(For those of you unfamiliar with the original song, here’s that:)

Tom

Now, we were stopped in our tracks by this. We realised that in every song to do with pokemon ever released, there had always been this rapper, doing his business in the background. Mostly consisting of repeated mantras of ‘yeah’, ‘come on’, and ‘yo’, expertly interspersed with obscure references to pokemon, this guy was clearly an essential part in any song about the game. With this revelation, we came to the sad conclusion that we’d made a horrible omission in the final cut of our own attempt.

But we are sad no more, because today in the studio, we took half an hour out of our busy schedule recording Alex’s new album to make a few little additions to the song. Below is ‘Pokemon, What Happened To You’, with myself rapping throughout. We like to call it ”Pokemon, What Happened To You?’ What Happened To You?’.

You can buy the original EP, with this song, albeit rapless, by clicking here.

Tom

Guess I’m just boring.

So here’s what’s been happening at Tom Milsom HQ recently:

-We’ve been working on the website, doing some things that make it easier to use, some to make it harder*

- We’ve been making a brand new Hexachordal video ready for uploadin’ tomorrow

- We’ve been decorating the Milsom house with trees and sparkle

- We’ve been searching for a cure to Leukemia**

- OH YEAH WE WENT TO AMERICA

On December 10, I set off to New York with Alex Day. Charlie McDonnell and the magnificent Eddplant to meet the one they call Mickeleh in Manhattan***. After two days of professional dicking about, we settled down to play a gig at Gizzi’s Coffee on W 8th Street, and my God what an event. Ed opened superbly. Alex played a blinding set (even if I did forget the words to No Sacrifice again, which I still feel terrible about), and Annie Dinerman, who was the poor lady trapped between us in the set-listing, held her own and kept the audience attentive, no mean feat for someone who wasn’t British, male or cute, when that was what the audience had gathered for.

Still, there was more than enough of that to go around after Annie played. I started my set, and about halfway through, due to overwhelming demand, I let Charlie get up and play a few songs. I am so glad  I did.

Never before have I experienced anything quite as similar to what Beatlemania must’ve been like. I may never again. The audience would not stop screaming. It was hilarious and terrifying in equal measure. It made my trip. I think it made Charlie’s too, after he’d had a while to calm down.

The crowd was ravenous for merch. Did I mention the size? 125 people where 30 were expected. We completely sold out of every single thing we’d brought to sell. We made what the folks in the biz call ‘a killing’.

We dicked around for two more days, met meekakitty, mimsiesky, colormekristen and Liane (as in the Awesome Girl), spent lots of lovely time with Mike and Michael (Aranda – a charming and beautiful fellow who I strongly recommend. Five stars) then went home again. It was great.

We plan to do another bout of US shows in the summer, just before Vidcon. Hope to see you there!

Tom

*only one of these directions is intentional – hindsight is a wonderful thing. Foresight moreso, but it’s a lot scarcer around these parts.

**And it isn’t more cowbell. We’ve tried.

***Mickeleh in Manhattan, as it happens, is the title of my low-budget remake of Sleepless in Seattle

The original plan was to hold it at the Duke of Uke, but when they said they didn’t have the space, and we realised there’d be twice as many people attending as could fit in the Duke, we had to reconsider. I used to do stand-up at the George most weeks back in the mists of time, and so I knew they had a reasonable sized room. It turned out to be perfect.

There were about 100 people in attendance, I think. The audience were receptive and excited, and wonderfully loud and cheery in response to everything played.

The evening started with a full but quick and breezy run-through of most of Awkward Ballads, my first album. I thought it would be interesting to chart the changes I’d undergone between first and second albums, and I think the most interesting highlight was how much easier Awkward Ballads was to sing. A lot of the songs don’t have melodies so much as words strung together in rhythms, so it’s pretty easy to be quite off on a lot of notes and for it to still sound okay. Not so with Painfully Mainstream. A couple of the blogs I’ve read about the evening have said that my voice wasn’t great. One even went so far as to say that they’d have been happier were it just an Alex Day and Eddplant gig. I think this is the fundamental difference between people who hear music casually and are kinda into it and people who genuinely listen to and understand and appreciate it – people who prefer perfectly polished pop to rougher, more interesting things that are open to wider interpretation as art. But that’s another blog entry entirely*.

The next section of the show was dedicated to my good friends Alex and Ed, who both played a number of their songs, and were both excellent. Ed was on top form as a musician and a performer, and Alex did a wonderful rendition of all his greatest songs. I was as proud of them as I could possibly be.

The third part of the evening involved all three of us up on the stage playing through my new album, Painfully Mainstream. The biggest issues here were two-fold – there was a microphone that didn’t work, which I think got a lot of the audience quite impatient after a few minutes, and there were the complex manoeuvres of the piano, which we had to continually shift back and forth on the tiny stage in order for things to work properly. This led to a lot of dead air, often for a good 10 seconds, where we really should’ve been talking to the audience and connecting with them so as not to lose their attention. When it’s just me + uke, the show always bounces along nicely and I can get the atmosphere ever higher – with the constant shifting of equipment, it was hard to get people excited for more than the length of a song. Sad.

Despite this, we sold awesome amounts of merch (I sold more than half of all the copies of my CD I have) and spent an hour after the show signing things that people wanted us to sign. It was a great evening, and one that I’d love to recreate elsewhere in the country – perhaps next time with a backstage area. It was awkward to start the show, because I had to walk through the crowd to do so. What we really needed was somebody to go on and introduce us with, like, a really brief opening act. (Thax – I’m looking at you. Do you have international delegates?)

Alex’s blog on the gig: http://alexdaymusic.com/25/

Ed’s blog on the gig: http://eddplant.com/2009/12/performance-postmortem/

*and oh boy, it’ll be a good one.

Some videos of the evening:

There’s this terrifying perception that somehow in order to get onto this mile-high metaphorical pedestal, one has to contort oneself through a machine that exists in seventeen spatial dimensions. There is a physically human impossibility explained purely by the realm of theoretical science between most ordinary, struggling, desperate artists and the generally held consensus of ‘good art’. This is most prevalent in music (although every aspect of art is just as bloody reprehensible as the next) so forgive me if I seem a little unfairly audiocentric over the next few paragraphs. Here we go…

As a musician, I do a lot of things that a lot of very good musicians do. I listen to Neutral Milk Hotel and weep jealous tears. I read Pitchfork religiously, but at the same time hold a deep-set hatred for the subjectivity of the damn thing, not to mention a wracking fear that they’ll do to me what they did to Jet (namely link to a video of a chimp urinating into its own mouth in lieu of actually reviewing the album. Yeah.) I bash my fists in an impotent catharsis on my piano when I realise that none of the melodies I write are even remotely rememberable, and feel better afterwards. All this, not least Pitchfork’s utterly meaningless but almost obsessively geeky decimal ratings system, has led me to conclude that art is nothing more than a science.

Sure, it’s a lot more free than a lot of sciences out there, but there are artistic merits to mathematics, nobody doubts this. Why should there not be mathematical elements to art? In a way, sure, Xenakis could turn addled strings of numbers into sound, but in a much more mainstream everyman way, art is very scientific.

Way back when humans decided that just being alive and getting laid were tasks far too simple to justify existence, we started to question why we were alive. We soon began to consider the fact that perhaps we’d evolved into something that was beyond the constraints of what life intended and could provide, and so in order to further understand ourselves and create an exhaustive compendium of emotion and human transaction, we invented the most complex, distortive lens known to existence, and have fed ourselves through it ever since to produce paintings, records, books, drawings on walls, CDs, and data that will keep us alive well into the next millennium. Because of this long history and because of this ridiculous pedestal that is supported ever more by increasing numbers of people rushing to its base and lifting it above their heads in a massive pyramid of humanity, ever further towards the vanishing point in the sky, it’s very easy to believe that there’s a mystic, magical element to its creation that somehow is inaccessible to people. This is untrue. Every book ever written or translated into the english language is made of the same 26 letters. I know this is trite and oft-mentioned, but it’s worth considering again. Every popular song you have ever heard can be expressed as a wave. There is no song so magical and so astonishing that it does not conform to the physical motion of particles through air. Particles don’t care if Jeff Mangum has released a new compilation of early Synthetic Flying Machine demos. Particles will transfer those sounds to your ears just as they would a new collection of classical renderings of Andrew WK songs. We write this stuff, and the universe doesn’t give a single god-damn. We still have to conform to its regulations. We still have to do as it says.

We look upon the world that spawned us as sort of beneath us now, even though it’s, like, where we came from. We’re just a precocious kid disowning its parents, and the parents are just sitting back silently taking it because they love us. Look at a squirrel or a mushroom or an oak tree – they’re all perfectly in tune with themselves, to a level of harmony beyond what any human being could possibly achieve. We reject everything we know as inferior and yet here we are being unable to raise our children, being unable to even sustain our home, being unable to even finish our own god-damn lives to the extent where we will end it ourselves. We’ve managed to synthesise every other aspect of it apart from the animalistic part of our brain that controls crying and laughing and hitting our heads against walls while making weirdly quiet, deep little groaning noises. The intelligent part of our brains is there to try and make sense of – and create art out of – the impulses of that ancient slouching ape living inside our skulls. It’s an eternal struggle for mankind to be more than mankind can be, but the beauty of it lies in the fact that every single piece of it fails to do that, and simply becomes an expression of unique struggle instead. That horrible seventeen-dimensioned machine I mentioned earlier? That’s not what you need to go through to become an artist. It’s what art IS.

Art is occasionally, like Daniel Johnston’s recordings, or the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, beautiful because of the way it’s been created, because of the back-story to it, because of its context. Art is occasionally, like The Flaming Lips’ more mainstream albums, or the writings of David Foster Wallace, beautiful because of the very pleasure immersing yourself in them brings. But art is always beautiful because it is unerringly, indelibly, human. And so are you.

References:

“Pitchfork’s utterly meaningless but almost obsessively geeky decimal ratings system” adapted from “its utterly unscientific but geekily precise 10-point album-rating scale” – http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/pitchfork.html

“Look at a squirrel or a mushroom or an oak tree – they’re all perfectly in tune with themselves” http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/5847-neutral-milk-hotel/

he's a sexy bitch. Ooh such a sexy bitch.

That’s right! Painfully Mainstream, my second album, is on general release from today on DFTBA records! It’s got ten wonderful lovely songs on, including favourites such as Indigo, Porphyrophobia, Song For The Painfully Indie, Autumnsong, and MANY MORE!

We’re looking to get a page up soon where you can stream the songs and listen to them, in a try-before-you-buy situation, but heck, if you have my first album, there’s a chance you’ll want to buy it straight away, so I ain’t gonna stop ya. You can get the physical copy by clicking here, or be taken to the iTunes store by clicking here.

It’s been two years since I first began recording songs on my computer, without ever having the inclination to release an album. That I did and many people love it to this day and still listen to it regularly astonishes me and makes me very happy. Now, two years later, I’ve consciously tried to make music that’s as exciting, gleeful and listenable as it possibly can be. All I can hope for is that you love this one too. And I really hope you do. Obviously. GO BUY IT NOW KTHX

Tom

All My Little Words

Electric Wave

This is an EP that I’ve been working on for the last two weeks. It’s called Shallow Ocean, the genre it slots nicely into is IDM (but if you’re not a genre nerd, ‘electronic’ will do fine), and there are four tracks to it, which are as follows (with each one linking to a short sample):

Offshore

Plateau

Trench

Reef

It concentrates on underwaterness, and as such, has a really muddy, bassy sound throughout. (in terms of EQ: lots of low frequencies, with highlights on the lower mids and pretty much no highs) I highly recommend turning up the bass, closing your eyes, and enjoying.

Metropolis