First Listen: Culture Voyage – “Youth Fantasy”

This is a reprint from Ohm Park, thanks Davy!

My newest discovery while surfing around bandcamp is a two song single by an act called Culture Voyage that claims Atlanta as home. It’s some good quality glo-fi, especially the title track which features these 8-bit sort of sounds swirling and building on top of a chillwave foundation. Give it a listen, and then go pick up the whole package below:

Listen to Youth Fantasy here

{Featured Show} Sorry No Ferrari @ Criminal Records 1.29.2011

Atlanta math/prog rock band Sorry No Ferrari  will be performing at Criminal Records this Saturday, show starts at 4 pm. If you’re a fan of bands like Drive Like Jehu, Cinemechanica, and Faraquet, this might interest you.

Web: http://www.myspace.com/13154905

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sorry-no-Ferrari/24343349693

Filmmaker Bob Place Discusses New Movie Hate City

Hate City is new documentary about the various music scenes within Atlanta. It’s directed by Bob Place and since viewing the initial trailer, I’ve been very intrigued as to how this film will turn out. There was a lot of hype surrounding the dismal release We Fun, however many Atlanta locals argued that the film did not connect with the core values and ethos of Atlanta’s music scene.

In the following reprint from The Moon and Pluto, Moon and Pluto writer Nadia Lelutiu asks director Bob Place the hard-hitting questions about his new documentary.

“The film is not a movie highlighting different bands. It’s about the people in the music community in Atlanta, talking about the community and talking about how they’re affected by this post-apocalyptic state of the music industry,”  – Bob Place

“The internet changed the world. We are at the point that DIY is the best that it’s been and the best that it could be, because it’s so accessible, but because of that, it’s also a bad thing, because the market is flooded, and that’s what we go into in the film,” says Place. He also emphasizes what the film is NOT, “What I didn’t want to do is make a film where everyone is sucking each others dicks. It is about people involved in the community, not a self-indulgent 60 minute blow job.”

The film doesn’t only depict the perspective of bands, but various players in the music industry, including hip hop artists, music attorneys, independent and major record label owners, and radio DJs, with the intent to show, “every perspective of what is going on, but it’s all from the perspective of Atlanta.” Place describes the film as broken up into three segments, first establishing the music situation, then characterizing what’s happening in Atlanta and what makes the city special, and finally highlighting certain Atlanta musicians and industry folk that share their perspective on it all and reveal how they function within the current climate of the music industry.

Place is not only a filmmaker. He’s a comedian, deeply involved in the Atlanta comedy scene, as well as a musician in Atlanta. Throughout his experiences playing with his band, Swank Sinatra, over the past 7 years, Place had heard Atlanta referred to, time and again, as “Hate City” and found it an appropriate title for his documentary. “Hate City is Atlanta. Atlanta became such a popular town, as far as music. It became a destination for labels and artists, because of hip hop. When you get down to the microlevel, there’s so much going on. With the rock-n-roll scene, meaning anything that’s not hip hop, there’s a little more rivalry, and I learned that more while making the film.”

Place is adamant about the film keeping away from what’s “hip”, explaining, “I wasn’t trying to be hip about it. I don’t think I’m hip. Shitty bands do really well in Atlanta, and I think it’s because that group of people think it’s cool to be shitty…I don’t know exactly [why shitty bands do well]. I wasn’t trying to be hip or cool with the film. I was just being me and felt like an outsider of the scene. Not that there is a scene; there are a couple of little cliques. The film goes into that; it’s a music town, but it’s a segregated music town, with cliques of bands doing their thing and I wasn’t trying to cater to anybody. I was just trying to tell it like it is. There’s a lot of pretentiousness in the community, and with the particular thing that I do, we don’t give a shit about all that.”

It was a relief to hear that the film wasn’t trying to boast a certain group of bands or create the facade that there is an overriding music genre represented in Atlanta. Place also acknowledges that this film is not some “inside joke” that only Atlanta will get. He expresses the homogeneity of content in the film, saying, “I don’t think the only people that will enjoy it are the people in Atlanta for novelty reasons. It’s about Atlanta, but if you’re a musician, no matter where you are, it will be an interesting, informative film. It talks about the reality of where we’re at and what we should do, if you’re a musician. It’s the Atlanta perspective of that, but Atlanta’s a hot town! The audience is anyone that’s interested in being a musician.”

The storyline of Hate City was shot with 8mm film, to give the documentary a true gritty and dirty aesthetic. The interviews were handled with a standard definition camera, and once the interviews were cut, Place placed the interviews between these surreal, grimy storylines, and included hand drawn animations to create an artistic rendition of the interview content. Hate City took about a year to complete with the help of producers, Michael Albanese and Harvey Leake. After the premiere showing in Austin, TX at SXSW, the film will be screened in Atlanta, though there are no details on this yet. We’ll keep you posted.

{New Track} Perrion “PCP” Rodriguez – Rambling

Atlanta based rapper Perrion “PCP” Rodriguez just released a new track. It’s called “Rambling” and if you are a fan of rappers like Mos Def, Curren$y and Pharrell, this should be right up your alley. “Rambling” will be featured on Perrion’s upcoming mixtape Hip Hop Elevator Music.  As of yet, the release date for Hip Hop Elevator Music is TBA, but understanding Perrion’s hardcore work ethic, it will probably drop near the end of the summer.

You can hear “Rambling” and other tracks here.

ReverbNation: www.reverbnation/perrion

Twitter: www.twitter.com/pcpbeats

Letter to the Readers

Dear readers, I hope everyone has been able to resume their day to day activities without being blown completely off course by the torrid weather conditions. For those of you not based in the Atlanta area, we had some snow and many county offices were crippled this past week. I’m originally from Chicago, but I guess they haven’t figured out the secret of salt on snow down here.  But I digress…I want to communicate a new agenda to you for this year.

These past few weeks I’ve been thinking about what music journalism means to me and how this tiny blog fits in the midst of the massive blogosphere and music publications industry. The conclusion I’ve reached is simple – the music industry is like an aquarium, it’s a big tank full of all kinds of fishy personalities swimming and lurking about. The stereotypical image of record labels and label executives is that they are the sharks and the artists are the minnows. In reality, many artists are also sharks and predator fish that swim near the bottom of the tank. The labels are bigger sharks, but they closely resemble dim-witted schools of fish that cluster together at the sight of danger. In this underwater scenario, music journalists deserve a place too. The music journalists are the bottom feeders that suck the algae off the tank, their sole purpose is to digest the shit produced within the tank and regurgitate it so another unsuspecting bottom feeder creature can suck it up.

Music journalism is a touchy thing to me. Most music journalists do not play instruments, they don’t perform music, they do not have a knowledge of music theory or a formal background in musicology, yet they are responsible for dictating what’s hot and what’s not in pop culture news and media. These people have often failed at their own trade and are nowhere being masters of journalism. I see grammatical errors in album reviews that would make a halfway competent copy editor want to jump off a building without a second thought. All of this is both strangely peculiar and entertaining to me.

I started Shot From Guns with the intent of writing from the musician’s perspective. I’ve been in four bands, I played music half my life and I’m not some fat, balding middle aged man trying to tell you what’s cool. I could care less about what’s cool; I care about what connects with people. And a cheesy gimmick plus a $10,000 pr campaign won’t cut it.

For 2011, I want to focus on showcasing interesting and eclectic events being held by local artists. I feel that by showcasing these events in the featured shows of the week posts and show calendar, I can help artists a bit more by getting people out to their shows and the places where it really matters. In addition, I will continue to interview people who I feel are trendsetters and paving their own paths. I’m very proud of the interviews I’ve conducted so far, if you do a search in the search engine, you will see great interviews from people like John Balzary of Baroness, Robin Guthrie, Gavin Frederick of Stickfigure Records, and one of my idols Munehiro Narita of the band High Rise. That interview was conducted in Japanese and English so that was interesting to say the least. But there are many more interviews on this site.

I may not always be able to update this site, but when I do I promise I will include content that I feel is noteworthy and exceptional, content that will challenge you and hopefully things that will motivate you to get out your house and get involved in a few local events. Take care.

Sincerely, Taylor A. Northern

Call for Contributing Writers

Shot From Guns is a one man operation. I’ve been running this blog for around a year now and lately it has been tough finding content to post on the site. I need fresh minds and perspectives to help keep this blog interesting, so please feel free to contact me at tnorthern29@gmail.com if you have story ideas, news items, or would like to have articles from your blog or site reprinted and credited on Shot From Guns.

As I said in the mission statement, your voices are the powerful and stimulating winds that will keep this vessel afloat.

Featured Show of the Week

Year 2010 in Review

This is a reprint from Ohm Park, thank you Davy!

Years and decades are fairly arbitrary lines in time, but it’s interesting how things can be so easily organized in this way. Maybe it’s coincidence, maybe we can find a narrative in anything, or maybe there is something else at work. But in terms of the history of music, 2010 was very much the beginning of a new chapter.

The ’00s could be characterized as the slow ascent of indie music propelled by how the Internet changed everything. But in 2010, I get the sense that the influence of both indie and the Internet has reached its limit and now the oversaturation of those influences is pushing things in an entirely different trajectory. Of course, indie/Internet/blog music is still not exactly mainstream; there are plenty of genres that are more popular. But it has grown large enough to reach that point every popularized genre arrives at when it starts to cannibalize itself and embrace its own clichés, well on the road to becoming a parody of itself like hip-hop and country currently are. I started to worry this was happening at the end of 2008, but then the anomaly that was 2009 came along and my pessimism waned.

Looking back now, so many incredible, transcendent records just happened to converge in 2009 to cap off the decade, and this year lacked last year’s breadth of records that could both capture a wide audience and demonstrate an authentic, artistic vision. There were certainly some, but in terms of what was most widely praised in the indie world, for the most part 2010 was unimaginative and derivative.

Now it would be easy to just write this off as simply the cyclical nature of genres rising and falling in pop music–things get popular and then they start to suck. And that’s definitely part of it. But there’s something cultural at work as well. For someone who is, say, twenty years old right now and living in the United States, the backdrop to growing up has been 911, eight years of Bush disasters and wars capped off by a few years of a horrible economy and government dysfunction. Politics and the news have been beseiged by an intangible turmoil for a decade now, and it’s hard to ignore how this has affected the psyche of people growing up in this environment, even if those people are apathetic to these phenomenons. And really, If anything, these events have helped bolster the apathy of the youth for the world around them; this generation has a strong desire (which some may describe as a sense of entitlement) to skip all the bullshit and just be happy.

And this isn’t just about politics. As technology continues moving ahead at an unyielding pace, not everyone adapts to the change and embraces it. Globalization and the ever increasing complexity of the world around us can create a yearning to return to a simpler time. There is an anxiety about the current state of things, and this can help establish a feeling of nostalgia for the past, when times were perceived to be better. And that yearning for the past and simplicity has pervaded the fashions of music. Everything popular now is lo-fi or rips offs of styles decades old. Many people want to write off the 2 year running chillwave fad as just a blip, but its really a telltale sign of what’s happening across all of music, the convergence of all of these trends. It’s the ultimate escapism into simplicity and nostalgia, and that is what 2010 in music has been all about.

There are other cultural threads that push music in this direction as well. The reality TV/American Idol culture has ended up permeating into indie as much as indie has permeated the mainstream, if not more. People seem to only care about celebrity and gimmicks. More people are interested in Best Coast’s cat than in discovering musicians who are actually innovating things. And now that technology has shattered the bar to entry and enabled anyone, no matter what level of talent, to be able to create music, working at one’s craft has become increasingly irrelevant. A talented producer can make just about anyone sound good in a certain manner. And the sort of music that is popular now doesn’t require very much effort to make anyway.

Technology, specifically enabling anyone to be able to download anything for free, has shifted the way people listen to music. When you could only afford to buy so many records, people spent a lot more time with their music, and that benefited music that had a lot of depth, carefully crafted records. Now people blow through as much music as fast as possible, so the sort of music that people celebrate is the kind that catches one’s ears right away, even if there is nothing to it beyond the surface.

In just about every way, music has become more about style than substance. The artists who were successful this year by and large achieved success by means that had absolutely nothing to do with the merits of their art. It was all about back-stories, connections, cashing in on trends, hiring the right publicists, being friends with the right people, being hyped by the right blogs, etc. Sure, some of those successful artists happened to make some good music, but that’s not why they became successful. The environment has also has become one where artists are punished and marginalized for taking risks. Three great examples in 2010 are Sufjan Stevens, Yeasayer, and MGMT. I may not equally love all three of these records, but I respect the artistic choices they made, and while each has a small but fanatical cheering section, none of these were well received overall. Instead, boring, predictable, easily-marketable, overly-derivative, watered-down drivel ruled supreme.

I think it’s also important to note that 2010 showcased the most centralized music media since the ’90s. Where the ’00’s were all about de-centralizing music media because websites and blogs popped up everywhere and created infinite choice, now there is simply too much information out there for anyone to make sense of it. You see, the truth is that most people want to be told what to listen to and not have to do the hard work of finding it themselves. Other than us music nerds, most of which have our own blog, people don’t have the time to search across website after website looking for something new. So people have now migrated to fewer and fewer locations to find what they want. In the indie world, that means the aggregators, Pitchfork, which lines their content up with what’s popular on the aggregators, and the handful of superblogs that are now under Pitchfork’s payroll. The few music journalism institutions that still make money are only interested in making more of it and expanding their audience.

That can only be done in two ways once you have already captured a significant audience. Either create content that is so good that it transcends the topic of the content, which is hard, or just pick topics that are the most popular within the realm of relevant topics the institution can discuss, aka the SEO strategy, which is much easier. That’s why you see Pitchfork give Kanye West’s newest record a 10.0 and why Creative Loafing pretends Justin Beiber is part of the Atlanta music scene. Why go to the effort of creating interesting content when you can just reference celebrities and get tons of attention? I mean, you can’t really blame them, because they’re just giving people what they want. In the longterm, the Internet didn’t really change the nature of music journalism at all, only the structure. It created a temporary anarchy and changing of the guard, but we’re long past that point now. The professional music media is back to being nothing more than celebrity gossip reporting of another flavour.

Now, all of the trends I’ve described above don’t necessarily make me excited about the state of things. Simplicity, nostalgia, and commercial viability aren’t exactly on the top of my list of what I look for in music. But from my perspective, I can’t be pessimistic about it either. What I’ve been describing so far is about trends and what is popular, but that doesn’t at all speak to the sheer amount of quality, artistic music that is still being produced every second across the world. For someone who is willing to dig deep, there is an endless supply of music for anyone’s taste. And so really, it’s still a great time in the history of music for everyone, except artists taking chances and hoping to make a living from their music, and there’s still even a small chance to breakthrough that way if you’re really lucky. So what’s popular is starting to suck, but that’s okay because the underground is as fertile as it’s ever been.

If I was going to parallel 2010 to any other recent year, I guess 1998 would probably be the most appropriate. Trends aren’t looking so hot and that doesn’t look to change very quickly, but there’s plenty of incredible music if you know where to find it. And ultimately trends come and go, and things are always in a state of flux, so there’s no telling what could happen in the years ahead.