Author Archives: TomSlatter

Fireplaces and Washing Machines

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You may have noticed that I’ve been relatively quiet the last few weeks. That’s because I have just moved house and internet access has been patchy.

Yup, that’s right – an actual house. Whodathunkit?

We’ve just got ourselves a slightly neglected little victorian place just to the North of London. It includes a couple of very nice fireplaces, such as this one:

And a little outbuilding thing at the back which is most probably going to be turned into a little music room.

It needs a little work. At the moment it’s all bare walls and dodgy electrics (and, yes, the box to our Dalek Cookie Jar. What do you mean you don’t have one?)

So watch this space for dull updates about my inept attemps at DIY as I try to fix that up into a working, albeit tiny, music room.

PS. this weeks success included installing our new washing machine. This probably counts as the most masculine achievement in my life to date. I doubt I will top it.

Posted in DIY

Narrative in Song

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Oliver Arditi wrote a very thorough review of Three Rows of Teeth at the end of last month.

I am hugely flattered that anyone might write something so in depth based on my stuff, and tickled by the use of the word ‘habitué’ to describe you, dear listener.

I wouldn’t call you ‘habitués’ of my music. I’d call you listeners. Music monkeys. Eared scum.

No I wouldn’t really, but I do like the phrase ‘eared scum’.

Anyway, I digest…

Oliver, being a speculative fiction writer himself, talks about the narrative elements of my songs and rightly identifies a hint of musical theatre in them.

Tis true, tis true. I like a song with a story and have enjoyed several musicals. I know many of them are lightweight, but Phantom of the Opera, Jekyll and Hyde, Les Mis, Sweeney Todd – all of these I know and love. I know admitting so will wipe away whatever vestiges of street cred I might have had left, but a guilty pleasure wouldn’t be a guilty pleasure if you didn’t admit to it.

I also love Meatloaf, a few bits of folk and a hell of a lot of metal and prog rock that also has a narrative focus. I’ve never been keen on opera, mostly because of the singing style, but that aside, narrative music appeals to me.

That said, here are three works of narrative popular music that I have enjoyed and would recommend.

Operation Mindcrime by Queensryche

You have to be able to cope with 80s metal hairstyles and cheesy metal to full enjoy this one, so if those aren’t your thing best to stay clear. Operation Mindcrime however, is bloody fantastic. Musically it’s all singalong choruses and duelling guitar solos. The story is a relatively well-developed one about hypnosis, revolutionaries, madness and the evil, manipulative ‘Dr x’. It’s very comic book in tone – melodramatic and emo – which isn’t a criticism as far as I’m concerned.

There was a sequel, which has some okay songs on it and continues the story, but I wouldn’t call it essential. The original however is well worth a listen.

Sweeney Todd

No, not the movie. That’s okay, but actors aren’t singers and you want to hear this with proper singers. Again, this is pure, macabre melodrama – gore and murder and lust and innocence-destroyed. And lots of dark humour. The recent London cast is very good, as is the original recording (although the accents are a little interesting on that as the American singers understandably don’t get every cockney vowel sounding perfect).

Musically this is complicated stuff for the West End – Sondheim has a deft hand with lyrics and a very pleasing attitude to discord. He has a way of mixing simple melody with off-colour harmony that perfectly complements the subject matter.

Outside – The Diaries of Nathan Adler, or The Murder of Baby Grace Blue, a gothic drama hyper-cycle

More melodrama and dark humour here (I know what I like) in the fourth album that Bowie and Eno made together. It may be heresy to say it, but for me this is a far stronger work than the original Berlin albums they made together.

Of course it is not nearly as influential as them, but it’s a more accomplished work and a more satisfying listen on the whole. However, it suffers somewhat from the superfluous addition of ‘Strangers when we meet’ at the end – which apparently was added at the record company’s behest when they realised what an uncommercial record Bowie had made. A perfectlygood song, but out of place on this album.

Outside’s story, told in the liner notes, details PI Nathan Adler’s investigation of the murder of Baby Grace, who’s death appears to be connected to some rather unlikely works of modern art.

Modern Art was clearly an influence – At the time Bowie and the artist Damien Hirst were apparently concocting plans to attach the head and genitals of a bull to the corpse of a man who had left his body to art – or so the story goes. A similar image can be seen in the liner notes for the album.

Lyrically Outside is a masterpiece. The album was written via improvisations, with Bowie running his story through randomisation software to create some truly unhinged nonsense – The Voyeur of Utterdestruction as Beauty – which nevertheless hints at meaning because of it’s origin as a coherent story.

Musically it achieves amazing things too – neon gothic layers of synth and guitar, samples and percussion. Even an update on Major Tom in the form of ‘Hello Spaceboy’.

Outside does what I think the best narrative songs do – asks questions, gives hints to the story, but doesn’t spell everything out.

Of course you can’t do that with musicals like Sweeney Todd where the point is to tell a story. Outside is primarily an album of music that uses narrative and one of its ingredients – something that I tend to do with my own music.

So far my musical narratives have been steampunk. I think I have maybe one more thing to say that fits into that genre, before I try my hand at another. I may be wrong, we’ll see what the muses say, but whatever I do next, narrative is sure to play a big part in it.

I don’t get Record Store day, but here are 3 Indie Records you should buy

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I don’t get record store day.

First there are the words in the title. To my English ears the word ‘shop’ is more appropriate than ‘store’, and I have no love of vinyl and no desire to own a record when good quality audio files are an option.

What? You think those are shallow points, hardly worth making? Well it’s my blog and I shall say what I want.

I am all for supporting independent artists. I’m currently getting ready to move house, and in doing so I’ve got rid of a lot of CDs. The ones I’ve kept are, by and large, independent albums. I’ve kept these not because I ever listen to the physical CD – they were all ripped to hard drive once I bought them – but because I value the transaction and the opportunity to support an artist I like.

But shops? Bricks and mortar shops? I can’t stand the things. I have no desire to go out to a special place just to buy things, I have no desire to have to queue up with others, to take the risk that what I want isn’t in stock, to be inconvenienced by those who take up space ‘browsing’ rather than having a definite idea of what they’re going to purchase so they can get in and out very quickly. In short, shops bemuse and annoy me, and just because some of them sell music doesn’t suddenly make them worthwhile.

If you like them, go ahead, no problem, I’m not suggesting we get rid of shops, but I don’t want to bother with them.

Don’t you think that’s needlessly negative? Lots of people do value the chance to browse in a physical space. Lots of people want to support their friendly independent record shop and browse its shelves for interesting and obscure vinyl releases…

Fine, lovely, let them do it, I’m not interested, it seems needlessly out of date and a waste of time to me. Also this obsession with physical things seems a little weird, and there’s just a self-satisfied, pretentious feel to a lot of it. Like people who go to farmers’ markets or buy organic food because they think they’re making an ethical choice rather than trying to say something about their status and class.

Blimey, attacking organic food and farmers markets as well? As if you’re not pretty middle class yourself, with your Guardian and your fluffy liberal views

Shut up. You are essentially me, and I’m buggered if I’m going to spoil another blog post with a mock argument with myself in a lame attempt to be funny. It’s bad enough I just wrote that sentence to preempt any accusations of not being funny. Let’s just get on with something worthwhile…

Right, here are some good indie records:

Let’s Build An Airport – Matt Blick

This Ep, by Matt Blick, is really rather spiffing. He writes a blog on the Beatles and you can really hear the influence here. In a good way. Highlights: [Everything is] Broken with it’s 7/4 rhythm, interesting instrumentation and fantastic chorus and Let’s Build an Airport which is a perfect little pop song.

Ghost – Matt Stevens

This has just been reprinted, so you can go buy it and own it and hold it, which I assume will assuage your weird record fetish. Oddball that you are. I recently described it thus:

‘Ghost used to be my go to album for washing up and visiting the gym, now it’s more likely to accompany me as I fall asleep on trains in the morning. It’s that good (Sorry Matt, that was supposed to sound like an endorsement. It came out kinda mildy sarcastic). Look, buy the album, it’s good. I am being serious.’

Nick Tann – The Vinyl Project

Yeah he’s into vinyl, which as we’ve established, is weird. But 3am is a bloody good song with a chorus that will not leave your head, and the rest of the songs are great too. Well worth it, even if he does like vinyl.

So there are 3 indie records you could/should buy. But don’t go to shops. Shops are full of people, and we all know people are overrated.

Song of the Month – Lines Overheard at a Séance

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I thought I’d start highlighting some of my old songs, just to highlight some of the stuff I’m proud of that you might not have heard.

Lines Overheard at a Séance is from my first solo album, Spinning the Compass. I composed it for FAWM 2009 and it was almost entirely improvised, pretty much as you hear it now.

The basic chords, melody and lyrics were written in perhaps twenty minutes. I sat down at the keyboard, chose a suitablyodd chord to begin with, then just started playing.

Lyrically what came to mind as I played – although I subsequently tidied things up for the final version.

Thankfully, when I realised what the title should be, it all made sense.   The words hint at murder and corpses buried in secret, but never spell out exactly what they mean.

I am rather fond of it. And you can download it for free, should you choose.

In Praise of the Album

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This is a repost of something I wrote for Comraderobot.com a while ago. I still like albums, so I thought I’d rewrite it and post it here. 

A lot of people have declared the death of the album. So many, there’s even an article on the subject in the Christian Science Monitor (Christians and science? What?).

Personally, I find this distressing because I listen to albums, as albums. I like them! Pearl Jam’s Ten, Mansun’s Six, Bowie’s Outside, Dream Theater’s Awake, Metallica’s Master of Puppets, King Crimson’s Red all of these are amongst my favourite albums, and I have always listened to them as a complete work.

My favourite works of popular music all fit together as roughly forty minutes to an hour’s worth of coherent music. I like them that way, and as an artistic statement, I don’t see that anything’s changed.

Business Case?

I don’t know about the business case, though it seems to me that there are differing views on this. Scott Perry of the New Music Tipsheet says they make financial sense, Bob Lefsetz says they don’t.

But I’m a fan!

What I do know is that there are plenty of us out there, the real music fans, who don’t just listen to the hits. I’ve never listened to music radio, I don’t see what it’s for at all. First you have DJs, as if the concept of someone stupider than me babbling crap between songs could be entertaining, but worst of all you only get the latest single or biggest hit from any given band, invariable with the beginning and ending cut off.

Useless. Pointless. You hear the hook, but it doesn’t hook you in, because we’ve changed to the next song.

The point of the hook is to get you interested enough to put the effort in and discover the larger work. Having a random pop hook stuck in your head, knowing forty such random hooks, is not what being a fan is about. The fan is the person who puts on their headphones, lays on their bed and listening to every note beginning to end, losing themselves in the music. The fan is the person who lets go of seconds and minutes in favour of beats and bars, so that an hour of their time isn’t an hour at all, but a space of time and emotion totally dictated by the music.

I don’t want to do that for a catchy riff and three goes round the chorus. I want the mix of pace, the build, the development of a larger work.

Something very similar happens with the live set. Any musican will tell you that playing live is less about the individual songs and more about the mixture of pace, key and emotion to create a space in time. Albums do that too. I don’t want to lose it, and I don’t see why we should.

Organising principles.

Steven Hodson tells me ‘the majority of musicians still only produce one or two good songs per CD’. CDs have always been full of filler, with countless bands managing a decent single or two, and then hours of crap. Does that invalidate the album as an artistic concept? No more than a bad tv series invalidates the notion of a tv season as an artistic statement. Sure, there are crap albums, I own shelves of them, but I don’t see what that has to do with the artistic merits of the form.

To be fair, the first article I read on the subject only said albums might end as an organising princple, and Steven Hodson in the above article says albums will stay if ‘musicians provide enough value for fans so that they are willing to pay for an album’.

Albums were never the only organising principle. The live concert is an organising principle, as are listener generated ideas like the mixtape and the playlist. I will even grudingly admit that playlists chosen by DJs might be acceptable to some people. And yes, the internet is opening up new possibilities in terms of regular updates, more frequent smaller collections. Even singles have a place for those that like them, though I never have.

Just don’t tell me albums are dead, because I love them, and I’d rather a few more were made.

The end of the Time Traveller’s Tale?

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Andrew Fletcher who happens to like my music, has written his version of the ending of my Time Traveller suite. I think it’s ace, and he has kindly agreed that I might post it here. I suppose it might count as a piece of ‘fan fiction’. Fun!

Tom Slatter recently released a new album “Three Rows of Teeth”

Three of the songs on this album are all part of one unconcluded story, “The Time Traveller’s Suite”

In the first song, a man is awoken in the depth of night, a girl with a missing eye stands at the foot of his bed staring at him. Before he can act, she says; “Is this the way that my death began?” and with a cosmic shimmer, the girl vanishes from sight!

The man sits up in bed and asks “Is this how one loses a heart?” for in that brief encounter, he fell in love with the mysterious girl. “How do I find her? how do I trace the girl with the missing eye?!”

He sets about developing a machine that will enable him to travel through time in order to find her again. His friends, family and colleagues grow concerned as he searches scrapheaps for budget pieces, but eventually he becomes more desperate, and in the face of adversity, he sells his part of his family’s inheritence in order to fund the remainder of the project.

He eventually finishes, he throws the switch and the whirring machine sends him into the distant future. The years speed by, fashions change and buildings rise and fall until he arrives at a time with endless nights. Convinced that this hell at the end of the Earth is where he’ll find her, since he evidently can’t travel backwards to the night she appeared, he has concluded “If I can’t go backwards, neither can she!”

However, his search seems to have been in vain. He is unable to find the girl with the missing eye, and now trapped alone at the end of the Earth with apparently no way back, he despairs.

A recurring feature in this first song is “What we say three times is true”, I’ve personally concluded that it’s some sort of mental determination therapy technique, if he tells himself three times that he’ll do something, he’ll do it. He vows to find the girl with the missing eye and make her his.

This is where the first song finished. Left at the end of the Earth.

The second song begins with “Maybe I lost you when the roses died”, referring back to a point of time he shot past while searching for her. It goes on to sing about missed chances and reasons he could have missed her.

In this despair, he stumbles on a way to go backwards. “Rise another leaf, and fall another empire… I’ll bring the whole thing down to it’s knees! I’ll find the love that once found me!”

He channels what little energy is left on Earth, destroying it to propel him and the time machine backwards an undetermined amount, but this would give him another chance to find her!

The third song “Love Letters and Entropy” had me confused until I actually looked up the meaning of the word. Entropy meaning chaotic threw the song well into context. He manages to go back in time, and begins his search with a much stronger determination. Being told by ignorant bystanders that “Love is behind every fallen star” though he has been to where the stars finish, and she wasn’t there.

Now that he’s back in the past, the world is different, it’s chaotic from what he remembers. Perhaps his time travel or his unhealthy obsession has warped his vision.

Although it’s not clearly stated, I have my own interpretation of what happens next.

“Found love in the world where we met”, he has made his way back to where he started, to just after he left in the first place. His friends and family get him to a psychiatrist. While in their care he meets a nurse and falls in love with her. Their romance comprised of love letters written to each other amidst the chaos that is Earth.

This is where I feel the third song ends, but I think I know the next part of the story.

Things seem to be looking up when a future version of himself appears, he has a replaced eye and looks as though he has been wrecked and attempts to kill him, shouting incoherently that he’ll not let the girl with the missing eye die. He shoots! The traveller is shot through the face. The future version of himself vanishes much like the girl did at first.

The nurse gives one of her eyes to the traveller and then goes on a hunt to find this mystery assailant. When the traveller recovers, he realises what’s happened and attempts to chase her.

Unfortunately, he is unable to chase the nurse, who is now the girl with the missing eye, because she has taken the time machine. The traveller must now build a second machine, without money and the sheer complexity of the contraption, it’s safe to say at this point, the traveller is trapped.

The girl with the missing eye follows the assailant, the future traveller. By the time she finds him he’s an senile old man, killing him now wouldn’t be enough, he would die naturally soon enough, she wanted him to suffer. So she leaves the old man to die and travels back destroying this alternative future which won’t actually happen if she kills the assailant at an earlier point in time.

While tracing the assailant’s life back, she finds herself standing at the foot of the bed of a much younger version of the assailant, recognising him as her love from the hospital. It suddenly dawns on her that SHE is the one he’s been ranting about, the one he could never find. To prevent a paradox, she had to leave him and never be found.

She mutters aloud “Is the way that my death began?” knowing full well that for her love to live, she would have to disappear and die never seeing him again.

She then travels into the future and hides in the day after the last day of Earth. Somewhere she know he would never search for her. Poetically hiding behind the last fallen star as is pointed out in Slatter’s third chapter of The Time Traveller’s Suite.

Back with the traveller, many years pass… Busking for money and parts for him to invest in the second machine. One with appropriate modifications to go forward and backwards so that when he found her, he would have to destroy whenever they were to bring her back with him.

Out of desperation though, he runs a test of the incomplete time machine, he knows it shouldn’t work, but he’s got few choices. It “works” he is launched back to but a few hours before his future self would come in and try and kill his past self.

With haste, he acquired a small firearm and made his way to the hospital where the assailant would be. He got there, and there he was, with the nurse!

“I will not let the girl with the missing eye die!” realising all too late that HE was the assailant and he had just done what he set out to prevent. The time machine destabalises and he returns to when he tested the incomplete time machine.

He loses hope, he knows what’s to become of him. He can’t complete the time machine to chase her, and that past version of himself is destined to become the busker. He resigns to live in solitude, accepting his fate as a man ruined by love.

Many years pass, he still lives on the street as an old man. On a cold night, a familiar face appears.

“I finally found you… My love” He says to the girl with the missing eye.

She glares angrily at him, as though what he did so many years ago had just happened. Unsatisfied with the prospect of murdering him, she says “I will find your past, and make you suffer ’til the end of your days”

Did she appreciate how right she was? So ends the tale of the Time Traveller.

Confessions of a Music Thief

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I’ve a confession to make – I have, once or twice, downloaded music illegally.

For example, about ten years ago I downloaded a couple of Dream Theater albums.

I love Dream Theater, I’ve since spent a lot of money on them – CDs, DVDs, Concert tickets. I’ve spent hundreds of pounds on their stuff over the years.

But I first heard of them when I was a penniless student. One of my bass guitar pupils came tome wanting to learn tracks from Images and Words – He gave me a CDR he’d burnt of the album.

We didn’t get far with a lot of the tracks – Dream Theater are a little beyond my bass abilities – but I did like the music.

So I downloaded everything I could, much of it via torrents.

Was that wrong?

As a consequence I became a fan and have spent over the years, hundreds of pounds on their stuff that I otherwise would not.

But of course it wasn’t legal.

Yesterday I discovered that my latest album has turned up on several torrent/download sites, leading to the biggest one day spike of listeners on bandcamp I’ve ever had.

Is this wrong?

I can’t bring myself to object. It is illegal, and frustrating because you can already hear it all for free and download much of it in exchange for just an email address.

Andrew Dubber, in his 20 things book, wrote about the process we go through when purchasing music. It goes: Listen, Love, Buy.

The modern listener expects to hear music before they buy it – and there’s no way to stop that.You have to turn someone into a fan before they spend any money on your music.

That’s exactly what happened when I first heard Dream Theater and subsequently with lots of other bands. The difference is that nowadays I discover music via legal means because they’re the most convenient – spotify, youtube, bandcamp etc.

I’d prefer it if I could control where my music was and prevent it from being on download sites that exist mostly to make money for others, but if people are hearing my music, well hopefully some of them will become fans. And that can’t be a bad thing.

Is it Prog, or is it Neo-skank Hardprog?

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I’ve just started marketing my new album – including sending it to people who write about prog. Yup, I’ve taken the plunge and chosen to openly use that most contentious of terms ‘prog’.

My name is Tom Slatter and I make prog rock music.

Why should I be wary of the term?

Certainly not because I want to be able say ‘my music doesn’t fit into categories – it transcends them’ I’m not quite that pretentious, and my music definitely fits into some rather obvious categories.

Also, not because ‘prog’ is an unfashionable term. I’m not writing top 40 pop after all, the mainstream does not beckon.

No, I’m a little wary of the term ‘prog’ because a few times I’ve seen a certain section of prog fandom engage in discussions about what is or is not prog – and discussions like that are always tedious. You know the sort, those who really care whether Deep Purple are hard rock or heavy metal, who really care whether you’re prog metal or just complicated, overlong metal. Whether you’re progressive – or just prog. Dull, dull, dull.

Being the pretentious muso that I am, my unversity dissertation was on genre distinctions in heavy metal – In particular comparing thrash metal to the NWOBHM.

Yes, I know, I know,

However while researching that I came across Running with the Devil by Robert Walser. This is a great book for anyone interested in heavy metal and sociology (isn’t that all of us?). From this I took the idea of continuums of genre, which is a much more useful idea than strict categories. Think of a continuum that runs from prog to not prog, or from heavy to not heavy. You can place different songs, bands, movements along those axis.

Much more useful than ‘It’s soft trance progcore,’ ‘no it isn’t it’s nervecore hardprog,’ ‘Rubbish, they’re clearly Clockpunk nanocore’

Sizzlerock
Nipplecore
Sazz
Wobbleprog

Making up imaginary genre names is fun.

What point was I making?

Oh yeah, my music is on the prog spectrum, somewhere near where it crosses the English singer-songwriter spectrum.

That’s the point.

Stozzcore

Heavy Slab.

Neo-Skank

The Bullshit Klaxon

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Awooga! Bullshit! Bullshit!

Listening to the Pod Delusion on my way to work, I heard a blatant real life example of Godwin’s Law – in a piece on male circumcision there was a recording of a rabbi making the ‘point’ that the only world leaders to have banned the practice were Hitler and Stalin.

Yup, someone was actually prepared to say that in public and carry on speaking as the audience to the debate laughed at him.

Now I could go on a long rant about what I think of people who think their rights as a parent negate the rights of their offspring. I could object long-windedly to cutting babies up for dubious reasons. But who’d read that? Those are just opinions and there’s a more important ideal:-

I’d like to propose that any public debate should include a simple device – the Bullshit Klaxon.

The Bullshit Klaxon would be manned by someone who was well up on logical fallacies and could identify for example, the appeal to authority, godwin’s law, the classic ‘You don’t have an answer, therefore goddidit’ etc.

Any time anyone trotted out one of these fallacies there would be a loud ‘Awooga!’ And they would be forbidden for speaking for the rest of the debate.

We must do this, because it says so in a bronze age book? Awooga!

Someone I met once had a personal experience, so it must be universal? Awooga!

You can’t believe something, therefore it isn’t true? Awooga!

I don’t mean I want a klaxon going off whenever there’s someone I disagree with. I’d like that, but it isn’t reasonable. Whereas it definitely is reasonable that public debate, especially large public debates that include elected officials, be policed for logical fallacies.

This would aid democracy, and mean that a lot of the loud, idiot voices would be drowned out by even louder awoogas.

It would also be a blow against religious freedom, what with the modern popular religions all being based on logical fallacy. The curtailment of religious freedom is of course a good thing, and I know because I personally can’t take the idea of God seriou- AWOOGA!

Oh all right, just because I can’t believe doesn’t mean there definitely isn’t a god. However, religions have done so much damage to so many people that surely – AWOOGA!

All right, that’s not a logical argument against all religion either but… look, just stop it. My opinions are facts, your facts are just opinions!

Erm. Yeah, Bullshit Klaxon. That’s what we need.

__________

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