Part two of a series of posts reflecting on almost a decade of DIY culture - focusing this time on live recordings, bootlegs and tape and CD-R labels. For an introduction to this series, click here.
Two:
Two:
2008: Bootleg shows. You can get a pretty good recording out of an
mp3 Dictaphone. They’re pretty expensive but one of your student mates will
have one I bet. It probably will fuck up pretty badly if you are trying to
record a full band, but its fine for acoustic shows. And you can then download
it to your PC, edit it with Audacity into separate tracks minus all the blah-blah bullshit and then you can
do what you want with it. Maybe you could upload it to a blog so everyone can
listen for free or maybe you could burn it to CD-Rs and put it out as a limited
release? PS – it’s polite to check with the people making the music before you
do this of course but you already knew that, right?
2017: This fragment was inspired by a live recording of an indie pop
band called the STAY TOGETHERS. That band featured people who were on or would
go on to be in a bunch of punk bands like GORDON GANOS ARMY, CIRCUS ACT and
YOUNG ADVENTURERS and Chris had used a digital Dictaphone to capture what I’d
hoped would be released as a demo before it fell off a cliff. As far as I’m
aware, the only track released from it became part of Degrees of Separation comp about a decade later.
What attracted me to that long-lost demo, beyond it containing a ton of
total bangers, was the cheapness of the recording. I love the accessibility of
making a demo from just playing a house show. I've never had much money and a
lot of what I was involved in was about finding ways to make things happen with
what I had to hand rather than letting a lack of equipment or finances or
knowledge stop me.
Of course, a couple of years later I realised that Chris had a particular
device that was designed for recording music and that it wasn’t just a regular
Dictaphone. By this stage, I think I’d borrowed a regular recorder and had a
crack at bootlegging some shows. I can’t remember what happened to the mp3s or
what they were like but I vaguely remember that the lead was lost and I
couldn’t work out how to get them off the device. Alas, those sets are lost to
posterity... Meh.
2010: See Toby’s excellent A Load Of Stuff That Happened blog for something similar to this.
2017: We are used to thinking of a record as a 'a thin plastic disc
carrying recorded sound in grooves on each surface...' so it's also worth
remembering that a record is also 'a thing constituting a piece of evidence
about the past...' It is
the capturing and sharing of an (often fleeting) moment, warts and all, the
process of which has shifted away from making grainy VHS cassettes like the
Southcoast Hardcore 2003 comp to YouTube channels full of live footage of bands
and crowds going off. Hate5six,
with its hub of high quality recordings of hardcore bands, is of course also a
particularly great - and long running - go to for this
kind of material.
Having played out a bit recently for the first time since the beginning
of the decade, it's been noticeable how many more videos circulate in the
aftermath of a show and how listenable a lot of them now are. This is clearly a
positive, but like with most forms of convenience, I wonder what is lost. Are
these films treasured like the much-rarer recordings from the pre-internet era?
Is there some sort of middle ground - DVD-R compilations perhaps - that give
streamed material a greater sense of permanence and curated boundaries? And
returning to the original meaning of this fragment, given the increasingly good
quality of footage, are bands ripping the sound to make their own affordable releases?
Capturing the moment was what Toby was trying to do when he collated a
lot of footage of DIY bands in one place alongside some of his writings:
I started [A Load Of Stuff That Happened] as I had a moment of realisation when I was
watching some bands at the Cowley Club in Brighton around 2007. I was seeing
some fantastic UK bands on a regular basis but there was a high chance in a few
more years some of these bands would be no more, and a few years later possibly
forgotten with some having never recorded a note. I wanted to document this
time, to show it had happened as there's a ton of these part-time bands playing
every UK town most nights and for me at that time these bands were important
and formative and live recordings can be a great way of capturing why.
It's also part of what
we were trying to do with In
On The Secret.
Three:
2008: So you’ve done a record and you’ve got no money but you
still want to make 1,000 copies, so you do. Then you have to pimp them out and
you’re still broke and it puts lots of pressure on you all and you split up
after 3 weeks. What about the inversion of this, i.e.: making deliberately
limited runs that match the practical limits of your resources. Or putting out
spray painted CD-Rs that you can make when you need them. [Now long defunct] local
labels like Milliepeed Records and At The Library used to put out CD-Rs and it
was an effective way of getting music to people.
2017: In the 00's, there was no super cheap way to publish our music
except by hand dubbing tapes or burning CD-Rs. Limited runs are synonymous with
record collecting these days, but that wasn’t on our radar when we spray
painted CD-Rs in the garden before the first GORDON GANO’S ARMY US tour. We had
no money and no label able to front up what was for most people we knew a lot
of money to get them pressed professionally. It was the mid-2000s version of
uploading the record to Bandcamp for download. I seem to remember the red paint
seeping around under the disc and sticking it to the newspaper and ruining a
bunch of CD-Rs.
It was the regular set up with Milliepeed, as Jim remembers:
CD-Rs just made Milliepeed work. I wanted everything to be cheap, so
people would be more willing to take a punt on a record but spending hundreds
on a run of ‘proper’ CDs put you at risk of being out of pocket, so you shifted
them for a fiver. Being able to can burn/spray CD-Rs and photocopy inserts,
meant you could sell whole albums for £1 without any risk of losing money! Plus
it had the same aura as the cut & paste flyers that were one of my original
draws to punk and hardcore.
*
This fragment also reminds me of a couple of instances where bands I had
played in limped over the finishing line. We’d held it together long enough to
put out something and then imploded. I still feel guilty that the labels
involved likely lost a ton on those releases. Bands (and labels) now seem to do
their own risk-free digital distribution via Bandcamp whilst DIY labels do
short runs of records and pre-dubbed tapes that they know they can shift.
This is the flipside to the moustache wax soaked revival of the audio
cassette. Beyond hipster fetishization, it’s also cheap to do the sort of short
runs that a DIY label can take a punt on and I've benefited from labels like Cult Culture and Circle House Records
putting out material on this format. The Luddite in me loves that tape labels
form a nice parallel to - and on the surface at least, a technological
regression from - the CD-Rs that served
our need for affordable releases a decade ago. Jim from Circle House echoes the
same sentiments as Jim Milliepeed when he explains:
A big part of doing tapes over vinyl is cost and practicality... vinyl is too
expensive to produce and would be difficult to cart around with me when I’m
moving, which I’ve done and will do every 6-9 months... They are the affordable
way of being able to do a DIY punk label for me right now. There’s also the
cost element for the people buying the tapes. It feels like with expensive shipping
costs, dodgy exchange rates etc. records are getting more and more expensive to
produce and therefore buy, pricing a lot of people out of being able to buy
them, which sucks, whereas tapes are an affordable way to get a hold of great
EPs and albums.
*
Jump to fragment (links added as fragments are posted): Intro // One // Two // Three // Four // Five // Six // Seven // Eight // Nine // Ten // Eleven // Twelve // Thirteen // Fourteen // Fifteen // Sixteen // Seventeen
