I’ve prob­ably talked before about my ser­i­ous man-​​crush on Gisle Martens Meyer. Mostly I just really like his music. Fol­low­ing his blog there’s a lot I can identify with, too. He’s one of the few musi­cians to do his best to give an expli­cit “fuck you and thanks for dying” to the music industry at every oppor­tun­ity. He’s embraced the new real­ity of music dis­tri­bu­tion with open arms. Plus he seems very gung-​​ho about the robot future in con­trast to all those losers who throw around words like “apocalypse”.

The first sen­tence of one of his most recent blog posts just hit me like a brick:

The reason I like the future is because you can change it.

That sums up a lot about me and why I get so frus­trated with friends my age — or usu­ally quite a bit younger! — who are already start­ing to slip into the con­ser­vat­ive “things which are new suck” men­tal­ity. It might take me a bit of extra effort to “get” some of the new changes to the world: Twit­ter is a good example. It would be easy for me to stick to how things were and shake my cane and say “in my day, we wrote blog posts with more than 140 char­ac­ters!” but I think in the end it’s worth it.

I’m pretty psyched about the future and I want to be a part of it and, I guess most import­antly, I want to change it.

For those who know a bit about me, you know one of my favour­ite musi­cians is Gisle Martens Meyer, his most fam­ous musical pro­ject being Ugress. I fol­low the blog, I buy the music, I down­load the music that isn’t sold, I even briefly con­sidered mak­ing a trip to Min­nesota at one point to see his first (and so far only) live show in North Amer­ica. If I’m a “fan” of anything/​anyone in this world, it’s surely Ugress. Still it took me over 2 weeks to build up the need to part with my hard-​​earned £6 (it’s always a fun sur­prise to find out at the end of the month how much my credit card com­pany has charged me for for­eign cur­rency) and buy his latest album. In fair­ness, I am very cheap.

(If you’re inter­ested in his music, most of his albums offer free tracks and the rest are only 79 pence each)

First, a brief review. Remin­is­cience is much bet­ter than Uni­corn (the pre­vi­ously most recent album) in my opin­ion. Uni­corn had some good songs but the dir­ec­tion of the album was a little poppy for me, focus­ing a lot around the vocals of Christine Litle (who I must con­fess is pretty darned cute and a good singer to boot). This album’s more about the beats and the sound aes­thet­ics, which is what got me inter­ested in Ugress in the first place. I’ve only listened to half the album so far and I already I have a good 3 or 4 new favour­ite songs.

Read­ing his blog, you get the impres­sion that GMM is more a sound engin­eer than a com­poser. That’s prob­ably an exag­ger­a­tion (and it’s easier in text to describe engin­eer­ing pro­cesses than a par­tic­u­lar com­pos­i­tion on the go), but it’s pretty clear he takes sound pretty ser­i­ously. I’ve paid spe­cial atten­tion to it lately and noticed he really does a remark­able job of get­ting the most of the dynamic range that the (16-​​bit sample depth/​90dB, if I’m not mis­taken) MP3s will give you. Cool inter­est­ing post: describ­ing how he used a speech syn­thes­izer to gen­er­ate lyr­ics. Okay now I really am sound­ing like a fan.…

Any­way what I really wanted to talk about was GMM’s reac­tion to the album being pir­ated (or copy­right infringed upon to use made-​​up pos­sibly cor­rect ter­min­o­logy). He doesn’t just do the pro­duc­tion him­self, but he does all of the pub­lish­ing and dis­tri­bu­tion and what­not him­self. Tra­di­tional music labels, I under­stand, are as good as dead and worse than use­less. He gives out some free tracks, the rest are cheap and dis­trib­uted largely online, he’s okay with mash-​​ups and pub­lic per­form­ances and deriv­at­ive works and using his music as a back­ground to your stu­dent film. He dis­trib­utes the music in high qual­ity (320kbit/​s) non-​​DRM MP3s and even in FLAC.

What’s inter­est­ing about this is that he’s one of the very few (the only one I’m really closely famil­iar with) that is doing everything Right and makes it his day job (and then some; I worry a little if he has a life besides). Not that it I should be sur­prised that it would get pir­ated. People will pir­ate any­thing. People pir­ate free soft­ware. It’s almost like people put more effort into pir­at­ing than it would take to get some­thing legit­im­ately just for the sake of pir­at­ing. Well I’m not being fair: clearly people are pir­at­ing because a £6 album costs £6 more than a £0 album.

The primary reason I sup­port free soft­ware is to give free­dom to the users to use and repur­pose the soft­ware how­ever they like. This is from a dog­matic stand­point (I treat soft­ware pub­lish­ers con­trolling their soft­ware with great sus­pi­cion), from a qual­ity stand­point (there’s an annoy­ing bug in OS X’s Terminal.app for the past 6 months or so that I could likely fix in lit­er­ally a minute, but Apple has pre­ven­ted me from doing so) and from a human­it­arian stand­point (it’s near impossible to advance human­ity with improv­ing on one another’s work without per­mis­sion). I can see how this car­ries over from soft­ware into other realms of “inform­a­tion”. One thing I’m def­in­itely not is an eco­nom­ist, but I’ve increas­ingly viewed the Free Soft­ware Foundation’s free­dom 2 (that you should be able to share what you like with your neigh­bour) with some hes­it­a­tion. It’s a fant­astic idea in a great many of cases (cf., Linux), but I don’t see this as a strict mat­ter of free­dom, but as a mat­ter of eco­nom­ics and it’s one that I think can be treated on a case-​​by-​​case basis.

With this in mind I see GMM’s way of doing things as the Right way of doing things, or more accur­ately, as a Right way of doing things and would like more people to send him money in exchange for his hard work. Then again, I am just a fan. Ser­i­ously, The Bosporus Incid­ent is awesome.