of it reminds me of Chris Jeffs’ early material as Synesthesia (which is some of my favorite music on RePHLeX), and there are hints and intimations of other RePHLeX artists in other places on the EP. There’s lots of bouncy synth-funk, some anodyne, dry rhythm tracks, and plenty of the analog squelchiness that seems to be RePHLeX’s defining trait at this late hour in their existence. The results are pleasant, satisfying, and not at all worthy of the ridiculous levels of hype the project has received.

My guess, based on my fallible ears and this bulletin board thread, is that The Tuss is some kind of RePHLeX All-Stars project. The odds are good that this a bunch of collaborative material (like the regrettable Mike & Rich album put out by Richard James with Mike Paradinas of µ-ziq) that’s been kicking around on James’ hard drive for a while that he eventually packaged up and put out. The only reason it matters to me is because I keep hearing very familiar things on Rushup Edge, and for some obscure reason it matters to me whether it’s an established artist pulling some good stuff out of the archives (and screwing with people’s heads for the sheer contrary joy of it), or an extremely talented mimic cranking out rip-offs.