The Omniscient Mussel » Features

Foster the People

Miss Mussel — Tue, 22 May 2012 21:07:37 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, I sat down with Mark Foster from Foster the People for Time Out New York.

At first listen, Torches is a collection of light indie pop with obligatory hand claps and the occasional laser beam pyew. Listen more carefully and you’ll hear a mille-feuille pastry. “I love countermelodies, I love hooks and melodies that stick in your head,” says Foster. “If I could put 20 melodies in a song and they would all work together, I would. Actually, I’ve got to work on that. Simplify my shit. I’ve got so much stuff going on you can’t even hear what’s happening.”

Foster’s background as a jingle writer, and the band’s willingness to license its songs, prompts the inevitable question about selling out. What troubles him is not the usual complaint about being under the thumb of evil corporate overlords, but rather artists who are disingenuous in order to make a buck. “When I see artists that are trying to put something on, it’s such horseshit to me,” says Foster. “There’s not a lot of artists that are truly being who they are that are really that freaking weird.”

There wasn’t room for it in the final piece, but it turns out Mark was in the Cleveland Orchestra Children’s Chorus and took piano lessons from age three until the drums wooed him away at age 10.

Read the whole thing ici.
And/or just give them a listen via the embedded Spotify playlist below. [That was for your benefit, feedreader peeps. You're welcome.]

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Ballet Shoes

Miss Mussel — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 17:54:50 +0000

In the autumn, I had a chance to visit the workshop in East London where Freed make their ballet shoes. The tension between fashion and function, art and craft and high and lowbrow made the visit interesting in all sorts of ways aside from the obvious how-they-do-it.

The manager, Gary Brooks, was extremely generous with his time, and I left knowing more about shoes and the shoe business and than I ever thought possible.

Tucked away in the side streets of Mayfair, the world-famous tailors of Savile Row make gentleman’s suiting to order for businessmen, gentry, politicians, oligarchs and Saudi princes.

Six miles to the east, in Hackney, lies another temple to old-school English craftsmanship: Freed of London, makers of custom pointe shoes since 1929. In a small workshop flanked by midrise apartment blocks, a no-frills sandwich café and a betting parlor, 12 shoemakers each transform satin, canvas, cardboard, burlap and leather into 40 pairs of pointe shoes each a day.

You can read the whole piece, including the part about Liverpool footballer Steven Gerrard, ici.

This video, made by the Dutch National Ballet, shows a ballet shoe’s entire life cycle.

And this one, from Australia, shows more about what happens to the shoes once the ballerinas get hold of them.

EN POINTE! from The Apiary on Vimeo.

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Jackie Evancho

Miss Mussel — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:58:51 +0000

Last Sunday I had a piece in the Times about crossover soprano Jackie Evancho. She’s difficult to write about for several reasons, not the least of which being that she’s a child. On the other hand, her parents have decided it’s ok for her to be in the limelight, so it’s only fair that she plays by the same rules as everyone else.

In any case, the crux of the situation from this vantage point boils down to this:

The task [of quantifying Evancho] is made even more difficult by the fact that Evancho is, in many ways, unremarkable. She has said on several occasions that she doesn’t practice much, and though her website lists 10 full-length concerts between now and September, many of her gigs are one- or two-song appearances.

By way of contrast, the pre-college divisions of major conservatories are full of sixth-graders who can play circles around her. Anglican and Episcopal cathedral choirs have spent 400 years training children from age 7 to sing extremely difficult music in a manner antithetical to Evancho but still highly stylized and not entirely natural. Elite gymnasts with Olympic aspirations or ballet dancers with an eye on a pro career have to get their 10,000 hours of practice in before they even reach middle school. All of these children spend hours shuttling between lessons, competitions and training gyms with many living away from home for large parts of the year.

Read the rest ici

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Stephen Merchant

Miss Mussel — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 06:46:20 +0000

“One of my great frustrations on the tour in England was I was always imagining that there would be gorgeous groupies hanging around outside but most of my groupies are middle-aged guys who work in computing. I shall be intrigued to see the caliber of weirdos that hang out outside the stage door [in LA]. I’m hoping that it will be more sort of Playboy bunnies.”

Read the rest, including a rather amusing story involving ‘Alison,’ ici.

Side Note: My computer is called Barry after Barry Off Eastenders, a character on Extras, which stars Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais.

Behold:

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Tori Amos: Night of Hunters

Miss Mussel — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 06:11:40 +0000

Tori Amos has a new record out on Deutsche Grammophon. Whether this is a good thing or the end of the world as we know it is up to you. From my chair, it’s one of the rare crossover projects that stands on its own as an original work and the more of that sort of thing that’s around, the better.

I had the good fortune to chat with Tori for the LA paper. The more I talk with pop musicians, the more I appreciate how much effort goes into creating something new. It’s still rather strange to think that the person creating the art can be sitting next to me on the couch and even more strange to realize that for most people, that’s not strange at all.

Here’s one of the best bits:

“There’s a sexy element to penetrating the dead guys and making a new being together,” said Amos, who lives in Cornwall, England, with her husband and daughter. “You’re not a sonic necrophiliac but you are walking into a specific space. You have to look at the music as a sonic architect and study how it is made. Then, you must step back or you can never create because you’re in such awe of it that you feel that ‘I can’t touch this because it’s sacred.’”

Read the rest here.

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CBC Radio – from sea to sea to sea

Miss Mussel — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 00:04:08 +0000

A few weeks ago I had a piece in the LA Times talking about CBC Radio’s 75th anniversary, specifically how it serves as a uniting force in a country of geographical and cultural disparates.

Plus, I got to interview the ever-lovely Jian Ghomeshi, so it’s a win all round.

It’s 1928, and the Canadian government is in a panic. It’s issued radio licenses to Canadian stations since 1922, but most Canadians are turning their dials to American programming. What to do? A royal commission on the future of broadcasting was convened, and eight years later, after a brief incarnation as a state-owned national broadcasting network, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. was born.

Its mandate: to reflect Canada to Canadians.

Today, the service covers 99% of Canada’s 3.8 million square miles and creates audio content in the country’s two official languages — English and French — as well as eight aboriginal languages across six time zones.

How does a national broadcaster make content that appeals to all its listeners when, as the first CBC chairman, Leonard Brockington, quaintly put it in his inaugural broadcast, “The lady of the house in Halifax is often busy with her domestic tasks before the gentleman of the house in Vancouver has finally settled down for the night.”

Read the rest ici.

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Dispatch from the Marketing Department

Miss Mussel — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 19:13:51 +0000

This week, I had the chance to report on two new things from the world of classical music marketing.

First, the Vancouver Opera collaborated with marketing agency Taxi to produce a series of adverts pitching opera as adventurous as gondola bungee jumping or eating lamb fries.

And then Naxos was infiltrated by zombies who promptly put their new charges the task of making an album to accompany their imminent demise.

Not a cursive letter or rose in sight. It is possible, everyone. Take heart!

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Elbow: Interview Extras

Miss Mussel — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 05:01:32 +0000

The Manchester band Elbow finished its North American tour last night in Los Angeles. I caught up with them in Toronto on Wednesday.

I first heard of Elbow when they did a gig with the Hallé Orchestra as part of the Manchester International Festival in 2009. It didn’t occur to me to get a ticket, as I expected it would be another rock band with the orchestra playing whole notes in the background.

Wrong. It turned out to be the most talked about shows of the festival.

Elbow’s new album build a rocket boys! is a masterpiece. More emotional than Radiohead, less angry than straight-ahead rock and more sing-alongable than prog-rock…the most Brahmsian of rockers [an abundance of 2 against 3 and BEARDS]

Writing about rock is more difficult that it looks. Every genre has its shorthand and it was immensely frustrating not have the vocabulary to describe what I heard or the shared reference points with the audience.

Despite my inadequacies, the boys were lovely chat with and it was a pleasure to get a peek into how they crafted their music.

Here’s a few bits that got left on the cutting room floor.

No teenage retrospective is complete with a tale of sexual awakening and on this album, “Jesus Is A Rochdale Girl” is it. Said Garvey, “I was brought up a Catholic and around the time I started losing my faith in God, I moved out of my mom’s house and basically this angel, this beautiful creature, Kath from Rochdale used to visit me and give me food and love and comfort.” Garvey’s time with Kath is clearly a happy memory and he pauses for a moment to enjoy it before continuing with an impish grin, “Catholics aren’t allowed to have sex before marriage….fuck that! She helped nudge the last of my Catholicism out of me.”
//
“Everyone liking the Seldom Seen Kid [2008], it won every award in the UK and made us want to show them people what else we did. We deliberately made a really subtle album, not churlishly, we didn’t want to make something inaccessible and I don’t think build a rocket boys! is.

I think the next logical step in people’s minds was that we do something big and stadium worthy. But there’s nothing logical about that to me at all because then you have to come down from that or replicate that, which is even worse. I want to make records that people care about, we so why would you make one you know people are only going to care about for that summer? I want to make something subtle that will last for life.”
//
Talking about the Birds (reprise), sung on the album by an old man
“We worried that the fact that The Birds was written by the point of view of someone being patronized by their carers. The first half of the song is a very melancholy love song talking about the last encounter of a failed love affair.

We wanted a frail old voice, so we had to audition old men. That was something I never thought I’d do for a living! He’s called John Mosely and he showed up with his wife along with the other interviewees. John had been a piano tuner in life and a watch mender. He was this very mousy, sort of churchy but very well dressed man. Utterly charming but very softly spoken. He wife was on his casting picture with him too. Very cute. Utterly in love.

We picked him, he did the job, did a great job and we thanked him very much.

Months later, his grandson gets in touch with me through my radio program and tells me, ‘At Christmas granddad dropped the bomb. What you probably didn’t know was that granddad was a secret service operative during the Cold War in Hamburg.’ So, he was basically running people back and forth over the [Berlin] wall masquerading as a piano tuner and watch mender.

So this beautiful, frail-voiced man on our record singing this melancholy song could probably snap my neck in half.”

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Is music above politics? WikiLeaks says no.

Miss Mussel — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 02:53:02 +0000

The questions was sparked by the Proms protest incident a couple of weeks ago. The instant reaction from music lovers was that it was. Art should not be sullied by petty mortal squabbles etc.

The contemporaneous release of unredacted WikiLeaks cables and a hunch that music and politics have been cosy bedfellows since the beginning led to some idle querying of the WikiLeaks database.

Violin and piano appear often, relatively speaking, as does orchestra and symphony. [Incidentally, it turns out the diplomats are quite fond of using the word symphony as a metaphor for everyone having an important individual role in a group project.]

Trumpets, clarinets and flutes get an occasional shout out. Violas, french horns and double reeds, I’m sorry to report that the U.S. diplomatic corps does not rate you.

My piece in Sunday’s LA Times gives you a bit of an idea how how classical music is used in the diplomatic world.

My absolute favourite cable is from Baghdad and begins in this spectacular fashion:

“What do you get when a U.S. Army band plays an Eastern Orthodox wedding hall in a Yezidi town with Arab, Christian and Kurdish musicians under the watchful gaze of the Barzani patriarch, a crucifix, and the Iraqi flag, plus a banner celebrating the anniversary of an anti-Saddam uprising?”

The rest is here.

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Procession

Miss Mussel — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 11:35:20 +0000

Sunday afternoon, Miss Mussel found herself wanding around Manchester’s city centre. The weather was glorious, the buskers were out and there were plenty of grass patches upon which Manchester fine citizens were acquiring their orange tinge in a more natural way.

While partaking in this activity herself (for cultural immersion reasons only, obviously), Observer and Innocent fruit smoothie in hand, Miss Mussel’s idyll was encroached on by the sound of distant pipes. And then a brass band. And then pipes again. A quick investigation revealed that a procession of North Manchester’s Catholic churches was not aware of some recent constructions works when planning their route and was now stuck on a side road.

Churches in the Northwest, both Anglican and Catholic have traditionally paraded through town on Whitsun, which falls on the seventh Sunday after Easter. Girls traditionally wore white dresses to church. The practice is much less common now and Miss Mussel’s streamer-holding informant told her that this parade tradition was organized by “The Italians” and then the Irish Catholic churches joined in later years. This explains the pipes and the number of times Black is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair was played. It also explains the iconography.

When apprised of the procession’s predicament, the beat cops calmly cleared a route and redirected traffic to allow the 15-church procession to circle the block and turn around.

It wasn’t an official parade in the sense that people were lining the route waiting but rather the sort of intersection between civil and religious activity that you get in a country where church and state are not separate entities. The bands need parades to march at and the churches need someone to make noise to attract attention.

Everyone’s happy. Except for the sullen teenagers, who, with each step, hate their mothers more and more for guilting them in to participating. Nothing can fix that.

(click on any thumbnail to embiggen)

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