If you know what Tenacious D is to heavy metal, or what Flight of the Conchords is to classic rock, then you have an idea of what Future Folk is to folk and bluegrass.
But there’s also what I would call a “prog twist” to Future Folk: namely, the sci-fi, alien spaceman concept album theme.
So, think of it as the genre of Prog Folk — with its one-of-a-kind occupant.
It’s charming and hilarious. Who would have thought how much fun a banjo and a guitar can be together?
And, as an added bonus, it’s the kind of movie the whole family can watch.
You have experienced this during your own listening:
Music released today typically has a dynamic range only a fourth to an eighth as wide as that of the 1990s. That means if you play a newly released CD right after one that’s 15 years old, leaving the volume knob untouched, the new one is likely to sound four to eight times as loud.
As Ethan Smith has written, the problem is with us all over the place:
Over the years, rock and pop artists have increasingly sought to make their recordings sound louder to stand out on the radio, jukeboxes and, especially, iPods.
But audiophiles, recording professionals and some ordinary fans say the extra sonic wallop comes at a steep price. To make recorded music seem louder, engineers must reduce the “dynamic range,” minimizing the difference between the soft and loud parts and creating a tidal wave of aural blandness.
“When there’s no quiet, there can be no loud,” said Matt Mayfield, a Minnesota electronic-music teacher, in a YouTube video that sketched out the battle lines of the loudness war. A recording’s dynamic range can be measured by calculating the variation between its average sound level and its maximum, and can be visually expressed through wave forms. Louder recordings, with higher average sound levels, leave less room for such variation than quieter ones.
The problem even extends to vinyl releases, as Angry Metal Guy chronicles:
Labels are also looking to cash in on vinyl’s new found popularity, and so there’s plenty of lazily produced, poor sounding special edition reissues out there. And even with new vinyl, there’s never a guarantee of a dedicated, dynamic master, only the possibility. If the vinyl is sourced from the CD, it will sound every bit as bad.
In short, the problem here is that the ability to turn the music up to 11 should reside with the listener, not the mastering engineer:
There is a major difference between manipulating the recorded volume versus the playback one. When a mastering engineer artificially pushes the volume higher by applying massive amounts of DRC, he or she is changing the recorded volume by squashing the high and low ends of the frequency spectrum. This process has the nasty byproduct of causing transients and imaging to substantially degrade, making the music sound lifeless and dull.
The are many reasons why this huge problem persists today.
But one of the big myths (“metal should go to 11”) can be debunked quantitatively:
One of the most pervasive myths in metal production today is that because metal is supposed to be played loud, it has to be recorded loud. This could not be further from the truth. Some of the most popular metal albums in history are also some of the most dynamic. Master of Puppets: DR12. Rust In Peace: DR13. Painkiller: DR11. Reign In Blood: D14. Notice anything similar about these albums? They were all released prior to 1992, which is roughly the start of the Loudness War. From that year onward, the entire music industry began to engage in constant one-upmanship. Not only did every new album have to be louder than the one that preceded it, but louder than the other guy’s new album as well. By the late ‘90s everyone began to settle around DR6, which is where we are now. Why DR6? Because that’s as loud as you can possibly go while still attempting to hold on to some semblance of fidelity. DR6 is far from ideal, but for every point of dynamic range lost below that mark, you begin to do exponentially more damage to the sound.
A big problem with the industry today is that if you’re on a major label, chances are they won’t let you release an album with high levels of dynamics even if you wanted too. If you send them a fully dynamic master, they’ll think there’s something wrong with it and hire an engineer to smash it down to DR6 before sending it off to the CD pressing plant. …
The truth is that most bands simply have no idea that the DR5 and DR6 masters used on the vast majority of new CD releases are not something people actually want. I know that it’s going to be a long and uphill battle to change the minds of the executives at the major labels, but most bands on small labels generally have a fair amount of creative freedom in terms of what they can do with their masters. So if enough of you let them know that you want them to release albums with proper dynamics, they will listen.
Prog should definitely lead the way out of this morass. Why shouldn’t every self-respecting prog artist proudly and prominently place a DR number on the back of every CD they produce? It could be a way of self-identifying yourself as a serious prog artist committed to only the best sonic experience.
If not, maybe the DR Database needs to be in every reviewer’s toolkit. But keep in mind this caveat that the Dynamic Range number is just the beginning of a discussion about an artist’s musical release, and not the final word on its evaluation:
DR6 is now the industry average and already considered by most sane engineers as too compressed. The recommended level by most industry experts is DR8 or higher. A bit of a fair warning though, a higher number doesn’t necessarily mean its sounds better, but in the overwhelming majority of cases, it usually does. And applying DRC is not evil in itself either, provided it’s done judiciously. The fact is DRC is an invaluable tool that can make a good sounding record sound great. I highly encourage you to read some of our in-depth articles about dynamic range and why it’s not about the numbers, but about the sound.
So I’m sure you’re wondering though, why sacrifice the music’s fidelity just to make it sound artificially loud?
It stems from the fact that at least initially, our ears perceive louder as sounding better, and labels and artists try to leverage that fact in order to gain market share. The idea is simple, if a label’s roster sounds louder than its competitor, you, the listener, will tend to gravitate toward that label’s louder tracks than the other guy’s softer ones.
Perhaps the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx were objecting to the acoustic guitar because of its magnificent dynamic range.
Attention all planets of the Prog Federation: DR6 has assumed control…
Don’t miss Send My Roots Rain, a great EP with amazing vocals by Mallory Reaves, splendid instrumentation and production by Chris Folsom, and music and lyrics by Joseph Bottum:
Recorded by Nashville studio performers, Send My Roots Rain presents seven songs by poet and bestselling essayist Joseph Bottum. It’s new wine in old bottles—as each song rethinks a roots melody, giving new words and new life to underappreciated moments from the deep traditions of Anglo-American music. With an ear for the modal strains of shape-note and folk music, Bottum provides the words and revised melodies that bring out the murder, mayhem, and melancholy—the lovesick emotions, the God-haunted thickness, and the rich connections to the natural world—that the old music always assumed. The poetry of Send My Roots Rain aims at nothing less than what traditional music wants to say.
This is truly a splendid release from Remodeled Music. Definitely an upper-echelon release for 2014!
Consisting only of the finest sort of traditional popular music and poetry, you will want to download this and play it again and again during your most reflective summertime moments.
Take off, eh! It’s a beauty way to go (to school):
Rush 101: Canadian Prog-Rockers Are Now A University Course
It only took 40 years, but this fall the notoriously complex prog-rock of Canadian legends Rush will the subject of a course at Tiffin University in Ohio.
On this day in history 40 years ago, a young drummer from St. Catharines named Neil Peart officially joined Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee in RUSH… which is the line-up that has remained the same for the last four decades.
Happy Anniversary RUSH!
Virtual high-fives to all the fans for the last 40 years!
Sloan, one of Canada’s best bands, well known here in the Great White North for their mastery of rock and power pop, has brand new music coming out on September 9.
Sloan will release a double album, with each one of the four band members having the songs they individually wrote allocated to one of the four sides of the two vinyl LPs.
I like how they think! I always organize my own playlists along the lines of what I like to call “vinyl time.”
And of course you can also buy a digital copy of this new Sloan disc, which is appropriately called Commonwealth.
Two fine tracks are available already. Previews are available below: “Keep Swinging (Downtown)” and “Cleopatra”.
Google CEO Larry Page watched Psy’s now-ubiquitous Gangnam Style rake in $2 per 1,000 pageviews on its way Ito a $1.2 million payday by November alone. Page called Gangnam style “a glimpse of the future” as Psy was able to make a bonafide bankable hit through a video/download approach that had since been reserved for novelties like The Bed Intruder Song or Rebecca Black’s Friday. Songs no longer need airplay, major label backing or televised videos to be hits: They just needs to catch people’s attention and hold it as Yankovic has done for years.
If you applied that $2 per 1,000 to the 20 million views Yankovic’s four videos received during their first week of airplay, that’s $40,000 in one week alone. Not $1.2 million, but still not shabby for a week’s work.
But how does a company monetize that, you ask? Most of Yankovic’s partners do so through advertising: A concept that’s lost on many companies trying to make a dime off of streaming.
A glimpse of the future and the way prog bands can perhaps make some money to keep the music alive?
1. Open Up Your Eyes
2. Mask Machine
3. Bombs Away
4. The Fury Of My Love
5. A Place In Your World
6. Lost Without You
7. One Lost Forever
8. Peaceful Harbor
9. Cosmic Symphony
I. Still Life Of The World
II. Searching For The Air
III. Pound For Pound
Always support your local musicians. Go see their concerts as often as you can.
There’s nothing quite like hearing live music. Nothing can replace the unique and unrepeatable experience of talented artists sharing their gifts in concert.
Last night I had the chance to hear a wonderful double concert in Langley, British Columbia, at St. Nic’s which showcased musicians I have known from their past presence on the local campus here at TWU. It’s so great to see them now play live in concert.
The first half of the evening featured singer-songwriter Kathleen Claire, now visiting from out-of-town. Hearing Kathleen Claire’s voice live in concert is an amazing experience. She has such a delicate and dynamic range of vocal stylings, she sounds different from song to song, and she even does unexpected things within a single song to change things up and to surprise and delight. The intimate rapport that a singer-songwriter and her guitar can establish with an audience will always be something special to the live concert, and Kathleen seizes upon all of the genre’s possibilities. Kathleen played a perfectly paced set that included an impressively diverse sampling of her own songs, with even two brilliant covers thrown into the mix — CCR’s “Bad Moon Rising” and Joan Osbourne’s “One of Us” — which she transformed in very interesting ways to make them a part of her musical universe. Kathleen released her debut album a couple of years ago and is currently working on her next one with a UK record company.
The second half of the evening featured local singing sensation A Guy and A Girl. Jesse LeBlanc and Kathleen Dunn have been playing concerts together for three months now and they have a lot of people excited with their musical chemistry. They took top prize in a local talent contest, and I am sure we will be hearing more from them as they continue to share their infectious love of music. Their set featured a whole lot of fun, including a lot of joking around between numbers, and they took great pleasure in getting the audience involved in their hijinks as well, encouraging everybody to sing along at a number of points in the evening. Early on, Jesse introduced a song he wrote by saying that people should sing along if they know it, but then apologized that because he wrote it nobody had heard it yet and nobody would know it. Later in the evening, however, audience members could be heard singing along to real musical opportunities that the duo provided for full participation. With Kathleen on keyboard and Jesse on guitar, A Guy and A Girl combine two quite different voices into one musical experience and it is always a pleasure to hear them singing beautiful harmonies. They bring a lot of energy and excitement to their music, which ranges from the quiet and introspective to the revved-up and percussion-enhanced celebratory sing-alongs.
Support your talented local musicians. Always go see their hometown concerts and buy their music online. Thanks to digital downloads, you too can share in the magic while hoping that they will some day come to your own town on tour:
Progarchy 