Music From Mars

[ZoeB]

I can't believe I haven't posted this here yet... Yes, the title's heavily RDJ influenced, but the music itself is only somewhat RDJ influenced. :) Full streaming on Bandcamp:

 

Music From Mars

 

Any constructive criticism is appreciated, as always! ^.^ Thanks everyone!

[Terpentintollwut]

This is hardly constructive as it's probably down to personal taste, but I've been thinking that every time you posted something new - I find the manga-covers you always use for your releases very offputting Makes it tough for me to listen to the tracks without having those predefined images in mind. I think I read somewhere that a friend of yours makes them and that tells me you're probably very attached to them, but I think they have a negative effect on the music. I could have imagined Mars-surface, craters and shit, but now I have this manga girl in my head and that makes the music seem cheesy too.

 

But perhaps I'm the only one who sees it like that ... am I?

[ZoeB]

Thanks for the feedback! The artwork does seem strangely controversial, it's not just you. I'm trying to ensure it's different from most artwork for similar music enough to stand out from the crowd, yet homogenised among my own albums enough to be recognisable, and I like having the kind of artistic control you can't easily get with actual photography, for instance, at least not on a sane budget. I think it's safe to say the artist in question is very talented (I even prefer her work to, for exmaple, Abdul Haqq's covers for Model 500's Cassics and the Apollo compilation, although again that's probably just personal taste). So it seems it's specifically the manga style itself that some people object to. I'll take this under consideration, thanks.

 

Of course, I could be misinterpreting you. Is it this style of drawing you (or anyone else, for that matter) dislike, or is it the fact it's got people in it rather than just the landscapes? Is there anything else you'd recommend instead? I think I heard someone mention pure bokeh photography before, which would certainly fit the ambient music, but not the more upbeat tracks, and I'm not enough of one for consistency in that respect! There's also generative CGI, but again, I'd feel like I'm limiting myself, that time to more abstract electronic / mathematical sounds and less organic ones.

 

For what it's worth, I know the artist purely through commissioning her to draw cover artwork for me, so that's not affecting my judgement, although of course she's very personable. I keep coming back to her because she's so talented and because I like consistency amongst releases (such as with Ultimae Records and EM:T Records). I'd be happy to consider alternatives, but I still think her style best suits my music's needs.

 

Do you have any thoughts on the music itself, by the way? :)

[Terpentintollwut]

Aye, can't stand all these news bands that Warp are signing :(Bring back the good old days.

No, they won't come back.In my car, I listened to our youth radio programme the other day (EinsLive), they were talking abou Bibio and whoever, to me it was uninteresting kiddie shite, but the they mentioned WARP and I thought "WTF". But didn't care then, because I thought Warp became some "indie style guitar music" label. OK, also still electronic music - but no more invention of the wheel. What could have been expected.Yeah, I'm also an old daddy of almost 40, having bought the Forgemasters "track with no name", Tricky Disco, NOW, Sweet Excorcist, oh yeah, good past, purple records :) But hey it's the past. The future is somewhere else, probably not at Warp. My future is classical music, listening 90% to it. Only looking forward to Ae, Plaid stuff (Plaid are really good these days), but that's about it. Didn't like RDJ after Windowlicker, I think he was good for the big effects, but ran out of ideas, not consistent. Ae are more consistent, Plaid develop. Nothings sweeter than "Masato Shuffle". Period!

It's actually just the manga-elements that put me off. That's a) because I strongly dislike the anime and manga drawing style and b), which is more objective/relevant, I think it's too specific rather than too vague. It doesn't really give the music a chance to speak for itself, since it automatically evokes associations of Sailor Moon and the likes. Makes it rather kitschy. I just took another look at the cover and just noticed how the landscape and rocks are actually well drawn, I didn't even realize that before. Generally, having a drawing rather than a photograph/render as a cover is absolutely fine by my definition. Even a super-basic horizon would be fitting for Mars (like in the David Firth-universe where every horizon is pretty much just a straight line).

 

Now the music itself, since I've gotten over the cover, I actually like quite a bit, but even that I just realized now. I'm a real mangaphobic you see, it spoiled the whole experience for me.

I can't say too much about the music technically, as I don't make music myself (yet), but I make mixes and movies and am therefore big on Ambient and everything that has a certain atmosphere to it (I'm playing Geothermal Chamber right now) - it does stand out from most of the other "clean" ambient tracks posted here, quality-wise. I'm saying clean cause I think the style is rather clean, as opposed to the organic/grainy/fuzzy type of Ambient (e.g. the tracks Spittal makes, at least the ones I know). I like the later tracks better than the earlier ones. Or maybe it just took some time for me to get into the album. And why is there birds on Mars?

[ZoeB]

Ah, thank you very much for the clarification! I think in my mind, I associate that style with Akira, Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise, Ghost in the Shell, and Perfect Blue. I kinda forget that to most people, they probably conjure up images more of Dragon Ball Z and Pokémon (or, if you're my age, maybe Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds). It's one of those weird things where it's more like a medium than a genre, yet it seems to be kind of pigeonholed as one of those things that people either like wholesale or dislike wholesale. That's a good point that such associations may be backfiring for me. So I guess I could either make future artwork more explicitly for adults (not as a euphemism for having sex or violence, just being less of something that children would be interested in) and sci-fi / cyberpunk in terms of settings, or go for more abstract imagery. Might either of those help, do you think?

 

Although I reserve the right to have one or two more people in the covers, I already have one or two lined up for future albums anyway.

 

Yeah, there shouldn't really be birds on Mars unless it's been terraformed or there's a biodome there or something, neither of which are shown by the cover... But it's one of those things where I ignored any kind of coherent plot in favour of just doing what (to my mind, at least) sounded best.

 

Anyway, thank you for the cover artwork advice and I'm glad you like the music. :)

[Terpentintollwut]

Mind you I wasn't criticizing the birds, I was just wondering. I thought they were worked in quite nicely, even though I don't like birds very much IRL (I hate it when they come back on in the night and remind you that you've stayed up too long), but I believe there were some swallows in there and they, being one of the few cool species of birds, made up for the rest.

 

 

I don't know if that would "help", it's your decision after all and if you think the music goes well with those covers it suits your vision, so you should stick to it. I just felt the need to express my opinion. I like the black and white one of those unused ones better but that may be due to its sketchy nature and less typical setting/composition. I know there are good anime as well, although I haven't seen many. The main reason I dislike the style is the very style itself - it's someone else's style, yet so many people seem to have adapted it lately, rather than working out their own drawing style. It's relatively simple and has basic rules, so I guess it's appealing for some. But in the end I find manga-pictures are all copycats of something that's been invented by who knows a long time ago. Of course, everyone is inspired or influenced by certain style, yet I think manga is too dominant to allow seriously working in your own touch. I always say my best friend is my favorite artist when it comes to drawing/painting, he has a very unique style, of course there are influences as well, but I can always recognize his stuff. Those are his works: 1 - 2 - and my personal oldskool-favourite: 3 (he made that last one when he was 14 or so, used to draw those number 3's in school, many of them a day, we called them "the cheerful children") - Sorry I love showing his stuff cause I'm certain he'll be famous for it one day. If painting really is dead, he'll revive the shit out of it!

[ZoeB]

I'm not sure which other birds are in there, but they're mostly a local blackbird who my girlfriend and I have nicknamed Scruffy. By the time you get to the end of the track, I'm layering about two or three recordings of him on top of each other. :) It's a really lazy field recording where I'm basically sticking my arm out the window, holding on to a portable recorder. In all fairness, I did have to get up quite early to get a clean recording though, without lots of traffic in the background. :D

 

That actually makes a lot of sense about disliking a ubiquitous style because no thought has to be put into the style itself. I guess a good analogy might be if I was a composer and you were a producer. You might care a lot about making a unique sounding production, whereas (in this analogy, at least) I'd only really be concerned with the notation and not with the sounds themselves. What I like about the manga style is precisely that it is a simple, universal style, kind of like a lingua franca or agreed protocol, that lets you concentrate more on what you're depicting rather than how you're depicting it. Plus it's interesting to watch a style evolve as countless people contribute to and build upon the memepool, rather than each working in their own isolated island.

 

But yeah, that's just personal taste, and neither liking nor disliking it is more "correct". :)

 

Your friend is also very talented, and again has ensured that this forum will give me fresh nightmares...