Music

Here.

Perhaps one for Norman here. Bloke on M4 might know the tech but mebbe not the music.

So, just one of those things that crosses the mind. There are songs out there that would be fun to hear in other ways. How easy is it to do this?

Sure, there have been algos to turn any three notes into a Bach fugue for decades.

But, say. I’d like to hear what a strong male but high voice – so, a counter-tenor. We don’t have castrati, which is good, but nor do we have any decent recordings of those last voices. There is one, I think, but not good. I’ve seen around that a studio way to mimic is to run a female voice (a what, coloratura? Soprano? We’re already seeing the limits of my knowledge here) in parallel with the counter tenor. The pairing is, so online says, pretty close to the castrati.

But, so, that voice. A capella. Full volume, belting it. But doing Van Morrison’s “Crazy Love”. Might be very odd to bad and terrible. But, you know, maybe. I’d just like to hear it.

Is music AI good enough to do that yet? Here’s this song (and if necessary, find the sheet music for it to feed in), gimmie a capella castrati?

At a guess you’d want to be able to edit. This particular idea has been in my head for a couple of days and sforza and dimuendo varies as I play it through. When the HEAVENS Open and etc. Yes I NEED her in the morning, Yes I need HER in the night etc. You know, actual musician, singer, stuff as well as the mechanical playback.

So, if that can be done, what about Can’t Find My Way Home? The arrangement from Blind Faith, with the two guitars. Would that translate into a dual harpsichord arrangement?

And, ‘N’, ‘n’……how far has this tech got so far?

Today I found out that Vince Clarke – Yazoo, Erasure etc – is heterosexual. Wasn’t expecting that….

No stranger to rebuilding after disaster, the US band’s frontman Zachary Cole Smith now sees the entire capitalist project as ripe for reinvention,

Apparently they’re indie rockers.

Just astonising that indie rockers think capitalism is ready to be replaced, eh?

Developed by former Apple software engineer Christoph Buskies, KeyComp allows musicians to perform alongside prerecorded orchestral parts without sacrificing a “live” feel.

Using prerecorded instruments and samples is nothing new; several similar systems are already used in theatres worldwide. KeyComp differs in that it allows a single keyboardist to play a show’s melodic lines while the software adds custom-recorded (rather than “off-the-shelf”) orchestral parts that interact dynamically with the keyboardist’s touch and tempo in real time.

Thanks to successful union campaigning, the software is banned in New York, Washington DC and in Hamburg, where the software company is based. The MEAA is calling on it to be banned or restricted in Australia, too.

“In Los Angeles, if a producer wants to use it, they have to pay a big levy to the unions; and in New York, where the unions are very strong, there’s a minimum orchestra size in each theatre,” Steendam says. “That’s something the MEAA is exploring here.”

Note, of course, that it’s the union which gets the money, not the not-hired musicians.

The album was released in November 1980 to critical disdain, but Lennon’s murder the following month sent sales stratospheric, and Lennon, Yoko Ono and Douglas went on to win a Grammy. They had already recorded the intended follow-up, Milk and Honey, but its release was delayed until 1984.

That year, Douglas sued Yoko Ono over unpaid royalties for his work on that album and Double Fantasy: “I waited three years, then I finally said to Yoko, ‘It’s really a lot of royalties probably accruing here… ’ And I got a nasty letter, almost like, ‘F— you, you’re not getting anything.’ ” A court eventually awarded him more than $2.5 million.

Not that I know anything about this – just gossip from the papers etc – but she’s as rich as Croesus off those royalties. And yet she’s done the above, and also refused to pay out anything to Julian until a court case. Sure, she didn’t, legally, have to either but, you know.

Sorta, you know, not nice?

In August they played their first gig at the Cavern Club (minus McCartney, who was away at a Scout camp in the Peak District). Ivan Vaughan began the set on tea-chest bass, but when he left to finish his homework Garry took his place. The club’s jazz-loving owner Alan Sytner sent a note to them on stage telling them to “Cut out the bloody rock”, but got short shrift.

The following month it was back to school for Garry – in the Remove at Liverpool Institute alongside McCartney, who had been held back after failing his Latin O-level, and Neil Aspinall, who would become one of the Fab Fours’ right-hand men and the head of Apple Corps.

Homework, scout camp, Latin O levels……

Beyoncé is now a billionaire, according to a report from Forbes – becoming the fifth musician to obtain the status.

The Grammy award-winning artist, 44, has joined the world’s wealthiest people following the success of her Cowboy Carter tour, which grossed more than $400m in ticket sales, and an additional $50m in merchandise sales. Her previous Renaissance world tour brought in about more than $579m.

Her husband, Jay-Z, was the first musician to become a billionaire on Forbes’s list in 2019. Rihanna, Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift have also achieved the elite status.

So that’s five more to be subject to extortionary taxation then.

Right?

If not, why not, and fearing the Swifites defending their Goddess does not, no, work.

Is there a music AI yet?

Are full musical scores available in digital format? Mozart, Beethoven etc? Led Zep?

Does that music AI grasp different sorts of ensembles? Brass band, big band, jazz trio, Mozart size orchestra, Bruckner size?

So, feed the digital scores into the different ensemble models, create the Pastoral by jazz trio (more likely, brass band, but why not kazoo orchestra?) and, maybe – different because still copyright – run Led Zep on different sizes of orchestra.

Flood Spotify and live off the proceeds.

So, what’s wrong with this idea? If the creation is cheap enough – as in, a few keystrokes for each piece per style – then the pitiful streaming payments still add up.

Anyone?

At the turn of the decade, gay male and non-binary pop stars seemed poised to take pop music by storm. Lil Nas X broke out with Old Town Road – which blew up on TikTok, sold about 18.5m copies and remains tied with Shaboozey’s A Bar Song (Tipsy) and Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You as the longest-running No 1 single in US history – and artists such as Sam Smith, Troye Sivan and Olly Alexander from Years & Years were all singing about gay love and sex.

But the initial promise has stalled. Lil Nas X’s attempts to build on his smash debut album have fizzled, and he is publicly dealing with mental health issues. In October, Khalid released his first album since being outed by his ex last year but only sold 10,000 copies in the first week in the US. A previous album, 2019’s Free Spirit, sold some 200,000 copies in the first week and led to him briefly dethroning Ariana Grande as the most listened to artist on Spotify.

That the rest of the music isn’t all that good?

This pushes some artists into behind-the-scenes roles as writers and producers, such as MNEK, who says: “Major labels aren’t searching for an openly gay pop star. They are searching for something that sells and is palatable for families and middle England.”

This also works and works even if we reverse it. The vast majority are not gay so people who sell to hte vast majority are not going to be talking about – say – minority sports like gay sex. You know, it’s a business?

Andrew Lauder obituary: record label executive who shaped rock
Influential A&R man who signed the Stranglers, Buzzcocks and Motörhead in the Seventies but let Queen and Elton John slip through the net, dies aged 78

OK:

As head of A&R at Liberty and then United Artists in the late 1960s, his British signings ranged from the cosmic space-rock of Hawkwind to the surreal humour of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band via the high-octane electric blues of the Groundhogs

And:

He was one of life’s incurable enthusiasts. Into the 1970s he signed Dr Feelgood, Motörhead,

There’s a definite thread that connects Groundhog, Dr F and Motorhead.

But their most obvious immediate effect was a kind of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their initial success, you suddenly couldn’t move for indie bands who wanted to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”

There’s a bit on Primal Scream’s live version of Screamadelica, in “Loaded”. Mani’s playing bass for them by this time. And the whole thing simply does swing – as a result of his bass playing – in a way that the recorded version just doesn’t.

The AI plays Bach.

People Watching won because it is an album of both universal appeal and local colour. It has evergreen melodies holding down songs about guilt, urban decay and the tension of leaving behind working class life for global fame,

Be Joe Walsh singing “Life’s Been Good To Me So Far” next.

Fusing Bolan with Blondie by way of the New York Dolls and Sex Pistols, the band scored hits including I Want Your Love, Baby I Don’t Care and Landslide of Love,

Baby I Don’t Care is really “Wild Thing” rewritten. So Transvision Vamp were a Troggs cover band.

Sly Stone is gone but as everybody will be pointing out he left the stage a long, long, time ago.

They were the only band at Woodstock who had had a number 1. This is it.

Cracking piece…..

When contacted directly by The Telegraph and asked whether the band denied any modern day slavery offences, Moffat said: “All denied. It’s all fake. No one is a slave and everyone is ok. We have begun criminal lawsuits against the persons behind this hate campaign.

“We don’t believe in social media trials – we only believe in a democratic system of innocent until proven guilty, with fact-checking and hard evidence.”

Sgt Tom Ottley, of Devon and Cornwall Police, said: “As part of our response to the initial incident, we identified several of the occupants of the van as being potential victims of exploitation offences. They are receiving specialist support and being safeguarded at this time.

Of course, I’ve no knowledge of anything at all here. But “criminal lawsuits” sounds like bluster to me.

Irv Gotti, the chart-topping producer and music label executive who was instrumental in the careers of Ja Rule, Ashanti and DMX as the co-founder of Murder Inc Records, has died at the age of 54.

I have never – to my joy and relief, I think – heard of any of these. Which, given thatthe one of them is famous enough to have his death reported in the newspaper is a pretty big hole in my knowledge of the world. An appropriate hole perhaps, but one all the same.

Two teenagers arrested over fatal stabbing of 14-year-old drill rapper on bus
Police detain two boys and 44-year-old woman in connection with murder of Kelyan Bokassa in south-east London on Jan 7

Not to make light of a young lad cruelly done away.

But this idea of someone being a “drill rapper”. Seems a very common occupation judging from newspaper coverage. Now of course I’ve never heard of any of these people – it’s not really aimed at pale and stale like me. Also, there’s no way I listen to teenibop chart countdown each week.

But I’m getting the impression that this isn’t quite what drill rapper means – that connection to the teeniebop charts. Rather, given the cheapness of new media, this is something more like having a Facebook page. Pretty much everyone’s got a video camera these days – phones will record video. Mumble something while filming, stick on social media of choice, you’re a drill rapper. But, not really – in the same way that 60 years ago ringing your bicycle bell didn’t make you a campanologist.

Your “drill rapper video” is seen by the 50 to 200 people in your wider social circuit and that’s it. Some, obviously, do make it to the teeniebopper chart countdowns. But the newspaper descriptions of this or that lad as rappers are about someone shouting into a microphone for Instagram, not anything else.

Given my intense and detailed knowledge of todays youf scene of course all the above could be complete bollocks. But that is how it seems to me.

What was your worst financial decision?
It wasn’t really a decision so much as a deal I couldn’t do. It was about 1978 and I asked my bank manager for a £4,000 loan to sign the publishing rights for the songs of an unknown group called U2. He looked at me as if I were joking and turned me down. The rights to U2’s songs must be worth trillions now.

Umm, yes…..