On yesterday's show we
had a very special guest in for Festival Focus, none other than Jamie
Murray Festival Director of Doune The Rabbit Hole! Jamie was chatting
about what makes their festival great, and played some music from three
of the acts playing.
We also had our usual Peenko Friday Freebie track, our Featured
Artist was Primal Scream, our Classic Scottish Album was
Dananananaykroyd's 'Hey Everyone', and we had exclusive first plays of
new tracks from Discopolis and Mitchell Museum. Phew!
King Creosote - I'll Fly By The Seat Of My Pants - As chosen by Jamie Murray of Doune The Rabbit Hole
Punch And The Apostles - Tie Me To The Mast - As chosen by Jamie Murry of Doune The Rabbit Hole
Bill Wells & Aidan Moffat - Let's Stop Here - As chosen by Jamie Murry of Doune The Rabbit Hole
Cast your mind WAY back to the 12th of April when the SAY Award Longlist was announced. It's been a long and enjoyable road, one which has introduced us to new albums and allowed us to wax lyrical about old favourites, which has led us to this, the eve of The SAY Award Ceremony.
Chair: John Williamson (Academic)
Muslim Alim (Producer, BBC
Radio Scotland); Francis Bickmore (Editorial Director, Canongate Books);
Keith Bruce (Arts Editor, The Herald); Keith Cameron (MOJO); Francine
Gorman (Line of Best Fit); Mary Ann Kennedy (Musician/Broadcaster);
Malcolm Lindsay (Composer); Keith McIvor (Optimo); Susan Philipsz
(Turner Prize Winner 2010) & Fiona Shepherd (The Scotsman)
The above names mark the eleven individual faced with the tough task of crowning the inaugural Scottish Album Of The Year 2011, however rest assured that whoever they choose, it will be on musical and artist merits alone. My advice to them, if they haven't already made up their minds, is to go with your gut instinct.
Before the winner is announced, tomorrow evening from a ceremony in Film City Glasgow at which we have been lucky enough to be invited, here's a recap of each of the Shortlisted albums.
Feeling as fresh as a two week old sandwich I shimmied into my new timeslot on Pulse Community Radio of Wednesday's between 8pm and 10pm. Mark that one in your diaries folks!
This week's show featured some of the best acts I saw at last weekend's RockNess festival, plus music from the likes of Honey, Stanley Odd, Woodenbox, Seams and more! Expect heavy plugging of our Scottish Fiction Presents Gig which takes place on Sunday, as we played a track from each of the performing artists. There's also the Classic Scottish Album which comes from Boards Of Canada and our Featured Artist this week was Aereogramme. Enjoy!
I hate being stuck in work all day with no access to Facebook, Twitter and Blogger. Means I miss all the exclusives. (That and being bone idle, and generally having no access to exclusives).
So it's pretty common news by now I guess, yet given my continued support for The SAY Awards and the fact I'm genuinely delighted to see some albums on this list, I thought I'd post up about it anyhoo. So just pretend you haven't already seen the list and inject some sense of excitement into this post.
Firstly we should acknowledge the winners of the public vote, Twin Atlantic. Over 9000 people voted, which goes to prove that I'm out of touch with the public, and this means that Twin Atlantic's 'Free' makes the Short List. Fair enough, it isn't my cup of tea, but you can't argue with democracy. It would be interesting to know if the album was also picked by the judges OR if they had to bump someone else to include it...
Next shout out goes to Happy Particles, who defied logic by even making the Long List and now find themselves up £1000 and, in my opinion, in with a very decent shout of winning the grand prize. However the importance of their album 'Under Sleeping Waves' inclusion extends far beyond the monetary rewards. They are flying the flag for the unsigned, self financed and promoted musicians, those for whom making outstanding music is done in the confines of their bedrooms, in borrowed time in studios, paid for by gigging and working two jobs, the end results never in any danger of being what one would call 'chart successful'. I'm delighted to see Happy Particles make the Short List and gain even more exposure.
Also we are delighted that another two of our original nominations have made the Short List. They are of course Bill Wells & Aidan Moffat's 'Everythings Getting Older' and Remember Rememeber's 'The Quickening'. Both are brilliant albums and I couldn't complain in the slightest if they were the overall winners. Sad of course to see We Were Promised Jetpacks miss out on the final nod.
On last Monday's show I presented my 'dream Short List', and as well as 'Under Sleeping Waves', 'The Quickening' and 'Everything's Getting Older', we also plumped for King Creosote & Jon Hopkins, Conquering Animal Sound and Mogwai, so it's good to see them also on the final Short List. That's six albums out of ten that I would have chosen myself. Not bad.
Completing the list is Mungo's Hi-Fi with their album 'Forward Ever', Tommy Smith's 'Karma' and Rustie with the album 'Glass Swords'. I have to say I enjoyed Rustie's album when I listened to it, and can appreciate it's inclusion. Mungo's Hi-Fi are also very good at what they do, it's just that what they do isn't something I'm overly fussed about. And Tommy Smith's music is also off my radar. Yet the beauty of The SAY Awards is that it completely inclusive of all genres and that shows in the Short List.
My one gripe is the seemingly inexplicable exclusion of FOUND and their brilliant 'factorycraft' album. At least it proves that Stewart Henderson, the brains behind The SAY Award's and also head of Chemikal Underground to whom FOUND are signed, isn't exerting any influence over proceedings! I jest of course, but I'm genuinely shocked that FOUND did not progress into the Short List.
So that's my 2 cents. There's now two weeks on Monday for you to listen to each album again via The SAY Awards website and app. Once that is all over, it's just a hop, skip and jump to the Award Ceremony and the crowning of Scotland's Album Of The Year 2011. Here's the list in full (in alphabetical order):
You the good public were invited to vote for your favourite album for The SAY Award longlist on Monday. The votes are now in, and the Shortlist of ten will be announced tomorrow. On Monday's show we played a track from our ten picks, as well as plenty of great new music from Plastic Animals, Satellite Dub, PAWS and more! There's also a track from Plum whose album we recently reviewed, a Peenko Friday Freebie and some previews of Stag & Dagger which takes place on Saturday. Enjoy!
It's been over three weeks since The SAY Awards Long List
was announced and hopefully you've been busy familiarising yourself
with the unknown quantities that it threw up. As there's also now less
than twenty four hours until the all important public vote, and with the winner
of said vote guaranteed a place on the Short List of ten albums,
there's a lot at stake (£10,000 to be precise!) As one of the 100
nominators for the SAY Awards, we were chuffed to see four of our five
selections make the Long List. And we've decided to give you the
low-down on each of these four albums.
That isn't to say that the other 16 albums are not worthy of your vote
or being the overall winner. Indeed there's plenty of other worthy
contenders in our eyes, and we'll come to them in due course. We all
have our favourites and these four albums happen to be mine. That said
the most important thing is to make up your own mind and you can do that
over at the SAY Awards official site.
Without further ado, here's the third of our choices, 'Under Sleeping Waves' from Happy Particles.
Self-released
on 25 December 2011, 'Under Sleeping Waves' is an album that plays
great tribute to Scotland's love of the dreamy, shoe-gazing
side of pop. The influences are here, lead singer Steven Kane has a
dream inducing voice that harks back to fleeting beauty of The Cocteau
Twins' Elizabeth Fraser, the swooning melodies equivalent to Boards Of
Canada and more recently the likes of Errors and Remember Remember. The
last band mentioned shouldn't come as a surprise as Happy Particles
share some common members with Remember Remember. There is at times
even the sense that the layers of music, built painstakingly into an
atmospheric triumph could explode into a full blown Mogwai-esqe sound,
although the closest we get to that is towards the end of 'Come Home All
Dead Ones'.
The album plays by the maxim 'less is more'. Opener 'Aerials'
breezes in with little more to it than Kane's soothing vocals and an
eerie translucent distortion. 'Infinite Jet' comprises of the more 'traditional' song structure, a
resounding melody, steady but not overpowering drum beat ply together to
flesh out the sound. 'Slowness'
demonstrates further the post rock sounds further, with careful
emphasis on providing just the right amount of sounds. Not one beat,
note, string or key is out of place or unnecessary here. Indeed it's
easy to imagine the band gathered round dissecting their sound to remove
all the superfluous elements. And what's left is just sublime.
There's an air of beauty that surrounds this full album, and right at
the very heart of that is 'Offline Contact', a track that has the
ability to melt your heart then wrap it's arms around you all within
it's 4 minutes 33 seconds. As strong as it
started the album draws to a close. 'Empty Circle' embodies the band's
ability to build towards a heavenly effect; crashing cymbals, tinkling
xylophones, epic strings and that ever present falsetto all intertwine
and for those few fleeting moments it's as fine a collective sound as
you'll ever have the pleasure to hear.
'Classes In Silence' has a prophetic name as the tracks is just as much
about what isn't there as what is. It's minimalist post rock at it's
finest, and one imagines that years ago celebrated gentry may have
gathered in large concert halls to appreciate music of this exact
quality. 'Under Sleeping Waves' will bring you immense joy, and if
you let it, immerse you in swathes of gorgeous waves of unrivalled
beauty. Case in point is closer 'AM Sky (Bleary)'. Like it's name
sake, the track has the feel of light drifting over the landscape, each
note on the xylophone represents the light touching each point with it's
warmth. The warmth of this epic album will, one suspects, live well on
past the end of the day.
Why should 'Under Sleeping Waves' win The SAY Award 2011?
This, ultimately, is the question that I had to ask myself when
nominating the album, and one which you should ask when deciding to
vote, or not vote, for it. The answer is that in an award which focuses on the underdog that is Scottish music, Happy Particles are the racehorse equivalent of the 1000-1 shot. Everything is stacked against them, and in any other 'traditional' award structure they wouldn't even be at the party. The album released as a download only via Bandcamp, on Christmas day no less, by an unsigned band with little to no hype surrounding it, embodies the very ethos of The SAY Awards. It's about championing the unsung talent, about highlighting music which may have been lost to obscurity, and rewarding the talent that exists amongst that group. As a blogger I also see Happy Particles inclusion on the Long List as a vindication of what is good about music blogs. 'Under Sleeping Waves' flowed through the blogsphere like a tidal wave, gathering critical acclaim along the way. This album has benefited probably more than any other (Muscles Of Joy also received the same benefit) in the attention it has gained since being long listed. It also received a printed CD run allowing it to be stocked in high street and independent music retailers. Winning the £20,000 prize would be the ultimate reward.
On this week's show we feature another five artists long listed for The SAY Awards. Our featured artist is Kilsyth's The Twilight Sad, and our classic album track comes from The Beta Band. All that and music from Aerials Up, Craig_FS, The King Hats, Kick To Kill and more!
That picture above serves as a reminder of how I nearly electricuted myself doing gardening. The lesson? Do less gardening and listen to more music. And what better way to start than by listening again to Monday's show. Here's the playlist:
A week ago The Scottish Album Of The Year Awards were announced unto the world. The SAY Awards as they have affectionately become known are the brainchild of the Scottish Music Industry Association led by Stewart Henderson, co-founder of one of Scotland's finest record labels, Chemikal Underground, and former bass player in The Delgado's.
The awards provide Scotland with something that a community as diverse and talented as ours has been missing for some time, an independent, respected and recognised award which will hopefully engage those outwith the community to listen to, enjoy and ultimately purchase the excellent bounty of albums produced and made by artists on our very doorstep.
The whole process is broken down into four main steps. Here's a brief breakdown of how things will transpire in the coming weeks:
Nominations
This is where the process begins, and this part has already been completed. The SAY Awards asked 100 impartial and independent people from all aspects of the music industry to nominate their top five albums released by a Scottish artist during 2011. These nominators include DJs, promoters, music retailers, journalists, radio producers, venue owners and bloggers. The team have taken great care to choose a extremely diverse and representative batch of people to ensure that The SAY Awards are not simply a old-boys-pat-on-the-back club, which is why people such as record label owners, band members and managers have been respectfully left off the list. With 100 different people choosing their top 5 albums, there's the potential for a up to 500 different albums to be represented at this stage. For a full list of who had their say have a look here. You may notice Scottish Fiction on there, but more about that later.
The Long List
Once the 100 nominators have submitted their choices, they are then scored as such. In order of preference a nominators first choice receives 10 points, second choice 8 points, third choice 6 points, and you get the idea. The top twenty scoring albums will be announced on Thursday at 9:30am as the official SAY Awards Long List. The Long List albums will be given special promotion via the SMIA, retailers and perhaps more importantly The SAY Awards App. The App lets you stream each album in full over the course of four weeks. You can recap on the weeks albums at the weekend, and stream all twenty on May 14th whilst you vote for your favourite. The App also lets you purchase each album via iTunes or directs you to your nearest music shop to buy it, plus lets you interact via Facebook and Twitter about your thoughts on each album. Never before has a Scottish music award been so interactive, engaging and highly supported by retailers.
The Short List
How do you get from a long list to a short list you ask? Well it's at this stage that the expertise and knowledgeable opinion of The SAY Award judges are called upon. The panel of 11 judges, again drawn from respected and impartial experts in their musical field, will consider the musical and artist merits of each Long List album and put their ten favourite through to the Short List. Sales, fan base and chart positions are of no consideration here, it's purely about the music. And to keep things as engaging as possible, the public are asked to vote for their favourite over the 24 hours of May 14th. If the album the public votes for is not included in the judges top ten, then the judges must make way for the public choice. Expect at this stage plenty of 'please vote for us' posts on Twitter and Facebook, as those battling for the £20,000 top prize look to get their way onto the Short List by hook or crook.
Winner
Whilst there can only be one winner, we have all seen the exposure that being a Mercury Nominated album gets an artist. Yes it's not all about money and album sales, but let's not pretend that those things do not matter a hell of a lot. One objective of The SAY Awards is to get Scottish music out to the ears and homes of more people. Each finalist will also receive a prize of £1,000 with the top album getting a whopping £20,000! The judges are called about once more to reveal who, from the Short List of ten, will be crowned Scottish Album Of The Year 2011. All of this will happen on June 19th at an awards ceremony held in Film City Glasgow. Be ready for plenty of disagreement, calling the judges stupid uncultured swines, and perhaps humble Oscar-esqe acceptance speeches.
The thing with ANY type of award ceremony is that there will always be naysayers and nit-pickers. The SAY Awards aren't perfect (to be fair I don't think they ever claimed they were) and won't suit all tastes, yet it's a real chance for the Scottish music community, bloggers, artists, record labels, journalists and retailers alike, to join behind the mantle of what could, and hopefully, will become a well respected mark of artistic credibility. For each person who listens to an album they may never have heard of before, then that is a small victory. For the winner, some real funding to let them produce more music against the unrelenting tide of financing music in a shark like economy. For us Joe public, the chance to debate, argue or agree with the records that made it, and those that didn't.
Scottish Fiction managed to catch Stewart Henderson for a few quick questions about The SAY Awards.
What makes the SAY Awards different to the Scottish award shows that have existed in the past?
Before going into any unique characteristics of the Scottish Album of the Year Award, we should be very clear that it has not been set up to be in competition with any other award in Scotland (or anywhere else for that matter). Taking The Scottsh Music Awards (Tartan Cleffs) as the highest profile event in Scotland at the moment, they have a well-established and successful ceremony that, year on year, raises tremendous amounts of money for Nordoff Robbins and delivers an entirely different 'prodcut' from the one we're proposing through The SAY Award. I think that for our industry to be truly representative of music fans up and down the country, we need the diversity of tone and style that defines our music to be reflected in our events as well.
We've been very fortunate with The SAY Awards in that we've been entrusted with significant resources to get it off the ground. That, and the contacts we've been able to tap into through the SMIA, has helped us pull something together that, I think, has a greater sense of scope and scale than anything attempted previously. By focusing solely on albums, we've been able to concentrate our efforts on (hopefully) delivering a diverse and progressive long list and, crucially, giving those albums a platform at media and retail that will materially benefit the artists. Having the unified support of independent retailers as well as front window displays in every HMV store in Scotland, racking in FOPP and online promotions through iTunes and Amazon is enormously important and will shine a light, not just on these albums, but on Scottish music in general. If that encourages music fans to reflect on the strength and diversity of our artists then the SAY Award will have done its job.
What would you say to those who question the use of a public vote as part of the shortlist selection process?
Read the format notes more carefully. I think we can all agree that an award that's decided exclusively by the public would be wide open to abuse and completely incapable of delivering the type of long lust we're after. That said, an award that excludes the public completely would be wide open to the criticism that it was an elitist closed order that marginalised (or worse, dismissed entirely) the opinions of thousands of articulate, open-minded music fans.
The long list is made up of the twenty highest scoring albums from 100 Nominators' Top 5s; the public, once they've listened to all twenty albums, can only vote for one of those albums; the most popular album from the long list (as voted for by the public) will be placed automatically on the short list; the judges may have placed that album on the short list already; if they haven't, then they'll have to demote one of their Top 10 choices to make way for the public favourite; the judges will ultimately decide on the winning album.
At Scottish Fiction we focus almost exclusively on Scottish music. As part of the SMIA, what is your view of the Scottish music culture?
I think the diversity and quality of music being released by Scottish artists at the moment is, frankly, extraordinary. Music plays such an important part in all our lives that it really shouldn't come as a surprise we're so self-assured and bold in the type of albums our artists are making.
There's some serious cash on offer for the winner, and with the app and the commissioned art prize, this all seems like a behemoth in terms of organisation. Is this a long term venture akin to the Mercury Music Prize?
The SAY Award is absolutely a long term venture. There's no way we're going to get everything right in our first year, far from it, but we'll hopefully be able to establish the name and format of the award moving forward and convince people that it's something worth supporting and, more than that, to be proud of.
Ultimately what would be the aim of the SAY award?
To establish, for the long-term, a credible platform from which Scotland's best music can be promoted and championed.
So to round things off I'd like to present the albums which Scottish Fiction put forward as our favourite from 2011. They may not all reach the Long List, although they should (it's started already!). But where ever these albums end up I think each of them are worthy of some more investigation from yourself if you have not already done so.
As the Renegade Master once said, "I'm back once again!" The first show of 2012 featured a whole heap of great music and an hour long tribute to Ziggy Stardust himself. Check out the full playlist below and listen in again. Podcasts are also now available to download. Fill yer boots.
Before attempting any review I always like to give the material in question a few listens over, let it float about my head and absorb it. With an album clocking in at just over 45 minutes that can take a bit of time, so, as the modern man and caring husband I am, I decided to catch up on some housework whilst listening. It was at this point I realised my mistake. Despite being an ambient, soft shoe-gazing album, 'Under Sleeping Waves' is not background music.
There are some albums that demand your full attention and make you work for your reward, Radiohead's - 'Kid A' and Sigur Ros' -'Ágætis byrjun' both spring to mind here. This is no bad thing, as in our fast paced world of iPod's and mp3's music can often become lost in amongst the back ground.
I digress somewhat, yet not without purpose. Self-released on 25 December 2011, 'Under Sleeping Waves' is an album that plays great tribute to Scotland's love of the erethral, dreamy, shoe-gazing side of pop. The influences are here, lead singer Steven Kane has a dream inducing voice that harks back to fleeting beauty of The Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser, the swooning melodies equivalent to Boards Of Canada and more recently the likes of Errors and Remember Remember. The last band mentioned shouldn't come as a surprise as Happy Particles share some common members with Remember Remember. There is at times even the sense that the layers of music, built painstakingly into an atmospheric triumph could explode into a full blown Mogwai-esqe sound, although the closest we get to that is towards the end of 'Come Home All Dead Ones'.
The album also plays by the maxim 'less is more'. Opener 'Aerials' breezes in with little more to it than Kane's soothing vocals and an eerie translucent distortion. Like a beckoning temptress dressed in nothing but a see-through negligee it's impossible to turn back now.
'Infinite Jet' comprises of the more 'traditional' song structure, a resounding melody, steady but not overpowering drum beat ply together to flesh out the sound. As the track gathers pace there's an unexpected change of pace, rather than a jarring stop it feels as if the band are content to let their pace run out of steam, much like the hazy stages in awakening from a dream.
'Slowness' demonstrates further the post rock sounds further, with careful emphasis on providing just the right amount of sounds. Not one beat, note, string or key is out of place or unnecessary here. Indeed it's easy to imagine the band gathered round dissecting their sound to remove all the superfluous elements. And what's left is just sublime.
There's an air of beauty that surrounds this full album, and right at the very heart of that is 'Offline Contact', a track that has the ability to melt your heart then wrap it's arms around you all within it's 4 minutes 33 seconds (Cage would be proud).
Generally with albums, there's the usual highs and lows. Yet it's practically impossible for me to fault this record. As strong as it started the album draws to a close. 'Empty Circle' embodies the band's ability to build towards a heavenly effect; crashing cymbals, tinkling xylophones, epic strings and that ever present falsetto all intertwine and for those few fleeting moments it's as fine a collective sound as you'll ever have the pleasure to hear.
'Classes In Silence' has a prophetic name as the tracks is just as much about what isn't there as what is. It's minimalist post rock at it's finest, and one imagines that years ago celebrated gentry may have gathered in large concert halls to appreciate music of this exact quality. Happy Particles deliver many times over on the oft used, but not always justified, tag of 'classical rock'.
If I could compel you to do but one thing this month, it would be to buy this album. 'Under Sleeping Waves' will bring you immense joy, and if you let it, immerse you in swathes of gorgeous waves of unrivalled beauty. Case in point is closer 'AM Sky (Bleary)'. Like it's name sake, the track has the feel of light drifting over the landscape, each note on the xylophone represents the light touching each point with it's warmth. The warmth of this epic album will, one suspects, live well on past the end of the day.
Buy Happy Particles - 'Under Sleeping Waves' for £5 on Bandcamp (You can also stream the album in full)
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