[thought you all might enjoy this; from the new york times yesterday (6/24)]
Music Made With Soda Cans and Soggy Hamburger
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL
When the British musician Matthew Herbert performs as Radio Boy, he
demolishes his instruments. But the debris from his theatrically violent
concert contains neither guitar-string curlicues nor drumstick splinters.
Instead, the stage is littered with crumpled soda cans, shredded boxer
shorts and wads of soggy hamburger.
By pulverizing the products sold by multinational corporations, Mr. Herbert
is protesting global consumerism. He is also making music, which has been
captured on a new album, "The Mechanics of Destruction." As he shakes,
rattles and rolls such store-bought goods as a caramel latte, he digitally
manipulates the sounds into pulsating electronic dance music. For instance,
"McDonald's," the album's first track, was assembled by electronically
altering the noises made by thumping a hamburger bun, slurping a drink
through a straw and rustling the food's bag.
Within his chosen genre, Mr. Herbert, 30, is increasingly successful. He has
deals with five different record labels, and he has created crafty remixes
of songs for Bjork and dozens of other musicians. Like many electronic dance
artists, Mr. Herbert records under several names, including Doctor Rockit
and Herbert. "The Mechanics of Destruction" is attributed to Radio Boy,
which he reserves for his more experimental efforts.
But Mr. Herbert's struggle to distribute the new album over the Internet
also reveals the hidden costs of a medium that is often thought to be a vast
showcase where musicians and other artists can share their work with a broad
audience at little cost. "That's the myth of the Internet," Mr. Herbert
said. "It's actually quite expensive to keep things going."
Happily for Mr. Herbert, the Internet provides an alternative to traditional
methods of music delivery. He would find it difficult to distribute "The
Mechanics of Destruction" through conventional music-industry channels,
given the album's anti-corporate stance and "profit free" designation. So he
decided to give away a compact-disc version at Radio Boy concerts and to
make song downloads available at no charge from an Internet site. Using the
Internet "was the logical thing," he said. "I thought it was going to be
cheap and easy to put it in the hands of the people" around the world.
But Mr. Herbert quickly found himself in a predicament when the album was
put online in mid-March. Heavy site traffic caused the computer on which the
songs were stored to crash. To unclog the pipes, he shrank the size of the
song files by reducing their audio quality, but listeners complained. In
less than a week, the song files were removed from the site,
themechanicsofdestruction.org.
Only 250 copies of the album were downloaded during that week. Then a couple
of weeks ago, Mr. Herbert discovered just how expensive "free" is when he
received a bill from his Internet service provider for ?1,200 (about
$1,800).
Most Internet hosts charge extra for high volumes of data transfers, and
even with the small number of downloads, the album site greatly exceeded its
modest monthly quota.
Mr. Herbert was stunned by the size of the invoice. "For that, I could have
flown to each country and hand-delivered each copy," he said. "So much for
the wonders of the Internet." He has yet to pay the bill.
In the meantime, the album was to be restored to the Internet today in a
new, less costly location: on the Web site of Mr. Herbert's newest record
label, at www.recordsinprogress.org.
So far, Mr. Herbert has been more successful at distributing the album
offline. He has given away about 12,000 CD's, mostly at concerts in Japan
and Europe.
Mr. Herbert is scheduled to perform tomorrow and Wednesday in New York at
the Mercury Lounge, where he will be accompanied by a guitarist and a
singer.
Because of problems with lugging large boxes of CD's through customs, he
does not intend to hand out the Radio Boy album at the shows.
He is planning, however, to include solo performances of songs from "The
Mechanics of Destruction" in each night's set. "All the best ones are the
messy ones," he said. In "Starbucks," for instance, coffee drinks and
accessories like drinking straws and paper bags will be used on stage to
recreate the album track.
Mr. Herbert said: "If you bounce the plastic frappuccino cup on a
microphone, you get a very specific tone. Thanks to globalization, this is a
universal tone, so wherever I am in the world, I've got this array of
musical instruments." While making the noise, he will digitally capture the
sound with a sampler, then twiddle knobs and press buttons to chop up,
extend or layer the snippet with other bits to produce music.
Mr. Herbert is one of many musicians who, rather than appropriating extracts
from others' songs, use found, ambient and other naturally occurring sounds
as the foundation for their tunes. Mr. Herbert has even written a manifesto
to help define his work. Mr. Herbert's document forbids the use of drum
machines and sampling from other people's music.
Debra Singer, the associate curator of contemporary art at the Whitney
Museum of Art who organized the sound-art exhibition in the museum's 2002
biennial, said she enjoyed Mr. Herbert's album. She said, "Even though
musically it's very engaging, what really distinguishes it is the concept
behind it and the source of the sounds." She also appreciated how Mr.
Herbert combined digital music-making technologies with "deliberately
simplistic gestures" like banging a DVD against the microphone instead of
sampling its soundtrack.
But Kim Cascone, a San Francisco composer and co-founder of Microsound, an
electronic mailing list for the discussion of digital-music aesthetics, said
Mr. Herbert may have disguised his agenda too well by turning the sonic
sources into standard dance-music sounds. "The frappuccino-derived sounds
become the kick drum, a bass line and percussion," Mr. Cascone said. "The
message becomes displaced via this transformation and is unable to be
recovered."
Mr. Herbert said he has worked hard to make sure that the music cannot be
heard until listeners are exposed to his agenda. He admitted that he was
irked by a sticky political issue: to access the songs online, most people
will use the hardware and software of giant technology companies like
Microsoft.
The Internet, Mr. Herbert acknowledged, has created a new set of issues.
During the debate over Napster and other music-file-sharing services, he
said, the Internet was often portrayed as "some sort of Marxist utopia where
everything was free and everyone had easy access to everything ? and as soon
as you try to give your album away properly, it all starts to go a bit
wrong."
Web Site: www.recordsinprogress.org
"it's more like viewing something through the bottom of a murky glass, and
that's the beauty of it"
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