^I did that last night. Go me! I’m just curious as to how many of you have already seen it an’ that. Go ahead, post a comment! I’m just jealous of Alex’s blog because he always gets like 50 comments on all the blog entries he posts. Where can I get that level of Online Internet Validation?
To procure more comments from you, the unwilling masses, I have some questions for you, which you can choose to answer all of, some of, or none at all. The choice… is YOURS!
1. Do you like my new haircut? I like my new haircut. Hatti says I’ve stolen her hair and that’s bad because she’s my girlfriend so we’re together a lot and we’ll appear to be SICKENINGLY IN WUV to the point where we’ve got MATCHING HAIR. But don’t listen to her. She’s a meanie. A sexy, wonderful meanie.
2. Are you excited about CHRISTMAS? I’m so excited that I’m CAPITALISING all the important NOUNS and VERBS that OCCUR in my SENTENCES.
3. Er…
4. That’s it.
BYE BYE LOVE TOM XX
Posted Under: Uncategorized This post was written by tommyf on December 24, 2009 Comments
I don’t know how Alex does it – the constant blogging (often more than once a day) – admittedly, he has six years of practice backing him up, but even so I can’t understand where he gets the time or the energy to live his life in such a fashion that blogging nearly every day is a viable option.
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
Posted Under: Music, News This post was written by tommyf on December 24, 2009 Comments
So all of three days ago now, I played at my London album launch, which was held at the George on the Strand. It was really rather ace. (for those of you who are in the US, the NY launch is on December 12. Click here for the facebook event page.)
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?)
Guys, I’m sick of this. The world of art and artists has become so slovenly, amorphous and bloated that while the very tip of it has crawled and slimed its way up onto a pedestal, it’s left a wide trail of itself lying confused on the stairway, and most of it is immobile, upside-down, on the floor, gazing up at its front end way up high and not even recognising it as its own. I want to know at what point it plans on losing some of this excess weight.
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/
Now guys, I don’t want to alarm you, but I’ve done something pretty freakin’ huge:
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
Posted Under: Music This post was written by tommyf on December 1, 2009 Comments
So here’s the story. I wanted to create something that I wasn’t involved in. Everything I was doing was starting to sound the same, so I wanted to make some music that I could set off, and leave to run its own course and develop in its own ways. Something that was me, but something a bit more beyond what I normally do. The EP was originally going to be called ‘Selfless Songs’, due to this nature of me actually not being that involved in them at all. These six tracks were the simplest experiments in those forms, so simple as to almost resemble geometric shapes. I changed the name of the EP, in the end, to Geometry. I love their simplicity. Here’s a brief rundown of what happens in these tracks.
1. Assymetric – two tones that very slowly begin to differ from one another, creating a phase piece.
2. Fibonacci – notes dictacted in terms of distance by the first numbers in the fibonacci sequence (1,1,2,3,5,8)
3. e – the single notes are dictacted in pitch by numbers within the first 1,000,000 digits of the mathematical constant e, starting at the only point where 99999999 occurs. the chords are also defined in pitch and rhythm by groups of numbers from e. This was painstakingly boring to make. C’est la vie.
4. Sohcahtoa – a recurring pattern with a slightly offset delay that makes it build up into some sort of infernal steam machine.
5. Circumference – every note over three octaves played at once and left to dissolve and disintegrate.
6. Two Right Angles – the most involved of all the pieces, but still not with me playing any instruments per se; this is again created with various complex delays.
Listen to these pieces as just that – pieces. Little oddities of sound created through interesting ways. I like to think this is conceptual music at its most pure.
I’m sure many of you reading this are anxious to know more about my upcoming second album. For those of you who didn’t know I was bringing out a second album, I am. For those of you who don’t know I’ve ever released an album, I have. And I am. There, now you’re anxious to know about it. I shall put you out of your inevitable anxiety… Now.
Here are some vital facts about my next album:
1. It’s called ‘painfully mainstream’.
2. It’s going to be released by DFTBA. Naturally.
3. Yes, indigo will be on it.
4. There will be an iTunes download as well as a sexy physical CD.
5. Yes, indigo will be on it.
6. There are 11 tracks, totalling nearly 45 minutes.
7. It skips genre frequently, ranging from stuff that’s nearly antifolk to stuff that’s nearly post rock.
8. Yes, that is a bit pretentious.
9. Yes, indigo will be on it.
The planned release date was the 1st of November, but that was based on me getting the cover shoot done by yesterday, so never mind. I’ll talk to Alan Lastufka, a man who is patience personified, about an actual release date. Then take those photos he needs. Send the man some love on Twitter (@alandistro), because I am a terrible contracted musician and he deserves nothing less than another Chameleon Circuit. No wait…
Anyway! Apart from that, I’m also planning on making t-shirts like johnny did, then everyone else ever ever did. I reckon a few Tom Milsom shirts at gigs and things would go down well.
Tell me your thoughts in the comments, whether you’d buy my t-shirts regardless of whether they’re charming and well-designed or not (although I like to think they will be) and what other merch you’d like to have spawning from my little hands.
Notes:This is the launch party for Tom’s new album “Painfully Mainstream” and Tom will be performing songs from the album with his backing group including Alex Day and Eddplant.
It’s here. It’s been here for a month, but due to an utter failure in communication, it’s only available NOW. Don’t worry people who’ve subscribed, you’ll get 12.
I was asked to write a satirical song about the US Healthcare Reform a few days ago for a live broadcast that will be happening in about an hour, at 9:00 PM UK time (1:00 PM Pacific) on building43.com – I recommend you get over there for some amazing times if you know what’s good for you. I’ll be in there like a mother.
It also features the charming Steve Gillmor, long time tech journalist and all round wonderful person, who will be being his usual self throughout. Don’t miss it. linky: http://www.building43.com/realtime/
PS: Here, for your enjoyment and sanity, are the lyrics to tonight’s song. A recording may follow if demanded.
Hello Mrs. Palin, what’s the matter here today?
Having those same stomach cramps again?
It says here in your notes that you’ve been quite distressed of late
Did you take your meds and see what happened then?
And how’s your son today, I hear he’s doing very well,
And really thriving in our current scheme,
But in a few months time we’ll have to throw him in a ditch
And laugh as he begins to writhe and scream.
Because we’re going public
With a National Healthcare Reform
We’ve been prescribed a free dose
Of utter degradation
Of every human ever to be born,
Raise your glass, and raise your taxes,
Be happy, and try not to make a fuss,
We’re only following in the footsteps
Of every civilised nation other than us.
So Mrs. Palin, don’t be panicked, don’t be scared,
It isn’t quite like 1984
At least, it won’t be like it in the orwellian sense,
But it’s when Canada got their foot through the door.
But times will be much harder when we must discriminate
Against those disabled sick and elderly,
You’re right, discrimination only works against the poor,
And that’s worked out just great for you and me.
But now we’re going public
With a National Healthcare Reform
Fixing people up, and then making them pay
Is just a calm before the storm.
Raise your glass, and raise your taxes,
Be happy, and try not to make a fuss,
We’re only following in the footsteps
Of every civilised nation other than us.
so Mrs. Palin I appreciate your frets,
But rest assured these new times could be great.
If you lack inspiration, look no further than Bhutan,
They’ve had one there since 1998.
Just sit back and relax, and let the whole thing pass you by,
I’ll tell you now, it’s better off that way.
Then come back here in two weeks time and rest assured you will be fine,
As long as you get someone else to pay.
But now we’re going public
With a National Healthcare Reform
Maybe one day we’ll be vaguely up to date,
And looking after citizens will be the norm.
Raise your glass, and raise your taxes,
Be happy, and try not to make a fuss,
We’re only following in the footsteps
Of every civilised nation other than us.
Going Public
With a National Healthcare Reform
In addition to the people who are missing half a leg
We’ll also treat those who just feel a bit forlorn.
Raise your glass, and raise your taxes,
Be happy, and try not to make a fuss,
We’re only following in the footsteps
Of every civilised nation other than us.
Posted Under: News This post was written by tommyf on September 8, 2009 Comments
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*.
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