Category Archives: Music

I am not good at following advice

I’ve been thinking a lot about Other Jairuses. (Other Jairii?) If I had made different choices, focused my energy on different things. What would I be doing now. What would I be good at.

Eight years ago I was trying to decide where I should put my creative efforts. In design and visual art, which I had done professionally off and on — In writing and storytelling, where I felt very confident and capable — or in music, where I had been DJing for a while but I had no idea if I had any of the necessary skills to put together a song that anyone might want to listen to.

I asked a lot of people which they thought I should focus on, and almost everyone said writing. It was my ‘strength’. A few people said design. No one said music.

Eight years later and I have a couple of releases out, I’ve done a lot of touring, and I am for sure Jairus The Electronic Musician to a lot more people than I am Jairus The DJ. I haven’t been writing regularly or doing any design that isn’t paid work. I didn’t realize it while it was happening, but I traded those outlets in to make music.

One of the things that happens when you don’t do something for eight years is you stop being really good at it. Or you stop being good at it on demand, at least. I can still write things that I feel good about, but that’s the exception rather than the rule, and oh my god is there anything less interesting than someone writing about how challenging they think writing is.

Eight years later and I feel the hole left in me where I used to tell stories. Eight years later and I remember how good it felt to be up late creating something beautiful in photoshop that wasn’t for anyone but me. Eight years later and I’m not a writer, or an artist, or even really a DJ anymore.

Eight years from now, what I am going to wish I had spent more time doing? What am I going to wish I had gotten better at? What art am I going to wish I felt comfortable making?

That’s what I need to work on today.

#MP3Tribute

I think Aaron Swartz’s death hit us all differently. I felt like we weren’t just dealing with the loss of an incredibly talented and driven mind, but also with having our collective future robbed of all of the things Aaron had yet to do. People wouldn’t have the same access to music that they do today if it wasn’t for Aaron, and I wouldn’t have had the opportunities that I’ve had as an artist if it wasn’t for Aaron. I want to celebrate what he’s given us.

I’m asking artists to join me in making 100 albums free to download in Aaron’s memory.

Things I Have Been Enjoying Lately, Third in a Series

Front Line Assembly – AirMech

FLA - Airmech

Front Line Assembly changed my life.

They were the first industrial band I ever heard, way back when a friend gave me a tape of Tactical Neural Implant in 92. I remember putting it in my walkman, hitting play, and listening to Final Impact completely stunned. I had been listening to Guns N’ Roses, Led Zeppelin, and N.W.A — nothing that prepared me at all for what I was hearing. I didn’t know music like that existed. I didn’t even know it was possible to make those kinds of sounds. The same friend clued me in to Delerium, Noise Unit, Intermix, and the rest of the FLA side projects. (Synaesthesia has always been my favourite of those, and their Ephemeral record is one of my desert island disks.)

Tactical Neural Implant was twenty years ago, and FLA’s still releasing albums. They’ve got new blood in the band, and whatever combination of people and equipment it took to make AirMech should probably be flash-frozen and preserved for future generations.

Fair warning: AirMech is completely instrumental. It’s also a video game soundtrack, and not a club record. And, like a lot of FLA records before it, the production is heavily influenced by whatever was blowing up in electronic music when they made it (which in this case is dubstep, so get your haterade ready).

The thing that makes this album amazing isn’t the wubs or the lack of vocals. This album is great because the diversity in the production spans very nearly the entire FLA discography. There are sequences that sound like they could have been taken off of Tactical Neural Implant, next to parts that could have come from lost Delerium or Synaesthesia tapes. There are elements of it that are unmistakably modern, and without any vocals in the mix the electronics shine in a way they aren’t often allowed to.

I don’t know if I’d say that this is FLA’s best record since the classics — I think Artificial Soldier is as good as anything else that got released after Millennium, and it’s hard to compare a heavy club record to a soundtrack — but I’ve been listening to it more than I’ve listened to any other FLA record since the 90s, and I’m not putting it down anytime soon.

If you were ever a fan of FLA’s less aggro material, you should listen to Airmech.

We can do better.

It has been a very long and unlikely week.

Last Thursday Nick and I got on stage at Kinetik and played the best set either of us have ever played — a 50 minute performance, but it’s the last five that everyone’s talking about.

We had a message we wanted to deliver, and we did it. And a week later, the conversation about it is still going strong. It’s funny, before Nick and I went on stage we were talking about what could happen. We thought maybe a few people might get behind it. We also thought maybe we might get booed off stage. Worse yet, we thought maybe no one would notice or care.

Seven days, hundreds of shares, and 10k+ views later, people are still talking about misogyny and racism in industrial music. We’ve had hundreds of people get in touch to tell us how much they appreciate what we did. I’ve lost count of the number of women who’ve told us that this kind of imagery is exactly why they left the scene. And if I told you how many people (men and women alike) cried when they spoke to us about it, you wouldn’t actually believe me.

So, it’s a week later. The message is as clear as I could make it. Andy and Thomas have both said their piece on it. There have been articles, interviews, and editorials. And people are still talking about what it all means. About sexism, about racism. About art, communication, and community.

What does it say about our scene, that this resonates so strongly with so many people? What does it say about the conversations we haven’t been having? And what will happen if more people continue to say: We demand better.

I hope we’ll get to find out.

Six Degrees of Awesome

From me to Johnny Cash in 5 steps.

  1. I (Ad·ver·sary) was remixed by J.F. Coleman (of Phylr)
  2. J.F. Coleman was in Baby Zizanie with J.G. Thirlwell
  3. J.G. Thirlwell was in The The with Sinead O’Connor
  4. Sinead O’Connor wrote “Don’t Give Up” with Willie Nelson
  5. Willie Nelson was in The Highwaymen with Johnny Cash!

Huzzah!

The War Against Free (or: Oh Crap!)

Why record labels will never win the war against free: An experiment.

The whole file sharing phenomenon (and legal music downloading) is largely driven by a powerful psychological aversion to being cheated.

It turns out that free is so powerful not because it’s free, but because it allows us to minimize the risk of being cheated. Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely conducted an interesting experiment to understand “free”, which he writes about in his book Predictably Irrational.

First, he and his colleagues sold random college students two kinds of chocolates. One was Lindt Truffles from Switzerland. The second was Hersheys Kisses. The truffles were 15 cents and the Kisses were 1 cent. The students reasoned that the difference in price between the two chocolates was due to quality. 73% chose the truffles and 27% chose the Kisses.

Then Ariely did something interesting. He introduced free into the experiment. He lowered the price of each chocolate by 1 cent, so the truffles were now 14 cents and the Kisses were free. All of a sudden, preference for the Kisses skyrocketed.

Ariely concluded that free is so enticing because it eliminates the risk of buyer’s remorse, or what I like to call the “Oh, crap!” factor. Nobody wants to buy something and then discover that it’s not what they expected. Even if the price of that thing is just a few cents, the psychological aversion still exists. When something is free, that risk is eliminated entirely. It may still not be what you expected, but at least you didn’t lose anything by paying for it.

Cuts Me Up

The Top 20 Alternative Videos of 1990, as recorded by the 120 Minutes historical playlist archive.

  1. Depeche Mode “Enjoy The Silence”
  2. Jane’s Addiction “Been Caught Stealing”
  3. Peter Murphy “Cut You Up”
  4. Sinead O’Connor “Nothing Compares 2 U”
  5. Sonic Youth “Cool Thing”
  6. The Sundays “Here’s Where The Story Ends”
  7. The Charlatans U-K “The Only One I Know”
  8. Midnight Oil “Blue Sky Mine”
  9. The Cure “Never Enough”
  10. Concrete Blonde “Joey”
  11. The Soup Dragons “I’m Free”
  12. World Party “Way Down Now”
  13. Nine Inch Nails “Head Like A Hole”
  14. The Jesus and Mary Chain “Head On”
  15. Cocteau Twins “Iceblink Luck”
  16. The Pixies “Dig For Fire/Allison”
  17. The Stone Roses “Fool’s Gold”
  18. The House of Love “I Don’t Know Why I Love You”
  19. Iggy Pop “Candy”
  20. Happy Mondays “Step On”

(Via MeFi.)

Goth·ver·sary

Gothtronic reviews A Bright Cut Across Velvet Sky:

Ad·ver·sary is the powernoise/IDM project of Jairus Khan. In 2008 he made quite a name for himself with his album ‘Bone Music’, which was available as regular cd edition on Tympanik Audio, but could also be downloaded for free in high quality. [...] A very good remix album. Although some songs get remixed three times, all the tracks have a reasonable different sound, so it doesn’t get repetitive. Together with the addition of a couple of new tracks this is really an album you should have in you collection!

I agree with this man! You should download the album (it’s free!), or pick up a CD (on sale now!) from Tympanik.

I love my job (first in a series)

This is a list of near-mint records that my boss just gave me:

  • Bauhaus – Bela Lugosi’s Dead (!), 1979-1983, The Sky’s Gone Out
  • Blondie – Autoamerican
  • Gang of Four – Entertainment!, I Love A Man in a Uniform, Solid Gold, The Yellow EP
  • Joy Division – Atmosphere, Closer, Substance
  • Love and Rockets – Ball of Confusion, Express, Love and Rockets, Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven
  • Minor Threat – Out of Step
  • Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper – Root Hog Or Die
  • New Order – State of the Nation, Subculture, Substance, Technique, The Perfect Kiss
  • Pere Ubu – The Tenement Year
  • Public Image Ltd. – Album
  • Simple Minds – Sister Feelings Call
  • Siouxsie and The Banshees – Cities in Dust
  • Skids – Days in Europa
  • Squeeze – Babylon and on
  • Talk Talk – It’s My Life
  • Talking Heads – Wild Wild Life
  • The B-52s – The B-52s
  • The Cure – Boys Don’t Cry, Concert (Live), Standing on a Beach
  • The Jesus and Mary Chain – Automatic, Darklands
  • The March Violets – Walk Into The Sun
  • The Mission – Carved in sand
  • The Screaming Blue Messiahs – Gun-Shy
  • The Sugar Cubes – Life’s Too Good
  • NME C86

(They were sitting in a milk crate on my chair when I got in this morning!)