Front Page

EMI - laying on of Hands

EMI's new boss may be its salvation

By David James

Confirmation, if any confirmation were needed, that the music business is not really a business at all, has come from the new owner of EMI, one of the majors. The ailing company has been acquired by Guy Hands’ Terra Firma. This is not a joke (although it is a rich source of potential puns). The joke, it turns out, is EMI.

Hands was quoted as saying, no doubt with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, that he has bought a dog. “We look for the worst businesses we can find in the most challenged sector, and we get really happy if it’s really, really bad. We are just hoping that EMI is as bad as we think it is.” He is unlikely to be disappointed.

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Alt. Folk

Jimmy Dowling: plain talkin' man
Jimmy Dowling:
Self-titled album 2002

By Simon Gordon

Jimmy Dowling’s songs communicate that rarest of things: an honest simplicity that much of today’s popular music lacks. He has a knack for finding the unadorned beauty in the everyday. On his self-titled album – recorded in Toronto on a four-track in 2002 with the help of a few mates – Jimmy gives us his refreshing view of the world.

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Photoessay - music festival

High live Vibe scribe

Photos by Daniel Smith

Text by Peter Haydon

Want counterfeit passion at the social club? Or a taste of the Raj at the Regal? Allow Daniel to take you on an illustrated tour of the whirling world of High Vibes.

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Eclectic Byzantine and modern

The harmony and the ecstasy

Jouissance
The Scot's Church, Melbourne
Tuesday 3rd April 2007

By Peter Haydon

The eclectic group Jouissance have been around for a while now. Originally formed to create a very modern interpretation of the songs of Hildegard, they have continued to play in regions of music in a way that is at once innovative, meditative and intense.

So I anticipated something special in their performance at Scot's Church in Melbourne at Easter, exploring themes from Byzantine Greek music, theology and lore.

After a reading from the Gospel of Matthew, Jouissance begin with a piece called The Bridegroom Troparion, in which Peter Neville's ethereal bowed crotales state the melody.

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Aimee Chapman: Hairbrush to microphone

One woman's path towards earning an income from music

By Herself

A year and a half has passed since I finished full-time tertiary studies and was sent off into the world as fully qualified, bright-eyed, ambitious and enthusiastic ‘musician’. Eighteen months later and I find myself wiping the dust off the signpost I chose, to see if the road it pointed to did in fact read ‘Working Musicians - This Way’.

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Interview

Antescene: new way get a fair gig?

By Peter Haydon

Chris Chinchilla (the man whose name you want to pat) and Cate Lawrence are organising another Melbourne gig for Antescene. As the name suggests, Antescene is really trying to subvert all the characteristics of the original indie band performance scene. (Actually, "Ante" in the Latin means "before" not "against" but no-one could possibly argue that it isn't a much cooler word than Antiscene, which sounds like a homophobic punk band – I digress, but this article is a veritable feast of digressions.)

Antescene involves a co-op approach, equal sharing of takings, non-traditional venues and odd partnership with political groups and other creatives such as craftworkers. Come back William Morris, all is forgiven.

Unsurprisingly, young original bands are lining up to get involved.

I caught up with Chris, the one-time star of high profile English indie band Art Brut, and the far less famous but no less interesting Cate at the Brunswick Green, and our loose-jointed and far ranging conversation touched on polkadot rabbits, rural gigs, warehouses, noisy neighbors, tampon sculpture, underage shows and sealing wax. Read on if you dare.

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Send us your email, notes, memos, random thoughts, trenchant complaints. Tell us about your adventures, strugggles, disasters, disappointments and successes as a musician.

We give preference to letters of 200 words or less, but try your luck anyway. We may edit your letters for reasons of space, or possibly because we're just a bunch of interfering bastards. Despite that, we welcome your feedback, comments and observations. You can use a pseudonym if you wish, but please include your real name, suburb/town and, if you are writing from outside Victoria, your state/country.

Email us at musosunion@aol.com.

Got a problem or question relating to the music biz? Ask Uncle Terry.
(Uncle Terry is a grumpy old man who lives in a cave in one of the less fashionable corners of the Yarra Valley. He is not a qualified legal practitioner and he does not dispense formal legal advice. Neither he nor the publishers of "The Dues" accept any liability for the results of acting on the opinions, statements or recommendations expressed in his column)

Email Uncle Terry on musosunion@aol.com. Please provide your name and suburb (& state/country, if you're not a local yokel...)

Sales network?

Dear Uncle Terry,

We are looking at various music and social networking websites as ways to promote our music and get it out there. Which ones do you think are the best?

Matt

Dear Matt,

The short answer is none, or maybe all of them. What is wrong with such sites is a more interesting question.

Before the advent of the internet, distribution of music was pretty much completely controlled. It was next to impossible to get a recording out to the public (other than selling at gigs) unless you went through a record company. More recently, three things made it possible for anyone to record and distribute their music:

• The internet
• An incredible leap in the quality of domestic recording equipment
• An equally incredible drop in the cost of that equipment (not to mention a large oversupply of alleged recording engineers!) .

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747 Jumbo for sale. As new. Hardly used. Owner going overseas. Less than 2,000,000 km on the clock. Only used by little old lady to cross the Pacific. $57,452,700 ONO. Call Amanda on 011 411 545

***

All you can eat for $22. Blubber’s Bistro. Open 12–2pm for lunch, 6–10.30pm for dinner. 18A Grunt St, Prahran (Up the stairs past the morgue). BYO plates. Call 9998 8898 for bookings

***

Stick of dynamite for sale. Used once. Estate of Raul Todd. 7678 7334

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Mud, sweat and tears

We spend a lot of time, in this ezine, grumbling about various aspects of the music industry. The antics of the major record companies would be laughable if they weren't so often injurious to the interests of recording artists. As much as we can within the the draconian libel laws of this land, we point out the depredations of agents and venue managers, and give you stories from musicians themselves that demonstrate the constant struggle of a working musician's life.

In the midst of all this, we have to remind ourselves that there is also beauty.

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Disclaimer:
Articles express the opinion of authors and not necessarily that of theMusicians Union of Australia. No responsibility is accepted for unsolicited material. The Dues makes every effort to use reliable, comprehensive information, but we make no representation that it is accurate or complete.

Order of Merritt

By Theo Schulsospekz

Australian music legend Max Merritt is suffering health serious health problems so a benefit concert is being held to help him out on Sunday 21 October.

According to figures prepared by Hans Hoegh-Guldberg in the Music Council of Australia's Knowledge Base, the value of the music sector in 2005-06 was $6.82 billion.

If Max had got his fair share of that maybe he wouldn't need a benefit.

...more Intelligence

The company you keep

Reviewer:
Sean Rabin
Title: In the loop, by the numbers
Published:
The Australian 17/9/2007

By Trevor Plug

Try as I might, I can’t really fault this review. It even induces me to go so far as to listen to one of the tracks on the album mentioned and I found that I didn’t entirely hate it. This may seem to render the task of reviewing the review, well, impossible, but, here goes…

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Part 10 in a series by
Bellaire Hillock

Last time, we looked at the main elements of a promotional package. You can chuck a few other things into this package, so lets have a look at some of them now.

DVD of the band's performance

This can be quite expensive to produce. Before even considering including it in your package you should do a very rigorous cost/benefit analysis. If you have access to a low-cost or DIY option, you should consider this option. Keep in mind, however, that a badly produced DVD may be worse than no DVD at all!

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