Music For Dozens Blog

So, it's not quite "official" MFDZ office space, but Chris and I have decided to go in on a desk at Less Distracted, a room in a converted industrial building near the river that's shared by a bunch of neat web-based Portland enterprises like Urban Honking and Tables Turned. The room is organized by Javan who was so helpful in building last year's PDX Pop Now! website.

One of our new office mates, Marcus from Tables Turned has already proved neighborly by uploading a track to MFDZ: The Hot Button:



We'll post some pictures of the space as soon as we take them. In the meantime, welcome Marcus!

MFDZ's skunkworks project exists!

We've a new prolific artist here at MFDZ! Cise dropped in about a week ago, and I've been listening ever since. I wanted to know more about the artist, so via Google, I found this interview.

How, do you think, does the internet (or mp3) change the music industry?
"To tell you the truth, personally it's helped me leaps and bounds ! It's been a great way for me to reach listeners who would have otherwise been inaccessible. In only a few months, I've been able to build a solid fan base and generate a considerable buzz. Apparently, most of the new artists that people come across on the internet are average at best. So when something comes along that's different, and hot, they gravitate to it. That's the kind of consistent response I've been getting. Where I'm kinda like "thanx for listening", they're like "thanx for being here", ya know ? Soon everything is gonna be on the internet and it will be more convenient to make music available to different parts of the world. Simply put, it's the next step in the evolution of music."

The Beauty, another neat Portland band that uploaded today, couldn't really come from a more distant part of the Portland scene than Agents of Future without being from Seattle. On their Soundclick page, they describe themselves as the "house band" at Voodoo Doughnut, the crazy all-night doughnut shop in downtown Portland, which used to sell a Nyquil-filled doughnut before they got in trouble with the FDA. Shows there take place on the roof of the bathroom, about ten feet above whatever crowd has managed to squeeze into the tiny shop's very limited standing room.

The Beauty's music is like a combination of TV on the Radio's indie soul with Nine Inch Nails' industrial crunch. The song they uploaded, Weight in Gold, combines a distorted didgy beat that's often punctuated with shrill beeps and shreiks with harmonized vocals that range from sweetly pretty to gritty and throaty. It's a compelling mix:

Agents of Future is a self-described "bunch of Jesus-loving, jalopy-gospel way-backers [who] get together and do creative things". They're part of The Bridge a youth-faith community that at least used to meet (I don't know, maybe the still do) at the Meow Meow/Loveland, the Portland all-ages club where we've held PDX Pop the last two years. The first year of the festival, when we showed up Sunday morning to get set up, their meeting was just wrapping up. After taking down their tables and chairs, a few of the Bridge-ers stuck around to chat and ended up staying for the festival. Maybe some of those guys turn out to be in this band, who knows?

Anyway, they describe their track, Clockwork, as a "piano punk ballad hot-as-magma" which I think speaks for itself:



One cool thing Agents of Future did in posting this track was to include the chord progression along with the lyrics. I don't think we'd ever anticipated a band using the lyrics section for that, but it's a great idea.

Last spring, while working on curating the PDX Pop Now! 2005 compilation, I was totally amazed by the amount of amazing music that's made in this town. The first year we'd gotten about 125 submissions for the thirty or so slots on the double disc compilation. Last year we got more than 400. Even after we filtered that down to around 150 on a first listen, the list was still overwhelming. Everyone involved ended up with a bunch of bands they'd never previously heard who now became new favorites. And, obviously, with only about twenty slots open after the great job our compilation team did soliciting tracks from bigger local bands like Slater-Kinney and The Decemberists, not all of these could make the final cut.

One of my favorites was a band called Dragging An Ox Through Water. The song they submitted was warm and buzzy pop with a great combination of lo-fi finger picked acoustic guitar, beautiful synth harmonies, and a great melody. So, I was thrilled this morning to see they'd uploaded a song to MFDZ. It's called Aces:



I look forward to more uploads from them (and maybe even from some of those other great Portland bands that are lurking out there).

I'm always so impressed by people who have actual old-fashioned technical musical ability. I just spent the last hour recording my housemate Ethan singing a Bach hymn, Owelt, Ich Muss Dich Lassen. It's four part harmony and Ethan sang all of the parts himself (the tenor part was the hardest). I spend so much time immersed in music that is (or pretends or aspires to be) "naive", "direct", or "personal" in some way that it's amazing and refreshing to see someone with a real grasp on music as literature, as history, someone who can use the tools of reading and performing to make music from the past live now.

And, Ethan's using the recording as part of the process involved in getting this incredibly cool job working on an online Google ad campagin. He's (fingers-crossed) going to be part of a traveling quintet of brass-playing singers who'll travel the west coast serenading gMail users. I've been working on him to get a laptop and digital camera (not to mention a blog) to document the trip when it happens. I'll keep you updated on that, but in the meantime, here's the track:

Hanging out around in new uploads just now, I discovered some super cool music. Nephewredman combines electro beats and sounds with some catchy vibrato-ed electric guitar melodies to make songs that walk the tough line between being electro/atmospheric and pop-listenable. Here are two of my favorites:

Why So Many Ladybugs? is totally the breakout hit:



and also checkout In Transit It Is:



Note: One little complaint about our beloved MFDZ users I've been asked to pass on by many of my friends: Come on people, let's see some spacing and capitalization (and fewer numerics) in the artist and user names, you're freaking out the old-folks! You've got real names and you know some real words, I'm sure, what's so wrong with those?