I recently found out that Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin has been demolished to make way for flats. I don't know why, but it completely broke me. I started sobbing, properly sobbing, out of grief for a recording studio I've never even set foot in.
I suppose it's the death of my youth and my slide into irrelevance. When I was a young musician, a studio was something indescribably special, a place where dreams could be made, a place that you scrimped and saved just to get an overnight session in when everyone else had gone home. It was a symbol of popular music and the centrality of popular music in popular culture. Obsessives like me could map out every studio their minds, an interconnected web of demos and albums and stories and legends. Now the few studios that remain are just pantomime, an "experience day" for middle-aged businessmen, a photo backdrop for pop starlets looking to reinvent themselves as credible artists.
Windmill Lane have ostensibly moved to a new building across town, but it's a bit of a sick joke - the new studios are owned by a for-profit music production college, training wide-eyed teenagers to do a job that no longer exists. They kept the name, but the heritage is gone. The settee that Christie Moore slopped Guinness over, the fag burns on the console left by an absent-minded Phil Lynott, the carpet that soaked up Sinead O'Connor's tears, all chucked in a skip by some Polish builders. Hundreds of studios, thousands of stories, all just chucked in a fucking skip.
Still, at least the developers will make a few quid and some young professional will get to spend €300k on a two-bed flat with a Smeg fridge.
I ran my own studio in the early '10s. It never really took off, I didn't know back then, of course, that the time of anybody needing to pay for professional recording services were practically over for all but the most niche types of music. We thought we'd still be able to get plenty of trade from musicians hoping to get a cheap demo out and our niche would be as that budget studio all the up and coming local acts had passed through when they were brand new and skint.
Even aiming at the metal crowd where people won't settle for anything less than an authentic live drum track and a guitar cab with an SM57 in front of it, we largely found ourselves doing business as a glorified rehearsal space. Towards the end it was just a big garage we smoked weed in. I can remember the feeling of melancholy when we signed over the lease and took all our wall carpet to the tip.
Just imagine how many people have heard sounds produced in that Welsh farm, or that Canadian place that burnt down. That Swedish studio that did all the early death metal albums and now it's a community centre or some shit. It's tragic.
The music industry is dead. What's left is a husk.
I guess it's testament to what professional-sounding music people can make on their laptops too which is democratising.
I did an audio tech degree from 2001-2004 and they told us there were only 1000 professional [producers? studio engineers? I've forgotten] in the whole of the UK so it wasn't great odds even back then.
We were well into the home studio boom by 2000. We'd had reasonably affordable studio gear for about a decade prior (ADAT decks, Mackie desks, the new wave of Chinese condensers) but Cubase VST came out in 1996, which really marked the beginning of the end. At about the same time, we got the first wave of digital portastudios, which killed the demo studio pretty much overnight - for the price of a week in a cheap studio, you could buy a little box with 8 tracks of digital recording and some basic effects.
I suppose it's essentially a good thing that recording was democratised, but it coincided with a lot of shitty and undemocratic changes in music. John Peel died in 2004, which was a great loss to music and marked the end of an era. Myspace and Napster were supposed to democratise the distribution of music, but the opposite really happened - unless you've got a trust fund, it's very hard to break through the noise and find an audience. A&R men started trusting follower counts more than their own judgement. Development deals died and the majors started expecting new acts to bring their own fan base. Small venues started going pay-to-play, pricing a lot of artists out of the opportunity to build an audience by playing live. The old system was unfair and arbitrary, but at least you had a chance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZiHb6PH1dA Close your eyes and imagine you're floating over a lush, green, friendly grassland on a sunny day, the occasional copse of trees offering inviting shade to rest a while.
I posted ISAN in the other thread just to see what the recommendation would be but it's got me back to what an absolute gem Lucky Cat was. I guess I've gone back to synth now that the weather is turning.
I wonder if camcorder users had any inclination that one day their recordings would be turned into music videos. What's weird is we all have video recording devices in our pockets these days but I can't imagine we're leaving behind anything like the content of people just going about life.
Maybe in 10-20 years people will start plundering footage from early youtube.
I can't tell if this is shit and I just really want to get high. It's a travesty - I asked around for numbers but just ended up with coke dealers. Don't get old lads.
I heard somewhere that someone asked Herbie Hancock for proof that he was enlightened (in the buddhist sense of reaching nirvana or summat) and he came out with this above song shortly afterwards. I'm pretty convinced lads.
>>12274 Unfortunately when you put this much effort into the image of the performer, its audience can't reasonably be expected to judge by the musical merit alone.
I want to believe that the homecut fringe and tassels are genuine character calling back to my childhood, but instead i'm left with the niggling feeling of being played.
Just seems a bit contrived.
it's got a nice Enja vibe and i'd probably like it if i head it on the radio, first.
>>12273 I'm really enjoying this, 23 minutes went by without even noticing.
