Ripple Music, home of the “Best retro-rock and metal on the planet” is thrilled to announce it’s sponsorship of TBFM Factor 2012 – the biggest “on-air” battle of the bands ever!
TBFM Factor 2012 is presented by internet radio station Total Biker FM, home of hard-driving rock n’ roll. This is the second time the station has presented this competition. With so much talent out there TBFM wanted to help promote the top bands and hopefully give them the boost up the ladder that they deserve by setting up a fan voted competition.
In 2010, the station was not fully prepared for what turned out to be an amazing competition with over 4 million hits during the final week which crashed the servers TWICE! The competition was such a great success, they decided to bring it back in 2012, bigger, better and more prepared!
The competition is set over 15 weekly knockout weeks. Music from 10 bands each week will get airplay on the Sunday Show on Total Biker FM and then fans get to vote for one week on which band deserves a place in the final. After 15 weeks, a final place is given to a wildcard, which will be the highest voted for runner up from all the knockout stages.
On week 16 the epic final takes place. All 16 bands get featured on air on a special 4 hour show and then all week during all regular shows while fans vote again for the best band of the competition. The winning band will receive some great prizes including the top prize of an exclusive one album record deal with American label Ripple Music.
This is one lucky band’s opportunity to join with Ripple Music and become a label-mate of such roaring artists as Mos Generator, Trucker Diablo, Stone Axe, Iron Claw, Grifter, Poobah, JPT Scare Band and Fen.
More prizes are on offer for the finalists ranging from musical equipment to website memberships to free record mastering. Registration closes on 31st March, 2012 and the competition gets under way on June 10th, 2012 with the grand final in September.
More information on the bands taking part, how to register, prizes and sponsors can be found at www.tbfmfactor.com
150 bands take part over 16 weeks… only one winner!
And a Ripple record contract is the Grand Prize!
Important dates are as follows:
Registration closes 31st March 2012
Qualifying Bands Line-Up announced 13th May 2012
Competition starts 10th June 2012 for 15 weeks
The final will be on 23rd September 2012
Winner announced 30th September 2012
This was a sweet surprise. Thanks Racer.
I first discovered Tuber while Bandcamp browsing last year and I immediately downloaded their free, self-titled ep after streaming their four tracks of superb instrumental desert-rock music. This power trio from Greece offer up a touch of trippy with plenty of heavy guitars and pounding grooves, believe me.
I was more than happy to learn in Racer’s email that Tuber have recently added a new single, “Smoked Up Notes”, to their free digital catalog.
Nice. I love that title. It’s perfect, especially for someone who calls himself ‘Heddbuzz’, right?
The song itself is excellent, too. “Smoked Up Notes” sounds amazing and it’s almost seven minutes long. It starts out with hypnotic guitars and and a steady swagger but the heavy is just around the bend. And heavy it is. Uber-heavy. Tuber-heavy…and all smoked-up.
Yeah, man, I’ll recommend Tuber to anyone who enjoys instrumental desert-rock. Check ‘em out and download some free music already. Damn.
–Heddbuzz
http://www.tuber.bandcamp.com/
http://www.facebook.com/tuberband
http://www.last.fm/music/Tuber?ac=tuber
The Enthusiasts –Sinkin/Risin’ b/w Joanne
Mutated garage fuzz with a mean and beefy bottom end. The Enthusiasts know how to bring the rock into the garage rock vein. Not content to settle on the fuzz and tin can vocals, the lads drop some big, near-stoner riffs, a nifty breakdown and a blur of a guitar solo into “Sinkin’/Risin’”. “Joanne” follow suit with a tasty, psychedelic guitar/vocal intro.
Coming from a “small town north of NYC”, this is the Enthusiasts second 7” platter. Toss in a handcrafted, self-stapled sleeve and we got ourselves one tasty vinyl treat released on the band’s own Magic Sleeve Records. Recommended for fans of Baby Woodrose and Dolly Rocker Movement.
www.facebook.com/enthusiastsny
Mondo Ray – Hypnotized b/w Nothing
Another blast of garage fuzz this time courtesy of Windian Records. What we got here is very simple. “Hypnotized” is about 2 minutes of absolute garage pop perfection. Swirling organs form the background for a guitar, bass and drum attack. Toss in a melody worthy of the best of Baby Woodrose and we got ourselves another winner. Big time. Flipside “Nothing” runs out on a sixties melody over a choppy, stuttering beat, and some nifty guitar work. Seems to me that Mondo Ray are a couple of brothers, David Da Cruz on guitar, bass, and vox and Hugo Da Cruz on drums, organ and vox. Don’t know what growing up was like in their house, but I’ll tell you, their parents certainly raised them right. Also recommended for Baby Woodrose and Lorenzo Woodrose fans.
http://windianrecords.wordpress.com/
The Penetrators – Gotta Have Her b/w Baby, Dontcha Tell Me
Also sent in from Windian Records, The Penetrators took their music tutelage in a different garage. No psychedelic flourishes here, these chaps trained under the watchful eye of headmaster The Sonics. Fuzzed and amped, distorto R&B rains all over “Gotta Have Her,” making it sound like a lost, treasured gem from the 1960’s. This song simply rocks in a sock-hop kinda way with some killer surf-guitar licks and barely-hangin-in-there vocals. Great fun. Flipside, “Baby, Dontcha Tell Me,” brims with a nascent rock fury, again bring on the Sonics, the Outsiders, the Standells. You name it. If it’s old school garage your looking for, the Penetratos deliver in spades. Another winner from Windian.
http://windianrecords.wordpress.com/
Pile – Big Web b/w Afraid of Scissors
I’d not heard of Pile until Ripple’s good friend Dan Goldin of Exploding in Sound wrote to tell me that they were the first signing to his new record label, Exploding in Sound Records. Well, Dan had already proven his good taste in music with Exploding in Sound’s killer comps, so of course, I had to check this band out. What we have here is the band’s earlier 7” (on gleaming swirled green vinyl) originally released in 2010 (or 2011). “Big Web” is a dirge of Velvet Underground inspiration in a post-hardcore kinda way. Claustrophobic walls of guitar create sheets of sound as the tension and melody build. Flipside, “Afraid of Home” lays down a similar vein with a pulsating bass line that literally drives the song. I’m usually a bit leary of post-emo-hardcore-punk like this because it just becomes too whiny. Thankfully, none of that happens here. Soundscapes rather than songs are the story of the day, with vocals that build to a grind, not a whine. Definitely, caught my attention to see what Exploding in Sound does next.
Acid FM/Space Mirrors – Split 7″
This split comes as a nice looking package from Monster Fuzz Records and Acid Fuzz (Monster Records’s own Sparky Simmons) leads of right into a cosmic journey of space rock proportions. Perhaps it’s a good thing that I was playing some Hawkwind last week, because Acid FM take us right back into that galaxy with gleaming guitars, black-hole sized bass and nebulous riffs. “Space Beyond Space,” is just what the title says, a rocket adventure into the cosmos of mid 80’s Huw Lloyd Langton solo material. The track rocks, though, it never slags, with its up-tempo pace, nice star-shattering lead guitar work and spacey vocals. Flip over and we get Space Mirrors’ odyssey of a psychedelic inner cosmos exploring “Dreams of Area 51.” Just when the song seems like it’s settled into a pleasant mid-tempo vibe, a mean riff explodes throughout the chorus elevating this to true headbanging galaxies. Lyrics of governmental conspiracies, terrifying secrets, and lurking darkness, and sung-spoken by Martyr Lucifer round out this mind-blowing platter. Cool limited edition 7” on red vinyl in 300 copies
http://www.spacemirrors.com
http://www.monsterfuzzrecords.com
http://www.acidfm.com
–Racer
School Of Seven Bells – Ghostory
Master Musician – Great Pianist
Now that he has retired from the concert platform, do we call him a past master? No, he is still in our minds a master and we salute him.
Who showed more teeth when performing, Alfred Brendel or Ken Dodd? Alfred hated waiting in the artists’ room; he always hurtled onto the platform as if he could not wait to get on with the music. For many years his fingers oozed blood so that his fingers were covered with band-aids ” I am the only pianist who cannot play unless he is plastered.”
He obviously likes playing with words as well as piano keys so it was no great surprise when he started to write poetry; it is published and he has even had some of his poems set to music by Harrison Birtwistle. In his early days, he had many concerts in Germany and his native Austria with his baritone friend Hermann Prey. Their tours entailed many rail journeys and while waiting for trains they used to make funny faces into those four-shot photograph booths that you find on platforms, acting out lines from Schubert’s Winterreise or Die Schöne Müllerin. Another. Another habit was collecting misprints. Alfred would hand you the latest from his wallet and scan your face eagerly until you got the joke when he would explode with laughter.
On the contrary, his performances were very serious, just occasionally to the point of being on the intellectual side when he could lose his spontaneity, over-phrasing simple tunes.
He researched music texts thoroughly, not even trusting so called Urtexts, searching out the original autographs whenever possible. At his usual best, his playing was a perfect blend of head and heart, backed up by technical perfection. Playing Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert and Weber (his playing of W’s Konzertstuck was like a romantic dream), Liszt (in his early days), Busoni and Schönberg, peerless, he was one of the greatest pianists of his day.
He settled in Hampstead in a house full of native art; and when the house next door became available, he bought that too, so as not to be overheard by neighbours.
He became interested in the piano’s innards in his constant search for a good piano, knowing just enough about things like pricking the felts as to be a bit of a menace to the piano tuners and technicians. He is obviously a good teacher – as witness his star student, Imogen Cooper. Marriages: two; children, also two, a son and a daughter. Adrian is a fine cellist, often playing recitals with his father.
Long may he enjoy his retirement!
The Overture, Concerto, Symphony concert programme that existed for such a long time seems to have been overtaken by the American habit of a programme with just two works, even beginning with a concerto. On February 9 in the RFH we started off with one of the weightiest of Piano concertos, the B flat, Brahms No. 2, Opus 83, composed about the time that he sprouted his beaver. Clara must have had her work cut out to get her maulers round it – surely it’s a man’s work if ever there was one.
Rich, beautifully composed, a complicated structure, perfect in all its parts from the serene horn solo lead-in, through the chunky scherzo, the tender cello solo in the Andante, ending with the gay (old style meaning) finale. You almost forgive of the work coming to an end the way it happens, like a stately galleon coming into harbour.
The Russian pianist Arkadi Volodos whose masterly Rach. 3 some time ago might have made one wonder if he might take the Lang Lang road to the flashing lights – but no, his way with the Brahms was virtuoso, yes, but measured and serious, almost solemn at times. Bliss was it!
The second heavy weight of the evening was the Fourth Symphony of Shostakovich, composed while World War 2 was raging but penned while Dmitri was in peace and quiet faraway in a Soviet composer’s hideaway. There are various hidden agendas that have been put forward, but hidden is the wrong word. No. 8 does not hide its message for it batters its way into the listener’s ear and consciousness, it goes for the jugular, searing the hearer, despite some quieter moments, quite shattering even if the coda is a soothing glimpse of better times (wishful thinking on Dmitri’s part?).
There are some similarities between No. 5 and No. 8 but whereas 5 has many melodic moments, 8 has few and is surely about DEATH. The DEATH of those millions who fought in the siege of Stalingrad and, just as surely, DEATH of more millions bulleted by the monster Stalin, and, quite likely, DEATH feared by the composer himself.
It is one of the wonders of our musical world that the persecuted Shostakovich was compelled by his inner self to go on composing, composing masterpieces too. A veritable miracle. certainly none in the audience in the RFH could forget it. The Philharmonia Orchestra under Tugan Sokhiev (Russian though the programme does not say so), played like virtuoso heroes and superb artists. Shattered we were in the audience, but somehow refreshed by a notable experience.
Salon has an article about the “death of chick lit.” I have a certain fascination with genre writing in fiction, less with genre as a commercial strategy and more with fiction that uses genres as surface topics — Joyce did it in Ulysses, Pynchon does it most brilliantly in Against the Day, China Mieville is perhaps the current reigning champ — but watching the product development and commercial markets in adventure, romance, westerns, space opera, fantasy, crime etc. rise and fall and sometimes return, even to challenge the “art” genres on their own terms is engaging on its own terms.
Music has its genre repertoires as well, and tracing them is of similar and probably more popular interest. Most musical production, the most popular music, is attached to genres with fairly hard boundaries between them. The kind of music I work with most — my own music, the music I discuss on this blog etc. — is marginal to this, when not essentially inaudible to audiences of critically mass. But for right and/or wrong, from this position of marginality, it’s been a strategic conceit of serious/classical/avant-garde/modern/experimental music maker that we don’t do genre proper, but rather reserve the right to use genre as a material and formal resource. Indeed the post-modernistas among us practically live off of genre-mining. But when our music does not refer to or otherwise partake of genres, we tend not to think of our output in any generic terms. The old masterpiece ethic of late classical composition is, in part, responsible for this with its insistence on total reinvention with each individual new work and a stubborn sensibility valuing the individual composer’s brand identity and the consequent stylistic territoriality contributes to this as well. We think of our own musics, rightly and/or wrongly, as above, beyond, or aside from genre.
But the rest of the musical world sometimes pays attention and sometimes features of our music are appropriated as generic musical material. In some cases — Philip Glass’s music is the best example — there is even a feedback loop at work in which the popular appropriation of elements of as figures and styles can be heard to affect subsequent music-making at the source. The imitations and parodies (in the old musical sense) of Glassiana in film and television theme music picked up on the tonal aspects of Glass’s practice divorced from the acoustical residua and graffiti that made his music once so transcendent, and Glass himself gradually took a similar turn. In this manner, something very close to a musical genre has been developed and it is indeed now possible (it’s happened to me, even) for a film producer to phone up a composer and ask for a package of themes and incidentals a la Glass. It has become a genre because it is recognizable, durable, divisible, and transportable (i.e. can be reproduced in varying musical contexts and functions) as such in the musical market place; a musical genre is thus, by definition, currency in the musical market.
Glass aside, as the serious/classical/avant-garde/modern/experimental is, in commercial market terms, marginal, if not dysfunctional or even failed, is it otherwise useful to talk in terms of genre? In fact, I think there are some niche markets in which it is useful, particularly as an historical aspect. The 12-tone or serial bebop piece, for example, had currency (in both senses) in a certain micro-market — largely academic — for a certain period of time. That era has long since ended* but some of those who had invested much in the technique and aesthetic managed — with a mixture of strategic reinvestments and tenured academic positions — to anchor themselves enough to sustain careers well into the next regime, if only as skilled artisans of an archaic practice, like mechanical watchmakers or specialists in the arcana of old computing systems.
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* Free dissertation suggestion: The Break Down of Bretton Woods and the End of the Princetonian Twelve-Tone Ascendency.
