Industrial Music

In a previous blog I finished up with the question:  Are musicians misguided to expect record companies to act in anyone’s interests but their shareholders?

My intention was to try to turn the tables on the usual question of whether the music industry exploits artists and instead to explore whether artists should reevaluate their expectations in a society where music is commonly viewed viewed as an industry rather than an art. To preempt the rest of this article, I believe the problem is at least partly down to our confusing the music industry, with its commoditised view of music, with music more generally.

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A Misfit’s View of Digital Distribution

Several months after its release on CD, Fusion Orchestra 2’s Casting Shadows is now available for digital download on CDBaby, Amazon and iTunes. While the announcement on the Fusion Orchestra 2 site explains briefly the complications that lead to the delays, this sheds a bit more light and opinion piece on the matter.

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Photography

Since the release of Casting Shadows and Down Is The New Up I’ve not posted much in this blog. That’s partly a reflection of the fact that since then I’ve been letting music take more of a back seat. Rehearsals and practice aside, most of my creative energies have been being channeled into my other major hobby: photography.

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CDs available!

Exciting times. Both Casting Shadows (Fusion Orchestra 2) and Down Is The New Up (Broken Parachute) have arrived back from production and are looking and sounding great, even if I do say so myself.

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You Wait Thirty-Five Years…

In what will probably go down as the worst bit of release timetabling in the history of my musical endeavours, it looks like both Fusion Orchestra 2’s Casting Shadows and Broken Parachute’s Down is the New Up are going to be released on the same day. It seems that you can wait thirty-five years for a release and then two come along at the same time.

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Broken Parachute Opens!

Well we haven’t quite got the album released yet, but in the mean time Broken Parachute now has a new website.

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Review: Deep Purple – Now What?!

Deep Purple have, after much speculation, released a new album called Now What?! And to cut to the chase it’s a good one.

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Sketch of a Day, and FO2 updates

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything in this blog, but today I have finally pronounced my instrumental track “Sketch of a Day” finished and so it seems like a good excuse to update things.

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Roland Super JX-10 Review

Back in May last year I got hold of a second hand Roland Super JX-10 and its associated programmer, the PG-800.

This was, I understand, the last of Roland’s analogue polysynths, and in particularly the last of the Jupiter line. It has some well-documented weaknesses with its MIDI implementation, not least of all that you can’t store or edit patches via MIDI. As its interface is via a two line menu and selector dials and buttons, the external programmer is considered something of a must-have for anyone seriously interested in programming it or tweaking it in realtime.

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Fusion Orchestra 2 Video

Just a quick post to say that the David Hewitt, who came along to a Fusion Orchestra 2 rehearsal in November armed with cameras, has finished producing his video of us. At seven minutes, it’s only fractionally longer than our shortest song so makes an efficient way of getting a feel for what the band is like.

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