From: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org (ecto-digest) To: ecto-digest@smoe.org Subject: ecto-digest V9 #180 Reply-To: ecto@smoe.org Sender: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk ecto-digest Monday, June 23 2003 Volume 09 : Number 180 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: etiquette (was RE: cd collecting) [Leon van Stuivenberg ] Re: Where the money goes (was Re: Ecto Napster) [Nadyne Mielke ] Re: cd collecting [Andrew Fries ] Re: Seeking: the Saddest Songs on Earth ["ron" ] liz phair review. ["heidi maier" ] Farewell... ["Dave Williamson" ] Re: cd collecting [meredith ] RE: cd collecting ["John Zimmer" ] new 'la oreja de van gogh' ["dave" ] Re: Seeking: the Saddest Songs on Earth. [Andrew McMichael ] Re: Where the money goes (was Re: Ecto Napster) [Dan Riley ] Re: cd collecting [Damon ] Re: Andrea Koziol tour dates (Canada only, I think) [Damon ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 08:03:00 +0200 From: Leon van Stuivenberg Subject: Re: etiquette (was RE: cd collecting) > because you are a part of the ecto community. I'm not convinced that And isn't it great that the sender's address is always so visible that flaming off-list becomes so easy (heck, there's even no reply-to directed to the list so by default the reply always go to the originator of the message). ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 01:29:14 -0500 From: Xenus Sister Subject: Where the money goes (was Re: Ecto Napster) This article was in a link off Slashdot: Subliminal Fusion writes "Business 2.0 has an article that breaks down where that $1 goes when you buy a song from iTunes or other online music services. Key figures: the site takes .40, the labels take .30 and the artists get a measly 12 cents for each download." The link to the actual article: http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,49472,00.html ==================== Hey, Ecto Napster (or whatever it's called, but Ecto should be in the title) could do a lot better than that. Personally, I'd prefer it be non-profit. I was thinking that if we could pull something like this off, it would sure give a boost to spreading the name "ecto" as a genre. I can't count the number of times I've said "it's Ecto music" (or wanted to say it) and have gotten blank looks. It SHOULD be an established genre name, dammit! I keep trying to type the word into ID3 tags and CDEX and it's not accepted. Not to mention, it'd be a great way to promote Happy's name and music. I wish I were a business person. I'd be the last person who could start something like this. I'm way too flaky. Vickie ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 21 Jun 2003 23:34:48 -0700 From: Joseph Zitt Subject: Re: cd collecting Andrew Fries wrote: > Anyway, I wish instead of leaving the list, Dave would post these flames > and names of their authors, so we could shame them properly. It is up to > him, naturally. But we cannot do anything about it unless we know the > names now can we? I think this might be a bad precedent. Posting off-list email to a list has always been considered a major breach of netiquette. And if the guideline is to hold for the people who are probably in the right, it also has to hold for people who might be in the wrong. While it might seem a good idea, as someone suggested earlier, to have all replies go to the list rather than the sender by default, this can have catastrophic consequences, as I learned some years ago: someone's reply-bot didn't pay attention to whether it had already sent a vacation message to the address, so it replied to a message, and then replied to the reply, and then to that reply -- 700 times in under an hour. Perhaps more recent list software is built to keep that from happening, but I haven't heard about it. I've had conversations inadvertently wander off-list due to the current safer configuration, but the alternative would probably be worse. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 21 Jun 2003 23:37:41 -0700 From: Nadyne Mielke Subject: Re: Where the money goes (was Re: Ecto Napster) On Saturday, Jun 21, 2003, at 23:29 US/Pacific, Xenus Sister wrote: > This article was in a link off Slashdot: > Subliminal Fusion writes "Business 2.0 has an article that breaks down > where that $1 goes when you buy a song from iTunes or other online > music services. Key figures: the site takes .40, the labels take .30 > and the artists get a measly 12 cents for each download." > The link to the actual article: > http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,49472,00.html My questions are: 1. Are these figures actually correct? 2. How does it compare to the artist take for album sales? I'm under the impression that twelve cents per song, or $1.20 per album (full album downloads are $10) , is much better than what artists generally get for album sales. I could well be wrong, though. :) /nm ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 03:00:03 -0400 (EDT) From: Mike Matthews Subject: Today's your birthday, friend... i*i*i*i*i*i i*i*i*i*i*i *************** *****HAPPY********* **************BIRTHDAY********* *************************************************** *************************************************************************** ********************** Nik Popa (DJNikPopa@aol.com) *********************** *************************************************************************** -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- - -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Nik Popa Sun June 22 1969 Cancer Teresa VanDyne Thu June 23 1960 Cancer Dave Torok Mon June 24 1968 Cancer Ethan Straffin Thu June 24 1971 Cancer Kevin Dekan Mon June 27 1960 Cancer Samantha Tanner Tue June 30 1970 Wild Goose BunkyTom Tue July 02 1968 Cancer Anders Hallberg Tue July 03 1962 Cancer Kevin Harkins Thu July 05 1973 Cancer Laurel Krahn Mon July 05 1971 Cancer John J Henshon Mon July 05 1954 The Year Of The Horse / Ruled By The Moon Jim Gurley Mon July 06 1959 Cancer Lisa Rouchka Fri July 08 1960 Moonchild with Java Rising Courtney Dallas Fri July 09 1971 Catte Michael Peskura Sat July 09 1949 HallOfFamer Finney T. Tsai Sat July 09 1966 Cancer Larry Greenfield Tue July 11 1950 Virgo Rising; Gemini Moon Marion Kippers Tue July 13 1965 Kreeft Ellen Rawson Thu July 13 1961 Double Cancer Mitch Pravatiner Mon July 14 1952 Cancer R. Rapp Wed July 14 1954 On a Gray Eye Sojourn John Zimmer Sun July 16 1961 Cancer Dan Stark Sun July 16 1961 Cancer Cathy Guetzlaff Mon July 18 1955 Cancer Vlad Sat July 18 1970 Warning: severe tire damage Jani Pinola Thu July 20 1972 Jonquil - -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- ------------------------------ Date: 22 Jun 2003 17:34:40 +1000 From: Andrew Fries Subject: Re: cd collecting On Sun, 2003-06-22 at 16:34, Joseph Zitt wrote: > I think this might be a bad precedent. Posting off-list email to a list > has always been considered a major breach of netiquette. I agree, but I'd say every breach should be judged according to specific circumstances. For one thing, I would say replying off-list in the first place is acceptable only if it takes the discussion on a tangent that's very personal or totally irrelevant to the list. While flaming could fit that description I'd call it a breach of netiquette anyway. What's more, I'd say when it comes to a private reply to a public thread the recipient has at least some right to bring it back into the public if they feel the entire thread should remain public. Finally if the private message is somehow abusive I'd think you'd have every right to seek recourse/retribution from the community. In which case you'd have to show you've been wronged, and by whom. That's what I would do anyhow, instead of just packing up and leaving - be warned if you ever think of flaming me off-list :) - --------------------------------------------------------------------- "Grrr...Arrgh!" -- Mutant - -- 16:59:48 up 8 days, 5:12, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00-- ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 12:23:06 +0200 From: "ron" Subject: Re: Seeking: the Saddest Songs on Earth hi couple of songs that crack me up so much i avoid listening to them: michelle shocked - ballad of penny evans (heard a rumour there was an official release of this in the pipeline) joni mitchell - down to you dr hook - things i didnt say (will forever have some very painful associations) james taylor & emmylou harris - millworker ron np - brunatex sampler = nice!!!! ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 23:01:04 +1000 From: "heidi maier" Subject: liz phair review. i read this in the new york times online. i'm sure it probably appeared in the "proper" edition, also, but alas we don't get the times here in australia! heidi. - --- Liz Phair's exile in Avril-ville By Meghan O'Rourke In 1993, the year Liz Phair's "Exile in Guyville" came out, legions of young, middle-class, well-educated women found in her lo-fi debut a kind of all-purpose autobiography, and a template - smart, deadpan, but also earnest - for making sense of their own experience. Within a year Ms. Phair went from being a 26-year-old singer-songwriter who had performed live some half-dozen times to the woman on the cover of Rolling Stone with the headline "Liz Phair: A Rock and Roll Star Is Born." The obvious question was: Would Ms. Phair be able to sustain her success? Ten years later, having put out two albums, "Whip-Smart" (1994) and "whitechocolatespaceegg" (1998), that were both greeted with mixed praise, she is now releasing her fourth - the eponymously titled and much anticipated "Liz Phair." It is, Ms. Phair has suggested, her bid for center stage - the moment when she will finally make the leap from indie-rock quasi-stardom to teen-pop levels of superstardom. Instead, she has committed an embarrassing form of career suicide. The album introduces a new Phair: a divorced, 36-year-old single mom who nonetheless gushes like a teenager through relentlessly upbeat songs with bland choruses like "Rock me all night!" and "I am extraordinary/ If you'd ever get to know me" - ironic, yes, but somewhat limply and shallowly so. You half expect the "i's" in her liner notes to be dotted with little hearts. In place of a sometime feminist icon, we have a woman approaching 40 getting dolled up in market-approved teen gear (the bad schoolgirl look, recently embraced by Britney Spears). She's junked her oddball, sui generis eccentricity for songs about thirtysomething traumas wrapped up in bubble-gum pop that plays off a cheap dissonance: underneath this sunny soundscape lies the darkness of life's hard-won lessons. This is a superficial way of jolting us, and the result is that Ms. Phair often sounds desperate or clueless; the album has some of the same weird self-oblivion of a middle-aged man in a mid-life crisis and a new Corvette. Not only will Ms. Phair alienate her old fan base, as she has defensively acknowledged in recent interviews, but in trying to remodel herself as a contemporary Avril Lavigne or Alanis Morissette, she's revealed herself to be astonishingly tone-deaf to her own strengths. Lyrically, this album has little of the potent acuity of her early deconstructions of relationships, and musically it has none of her tactile immediacy. "Exile in Guyville," a song-for-song answer to the Rolling Stones' "Exile on Main Street," seemed shockingly new not only because Ms. Phair, in her cracked, monotonous voice, sang about sex so diffidently and explicitly but because Guyville was such a recognizable, ordinary place - a collective village of young Americans whose defining idiom was ironic detachment. Ms. Phair's particular gift lay in her sharp-tongued charting of everyday emotions. Nearly all the songs were about romantic yearning, getting together, breaking up; the album was like a sophisticated self-help manual, whether you heard her songs as cautionary tales or as encouragement to take more risks. She wittily nailed the sulky disagreements of relationships, how quickly the trivial could provoke a sour truth: "And it's true that I stole your lighter/ And it's also true that I lost the map/ But when you said that I wasn't worth talking to/ I had to take your word on that." Her voice always held a back-story of suppressed emotions, the kind it's hard to get into a pop song; when she said "That's just fine with me" in response to a sexual proposition, you heard everything that wasn't fine, and also all the reasons she didn't want to get into it. She repeatedly leveled her straight-talking sensibility at men who said "things I wouldn't say/ straight to my face, boy" while expecting her to be a kind of sexy, game compadre. On a good day, Guyville was a place where women feistily, happily flaunted their sexuality. On a bad day Guyville was a place where one woke up with a man and "almost immediately . . . felt sorry." But where P.J. Harvey's wailing or Courtney Love's anger were shamanistic and almost feral, Ms. Phair was reassuringly human in her appetites, her arrogance, her fear, her inability to quite hit that high note. Her sexual frankness went hand in hand with a recorded-in-the-garage immediacy. The songs were spindly and moved in an odd, lopsided manner - parts were always coming loose, and who knew if Ms. Phair was going to hit the next note as she crashed her way through the chord progressions. Her signature style of drawing a word out across several notes in a kind of dull trill made a mockery of all that was feminine about singing. It seemed aptly to capture a generation's uncertainty about what might come next in the sexual game during a permissive era shadowed by anxieties about AIDS and date rape, culminating in Antioch College's prescriptive sexual code. Living up to her debut would have been nearly impossible, and the critical consensus was that "Whip-Smart" and "whitechocolatespaceegg" didn't. While "Whip-Smart" didn't have the same singularity of theme as "Guyville," it embroidered on Ms. Phair's interest in American mythologies in songs like "Shane" and "Go West." "Whitechocolatespaceegg" was more explicitly driven by songs about characters (several narrated by men) and eccentric wit (there's a very funny song about a family portrait of her Uncle Alvarez). Neither album was a breakout success. And so Ms. Phair has decided to reinvent herself. For the new CD, which took her five years to put together, she had come up with an album's worth of songs (a handful produced by Michael Penn, which explains why she sometimes sounds like his wife, the singer Aimee Mann), but still felt something was "missing," as she told Entertainment Weekly. So she teamed up with the Matrix - the songwriter/producer masterminds behind the teenybopper Avril Lavigne's recent top-40 hits "Complicated" and "Sk8er Boi" - in search of a radio hit. The Matrix are now writing songs for everyone from Britney to Ricky Martin, and they're not exactly in the business of making a singer sound more like herself. Yet Ms. Phair's appeal has always lain in her idiosyncrasies. When it comes to rock, we're used to wincing at stars dressed up in packaging that masks a lack of talent. Here, the wince comes instead from watching a genuine talent dressed in bland packaging. The album lacks the distinctive flair and sass of Ms. Phair's earlier work, and has little of its savvy insight. The songs are catchy, replete with pop hooks, but they're relentlessly peppy, and often Ms. Phair sounds as over-carbonated as a 13-year-old full of Diet Coke and Pop Rocks. The slick production diminishes her boldness the same way those child-size T-shirts emblazoned with the word "Sexy" always seem to make a mockery of their wearers. Her fantastically expressive diffidence has been replaced with a smooth and characterless tunefulness, pitch-corrected all the way through. In the world of "Liz Phair," banality wins the day, and intimacy is undermined by full-throttle presentation; the pleasingly goofy, outsize metaphors from "Guyville" and "Whip-Smart" about eyelashes that "sparkle like gilded grass" have devolved into hoary allegories in which relationships are compared to roadside accidents; life is a series of red and green traffic lights, and a woman is "like a wild flame." Throughout, the singer studs her verses with soft clichis like "too scared to commit" and "it's a war with the whole wide world" and moments of "lying awake in the dark/ trying to figure out who you are." Ms. Phair is still, at times, fearlessly and bizarrely outspoken - consider "H.W.C.," an ode to the beauty benefits of semen. In the first song, "Extraordinary," she offers a characteristic skewering of the contemporary male's fetishization of psychotic women - "So I still take the trash out/ does that make me too normal for you?" But the album's sporadic ironies ("I'm your average everyday sane-psycho supergoddess") are robbed of context and lost in all the sugar-coated guitar joie de vivre. The overall effect is of spending an afternoon with a once sardonic best friend overdosing on mood enhancers. You wait for the wink to come - the flaw, the crack in her voice, the weird minor note - that signals that Ms. Phair knows what she's up to (and that she knows we know too). But it never does. IN doing advance publicity for the album, Ms. Phair has repeatedly said she wanted to explore new musical avenues, and noted that she wouldn't know how to write "Guyville" today even if she wanted to. But no one expects her to. The newly divorced Ms. Phair could have written a record that captured the experience of women like her, women who may not have a husband to bring home a second check, but still want an active sexual life and maybe a child, and also want the means to raise that child. Music, after all, is a cultural arena that's somewhat safe for older women. Patti Smith, Lucinda Williams, Kim Gordon and Chrissie Hynde - all of whom have something in common, in terms of personality and audience, with Ms. Phair - are doing fine. So it's not exactly clear where the desire to infantilize herself comes from, unless it's that Ms. Phair, perennially willful, wants to buck expectations and write home about it. On only two songs on the album does Ms. Phair's impastoed, cheery smile crack, and both get under your skin. "Little Digger" tries to explain to her 6-year-old son why his father is gone and she's dating other men, and "Friend of Mine" tells of an old lover drifting out of reach. It captures something you may have heard your own single friends say - namely, that at a certain point they just don't want to keep getting seriously involved ("I don't have the heart to try/ one more false start in life") because the adult toll of losing not only a lover but also a friend - the person you talk to every day - is too formidably high. Like so many of Ms. Phair's early songs, "Friend of Mine" begins in medias res, with a wistful but wry plan for recovery: "Gonna take a vacation/ stop chasing what I lack." Of course, plans for recovery are quickly undermined by woe: "It's been so long/ since you've been a friend of mine," she sings, before saying "I miss you" - and for the first time on the record you hear an emotion more complicated than stage-lit optimism or empty irony. It makes you want to play the song again. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 21 Jun 2003 16:47:33 -0400 From: "Dave Williamson" Subject: Farewell... Meredith, This came through in the same session where I was sending my unsubscribe note, as did Vickie's reply. Thanks for the note - though I didn't request it or a public defence in our personal exchange. Yes I've been kicking around this list for a long time - probably about 10 years if my memory serves correct. As I noted to you, I hoped I'd made it clear to the list where I drew the line in my opinion, but that I had also dropped off because I really had no interest in raising any further personal shots via the subject at hand. If my opinion offended the general ecto population, I apologize. That was not my intent. I think the efforts of many of the people on this list to promote what is truly alternative music are to be commended. The music sharing subject is a controversial and emotional one, and an area where technology has outgrown the confines of an existing set of definitions to determine how to appropriately put it in a box. I don't know what the answers are to solve the issue, but it does have to be solved in one way, shape or form. The corporations won't solve it in any way that is satisfactory to either the individual or the artist. But nor will it be solved by putting the rights of individuals ahead of basic morals and ethics either. Technological advances and evolution are a reality - I have nothing against them and technology is not the issue (after a 20 year career in the software business I make my living from it). And Vickie, no I will not share anything sent to me privately. It is not right for me to do so. I dealt with each on my own (though in some cases just wish in retrospect that I'd ignored them), and that's really all that matters. So yes it's time to move on. Solely because of this music sharing exchange or the results to me personally from it? No. But it is a culminating event in a personal evolution away from what I signed up for initially. I felt the same thing on the Jane Siberry siblings list after many years on it as well and eventually departed. Maybe feeling like it's time to go also sequences with a change in my personal life. After two years in Boston it is time to go home to Canada - something I'll be doing later in the summer. Living here has been a rich musical experience for me, and in a two year time frame I've seen as many live shows as in the 10 previous back home. But that has not been without the cost of living through post 9/11 and Iraq in a country that has become ever more insular and introspective. Many thanks to many of you for some great musical ideas (notably all of which I was able to find either song excerpts, or artist authorized/provided downloads for before purchasing). My CD collection is richer for it. As for Happy Rhodes, she has a whole legion of fans north of the border as a result of me playing her stuff for friends, family and acquaintances. I hope she finds her way north to play some time. I'll continue to promote the cause, and breeze through the ectophile web page for new stuff. But seeing that raft of ecto emails in my Inbox is a thing of the past. Cheers, best wishes, and happy listening. My two final shows in Boston before I head home are Aimee and Tori, so maybe catch some of you there. Dave. - -----Original Message----- From: owner-ecto@smoe.org [mailto:owner-ecto@smoe.org] On Behalf Of meredith Sent: Saturday, June 21, 2003 12:24 PM To: ecto@smoe.org Subject: RE: cd collecting Hi, I've been rendered pretty much speechless by this, so forgive my lack of eloquence. This is for those of you (you know who you are -- I don't, nor do I want to) who participated in poisoning Dave Williamson's in-box with flames, thus causing him to leave ecto with the bitterest possible taste in his mouth: I hope you're proud of yourselves. As the years go on, I'm finding more and more that the perception most ectophiles have of themselves as a good group of people who tolerate divergent opinions and strive to maintain a flame-free environment is just a myth. Occasionally I forget this and actually take time out of my day to stand up to defend this perception, but then I find out it was just a waste of time. It's fine to disagree with someone (I didn't agree with Dave's position, myself). But if you don't have the balls to say what you have to say in the open forum, then don't say it at all. (And in case anyone out there is wondering why the hell I feel I have the right to make this statement: woj is the listowner, and woj and I are a package deal. I have the list password, so technically I own the list too.) =============================================== Meredith Tarr New Haven, CT USA mailto:meth@smoe.org http://www.smoe.org/meth =============================================== Live At The House O'Muzak House Concert Series http://muzak.smoe.org =============================================== ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 12:12:08 -0400 From: meredith Subject: Re: cd collecting Hi, Andrew responded: >What's more, I'd say when it comes to a private reply to a public thread >the recipient has at least some right to bring it back into the public >if they feel the entire thread should remain public. No. Sorry, but no. Posting a private response to a public forum without the responder's express prior permission is one of the most severe breaches of netiquette possible. Ask on any other forum and I guarantee you the answer will be the same. (In fact, on one of the lists I run that by necessity needs to have explicit ground rules, it is one of the only grounds for immediate removal from the list with no possibility of return.) And as to the issue of why ecto is set up for replies to go back to the poster and not the list: that's the way mailing lists are supposed to be set up, to prevent responses that are meant to be private from accidentally going to the entire list. A couple of the lists that I run ended up getting changed to replies going to the list because the people on the list were unable to understand this, and almost immediately they started to figure out why it's better to have it set up this way. =============================================== Meredith Tarr New Haven, CT USA mailto:meth@smoe.org http://www.smoe.org/meth =============================================== Live At The House O'Muzak House Concert Series http://muzak.smoe.org =============================================== ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 11:10:14 -0700 From: "John Zimmer" Subject: RE: cd collecting Meth wrote: > This is for those of you (you know who you are -- I don't, nor do > I want to) who participated in poisoning Dave Williamson's in-box > with flames, thus causing him to leave ecto with the bitterest > possible taste in his mouth: I hope you're proud of yourselves. This is highly uncool, and definitely NOT the kind of thing this list should be about. I disagreed with some of Dave's statements as vehemently as anybody, but it was soon apparent that this was a "religious" debate, in which neither camp was likely to win converts. I quickly moved on to other threads which held interest for me, and whoever felt justified in the actions Meredith described ought to have done the same. John ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 16:12:26 -0400 From: "dave" Subject: new 'la oreja de van gogh' So I was at Walmart getting theDark Angel DVD and I took a look through their CDs, found one I wasn't expecting, a new album, 'lo que te conte mientras te hacias la dormida', by La Oreja De Van Gogh, a great band from Spain. They've got a nice light rock sound, best comparison I can think of is the lighter side of 10,000 Maniacs, they work some interesting sounds into their music, and vocalist Amaia Montero is excellent. If you like bands like Maniacs, Sixpence, Frente, I'd recommend checking this band out. np: Grupo Limite - Mirame ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 21:22:25 +0100 From: Andrew McMichael Subject: Re: Seeking: the Saddest Songs on Earth. Hi folks. The sad song you'd probably all be aware of is 'This Woman's Work' by some english woman whose name escapes me. I have such a bad long term memory. Aside from this, I find 'Left Me A Fool' from the 'Strange Fire' album by Indigo Girls incredibly sad, and around 99% of the material of the Blue Nile also! Specifically a track called 'Regret' which only appears on an album in aid of a photographer called Oscar Marzaroli that they did in conjunction with other Glasgow-based artists. It just oozes hard core depression. :-) 'The Wing And The Wheel' by Nanci Griffith is sad/beautiful/wistful, as is 'Junk Drawer' by Jennifer Terran. And filling in that last slot..probably 'You're Ageing Well' from Dar Williams. Sometimes I find it hard to define where sad ends and beautiful begins, but much of Cocteau Twins and Bel Canto fit into both those areas for me. On a completely different note, I hadn't really thought about it..but I guess Happy would need a day job! I don't know how many CDs she sells, maybe enough to fill the boot of a small family car (I wish it were a cruise liner personally!)..but to hear that she had a regular day to day existence kind of makes me wonder! When I first became fanatical about Kate Bush, I couldn't get round the fact that sometimes she'd have to put on her marigolds and do the dishes. Hearing that Happy has a day job kind of had the same mind bending effect on me!! So what kind of job could that be? I hope it's not McDonalds, not that I have anything against that - I find their cartons very edible. I was going to make a joke about Happy meals but I decided against it. Okay, I'll get my coat. Andrew McMichael ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 15:26:44 -0700 From: "Bill" Subject: Re: new 'la oreja de van gogh' On Sun, 22 Jun 2003 16:12:26 -0400, dave wrote: >So I was at Walmart getting theDark Angel DVD and I took a look through >their CDs, found one I wasn't expecting, a new album, 'lo que te conte >mientras te hacias la dormida', by La Oreja De Van Gogh, a great band from >Spain. They've got a nice light rock sound, best comparison I can think of >is the lighter side of 10,000 Maniacs, they work some interesting sounds >into their music, and vocalist Amaia Montero is excellent. If you like bands >like Maniacs, Sixpence, Frente, I'd recommend checking this band out. I second that emotion. The music, the performance, and the singing of La Oreja de Van Gogh are all worth your time and money. Check them out! Also worth checking out from the Spanish/Latin world are Elefante, and also Ely Guerra. Happy EWS. >np: Grupo Limite - Mirame Tell me more! - - Bill G. ------------------------------ Date: 22 Jun 2003 18:31:06 -0400 From: Dan Riley Subject: Re: Where the money goes (was Re: Ecto Napster) Nadyne Mielke writes: > On Saturday, Jun 21, 2003, at 23:29 US/Pacific, Xenus Sister wrote: > > This article was in a link off Slashdot: > > Subliminal Fusion writes "Business 2.0 has an article that breaks > > down where that $1 goes when you buy a song from iTunes or other > > online music services. Key figures: the site takes .40, the labels > > take .30 and the artists get a measly 12 cents for each download." > > The link to the actual article: > > http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,49472,00.html > > My questions are: > 1. Are these figures actually correct? In the recording, tv and movie industries, it is usually safe to assume that all figures are lies. At best, these are "representative" numbers not specific to any particular store. > 2. How does it compare to the artist take for album sales? I'm under > the impression that twelve cents per song, or $1.20 per album (full > album downloads are $10) , is much better than what artists generally > get for album sales. I could well be wrong, though. :) That was my first reaction too--that 12% was pretty good by the dismal industry standards. Some relevant quotes from the site refd: The record company receives "performance royalties" that are paid to license an actual recording (not the written music). That explains why some performers, like alt-rocker Aimee Mann, run their own labels -- it allows them to keep a larger share of these royalties for themselves. (so, naively, Aimee Mann might get 42%; if she's also the publisher of her own music, she might get 50%--I doubt her cut is actually that good, but still, Go Aimee!) Twelve percent is average, but successful bands often hammer out better contracts. In many major-label contracts, charges for "packaging" and promotional copies are subtracted from the artist's cut, leaving the talent with a measly 8 percent. BMG, Universal, and Warner have announced plans to do away with such deductions for digital downloads. Indies like Aimee are probably the only hope for an "Ecto Napster"; there's no way the ecto collective would be able to negotiate rights with the major labels, which leaves the revolutionaries like Jane and Aimee who insist on actually owning their own creations (embarrassing confession: I have no idea who owns the performances on Happy's CDs). This also illustrates how important it is to get smaller labels into stores like iTunes, and how much incentive the major labels have to resist this. There's still potential there for internet distribution of music to be a disruptive technology in a *good* way, but it won't happen if the major labels have their way. - -dan ------------------------------ Date: 22 Jun 2003 19:00:55 -0400 From: Dan Riley Subject: Re: liz phair review. America's newspaper of record wrote, by way of heidi maier: > The album introduces a new Phair: a divorced, 36-year-old single mom who > nonetheless gushes like a teenager through relentlessly upbeat songs with > bland choruses like "Rock me all night!" and "I am extraordinary/ If you'd > ever get to know me" - ironic, yes, but somewhat limply and shallowly so. [...] > Ms. Phair is still, at times, fearlessly and bizarrely outspoken - consider > "H.W.C.," an ode to the beauty benefits of semen. In the first song, > "Extraordinary," she offers a characteristic skewering of the contemporary > male's fetishization of psychotic women - "So I still take the trash out/ > does that make me too normal for you?" But the album's sporadic ironies > ("I'm your average everyday sane-psycho supergoddess") are robbed of context > and lost in all the sugar-coated guitar joie de vivre. I heard part of "Extraordinary" on an episode of Charmed (guilty pleasure) TiVo picked up--they cut it off just before the irony really kicked in, but I liked the performance enough to google the lyrics and read the whole thing. I found the characterizations of the track ("relentlessly upbeat" *and* "bizarrely outspoken") a bit dissonant, but I will do my best to not fetishize the reviewer... - -dan ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 16:19:02 -0700 From: Damon Subject: Re: cd collecting On 21 Jun, meredith wrote: > This is for those of you (you know who you are -- I don't, nor do I want > to) who participated in poisoning Dave Williamson's in-box with flames, > thus causing him to leave ecto with the bitterest possible taste in his > mouth: I hope you're proud of yourselves. damn, and i went and started the thread, too. well, not the music sharing / piracy thread really, but the thread that *launched* that thread. i'd kinda hoped it would grow into an interesting discussion of collecting habits and media and what practical solutions people are coming up with to incorporate new and/or old technology into their listening habits. and i did enjoy that part of the thread, it gave me some ideas to follow up on. but i was very disappointed when it spawned an IP/piracy/technology flamewar. :( humans... we get passionate about things and forget to think, i guess. a strength but also a great weakness? - -damon - -- dl+ecto@usrbin.ca: protecting my real address since 2002 (too late!) > EWS starts here! < ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 16:32:30 -0700 From: Damon Subject: Re: Andrea Koziol tour dates (Canada only, I think) On 20 Jun, Sherlyn Koo wrote: > Andrea's kind of jazz/folk/torch, and she can sing so sweet it makes the bottom > drop out of your stomach and your heart break at the same time. Definitely a live > show not to miss, IMO. i'll second this, having discovered her at the same time at the vancouver folk festival while sherlyn was out here. also to be noted is how much she gets *into* the performance she gives... it makes her especially fun to see live. :) - -damon - -- dl+ecto@usrbin.ca: protecting my real address since 2002 (too late!) > EWS starts here! < ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 22:18:45 -0400 (EDT) From: breinheimer@webtv.net Subject: sad songs, wild world and a thank you a few belated sad songs: Al Stewart- Roads to Moscow In which a Russian peasant fights bravely against the nazis for the motherland only to be sent to a transit camp (Siberia) by his government at war's end. I saw Al do this live in the 70's at the University of Bridgeport (back in their wpkn days they had great concerts). He showed still photos on a large screen just for this one song. Heartbreaking. Bonzo Dog Band- Slush Hard to believe you'd see this group here. A simple haunting refrain with an incongruous laugh played repeatedly over it. I've not heard anything else like it. Especially surprising for a band renowned for its comedy. Tom Newman- Sad Sing Don't let the melody fool you. Focus on the wistful lyrics instead. Billie Holiday-Strange Fruit could make you sad or angry when you realize what the title refers to (lynchings). Albert's original missive that started the thread mentioned a friend who found everything by the Velvet Underground sad. While I do find this true of some songs (heroin for instance) there are many where the reaction is, well, hard to imagine. Does anybody really tear up when they here Sister Ray? For the person who wrote in about the female cover of Wild World I went to the allmusic site and searched for songs with that title. Of course I can't really be sure but the only thing that looked promising (imo) was a cover by a group called Baptism on "Cat People- a Tribute to Cat Stevens". It also features Kitty Litter covering Miles from Nowhere. Finally (about time you say) thanks to Nadyne and everyone else ( you know who you are) who took the time to give me recording advice. I'm in a difficult situation and really appreciate the help. -Bill np: Another Green World (Brian Eno) ps to adamk- remember those quiet evenings. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 22:25:04 -0400 (EDT) From: breinheimer@webtv.net Subject: sad songs Unbelievably my last missive wasn't long enough (try to refrain from any overly sarcastic retorts). I have to add John Prine's "There's a Hole in Daddy's Arm (Where the Money Goes)" to the sad song list. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 00:31:23 -0400 From: Jeff Wasilko Subject: Any interest in bringing Happy to Boston? I'm trying to put together a fall house concert series, and I'd like to include Happy in the schedule. Would there be interest from the Boston ectophiles in seeing Happy on August 9 or 10? - -j ------------------------------ End of ecto-digest V9 #180 **************************