Conversations about whether musicians should use social networks tend to be completely polarised, and usually take no account of the fact that there are about as many different motivations for writing music as there are people writing it.

In this recent article, we see Universal Music suggesting that they are disinclined to work with acts who aren’t knee-deep in social media tech…

There may be some indie hipper-than-thou artists who want to let the music speak for itself. They are probably not for us. We believe an artist has a responsibility to communicate with their audience…We embrace the world of technology and the vast improvements in communication

While there may be some validity to this, (after all there are far too many people in music who labour under the delusion that ‘if you build it they will come’), I think that the use of this sort of technology must necessarily come down to a question of temperament.

We, (Blu Mar Ten), are pretty sociable people and we’ve always enjoyed talking to people who like our music, and other music in general for that matter. We’ve been chatting with ‘fans’ ever since this guy sent us our very first email of support some time back in the mid-nineties. Many of these people have stayed with us for a long time and some have become firm friends both on and off line, giving us access to a globally connected network of nice folk who all enjoy more or less the same things. As time has moved on we’ve embraced all the new forms of social media, not because we think we should but because we enjoy basic human interaction.

However we recognise that it’s not something that everyone likes, or should be involved in. There’s nothing worse than seeing someone trying to engage with their fans when they clearly don’t really want to be doing it. It’s as awkward as watching someone who’s been forced to go speed-dating trying to muddle through and make the most of it but ultimately cocking it all up. Engaging with people in a disingenuous fashion is as easy to spot in the virtual world as it is in the real world, and is just as repellent.

There’s an argument to say that artists shouldn’t get involved with their fans because it destroys any sense of mystique and distance that serves people like Prince so well. I think that’s probably true, but then when I look at the state of the music industry and the way in which avenues of compensation are being shut off to musicians on a virtually daily basis, (sales collapsing, sync opportunities being eroded, live work diminishing), it seems a shame to close off something that gives you pleasure. There’s little enough reward in this game as it is.

It’s my feeling that you should use these tools if you’re already predisposed to a sociable sort of behaviour, (many musicians are), and avoid them if you aren’t, (many musicians prefer being private). In either case you should accept that there will be benefits and disadvantages as a result of your (in)actions, but for anyone to suggest that musicians should do one or the other displays a woeful lack of understanding regarding artistic motivation.

Been playing around trying to get Last FM to talk to Twitter and finally figured out how to tweet out the tracks that we’re listening to, along with a link so you can hear them too.

I’ve set up a brand new channel for this, twitter.com/BluMarTenTunes, and what you see there is what Leo and I are listening to on our various players…(Michael’s grumpy and refuses to play). I set up a new channel to avoid flooding the main Blu Mar Ten Twitter with tracks, which can be really annoying. This way people can dip in and out if they feel like it.

How is it done?
Take the RSS of your Last FM ‘Recently Listened Tracks’ and pass it to a friendfeed account, then sync your Twitter channel with your friendfeed account and push the stream out to Twitter from there. I also set up Tweekly to collate our top artists for the week and post the result every Monday

Playing around with vocals from JO-S.

This song of mine will wind its music around you,
like the fond arms of love.

The song of mine will touch your forehead
like a kiss of blessing.

When you are alone it will sit by your side and
whisper in your ear, when you are in the crowd
it will fence you about with aloofness.

My song will be like a pair of wings to your dreams,
it will transport your heart to the verge of the unknown.

It will be like the faithful star overhead
when dark night is over your road.

My song will sit in the pupils of your eyes,
and will carry your sight into the heart of things.

And when my voice is silenced in death,
my song will speak in your living heart.

- Tagore

In years to come people will stagger home down lonely streets singing your song to the strains of regurgitated vindaloo, all memory of who was behind the song lost. It is you, though, who will be responsible for bringing back those lost tastes, smells, tears, pangs, forgotten years and missed chances.

Surely, for a musician, it would be criminal to reach for anything less.

Read ‘The Manual’

Interview with Ex:Ample Magazine, 21st Dec 2009

EXAMPLE: So guys first off, hows 2009 been for blu mar ten?

Chris: Busy and focused. One of our best years yet

Read more »

Someone emailed us a few days ago and asked…

i’m interested in this ’sketch’ idea…how do you put together the sketches in terms of instrumentation? do you have a stock of samples/patches to draw on which you then refine? how far you take it during the sketching phase. how do you exact quality control to make sure nothing gets missed and none of the weaker ideas get picked? i’d love to hear one of the original sketches so i could get an idea of how much you work it up before you shelve it.

…So I thought I’d pick a recent track and show a few snapshots of the stages it goes through before ending up as releasable.

NB – All audio in this post is 64k mp3, aside from the Soundcloud player at the end

If I Could Tell You – Released April 2009

We started working on this in November 2006 and, as you can hear, the sketch consists of a load of musical elements with placeholder drums and bass.

2nd Nov 2006

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The next step was to try and figure out more interesting drums and bass, so we started playing with much more chopped up arrangements. You’ll hear that the ideas for the bass were more or less carried through into the final version.

7th Aug 2008

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Over the next couple of months we started to look at the instrumentation again and see what could be added, what could be thrown out, and what needed to be rearranged.

18th Aug 2008

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

14th Sep 2008

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

We then spent the next month arranging the track into a full piece while still rejigging the instrumentation and writing new bass progressions.

20 Nov 2008

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

29th Nov 2008

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

29th Dec 2008

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

We thought we’d got to a point where the track was more or less ready to go, but there was something nagging us about the drums. They were holding the tune back so at the very last minute we threw them all out and replaced them with the drums that give the whole tune a lot more space and that worked in sympathy with the instrumentation much more effectively, and that’s what you hear in the final version that was released a couple of years after it first began.

4th April 2009

Blu Mar Ten – If I Could Tell You by Blu Mar Ten

We recently started a collaboration with an up & coming producer and I was surprised by how early on in the process he wanted to start arranging the track.
(In case you don’t know, ‘arranging’ is when you take your ideas and arrange them along a timeline to build the structure of the whole tune).

He talked about wanting to figure out the ‘direction’ of the tune and I found this interesting because I realised that the way we normally write our tracks is very different from that.

Working in modern sequencers often forces you to think about music in very compartmentalised ways – everything moving from left to right, everything contained in little boxes, everything beginning and ending at very rigid moments – and this can often lead to highly formulaic ways of writing tracks.

Generally, we leave our arrangements as late as we possibly can. They’re always the very last thing we do.
What we have instead is a collection of sounds looping around & around, over which we let new sounds drift in and out, (often out-of-time), until we have a whole palette of ideas which we think are substantial enough to support a whole track.

Working in this way and not really having a ’start’ or ‘end’ point allows us to treat the music as a ‘field’ rather than a ‘path’, a space where things are able to relate to each other in terms of depth, rather than over time.

I remember once reading a glib description of the way memory works. As an adult we perceive events as having happened in sequential relation to each other; C follows B follows A and so on. We see events as a path leading backwards into our childhood, with memories as signposts in sequence along the path. However, the further back you go you eventually reach a point where an infantile lack of self-consciousness means that a linear perception of events fades and instead of a path we perceive our memories as a field with the signposts scattered in a haphazard fashion all over it, having no sequential relationship to each other, (one reason why it’s so hard to definitively pin down your earliest memory, or to put in order events that occurred between the ages of 4 and 5).

I think it’s this same diminished self-consciousness that you’re granted when working in an infinitely repeating loop. Like repeating a word over and over again until it loses its semantic tethering and just becomes a sound in its own right, you’re free to listen to and enjoy the sound of the word without being constrained by what it signifies. If you listen to a loop for long enough the edges start to fade away and you’re able to ‘drift’ sounds into it and work on their sonic qualities in relation to other elements rather than their ‘meaning’ in terms of an overall structure; not as things that have ‘direction’ but as things which occupy a place in space. This means that, when the time comes to arrange the track, the elements are less likely to have been formulated in such a rigid fashion and will, (hopefully), lend themselves to a more interesting progression.

As usual, Brian Eno has some interesting things to say on this topic.

I have this word that I think about a lot which is ‘unlocked’ music. Ambient – my kind of ambient music – is the most unlocked music possible. A lot of things drift separately from each other and you listen to the result. In fact, African music is basically like that, because you have two time signatures going on always, a three-beat and a four-beat, and they don’t always lock. They are cycles of different length that don’t overlay in precise numerical ways – or if they do they overlay in such long cycles that you are not conscious of that, necessarily. So, I’m always arguing for the unlocked. Some technology really encourages lock, so you have a problem with it being locked vertically. And if it’s keyboard-based you have a problem with it being locked horizontally as well. The instruments play either this pitch or that pitch, they tend not to move fluidly between them. You may have a mod wheel, but it’s not an expressive element.

When I make loops on a sequencer, I always try to play them all the way through, so I play the whole part, then I listen to it, and quite often I find a long section that I like. Loop that, cut it up so that the loop doesn’t recur regularly. The idea of always editing in straight vertical cuts is the most single annoying thing about most of that music. Because a whole part of my feeling has been to make music that is ‘unlocked’. And all that stuff like Thursday Afternoon, Discreet Music and so on, is very deliberately that: music where the elements float separately from one another.
One of the things I love about soul music is that it’s relatively unlocked, so there are things that are very tight, like the rhythm section, but it’s not tied: tight, but not tied. People can shift around, and they create inflexions by not falling together when you expect them to and so on. So this unlocked thing has been a big issue for me for a long time. And then suddenly this kind of music appears that is not only locked, but absolutely fucking bolted down together…

Since Natural History came out we’ve had quite a few questions about the the vocals on some of the tracks. So we thought it might be a good idea to introduce you to the singers we sometimes work with when we need vocal work doing.

In Part 1 we introduced you to Rochelle Parker, in Part 2 to Kameel and in Part 3 to Ernesto.

This time round say hello to Alexis Strum who is the featured vocalist on ‘Why Me, Why Now’ from our album ‘Black Water’.
Alexis is a singer-songwriter who, aside from her own projects, has worked with a bunch of other people including Kylie Minogue and Robbie Williams.

Read more »

There were three things that I think mainly created the sound of drum & bass. The first thing was MIDI, which enabled you to lock together a lot of instruments so that they all marched precisely in step. The second was computer mixing, which enabled you to finesse mixes by polishing very tiny details of the mixes. It was a deadly process and produced some of the worst music ever heard. And the third thing was the mass availability of quite cheap preprogrammed synthesizers. So, suddenly there was available to everyone a library of relatively exotic electronic sounds. And I think it’s those three things that made drum & bass.

I enjoyed that sound in its time, but I just got completely fed up with how easy it had all become and how you switched the radio on and you’d hear another tightly locked piece of music: Clock-clock-clock. And you could just hear all the clocks ticking in it, you know.

And then, as always, I was listening to a lot of ’50s and ’60s music, R&B and old pop songs. What impressed me so much about them was how unclocked they were, how loose and frail and organic. You’d hear a song where instead of every single moment and part of the space being filled with some bloody cheap synthesizer sound or other, there were sometimes real spaces, where people didn’t play anything in particular. The track would just groove along.

If you listen to early Al Green records or something like that, there’s really nothing happening a lot of the time. Sometimes, there’s just the guy singing in the studio, and you can hear feet tapping and the musicians are just playing in a quite relaxed way. This gentleness and this lack of the desire to fill every moment with some kind of special, little event started to become more and more attractive to me.

I started to find jazz more and more attractive as well. It seemed to me to be music on the verge of a nervous breakdown the whole time. It always seemed like it was going to fall apart, as opposed to drum & bass, which seemed so invulnerable and so totally rock solid, tightly bolted together. And I started to think that drum & bass was actually very un-modern. It was very “industrial revolution” in a way. It was filled with musical rivets everywhere. There was no biology to it. It will die.

Actually…I edited that slightly. It’s not Brian Eno talking about drum & bass, but about 80s music in this interview.
Sounded familiar to me though, especially with reference to what I’ve written about the type of sounds we use and why we use them.