Check out the NEW TOYS we have available at The Fold Studios:

1967 Akai portable ‘reel to reel’ tape recorder:

& A proper doper coffee machine, whoo hoo!

You can hardly turn on the TV these days without being confronted with an overwhelming torrent of bleakness. I’m slowly becoming unsure whether the curse of our generation is the crippling debt, soaring unemployment and obstinately sluggish growth, or whether our true curse is that we have to listen to everybody bleating on about how screwed we all are 24/7. Is there any better way of crushing confidence and morale than to bash people’s heads into the ground with incessant reminders of specifically which creek we’re up without which requisite implement?

But there is a silver lining to this most towering of cumulonimbi, a light at the end of this most Tokeinesque of dark places. The light is music… Or at least it should be.

I say should be because history has taught us that economic crises around the world have inspired some of the most enduring music of all time, and it’s because music has the ability to bind us as a society. No matter how often David and George tell us we’re “all in it together”, nobody’s buying it; as satisfying as it is to picture dear old Fred Goodwin rooting through the reduced section in his local LIDL, before switching the heating off and huddling round the oven while he cooks his 99p cheese and tomato pizza, we’re all aware of the reality.

Music however, is something can bring us together. So where is our recession music this time?!

The great depression patiently mused for Woodie Guthrie. The second world war brought to prominence the Andrews Sisters, Dame Vera Lyne and Edith Piaf. The recession in the mid-70′s conspired to bring us punk music and Thatcher’s controversially polarizing regime in the 80′s served up that most quintessential of recession songs, “Ghost Town” by The Specials.

So I ask you… Where’s our recession music now? It must be out there somewhere. Surely labels are missing a trick here. We all know that themes we can all relate to sell records by the busload, and there doesn’t seem to be a much more ubiquitous subject right now than our being hung out dry by the powers that be… AGAIN.

Maybe I haven’t had my ear close enough to the ground. Perhaps you can help me. Let’s have your suggestions for our Lehman Brothers award for “Best recession anthem 2008-2011″. Answers on a postcard please (or in a comment would do just fine).

PS. Our more curious of subscribers can find some further reading of the great history of recession music here.

We’ve all been there… Sat in the back of the car driving round and round in circles because your driver refuses to listen to you over the seductive, dulcet tones of the SatNav. “I know the way home” you’re thinking. “THIS IS THE WRONG WAY!!!” You’ve tried to tell them but they just won’t listen. Is it fear of the unknown? Or is it simply the unwillingness to actively engage the brain? What makes an otherwise intelligent and fully functioning adult trust a little gadget over their fellow sentient beings?

While I admit it’s a long way from some kind of Phillip K. Dick-esque dystopian future – human beings, stripped of the ability to think for themselves and question authority, are subjugated under the all powerful control of the “Pear Shiny and Ingenious Little Gadget Company” – there is an undeniable trend towards the “bare minimum” approach to anything that requires the engaging of intellectual effort.

Don’t get me wrong; that we live in an age when we have a whole world of information at our fingertips is truly a blessing. We have a portal of learning available to all such as has never been seen in the history of mankind. But perversely, the thing that makes this virtual wonderworld so golden is also its Achilles heal… The whole internet is, for the most part, unregulated and often unsubstantiated.

These days you could be forgiven for thinking that you can skip out years of learning, training and experience and become whatever you want to be simply be absorbing reams of opinionated ravings masquerading as informed debate on discussion forums and digesting hours of “how to“ videos by self-styled “experts” on Youtube.

Want to know the definitive answer (compete with scientific proof and technical expertise) to that most persistent of nagging questions: “which is best, analog or digital?”… Just search it in gearslutz or soundonsound for the conclusive answer. See you next year!

Want to learn how to mix a Hip Hop track? You could start at the bottom, working for months and months as a teaboy to get your foot in the door at a studio, making sure you spend all your time paying attention to what the engineer is doing, until one day you seize your opportunity with the appropriate zeal when the assistant goes sick. You impress the engineer so much with your professional attitude and unexpected aptitude for the job, you find you’ve somehow worked your way to a paid position as assistant. Hungry for more you spend hours and hours in the studio on downtime, applying what you’ve learned to mixing the studio’s current projects simply for yourself, until one day, years later, a big client hears your mix accidentally and is so blown away they insist on it being picked for the track’s release. Congratulations! You are now a mix engineer!

Or you could just do what this bloke says:

How to mix a rap vocal from "expert" village

Of course, on the internet, everyone’s an expert, and although there are sites out there that offer fantastic in depth advice and expertise (see Matthew Weiss’ fantastic article http://theproaudiofiles.com/mixing-rap-vocals/ for a much better example) the fact is that without a basic grounding through education and/or real life experience, it’s difficult for the enthusiastic novice to know where to turn and who to trust. When the SatNav tells you to drive into the North Sea to get from Croydon to Nunhead, common sense usually kicks back in, and this is something we must apply to information from the internet also, but telling the charlatans apart from the bona fide guru’s is a job in itself, and those looking for miraculous short cuts are likely to find themselves ill-equipped for the future.

For the first Fold Studios non-music related blog; a little music related link to kick things off:

I’m always astonished at the amount of genres, sub-genres and sub-sub-genres that seem to exist within popular music. It makes sense that popular music will spread out stylistically over time. Think of it like a family tree in which every generation spawns ever more offspring – the growth rate is exponential. So it comes as no surprise that all of a sudden there seems to be almost as many genres as there are bands and artists. It was whilst leisurely perusing through a genealogy of popular music I stumbled (through dream pop, neo-pysychedelia, noise pop, post punk and space rock) upon shoegaze. This caught my interest as one of the more (though by far not the most) bizarre names so I had a little nose around. It turns out to be a small sub-genre of alternative rock, so-called because the artists’ static and sullen disposition on stage, often staring at their own shoes or the stage as they performed. It was then when I had my sudden sociological epiphany.

Over recent years, social historians have noticed that people growing up in the same time periods tend broadly to share cultural and historical experiences, resulting in distinct generations types across the years. It leads one to ponder the defining characteristics of our generation. We’ve had the “Silent Generation”, the “Baby Boom Generation” and of course “Generation X”. But what of the current crop of young adults born since 1982 (apparently the end of Generation X)?

The “Fat Generation” perhaps? the “Cyber generation” if we wanted to be a bit less self-deprecating. According to William Strauss and Neil Howe (authors of the book “Generations”) we are the “Millennial Generation”. This is a surely a massive copout. I demand a name for our generation that tells us more about ourselves than simply the rough time period in which we were born. So I have come up with an alternative.

It’s been building slowly since the 90’s thanks to SMS but has exploded with the advent of true smartphones with Email and 3G access near enough anywhere in the country and the effect has been noticeably devastating on our collective social skills. It’s somehow come to the point where it seems to be acceptable to break off a conversation with a real life human being, only to make them wait around twiddling their thumbs while you tap away at a tiny keyboard or touchscreen for 5 minutes before returning to the conversation without so much as an apology. I’ve been sat around a pub table with friends and noticed more than one of them who spent at least half the evening heads down, tapping away. If it had been anything other than a phone in their hands it would have been considered either plainly rude or extremely odd behaviour, possibly bordering on autistic.

With more and more of our lives being manifested as bytes invisibly shooting in and out of these tiny plastic handsets, one can only imagine it getting worse. Handsets will soon have to be fitted with cleverly angles mirrors or forward facing cameras that project into a section of the screen to allow people to see where they’re going without averting their gaze from their screens. Skype and Facetime will inevitably encroach on the necessity for real face-to-face socialisation. I don’t know what passes for family evening social time these days but I imagine the days of collectively screaming at the TV while a panic-crazed woman with a perm and a jumpsuit tries futilely to fit a square block through a round hole while Richard O’Brien gleefully pipes away at his harmonica are long past. As more and more advanced phones are becoming available for younger and younger children one can envisage the classic family scene of the not-so-distant future. So, without further prelude, I give you…

The Phonegaze Generation

It’s 8:30 in the evening. The TV is droning away inconsequentially in the background. Mother is stressed. She has been doing the weekly shop for two and a half hours. After half an hour fiddling around on the comparethepricecomparisonmarket.com, she managed to discover which price comparison site offered the best services this week for online grocery shopping. After logging onto the site in question it didn’t take too long to discover that Asda represented the best value for money for her weekly shop. However, Tesco had recently put out a nationwide twitter campaign (only double-glazing firms and used car showrooms bothered advertising on TV these days) promising customers double the difference if they could find their weekly shop cheaply elsewhere. Just as she was about to pay she read the small print on the offer:

This offer is not applicable anyone who’s registered handset has visited any price comparison site within the last 96 hrs.

Offer does not apply to online purchases

She sank back down in her chair. She knew that the Central Consumer Information Network instantly logged all consumer information. Data on Everything that people buy, sell, look at, search for is instantly assimilated by the systems of every company registered for internet-based trading. The Tesco mainframe would automatically disqualify her basket from the offer. She went back to the Asda website, did her shopping again and paid. Or rather, she tried to pay. After she’d entered her card details the Visa EAGLE BULLDOG PREMIUM PROTECTION SCHEME! website flashed up demanding the 4th and 9th letter of her primary password, the 7th and 10th character of her secondary password and the 7th and 19th letter of her tertiary password. She went back to the main menu of her handset and opened up her “Password Reminder” app, which stored password hints for the hundreds of passwords needed for day to day life to function. She found the hints for the relevant passwords and jotted them down on the notepad app so she could figure out the required characters. After entering them in and finishing the shop she was still seething about the Tesco offer. They had nationally advertised the offer knowing full well hardly anyone would take advantage of it. Nobody shops in store these days. It just takes too damn long!

Next to her, Father was also stressed. He had gone to bed at 3 in the morning after a long day’s work and was woken at 5AM by a UAR (Urgent Attention Requied) tone emitting from his handset.

UAR was an app built into almost all business handsets. It was not possible to deactivate the app and he was contractually obliged to keep the handset with him at all times – Not responding to a UAR was a disciplinable offence.

He was good at his job. In fact, he was great. He knew it and his boss knew it. 10 years ago he had been promoted to section manager in the Logistical Investigation department of a large global firm which made, sold and hired out robotics for the manufacture of cars, planes and ships, as well as increasingly for household machinery such as washing machines and dishwashers.

His team had been responsible for locating and cataloguing missing equipment. It never ceased to amaze him how month after month, year after year, millions of pounds worth of equipment ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time or simply went missing altogether. His team were charged with locating the equipment and getting it back to where it should be ASAP. The workload had been heavy but he had excelled and saved the company millions. Then 3 years ago he had been informed that his office would be closed down, his team would be cut back from 11 to 3 (including himself) and everyone would work from home. The fact that the work was now done on a handset or laptop rendered the office an “unnecessary departmental overhead” and improvements in efficiency of the company’s proprietary apps and software combined with his proven track record under pressure meant that a large team was also unnecessary. They had supplied him with a new handset (UAR app preinstalled, of course) and packed him on his way home.

He sighed to himself and took 2 minutes out to start up his BP app. He held the touchscreen to his wrist until it beeped 3 times. 170 over 105. He took another aspirin from the jar on the coffee table and swallowed it down without water. He sighed again before bringing up one of his current projects on the handset. He know he would not be finished until at least 2AM.

On the sofa across the room the 3 children were not stressed. Three boys, 13, 11 and seven hadn’t made a noise all evening. In fact they hadn’t taken their eyes off their respective screens. Each wearing in-ear headphones, each independently whiling away with a bewildering digital dance of social networking, online gaming, offline gaming, on demand TV and homework. They would each have at least two chat windows open connected to friends they rarely saw in real life. It would take between 4 and 7 seconds to assimilate the last part of the conversation and reply to it, then a swish of the fingers would open up an online strategy game. Recently turn-based strategy games had come back into fashion as it perfectly suited this kind of application juggling. They would take maybe 20 seconds to assess their opponent move, decide on their own counter and make the move. They might then move onto an offline game. Action games and shoot ‘em ups were more popular offline these days as they could be played in 20 or 30 second burst and paused in between. Finally if they had any homework to do, they would spend maybe a minute on googleplus+ getting to the heart of the matter and either copying various paragraphs from different sites or reformatting and rewording previously copied entries. Within 3 minutes they were back to their social networking chat windows before the other person (often their brothers sitting next to them) got bored and ended the chat. Throughout this whole process there would almost certainly have been a small window in the corner of the screen set to “float on top” showing some on demand TV program or another.

Their parents had long since given up trying to understand how they did it. They were not technophobes by any stretch of the imagination, but these kids had been born into this technology and had trained their brains from an early age to work in synch with it. It was cognitive evolution on an alarming scale. Darwin would certainly be fidgeting in his grave if not completely turning as he pondered how much one species could change and adapt within the space of 2 generations.
At 9:00PM Mother, from 10 feet away across the room, communicated with her children in the only way she knew how, sending out a UAR message to her 3 children (For children up to the age of 16, parents and legal guardians were legally allowed to have UAR installed on their children’s handsets. The license would expire on the child’s 16th birthday):

HI KIDS. HLF AN HR TIL BT OK? I DN WAN ANY ARGUEMENTS. MAKE SUR U FINISH WT U R DOING AND R IN BED BY 9:30. PLS REMEBER 2 CHARGE UR HANDSETS OVERNIGHT. UR TEACHER APP WILL WAKE YOU AT 8:00. LOVE U LOADS. MUM XX

In the first sign of life all evening from the sofa other than the pattering of fingers and thumbs, all three children digested the news with a perfectly synchronised groan.

The Fold Studios have recently purchased a Universal Audio 6176 (the last one in the UK for the time being). It comprises of two of the most iconic pieces of gear ever made in one unit. A classic 610 valve console preamp plus an 1176 compressor.

The Fold Studios – On Location Recording from thefoldstudios on Vimeo.

It’s always more than a little cringeworthy listening to credible musicians and songwriters attempting a diplomatic defence of X-Factor as Nerina Pellot did recently.

“You know there’s so little music on telly, and it’s prime time telly, with music on it, which for me as a musician is really important”

It’s verging on a valid point. Jools is all well and good, but it’s on late and has developed over the years such a cliquey, muso-ish quality that it seems really to be preaching to the converted. But for me, clutching on to X-Factor as if it’s some kind vehicle for music seems to have about as much credibility as advocating the casting of Matthew McConaughey as a character with any kind of personality purely on the merit that he is a human being. Surely we can be more ambitious as a public and demand more from our TV producers than the annual wheeling out of 12 soon-to-be nobodies constantly resurrecting progressively less and less palatable versions of “You Raise Me Up”.

So I have a radical and controversial new idea! An idea to bring new and (occasionally) exciting but mostly rubbish music to the screens of millions across the nation!! An idea to replace the tawdry procession of limp and falsely emotive cover versions with a tawdry procession of limp and badly performed new music!!! An idea that I’m now going to stop building up on account of the fact that any of you who have read the title already know what it is!!!! Yes ladies and gentlemen, the solution is obvious:

BRING BACK TOP OF THE POPS!!!!!

Now I’m not going to over-romanticise it, because it was mostly rubbish. We all knew it then, and we all know it now. But it least it was a program (in keeping with the BBC’s mandate as a public service broadcaster) whose primary objective was not to make vast sums of money for TV production companies and the telecommunication industry, nor the cynical manipulation of music licensing and publishing rights for short term financial gain. No indeed! The primary objective of TOTP was simply to bring current popular music into the homes of millions once a week.

And to be fair, amongst the bad music, irritatingly “funky” editing, primitive “special fx” and of course those embarrassing fade outs where the performers were forced to humiliatingly press on with the lip-syncing charade while all semblance of feasibility was disappearing before everyone’s eyes and ears… Amongst all of the laughable mediocrity we, as a nation, shared in just a few great performances and seminal moments that X-Factor and the like just cannot provide. Probably the best known was Nirvana’s great piss-take performance of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. But Blur wearing Oasis T-Shirts at the height of the Britpop war and Shane Macgowan’s drunken stumble through “Fairytale of New York” also make for a worthwhile youtube re-visit.

Having its playlist largely governed by what was in the charts also meant that TOTP had the kind of diversity that X-Factor would never allow. As well the standard pop/rock/ballad stuff that we see on X-Factor, Metallica and Iron Maiden performed several times on the show, significantly helping to raise the profile of metal music in the UK. There was also plenty of airspace for dance music of all kinds, as well as hip-hop, funk, soul and R&B. It could never offer the musical quality and variety that Jools does, but it was never meant to – it was for a much wider audience and it did the job.

So the doomed crusade by the caring minority continues; the crusade for a fair share of good music to be injected into the public consciousness. Some of us have grudgingly accepted that this ideal can never be achieved, and that we have to settle. But even us, who have lost faith will never be prepared to settle for Cowell’s turgid dynasty. If we must settle, let it be for a more worthy vessel, let us not rest until we hear those words once more, that mighty battle cry that once rang out so clear and true across the living rooms of a nation…

“It’s Friday night, it’s still No.1…”

‘Back To Shore’ by Brother & Bones taken from the soon to be released ‘Skin’ EP. This project was recorded live at Goodmerry Farm in Cornwall by us at The Fold. Filmed and edited by Luke Pilbeam at www.rockingstonefilms.co.uk

For all you Brighton based beat bashers! If you need a few extra chops to add to your collection or just a cool place to practise and learn, check out this new drum teaching studio in Brighton. Give Pete ‘curry‘ Williams a call on 07919 181 426 or check out the website. www.element-drum-tuition.co.uk