| When we were urgently packing, as the first rockets had already been fired at my city and other cities in Ukraine, the most important things were about 40-50 of my favorite records, removing the covers from them to make more space... I almost didn't take any clothes. These will always be easy to buy. [My son] Danny took toys and one PlayStation joystick. |
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| Kazka (from left: Oleksandra Zaritska, Mykyta Budash and Dmytro Mazuriak) performing on Ukraine's Eurovision national selection show, Feb. 23, 2019. |
| (NurPhoto/Getty Images) |
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| quote of the day |
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“When we were urgently packing, as the first rockets had already been fired at my city and other cities in Ukraine, the most important things were about 40-50 of my favorite records, removing the covers from them to make more space... I almost didn't take any clothes. These will always be easy to buy. [My son] Danny took toys and one PlayStation joystick.”
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- Alisa Mullen, publicist for Kyiv techno club Closer
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| rantnrave:// |
I Sing the Bible Electric
The lead story in today's mix is a deeply reported, beautifully written longread about an amazing piece of religious singing software called TROPETRAINER—a complex program that helped teach Jewish children how to chant the words of the Bible at their bar and bat mitzvahs, but that also, by virtue of its existence, provided Jews around the world with a "deep archive of sacred text and music, comprising dozens of different traditions, made easily searchable and infinitely customizable." There was nothing else like it, and because of a string of bad luck and the neverending cycle of computer updates and obsolescence, it may be lost forever. Vanished and unrecoverable. I thought of my own long ago bar mitzvah as I read S.I. ROSENBAUM's story about the vision of a single man, THOMAS BUCHLER, a gay Orthodox Jew who earlier in his life had produced SUN RA records, and I thought of my father, and I cried. And then I got angry. Why aren't computers and the internet backward compatible? Why have we created a technological universe where we can't march forward without erasing the past? What will become of today's music 100 years and 1,000 operating system updates from now? Read this story. You don't have to be Jewish to cry.
Sounding It Out
SOUNDSCAN was a good brand name, a portmanteau that described exactly what the company behind the name did. It disrupted the music business in 1991 by scanning the sales of sound recordings in a way no one had thought of before, forever changing how music charts were created, how records climbed up and down those charts and how both the music industry and the public perceived the relative success (or failure) of countless artists and bands. The name—with "NIELSEN" appended to it after an early acquisition—lasted for about a quarter century before it morphed into the more generic-sounding NIELSEN MUSIC. Then in 2019, the venture was acquired by the parent company of its most prominent client, BILLBOARD, and a year after that it was folded into a joint venture with ROLLING STONE's parent. In 2020, the Nielsen Music brand disappeared into MRC DATA, a corporate acronym that removed any hint of its music identity while doubling down on its tech identity. The company, to its credit, seems to have thought better of that. This week it was rebranded again as LUMINATE—an archaic, little-used English verb that evokes, for me, the feeling of lighting up a 19th century street with gas lamps. Quaint, like vinyl and Victrolas. It's warm but still aggressively corporate (you can see the shadows of branding consultants through the foggy gas lighting) and it doesn't describe what it does nearly as exactly as SoundScan did, which is perhaps why Billboard left the word "SoundScan" out of its story on the change, as if to hope no one would notice what's gone missing. As if, ironically, to obscure, rather than luminate, what went down behind those data-powered doors. But don't worry, we still see you in there, SoundScan.
Spot Foul
SPOTIFY's sponsorship of the soccer team FC BARCELONA is now official and it reportedly cost the company $310 million, or about one and a half JOE ROGANs. The optics are, let's say, not optimal. "Read the room," Variety's JEM ASWAD wrote in a vicious editorial about "The Ineffable Tone-Deafness of Spotify's DANIEL EK." The price is "More Than It's Ever Paid an Artist in Royalties," headlined Music Business Worldwide. For the same money, the British live music charity MUSIC VENUE TRUST argued, Spotify could have "secured a PERMANENT future for circa 700 UK Grassroots Music Venues" and "unleashed £40 million per annum into grassroots artist talent development." Of course, Spotify's recent track record of expenditures suggest it could probably do both things—support a soccer team *and* invest a few hundred million dollars into the grassroots music industry. But the question being asked here, in three different ways, isn't about what Spotify could do, but what it actually does do.
By the Pale Afternoon
In February, Ukrainian electro-pop trio KAZKA was rehearsing some new songs for a short US tour that was going to include a SXSW showcase this week in Austin. One of the songs, producer ANDRIY URENOV told an interviewer on Feb. 25, the day after Russian soldiers crossed the border, was BOB DYLAN's "MASTERS OF WAR." "It was perfect for [the] times. Which is now. We didn’t expect it would happen next day." The tour is off, obviously, as the band's two male instrumentalists can't leave the country. But singer OLEKSANDRA ZARITSKA is still on her way to Austin, where she'll perform with CHARLIE SEXTON at an "Austin Stands With Ukraine" concert Saturday at SPEAKEASY.
Rest in Peace
Two key voices in California jazz: Bay Area pianist JESSICA WILLIAMS and Los Angeles singer BARBARA MORRISON... Canadian singer/songwriter ERIC MERCURY.
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| - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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KEXP |
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| Ukraine’s DakhaBrakha: 'It’s not a conflict, it’s just war' |
| By Emily Fox and DakhaBrakha |
| DakhaBrakha is a band from Ukraine whose live performance on KEXP from 2017 has garnered more than two million views on our YouTube channel. One member of that band, Iryna Kovalenko, has been living in Seattle for the past five years. She spoke with Sound & Vision’s Emily Fox on March 11 while her husband, Oleksandr Cherniyenko helped with interpretations. |
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Variety |
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| The Ineffable Tone-Deafness of Spotify’s Daniel Ek |
| By Jem Aswad |
| One might think that, just weeks after his company scraped through the biggest crisis of its existence -- its stubborn defense of giving a gigantic international platform, not to mention more than $200 million, to Joe Rogan and his destructive, malignant opinions -- Spotify's Daniel Ek might exercise a little caution and humility. |
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Stereogum |
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| Benny The Butcher Turns Consistency Into A Weapon |
| By Tom Breihan |
| After slowly bubbling up from the underground for years upon years, Benny The Butcher has something resembling a pop hit, and he achieved that without changing a single thing. That’s inspiring. |
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Music Tech Solutions |
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| The Vinyl Resurgence is Understated |
| By Chris Castle |
| If you've tried to get a vinyl record pressed in the last few years, one thing is very obvious: There is no capacity in the current manufacturing base to accommodate all the orders-unless your name is Adele or Taylor Swift, of course. |
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Twenty Thousand Hertz |
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| Twenty Thousand Hertz: Hidden Hitmakers |
| By Dallas Taylor, Desmond Child and Gizzle |
| The names of pop and rock stars are known by millions of people around the world, but the people who actually write their music often stay in the shadows. In this episode, we peel back the curtain on the songwriters behind some of the biggest hits of the last forty years, and find out how this unseen part of the industry really works. |
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| what we're into |
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| Music | Media |
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| “REDEF is dedicated to my mother, who nurtured and encouraged my interest in everything and slightly regrets the day she taught me to always ask ‘why?’” |
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