Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Creative

Trio Season 6 – Suite #3: A Confidence Game

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Trio: Season Six, Suite #3: A Confidence Game
Unengaged, Tangling, Wonder

A sample of what I had to say in this Trio…

Unengaged
It wasn’t the lack of confidence in doing that thing, but the lack of confidence that came in the wake of that – like, “Oh god, what have I gotten myself into?” … It’s also about [lack of] confidence in performing it: I wrote that melody almost just as an exercise in getting it up into falsetto over and over again. I didn’t ever think I was going to perform it that way. … If it’s your song, and you wrote it that way, then there must be a reason it’s in falsetto.

Tangling
It was the anchor of this set … Somebody moves out of your life for some period … and you think, “wow, we’re so connected.” And then they get back and you don’t feel that connection immediately. And you wonder – was that connection so tenuous that it dissipated with the distance? … People change over a period of time, and you have to take some time to retune that connection.

Wonder
I think anyone can identify with that walking down the street – or, in the case of this song, in a train station – and you see somebody, and in your mind you have a whole fantasy about them in a split second … and then they get on the train. Or, maybe that’s just me?


Trio – the original singer-songwriter web session – returns for its sixth season featuring my original music, recorded live and DIY in my bedroom. You can download this Trio, or listen to a previous Trio:

The Sixty One

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Editorial Note: Since I first penned this essay The Sixty One has added some terrific features, but has also experienced disappointing community turbulence, which can largely be attributed to repeatedly poor public relations response from the administrators of the site..

The Sixty One is a unique social network that allows artists and musicians to interact, and the lack of a community relations plan – or, worse, imposing a pre-defined view of community onto the site – is not the prescription for continued success.

While I still think T61 offers a unique and enjoyable user experience, I do not recommend becoming a user of the site at this time. Clearly the administrative team needs to further develop their approach to community relations policies and infrastructure and their overarching plan for the site before any further expansion can be both feasible and positive.

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Lately the focus on my crushing internet attention has been brought to bear on The Sixty One, and compelling and altogether addictive new take on music meeting social networking.

At its base, 61 is a place to discover and stream (largely free) new music. Never a bad thing. However, it’s a little more complex than that.

When you sign up as a Listener on 61, you receive a small allocation of points. You’re free to listen to your heart’s content, but if you hear something you enjoy you can use your points to promote – or “bump” – the song.

It takes the most points to bump a new song, and increasingly less points to bump songs that are already popular. Eventually a song reaches the tipping point and launches onto the main page, where it racks up dozens of bumps by the hour from even the most casual of listeners.

When the songs you promote are further promoted by others you experience a return on your investment in the form of more points, scaled based on how early you bumped a song. This makes the act of bumping (and deciding when to bump) an exercise in risk/reward strategy if you want to maximize your ability to spread your influence (points) even further.

The competitive aspect of 61 – who has the most points – isn’t difficult to game. It doesn’t take much smarts to figure out what the community likes to hear, and to bump those sorts of songs as early and as often as possible. In that position you are effectually an A&R Rep – playing the numbers game in the hopes that a fraction of your investments will reap benefits large enough to cover your losses.

If you were playing to win, you’d get pretty far pretty fast with this strategy. Of course, some A&R Reps suck at picking the big hits, either due to a tin ear or a fickle public, and if you’re indiscriminate with your points you might wind up sharing the same fate.

However, there isn’t much joy to the 61 with that approach – you quickly lose sight of discovering amazing new music … listening to it and loving it, feeling that you have to proselytize to all your friends about it, and then realizing that 61 is built explicitly to allow you to do just that.

In this role you are more of a critic – except, there is no pejorative, judgmental facet to the site – it’s all bumps. So, really you’re more like a DJ, spinning the records that deserve the most ears. As you accumulate more points you become more influential – not only due to your riches, but because you’ll gain special abilities, like multi-bumping and reviving past hits. And, your picks don’t have to shoot to success overnight – just like artists receive residuals, you’ll continue to receive points as users discover (and re-discover) the songs you’ve endorsed.

The higher your rank, and the more consistently you bump tasty tunes, the more chance other Listeners will start to take note by subscribing to you – a built in audience to cascade additional bumps down your list of favorite tunes that benefits you and the artists.

If it sounds as though Listeners have all the fun… well, they do. The Artist side of the site is much more passive – you post songs, and sit around praying and fervently spreading good will via comments on other users and songs. When your songs are bumped you win points, which eventually allows you to post more songs, thus winning you more points… et cetera.

Artists are too playing a game – a subtle contest of scarcity and demand. Listeners love discovering new songs and swarm to songs with the most activity (think: feeding frenzy). On a slow day a mediocre new song will seem like blood in open water to bored listeners, but on a busy evening your big hit could get lost in the shuffle – hopelessly marooned with a low point total until a benevolent Listener/DJ gives it a fresh spin.

If you don’t make enough points before hitting your upload limit you’re stuck schlepping your tunes around the community, fishing for an endorsement to open up a new upload spot. (And, as I discovered last night, deleting a song subtracts its points from your total – an unfortunate war of attrition.)

To take advantage of this situation, as an Artist it’s in your favor to dole out catchy tunes slowly rather than dump your catalog all at once. This will entice listeners to bump each of your songs in succession, rather than having to choose between multiple tunes.

Also, Listeners can’t vote until a song has played for at least a minute, so your first few tunes should be chosen with this in mind. The one-minute-delay also promotes research – Listeners need something to do with their 60 seconds, and if they don’t see a catalog of past successes on your page they might be looking for another reason to bump you, so make sure to have a profile image, write a bio, and leave a comment on your song.

All in all, The Sixty One it makes enjoying (and creating) music a game, a game that lacks the pejorative “bad” vote of other discovery systems, like my old favorite somesongs. If it sounds interesting to you I hope you’ll sign up (and maybe even throw some points towards Arcati Crisis)! And, if you list me (krisis) as your referrer, I’ll even make points off of your making points!

So far my favorite tunes have been:

  • Anj Granieri — Former Stranger – On this tune the S. Jersey native sounds like an improbably cheery mashup of Dresden Dolls, Rasputina, and Des’Ree. She makes her Tin Angel debut on April 3rd – I may stop by.
  • The Box Social — Hot Damn! – Fuzzy hot rock in the Jet mold, but they’ll raise you great vocals and much more cowbell.
  • STEFY — Chelsea – Awesomely trashy electro-pop built on a rip-off of the riff from “Sweet Dreams.”
  • Wonkavision — Double-Dealing – Boy/Girl indie pop duet sounds suspiciously like New Pornographers, but jangly and loose in all the best ways.
  • grinConvention — Your Name – The Shirley Manson of T61: sultry female singer fronting an act across international boundaries.
  • Shearwater — Rooks – Snow Patrol with heart and reverb.

    • Not Dead, Just Floating

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    February tends to be a pretty sparse month on CK, aside from the first two, whose blogging were fueled by infatuation with the Queen of Darkness and Elise, respectively.

    Actually, February tends to be an infatuated month – a 28-day Fat Tuesday of topical gluttony – which is maybe why the blogging tends to drop off. In 2004 it was SongFight; last year, consuming media. 2006 was… being scruffy? I honestly couldn’t tell you.

    I bring those three years up specifically, as they’ve dictated much of my month so far. The scruffiness aspect finally ended this morning, when I shaved off what I think (if we’re being fair) I can say was my first ever mustache. It was charming at first, and looked dashing in photos, but the prickliness of it finally got to me (just as Elise was claiming I had progressed past Brillo-pad stage, too; oh well).

    The mustache was, in turn, indicative of my preoccupation with things other than self – as typically I am much too busy examining myself in the mirror to allow any such deviation from core residual self image – and those two things correspond to the other two years I mentioned above.

    Like a square to a rectangle but not visa versa, SongFight is to Arcati Crisis. SongFight was perhaps the first time Gina and I masqueraded under our proper name, though we had certainly recorded together before as an entity. And, from our fours-years-ago SongFighting emerged “Moscow, Idaho,” which we played an utterly stunning version of on Saturday ever-so-shortly before my voice-losing escapade.

    (“Moscow” is a curious story unto itself, but I’m saving a recap of that for when we have a better demo of the song.)

    Like 2004’s before it, this February so far has been a very Arcati Crisis month. We performed three separate times, and this last one marked a major milestone that we just realized this morning: we’ve now played every one of our current songs in front of an audience. That’s sixteen tunes, which represents a nearly indescribable leap from last February when we knew just three or four.

    In fact, with the exception of “Fisher Price” the songs which we now consider to be the most “solid” and “reliable” didn’t even exist as duo tunes this time last year – they were still relegated to the various demo discs and Blogathons from which they originated. Suddenly we find ourselves with thumb-twiddling time at rehearsals where we once were dreaming up new riffs to catalog tunes, and so far this month we’ve filled it with new songs and rehearsals with cello (!). Tomorrow we’ll be recording the few stragglers who haven’t yet made it onto one of our Live @ Rehearsal discs, and then I’ll be spending the rest of the month mixing.

    I know that other bands have come farther in a shorter amount of time – after all, of those sixteen songs all had been written prior to 2007 – but I still can’t help but be infatuated with our progress.

    Not just our progress, though – that’s an old-Peter model of infatuation, that restless addiction to revisiting a process and its product, rather than living in the present. This time I am actually infatuated with the present tense of us, and all that we are capable of. Could we have imagined in 1994 that one night we’d wind up on stage at Doc Watson’s a hair shy of last call with our friends bouncing and singing along to every word of our songs?

    Well, maybe we could have, but in that mental image I probably still had my Spock haircut, which is not nearly as ravishing as the current one, AKA “Dean Winchester.”

    Which, in retrospect, probably prompted the stubble.

    Meanwhile, there is the aspect of 2007 that I am repeating – I’ve been very much absorbed in media consumption. It’s partially because I have been following the primary elections on various news sites, but really it’s just an input/output thing. I’m outputting riffs, harmonies, new songs, project plans, site maps, engagement party thank you notes – all manner of creativity. And if I don’t ingest and digest input from some other sources I’ll be left with nothing to output.

    (Or, worse, I will return to my past-process addiction and just output recursive, painful feedback. Sort of like this post, but more shrill.)

    (Okay, while we’re parenthetical already I just need to point out that I started talking about that whole input/output deal almost seven years ago, and at work we’re reading this horrific business book that I won’t even do the justice of name-checking, and it has a whole fucking chapter about how you need input in order to maintain output. Like, with a chart of a Pac-Man-esque circle eating and shitting information. I kid you not. So, yes, 20-year-old-me could teach this business guru a thing or two about a thing or two.)

    (Any, mucho digression; do you see what February causes?)

    My increased intake of media – particularly election coverage, which has been nigh-unavoidable the past few weeks – has re-awakened my love of media critique. Especially after nearly four years of freedom from the bonds of television I feel like I’m seeing messages for what they really are for the first time – often just inelegant, thinly-veiled agendas meant to obscure the actual meaning behind the message:

    Disney loves to sell its girl-empowerment, but don’t look for it to offer a fair payout to the author behind one of its hugest properties, The Cheetah Girls.

    Similarly, CNN trumpets its bottomless cadre of cell-phone equipped i-Reporters, but when one of their segment producers runs a hip, snarky blog that gets too opinionated he is promptly fired.

    And, in perhaps my favorite example, our favorite brand names and supermarkets re-purposed plain old oats in increasingly portable and nutrionless forms until we are paying dozens of dollars on the pound for curiously un-oat-ish cereal bars, with MILK INCLUDED (TM).

    I’m not sure if the sudden transparency is coming from me, or coming from the internet, or coming from the world at large having finally gone in for a look at its cataracts, but I’m loving it.

    And, with ten days left to go, that is my February, so-far.

    Come in, ground control.

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    Of course, if you’re going to start losing your voice in the middle of your last song and subsequently fuck up the lyrics because you are so confused about why it is suddenly so hard to sing, it will be a song you know by heart and can sing backwards and forwards in your sleep and in elevators, and Gina will cast sideways glances at you to make sure you’re not dying or frothing at the mouth or anything, because your sudden lack of ability to hold it together would typically be accompanied by a medical emergency.

    And, well, it was a medical emergency – we’d spent too long in the chilly green room and played through the song on whispers and didn’t get to warm up and I had pushed too hard on a falsetto part on the song before and all of the other terrible things you should never, ever, ever do to your voice, and my voice rightfully gave in the first time it was asked to flirt with the top of the staff. But, why that song, you know? What would be the justice if you messed up a song that was, you know, hard, or that you were a little shaky on the lyrics on anyway?

    A shitty end to an otherwise pretty cool evening.

    How is it that we made it out to be so hard?

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    IMG_3071Earlier this evening Gina and I spent some time watching a DVD of a performance of ours from 2004.

    The experience was at once reassuring and horrific. Horrific because of the sheer terror of some of the choices we made on dynamics and harmony. Reassuring because the core of what we were doing four years ago – the good part – is identical to what we’ve been doing for the past thirteen months.

    Bands, unfortunately, don’t come with an instruction book. Luckily, Gina and I are unshakeable friends with the same ridiculous sense of humor, so the interpersonal part hasn’t been difficult, and any stumbling blocks have been handled with aplomb. But, it’s taken a lot of trying to figure out how to run an effective rehearsal, or how to approach learning a new song, or how to salvage a floundering set, amongst a myriad of other difficulties.

    (For the record, the former includes eating dinner first, and the second involves having multiple copies of printed lyrics on which we make constant, extensive notation in pencil. We haven’t completely figured out the third, but so far it would seem to involve playing “Pocahontas,” multiple times if necessary.)

    I feel as though now that we’re in our second year of formal existence the training wheels on our band are slowly starting to disengage. Clearly we know how to write lead sheets and arrange harmony, or else we wouldn’t have made it this far with a pretty solid 16-song set. However, 2008 is already bringing more advanced trials – like booking our own gigs, and adding additional members to the ensemble.

    We’re two unusual people, and we make an unusual pair of singer-songwriters. We sing an unusual collection of tunes ranging from unrequited longing to ruminations on the apocalypse, from vitriolic blasts to paeans to a semi-fictional communist outpost in Idaho. Neither of us knows a damn thing about what we’re doing, and we’re having a hell of a lot of fun doing it.

    If there was an instruction book I’m not sure I’d read any of it.

    (if you’re reading this on a feed, visit CK to hear the audio)
    (also, be our friend)