The value of music

This is my first post in… absolutely forever… Basically there has been nothing to write about. I finished my Masters, I did really well too. I then needed to take some time out for myself. Still working, but with no direction in my life. A lot of time was spent catching up with friends, being able to say ‘yeah, I’ll come to your party’, spending time with the family – stuff that most people take for granted and I wasn’t really able to for five years of my life.

I wanted to take some time to find a job. The realist in me took a look at my financial situation and thought “oh shit, I need more money”. I applied for many jobs, mainly in sound design, some in dialogue recording. I heard back from none of them (except for a games company, but I had enough contacts there to actually get told I didn’t get the job). I always knew that having an MA wouldn’t really get me work – without the whoring experience required, you can’t get jack shit. Combine that with recession on the way, I concluded I should just sit tight.

So I went back to my record label idea. To be my own boss and have an excuse to release my own music and projects on my own terms – and do it for a living. I got as far as pitching the idea to a panel of people who were going to give me money for the next nine months to get it off the ground – but my ideas got carried away. I was planning to release all content for free and make money out of licensing and merchandise sales. Just before my pitch, I bumped into an old lecturer, Katia. I told her about the idea and she shredded it apart in minutes, demonstrating that it was a bit far fetched and that I would never get the time to ever work on my own music if I took that path. So you can imagine how I lost confidence minutes later in the pitch and found myself speaking to blank faces… I don’t think I made the pitch.

To be fair to Katia, she advised me “you need to think about what you really want, but you need to be realistic and you need to do whatever is necessary” – effectively working as a free agent, rather than getting directly involved in the cokehead music industry. My argument for wanting to do a label in the first place was to avoid the bombardment of friend requests on MySpace – people filter this shit out. No one cares when everyone can produce their own music. A label has marketing links and can make a buzz. If you make a buzz, people will come to YOU. But it needs to be goooood.

I’ve considered putting an end to Angelchrome for a very long time now. It’s not me anymore. One thing that I’ve never been comfortable with is singing very ‘deep’ (i.e. teenage angst) songs, when I’m generally quite a chirpy person on the outside. I’m not always the happiest person on the inside, but when I turned 24, it became so clear that everyone really does feel like this. It’s nothing new. People have made money out of creating and selling empathy in the form of music. It’s an embarrassing thought to get up on that stage and sing these mediocre songs. Can I honestly make a contribution to society singing about stuff people have said for thousands of years through art? I don’t think so.

So where does this leave me right now? Well fortunately I have at least been making some kind of effort to keep myself involved. I have been writing a short animation with a 3D animator from Sicily (Francesca Stella), which we’re starting proper in the next week or so (when she finally scrapes the money together to buy a Mac Pro) and I have brand new music plans in collaboration with jazz-fusion bosa-nova singer Judith Haustein. I think she thinks this is going to be something small, but she’s so wrong. I’m starting it tonight…

Ok – the world didn’t open its arms out to me like I lead myself to believe, but I’m doing something about it, finally. I’ll make it happen for myself one way or another. And as for Angelchome, well… I’m going to have a think about it. I’ll leave the MySpace up for a little while and see what happens.