Chris Spring - Under The Radar

The only thing stopping Chris Spring being the most underrated Christian Singer/Songwriter in the UK is that he's so far underground few people know he even exists.




Sure, he has 1525 friends on MySpace (which is roughly equivalent to about 74 real people) but his press link doesn't work, the website link brings you back to his MySpace profile (try it - hours of fun!), Wikipedia suggests you try 'Chris Spurling' and Google thinks he's an "Artist, writer & curator specialising in African art & culture"

And yet...and yet...

His album The Universe Is Flat is without a doubt one of the best, and most fully realised debut albums ever released.

And it's free.

(that's right, go and download it. I'll wait...)

tum tee, tum tee mmm....ah you're back!

Everyone needs a hobby, so I'm on a quest to get Chris Spring the status he deserves as most underrated...etc etc.

Join me.

Dave at RadarRadio has. His recent show features "Become Part Of The Crowd", along with tracks from Sufjan Stevens, Derek Webb, Andy Gullahorn & Sara Groves. You can Download the show here.

Solving the energy crisis....

...one drum solo at a time.

I give you Darren King, drummer from Mute Math
(courtesy of Vitamin Z)

Dorothy Haskins on practice

In her book, A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO PRAYER, Dorothy Haskins tells about a noted concert violinist who was asked the secret of her mastery of the violin. The woman answered the question with two words: 

“Planned neglect”.

Then she explained.

 

“There were many things that used to demand my time. When I went to my room after breakfast, I made my bed, straightened the room, dusted, and did whatever seemed necessary. When I finished my work, I turned to my violin practice. That system prevented me from accomplishing what I should on the violin. So I reversed things. I deliberately planned to neglect everything else until my practice period was complete. And that program of planned neglect is the secret of my success.”

Hugh MacLeod on major label marketing

That's the thing about some big publishers. They want 110% from you, but they don't offer to do likewise in return. To them, the artist is just one more noodle in a big bowl of pasta.

Their business model is to basically throw the pasta against the wall, and see which one sticks. The ones that fall to the floor are just forgotten.

How To Be CREATIVE -Hugh MacLeod

Spiritual Disciplines Audio Book

ChristianAudio.Com are giving away the audio book Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life by Donald Whitney for free during March.

I've been listening to it on the way to work and enjoying it.

Between Two Worlds: Free Audio: Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life

Copyright Mythbusting

The music business giants are constantly appealing to the argument that if file sharing is allowed to continue, musicians will stop getting paid and will stop creating.

Here's a few facts to consider

A great wealth of music was created for thousands of years before musicians received any income from recordings of their music (whether printed, analogue or digital).

The vast majority of musicians creating music today do not receive any income directly from their songs.

Most of today’s greatest artists wrote their breakthrough albums/song (often their best work) before receiving any income from writing.


Here are some myth busters about where the present income goes


When you legally download a song from i-tunes for 79p (99c) the artists receives 4p (9c). Apple recently stated that if they were forced to raise this to a whopping 7p (15c) they would shutdown i-tunes.

When an artist records a song for a record company THE RECORD COMPANY, NOT THE ARTIST, OWNS THE RECORDING

When an artist signs a deal with a publisher THE PUBLISHER, NOT THE ARTIST, OWNS THE RIGHTS TO THE SONG

Recording advances are recoupable from record sales and the master tapes remain the property of the record company.

Don’t understand?

Your bank gives you a mortgage to buy a house.
You pay off the mortgage plus interest.
Who owns the house?
The bank does.
 
That’s the way the record companies do business.

True Story.

Hugh MacLeod on Songwriting Tools

The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props. There's no correlation between creativity and equipment ownership. None. Zilch. Nada.

Actually, as the artist gets more into his thing, and as he gets more successful, his number of tools tends to go down. He knows what works for him. Expending mental energy on stuff wastes time. He's a man on a mission. He's got a deadline. He's got some rich client breathing down his neck. The last thing he wants is to spend 3 weeks learning how to use a router drill if he doesn't need to.

How To Be CREATIVE -Hugh MacLeod

Coleridge: Being Creative Is Not Enough

I linked a few days ago to Steven Furtick's blog. He wrote

"Some people fancy themselves as being “creative”, or ”creative-types” because they have a lot of ideas. Cool. You have ideas. So does my 3 year old. That doesn’t make you creative...An idea without implementation isn’t creation...

By definition, being creative requires that you create something".

If you ever needed a concrete example of what Steven was talking about then consider the sad example of Samuel Taylor Coleridge...




Coleridge is the supreme tragedy of indiscipline. Never did so great a mind produce so little. He left Cambridge University to join the army; he left the army because, in spite of all his erudition, he could not rub down a horse; he returned to Oxford and left without a degree. He began a paper called The Watchman which lived for ten numbers and then died. It has been said of him: "He lost himself in visions of work to be done, that always remained to be done.

Coleridge had every poetic gift but one--the gift of sustained and concentrated effort." In his head and in his mind he had all kinds of books, as he said, himself, "completed save for transcription." "I am on the eve," he says, "of sending to the press two octave volumes." But the books were never composed outside Coleridge's mind, because he would not face the discipline of sitting down to write them out. No one ever reached any eminence, and no one having reached it ever maintained it, without discipline.

William Barclay: The Gospel Of Matthew (p.323)

Thru-You and the thorny problem of airspace

Stop Press: Kutiman goes viral on Lessig and 43 Folders.

In 1946 an American farmer, Mr. Causby, attempted to sue the US air force for using his property. What were the USAF doing? Flying their planes overhead. The farmer reasoned that as he owned the land he also owned everything above it.

Contrary to popular opinion the farmer won, leaving the way open for endless wrangling about exactly how much air he owned, under what circumstances the air force would be allowed to use his air and how much the use of his air was worth.

A similar debate has been raging for the last few years over who owns sound recording (vibrating air you might call it). The recording industry would have us believe they do and, like Mr. Causby, the courts are on their side. They would say that file sharing is ‘killing music’ and if allowed to go on unchecked will result in artists not being properly renumerated, forcing them to stop creating and go and find regular jobs to support their families. All music creation will stop - killed by a legion of 12 year old Limewire users.

My belief is that the present copyright laws, not file sharing, are killing music (or at least attempting to throttle the life out of it). What kind of creativity could be unleashed if we stopped trying to figure out just who owns each particular piece of airspace?

Maybe this is a taste of things to come.

Ophir ‘Kutiman’ Kutiel, a 25 yr old Israeli funk musician and producer, has posted a project called Thru-You on the web. It's an album completely made up of samples taken from YouTube and re-engineered into new pieces of music.

As one site says

“They're not just patchwork assemblages, they're sample-based original creations that could hold their own on anyone's album…It's a work of next-level genius”.

So who owns this music?

Kutiman?

Every single artists who’s music contributed? Every last church organist, guitar teacher, 80 year old session drummer, 11 year old trumpeter and even the guy selling his synth on ebay??

The publishers, who doubtless own the rights to some of the songs performed ?

YouTube itself?

Me (and everyone else who listens to it)?

I don’t know what the answer is. But what I do know is that my life is richer for the being able to hear this remarkable music and I’m glad Kutiman didn’t let the question of who owned the air stop him from creating it or sharing it.

Watch it here

Download the album here

Kutiman Biog (Wikipedia)


And here's another of the more uptempo tracks followed by a short video of Kutiman talking about the project

Ouch!

This one smarts a little, but I've got to hold my hands up and say "Steven, ya got me"

"Let’s define creative... Some people fancy themselves as being “creative”, or ”creative-types” because they have a lot of ideas. Cool. You have ideas.

So does my 3 year old.
That doesn’t make you creative.
An idea without implementation isn’t creation.
It’s imagination.

By definition, being creative requires that you create something.
True creative people don’t just dream it-they do it…or oversee the strategy to get it done.
True creativity results in a product. Not just an idea.

We’ve all met people who shy away from the hard work of action steps because they “don’t do the details”. They’re “more into the creative side of things”.
But as far as I can tell, the Chief Creator didn’t just think about light, stars, and human life…the proof of His creativity is the tangible detailed expression of His vision.

What will you create today?"

Take Your Vitamin Z: Imagination is Not Creation by Steven Furtick

Tithing Explained

Some people just have a gift for making complex theology simple...

"Now when I say a hundred..."



12 Stone Church via Zach @ Take Your Vitamin Z: Tithe Rap

The old is better?

My former pupil (and now my cousin!) Andy left this comment on my birthday letter post. I was going to comment back there but the old grey cells started going into overdrive so I thought I'd better make it into a post in it's own right.

"I prefer the old language version of the new testament. I guess it seems more genuine to me"

As I was recommending the reading the New International Version or the English Standard Version of the Bible obviously I would disagree! But not only do I think newer translations are better, but they are also older. Here's my thinking...

Personal. Before I became a christian I tried reading the Bible 3 times I think. I failed every time, because (a) I started at Genesis and (b) I was reading the old King James Version. I wasn't until my then girlfriend gave me a New International Version that I understood enough to get offended by Jesus and his outrageous claims. The dated language had softened the impact and made it seem, well, more unreal.

Intentional. One of the main contributors to the English language Bible was William Tyndale. The English Bible became known as the 'King James' or 'Authorised Version' (meaning authorised by the King not God!) Tyndale saw people ignorant of the truth of God because the Bible was locked up in Latin, a dead language that no one spoke anymore. Sound familiar? The Driving passion of his life was

"If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture, than he [the Pope] doust".

This was made possible because Tyndale and others translated the Bible not just into English, but in a form that was spoken by plough boys not professors. Over time that form of the language become more lofty and 'professorial' but it didn't start out that way and it wasn't Tyndale's intention. In fact I think he would be horrified to know people were still using it!

Representational O.k. so Tyndale didn't intend it, but who cares? What about what God intended? That's what really matters right? Well in the time of Jesus there were two forms of Greek. The first was used in the law courts and important documents the other was the Greek of the market place, called 'Koine' or common Greek. Perhaps unsurprisingly for the God who came to earth to live as a carpenter in a small town the middle of nowhere, he entrusted the most important message in the world to the language of the street, as spoken by fishermen and farmers.

Historical. So here's where it gets weird. The King James version was completed in 1611, translated from the best and oldest copies of the Greek, Hebrew & Aramaic scrolls available. Since then we have had nearly 400 years of discovering manuscripts, many of then older than anything Tyndale and his peers had access to. And who knows how many more ancient manuscripts have been found that shed light on nuances of meanings particular words, grammar & syntax. So if you're wary of attempts to modernise God's word and make it trendy and you want to be faithful to the original...you need to get a new bible!

Does that make sense?
Anyone who uses a modern translation - want to add anything?
Anyone who can read Greek - what's your perspective? (please don't get too technical, we're amateurs here!)

Five reasons you should get a feed reader

Mike Anderson at TheResurgence.Com has a helpful post on Five Reasons You Should Get a Feed Reader including the following dummies guide to Google Reader. Enjoy!




Related Posts: Abraham Piper - How To Use Google Reader for RSS

A letter to my pupils

My birthday was on Feb 8th but it took a while to type this up. For those of you who hate reading online you can download it as a pdf to print off and treasure forever ;-). Please pass this along to anyone you know who I have taught.

Today is my 40^th birthday. I am not over the hill yet (but you can see it from here). It’s also just about 20 years since I started teaching and I wanted to take this opportunity to write you this letter.

When I started teaching there were no mp3s, instructional DVDs or Internet tab; tab books were rare and wildly inaccurate and Joe Satriani still had hair.

At the age of 20 I expected by now to be famous and dead. 20 years on I find that I am neither. How did this happen? I started on the enterprise allowance scheme as a guitar teacher with the intention of fleecing Mrs Thatcher for £40 a week before going back to unemployment benefit and my plans for rock global domination. Half-way through that year I became a Christian. My life up to that point had been driven by a search for significance, having been told from a very early age by my father that I would never amount to anything. I was determined to prove him wrong and music was my means of doing so. Music (and musical success in particular) was supposed to fill the aching gap in my soul. The only problem was that the more success I had the unhappier I became. I'd just left my first professional band ('professional' meaning I was actually getting paid), we had roadies, a manager, we even had a van! But, as someone once said, “sometimes the further you climb up the ladder of success, the more you realise its leaning against the wrong wall”.

One day, sitting alone, I said to myself/God/whoever: “Whatever it takes to be happy I’m going to do it”. Then a weird thing happened. A conversation I'd had years ago with a woman giving out religious leaflets in the street popped into my head. She'd said “All you need to do to get to heaven is love God”. I decided to figure out how you could love someone you couldn’t see, hear or touch. That was the start of a journey that ended with the Bible, church and Jesus Christ. What I learned was that God had made me to know him as my father but in thousands of ways, small and great, I'd turned my back on Him, determined to live life on my terms. Now it was time to come home.

If it sounds like I got religious then you couldn’t be further from the truth. Religion is when you get a set of rules and try to keep them, but I hadn’t got something, someone had got me. My heart was changing, I felt different about everything including (in case you’re wondering) teaching. I actually wanted to work for a living instead of stiffing the government. When I started I had three pupils - Mark Taylor, Kristie Gill and John Matthews. In the last twenty years I’ve had hundreds more. I wasn’t a very good teacher - I couldn’t really read music, still mixed flats and sharps up and was only one step ahead of some of you. I spent far too long working at whatever you wanted to play instead of teaching you how to work it out for yourself but, just like you, I got better with practice. If you were one of my earliest pupils I can only apologise and say in my defence, that you were only paying £4 a lesson.

Many of you will be atheists of some description (from “I don’t believe in anything unless I can scratch a window with it” to “I have decided not to believe in God because don’t like him/her/it”). And I could try to answer the many varied arguments (I dislike James Blunt but so far he is stubbornly refusing to stop existing) but all I want to say is that God is real, he loves you, and one infinitesimally small evidence of that is that arranged everything so that I'd end up being your teacher.

It’s been a blessing to have taught you all. Not just cause you helped me feed my wife and kids but because I’ve learned so much from you all. Not in a mushy new age way. Lets face it, most of you when you turned up at were clueless, tone deaf and didn’t know which end of the guitar to blow down! But having to work out why the mixolydian mode sounds like country rock, why a flattened 5^th sounds evil and explain why D5 is called D5 has made me a better musician. And you've also introduced me to lots of great music from Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares to The Presidents of the USA.

So as a thank you (and because I'm getting old and increasingly opinionated) consider this fatherly advice a final free lesson…

1. Learn every single note on your instrument (and if you’re a drummer learn a second instrument).

2. Don’t sign a 360-degree deal with a major label.

3. Give away your music for free to start with.

4. When you listen to music spend most of your time listening to music you really love. (If you are doing anything other than breathing while you do this you are not really listening).

5. Listen to Beethoven’s 5^th symphony, first movement till you can spot every variation of the “da-da-da-dum” tune.

6. This week download or borrow a CD by someone who is supposed to be brilliant and plays a different style of music to you (try your parents or the library). Do this every week for the next 10 years. You will only like perhaps 30% and that is OK.

7. Listen to what is unfamiliar until you understand it. Listen to what you like until you know it. Then listen to what you love.

8. Write as many bad songs as you can for the next 10 years. It will help. Trust me.

9. In your music collection you should have at least one album you really love by someone who died of natural causes and one album by someone who is NOT British or American.

10. Most music 10 years old will be considered rubbish. Much that is 20 years old will be considered cool. There’s lots of explanations for this, but this will always be the case and just knowing it will keep you ahead of the game.

11. The music industry will never die. The record industry is already dead. There is a difference.

12. Read “The Future of Music” by David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard.

13. Learn to sing, at least to backing vocal standard.

14. Most people are kicked out of bands for 'musical differences'. 'Musical differences' is code for “You are a Twonk”. Try very hard not to be a twonk. Seek professional help if you need to. Twonky behaviour includes things like not keeping your word, financial dishonesty, poor time keeping, sleeping with your drummer's girlfriend/boyfriend/mother and personal hygiene issues.

15. Don’t put up with twonkiness from your fellow band members either. Blatant twonkiness will only be exacerbated by drugs and excess money or alcohol.

16. At some point in your life do an 'Alpha' course.

17. At some point in your life read the New Testament in a modern translation like the New International Version or the English Standard Version.

18. Practising is when you try to play something that you can't play. Do some practising.

19. It goes without saying that drugs are bad. So I'll say it. Drugs are bad.

20. Say thank you to your parents. I bet you didn't buy that first guitar with your own money.

Please leave a comment (with your name) and say 'Hi'.

Let me know how you're doing on the above points. Agree/disagree?

Any pearls of wisdom that I've missed?

Matt Blick 2009. YoungGlory.Blogspot.Com