It’s no secret that we’ve got more opportunity than ever to be heard. Between bedroom composers, online publishing and mobile file-sharing, opportunities await like the jagged teeth of a K.O.B.U.S! fan. But rather than falling into the trap of thinking that it doesn’t take much to get your name out there, remember the massive pool of competition. Follow these tips to raise your online profile as an artist.
The author of this post is also the musician behind this video. Visit Pravda23.com and download free local electronic albums. See what I mean about promotion?
Stream Your Music
There are about a million sites you can use to upload your music for the public, but start with Last.fm, MySpace, iMeem and iLike. Drop a few free tunes in there, because 30-second tidbits are about as tasty as the floor of Carfax. Let them listen.
Get A Homepage
Seems obvious, but spend the R150 and get a homepage rather than sending potential fans and clients to MySpace or Facebook. You either own or are owned.
Go Big
Don’t just rely on three or four sites. Hit every popular music site with your profile, but also get your images on Flickr, join Mxit Music, Twitter and YouTube. Even if it’s just a foot in the door, online music promotion is more about volume of content than the quality of your music. Get noticed by being prolific.
No excuses. In your face. Raw and emotive. Packed with talent. But also uplifting, inspired, unique and like a breath of fresh air. That’s the legacy that Levi’s® Young Guns has created in the past two years, tearing across the country and spreading the sounds of alternative, immediate, energetic music to their thousands of fans across South Africa. These are the big names of tomorrow, the young who never settle for less and are intent on making a mark that is unique, overpowering and hard-hitting. So put on your brave face, leave your inhibitions in the closet and venture out to enjoy this tour de force, a countrywide programme brings a few upstarts to a town near you.
The chaos blows into Cape Town on Thursday May the 22nd, landing at 14 Hope Street, a venue so cool it doesn’t need more than it’s address as a name. Last year’s Cape contingent saw The Beams, Unit-r, BlaqPearl and T.O.P. sharing their styles with hordes of hungry fans. This year it all starts with Jitsvinger and ETC Crew who are going to cross dimensions, shift paradigms and turn it all on its head with their eclectic range of strictly South African sounds.
Thanks to the fact that statistics can prove absolutely anything you want them to, we knuckled down to some hard research over a case of beer and discovered a host of results, some shocking and some rather boring. Check it out.
Opening track Be Real’s sweeping, glitchy intro will put you on the back foot from the start, and it’s around now you’ll probably hear someone ask, ‘who’s this playing?’ Yep. Thanks to pop-rocking second album Chrysalis (2008, Loneroc), the artist you’ve heard about, read about and perhaps seen out and about seems to have finally spread her wings and fluttered upwards.
The artwork may suggest an artist more pre-occupied with adolescent butterfly and bedroom diary imagery, but this ain’t cherry-pop for slumber parties: it’s melodic dance-rock; the kind you may hear at the end of the end of the movie, just as the hero grabs the girl and embraces her, thoroughly re-inforcing gender stereotypes and getting some action at the same time. Aaah, Hollywood.
Like that weird patch of fuzz at the small of my back, Go Home has grown on me. In criticism, it’s very detached/emo. But in praise, the track oscillates between the soft padding of the crystal-clear beauty of the female voice and a simple hard-rocking, singalong hook.
Tender and cinematic, Little Bird is the timely, slow-tempo break to Chrysalis’s opening energy. Hold Me follows with a similarly acoustic sound (as does closing, unplugged Hare-Krishna-esque version of the track), and now you’re hugging the wall of the alternative music bar, getting some words in with the cute guy that ‘accidentally’ bumped you with his pool cue before handing it over to his mate in the middle of the game, saying, “I’m out.” Just so he could chat to you. Bless.
“Most thankfully, we have an ALBUM here, and not just a collection of tracks.”
There’s a lashing of background electronica on Chrysalis, but, for the most part, we’re talking about live drums and the type of stuff you could reproduce live quite easily, without the trappings of truckloads of hardware. Of course, there is the cheesy value of lines like, “I just wanna walk in the light of what I believe,” (Faithless Heart), but hey! It’s pop! And, most thankfully, we have an ALBUM here, and not just a collection of tracks. In other words, you know what you’re in for the moment you hit play.
Nothing experimental or weird about it. Seems like Graham’s reserved her place on the radio-friendly bandwagon. But as an independent female artist in South Africa, Graham’s niche sure has been carved out for her, thanks to the likes of trendsetters like Karma-Ann Swanepoel (and Henry Ate) and…uh, the aptly named Louise Carver. It’s pretty safe to say that with two sexy albums and the look (and hopefully feel) of Xena the Warrior Princess, Liesl Graham’s beyond ‘upcoming’.
Our apologies for being so quiet. But we have been cooking up something special for you – a new album, which is called Daddy don’t Disco. You’ll have to wait just a little bit longer as we are currently in studio recording the beast. We are doing this with Theo Crous, legendary guitarist of the Nude Girls, and now also a highly respected producer who has worked with a long list of cool bands. Now we are on that list too.
June 1st 2008: Prepare to disco…
Writing Daddy don’t Disco has been an amazing experience; it’s been very rewarding, occasionally funny, and, as anyone who writes music knows, at times goddam difficult. You’d be forgiven for thinking ‘who cares, just tell us what it sounds like.’ But we’re afraid that we just can’t do that. Not yet.
What we can show you of the album writing process you’ll find in our pre-production blogs. Check out the videos (on the “if you’re dirty” group and our band page) that examines our pre-production process, as shot by our friends at the African Attachment. Or the pre-production photographs shot by the talented Mister Ross Hillier (check out this guy’s stuff). Or just carry on reading this insightful and well written blog to fuel your erudition. What we can tell you is that the previous album On a Stellar Bender was really a collection of songs whose origination spanned at least a year and a half; the material had various authors and mirrored a changing band. To the contrary, Daddy don’t Disco was written in three very intense months. Whew.
The process kicked off with writers’ shock as we realized that the months of improvising (as a methodology for generating new material) had yielded no songs. We had recorded tons of audio files, which contained sonic explorations, riffs, some interesting moments and a fair whack of nice sounding, slightly useless sound garbage. What was lacking was much evidence of strong verse/chorus relationships. With Theo Crous’s studio booked for April, and our first pre-production session with him as our producer planned for early March, we knew that we needed to get cracking, and fast.
The outcome of us knuckling down has yielded something that sounds pretty different to what we have made before. The songs “have their own being”, and have us wondering that we might have created something very unique.
Once we complete the album we will tour to the UK in late May. In June we will launch the album in South Africa and proceed to tour our country over the course of a few weeks.
All tour details will be announced through the media, our Facebook (‘If you’re dirty and you know it clap your hands‘ has moved. Here’s the new page). And don’t forget to download the free mp3s you’ll find on our Myspace
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