Three Blind Dervishes (Alf Layla Remix) by Thousand Yard Prayer

Nine Ships (Sinbad Al-Bahri Remix) by Thousand Yard Prayer (+playlist)

Secret Archives of the Vatican Video Podcast 5

Simum by Secret Archives of the Vatican

Cardamom Storm - Mısır Çarşısı Remix

Musician boutique

I've seen a lot of musicians, good musicians, creative musicians, become worn out with trying to "make it" and give up.  It saddens me because I believe in most cases they've been aiming for the wrong target, one that was never within their grasp.

The concept of "making it" that so many musicians have bought into is fundamentally flawed and is a poison legacy of the mainstream commercial record industry of the last fifty years. It says that your music (and ,sadly, you also)  only have value if you reach a huge audience and sell a great number of "units".  However, even in that industry's pre-internet heyday, the vast majority of signed, recorded artists never attained that and there was always a far greater community of unsigned musicians who didn't even have access to a mechanism to achieve it.

The problem is that we want to be a supermarket, churning out whatever sells, to the widest, most undiscerning audience. Quality means nothing and decisions are made based on potential profit margins.

I have a different idea of success.

If I can record the music I want to record, without pressure from anyone to conform to the latest pointless fad, and release it so that it is accessible to a broad audience and some people buy/acquire it and like it, and the whole process doesn't bankrupt me, then as far as I'm concerned I have been successful.  I am doing what I've always wanted to do and my creative drive is satisfied.

To continue the shopping analogy, the digital post-record-industry music world lends itself more to a boutique model than a supermarket model. A boutique can provide a high quality, beautiful product to a select, discerning audience. No-one can tell it what it can or cannot  make available.  It needs to make enough to survive but doesn't need to shift vast amounts just to cover its overheads.

So, if you're a musician who is tempted to feel that what you do is pointless because you haven't become a household name after years of hard work, perhaps the answer is to realise that you don't work in a supermarket, you own a boutique.  Seek a smaller, more appreciative audience. Paradoxically, perhaps, it's not a smaller vision, it's a bigger one.

Tracks

1. The Cup of Memory
   Secret Archives of the Vatican
   http://www.brokendrumrecords.com
2. Wadi Kadisha
   Scott Jeffers
   http://soundcloud.com/scottjtraveler/wadi-kadisha
3. Corsairs of Byblos
   Scott Jeffers
   http://soundcloud.com/scottjtraveler/corsairs-of-byblos
4. Into the Sunrise
   Thousand Yard Prayer
   http://thousandyardprayer.bandcamp.com/releases
5. Istanbul
   Batthebat
   http://soundcloud.com/batthebat/istanbul
6. Istanbul
   Elmomaclroy
   http://soundcloud.com/elmomaclroy/istanbul
7. Aksaid Wili Moudanine (Ask Our Brothers the Immigrants)
   Rais Haj Omar Wahrouch
   https://www.dust-digital.com/kassidat/
8. Aylana
   Idassane Wallet Mohamed
   http://sahelsounds.bandcamp.com/album/issawat
9. I saw a lady in Marrakesh
   Mooneyham
   http://soundcloud.com/moonyham/i-saw-a-lady-in-marrakesh

Music is the purest form of art...therefore true poets, they who are seers, seek to express the universe in terms of music... The singer has everything within him. The notes come out from his very life. They are not materials gathered from outside. Rabindranath Tagore

Our next release - Storms

We think that the music Secret Archives of the Vatican makes is interesting. Although there are now many, many artists from around the world mixing Western electronica with non-Western musical genres, we don't sound like any of them. That's not entirely deliberate - we've tried to sound like others but we're not actually able to!

Anyway, you may or may not be aware that there's not a great deal of actual playing of musical instruments in our music. We use a lot of sampling, a lot of programming, a lot of digital audio editing to come up with the rhythms and tunings and sounds that are our style.

Why don't we play the instruments ourselves? Well - all members of the Archives crew are musicians. We all play more than one instrument. However, much of what we want to achieve in the studio is beyond our technical abilities, hence the computer based approach to music making. In particular, we're currently exploring Middle Eastern tuning systems, so most Western instruments simply can't play the notes. I do have a fretless guitar but don't have quite the playing experience with it or confidence to achieve the ideas I want to.

I guess we could record guest musicians. The problems with that include lack of money to pay anyone, our studios being in our homes so times we can make noise are limited and that many of the musicians we'd love to collaborate with are in other countries or just too far away in this country.

Our next Secret Archives of the Vatican release will be called Storms. The title relates to the Turkish Storm Calendar and that is the thread that connects all the tracks. The tunes are based on Turkish traditional rhythms and makam tunings although they won't necessarily sound particularly Turkish. Like I said, we try to do these things but it always coming out sounding like us.

Release is expected to be at the end of July 2013 but here's a track to be getting on with. Click on the link to hear it.

• Cardamom Storm

It's in a 9 beat rhythm, Afr-Mawlawii, divided 4-2-3. It is tuned to Makam Hicaz Zirgule, which means the second and fifth notes in the scale used are not tuned as they would be in Western music.

Music, Culture and Conflict in Mali

“Our musician was on his way to a wedding in a village outside Gao, his car laden with instruments and equipment. At the checkpoint he was ordered to step down from his car by a MUJAO militiaman who then proceeded to search it. All the instruments are taken out and piled up by the side of the road; guitars, teherdent, amps, speakers, calabashes. The pile was doused in petrol and set alight. The musician was too scared to shout out, or cry, or flee. There were guns everywhere. He just stood and watched as his livelihood went up in flames. If he made a scene or showed any emotion, he knew that his own life would be in danger.”

Andy Morgan, who managed Tuareg desert blues band Tinariwen for seven years, has just released this very reasonably priced book. You can get it in various paper and digital formats from HERE. ____________________________________________________________________

Storms on the horizon...

The next Secret Archives of the Vatican release will be called Storms. The tunes, although independent of each other, are based on a theme, the Turkish Storm Calendar. We first came across references to this in a most excellent (and highly recommended) science fiction book set in Istanbul in the near future. The Dervish House by Ian McDonald provides no details of the calendar, merely mentions it. We were intrigued but found very little information on the internet - three or four webpages with incomplete or hard to interpret listings of the weather changes through a Turkish year. The names of the storms are evocative, however, and we decided to record a set of tunes related to them. We have, for a long time, been interested in the tuning systems used in Middle Eastern music, particularly Arabic music, but we decided to research the Turkish makamlar tradition which is similar but not identical. We found some good websites with details of the modes and scales used in Turkish music (makamlar). We then had to figure out how to make our synthesisers and samplers play the detuned notes that don't exist in our usual tempered Western musical scales. The makamlar tradition includes some melodic expectations and we were unable to find enough information to do justice to these, so our music is definitely not Turkish music and we haven't tried to make it so. It is our music, influenced by Turkish music. Not many people have used microtones in our world of electronica, so for many of our listeners, it will be their first exposure to music with a different tuning system. Many of the makamlar only have one or two notes that are detuned, so we think the music sounds natural and not hard for a Western audience to grasp. There are copious online sources of transcriptions of Middle Eastern hand drum rhythms, so we have used frame drums (which we love!) as well as drum kit sounds to programme our rhythms based on these and most, if not all, of the tracks on Storms are therefore not in common four-four time. Once again, we don't believe this makes the tunes inaccessible - many of these uncommon time signatures are rooted in ancient forms of dance music after all. We also haven't abandoned our flirtations with the Cronx's indigenous folk music, dubstep, and there are bass electronica sounds supporting the orientalist melodies throughout. We have a few tracks finished and some still in the pipeline so we don't have a release date yet. However, we'll be enthusiastically pimping Storms on all of our many online platforms in due course, so you'll know when it's out.