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.