Sweet Billy Pilgrim2013-06-19T11:58:11-04:00Sweet Billy Pilgrimhttp://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=tim-elsenburgCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Sweet Billy PilgrimGood old fashioned elbow grease.Pilgrim's Progress II (What's the Value of 'Free'?)tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31382212013-04-23T09:08:40-04:002013-04-24T11:49:43-04:00Sweet Billy Pilgrimhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-elsenburg/ Photo by Julian Simpson
These are interesting times for Sweet Billy Pilgrim. In collaboration with Mojo Magazine who awarded it 5 stars and an 'Instant Classic' rating, we're going to give people a chance to download our last album, Crown & Treaty, for free (you'll find the relevant link in the issue that hits UK shops on the 30th of April). It might seem like just another tiny ripple on an ocean of uncertainty into which bands and record companies increasingly desperately throw ideas in the hope that something will float, but to us, it's something more.
Well, it would be - right ?
We're in a fairly unique position as a band, in that we've amassed lots of positive critical attention including a Mercury nomination, whilst still operating - to stretch the seagoing metaphor to breaking point - somewhere so far under the radar, that it's probably actually sonar. Don't get me wrong, we have an amazingly loyal and enthusiastic congregation of Pilgrims (some of whom sung on the last album; some of whom have welcomed us into their front rooms to perform), and we continue to find our audience - and vice-versa - one by one; day by day.
These lovely people are inspiring and often humbling in their commitment to what we do, and in so many unexpected ways have given us what we needed when we needed it, and with it, the will to continue.
But the time comes, as a self-funding, largely self-promoting independent band, when you have to actually be the band that your music (hopefully) unselfconsciously details. Crown & Treaty did beat its chest a little. It did open its arms. People who heard it liked it. Now we'd like more people to hear it.
As an independent band, we don't have a marketing budget; we have word-of-mouth. We do have to think about how we can afford to make another record; how we can afford to tour as a six-piece band when a full-band show costs us anything between £300 and £400 to put on. Every day we gasp at the confident strides artists are making entirely independently of the music 'business'; and rightly so.
But it comes down to finding your audience. If you're lucky, you might already have a healthy number of grassroots supporters from the time when record companies still had strategies for putting your potential fans and your music together. If not, you've got find those people. What we love about what we do is having the chance to connect and share, and if that sounds a little disingenuous, we've been playing together (Anthony, Al and I) for nearly 20 years in parallel with our day jobs, our growing families and other life commitments. In short; we've only ever done this for love.
The difference is that the noise we make now isn't as esoteric or challenging as perhaps once it was. Not because we decided to try and broaden our appeal, but because that's how the songs came out. And so we'd like to find a way to share them with more people. Yes, a bigger audience might help us find a way to fund our next record. Yes, it might help us in being able to perform our music to more people. But more than anything else, it helps us to connect, both to an audience and to the act of creating something we feel is meaningful.
There may be those who question this decision given the ongoing discussions as to whether or not giving work away devalues it somehow. I think we imbued it with value when we made it. We painstakingly pieced it together over a year with careful hands. In all the time we've made music, we've taken no short cuts. We missed nights at the pub; time with family; sleep; job opportunities, and all because we take great pride in what we do. Austin Kleon in his book 'Steal Like an Artist' includes in his list of what an artist needs to 'succeed':
"The secret: Do good work and share it with people".
That's where you find us now. Those friends who have already joined us have been kind and encouraging beyond measure. Those who might join us soon are - to borrow the cliché - just friends we don't know yet. In creating Crown & Treaty with care and love; we gave it value. Once those songs are on the lips and wound through the lives of others; they give it value.
I'm starting to see musicians, bloggers, magazines, critics and DJs moving close together, and it's not a defensive circle; it's a creative huddle. I see music fans moving away from playlists and sponsored links and ignoring the white noise of corporate ads. They're turning to the musicians they like, and those who truly love music to find new things. Mentions on Twitter. Invitations to share stages. Playing on one another's records. Unsolicited reviews. Collaborations. Blog posts. Where the 'industry' is failing, music lovers are finding a way: music is finding a way, and that gives me such heart.
At the moment, that might not pay any of us very much money, but I can't remember basing one decision I've ever made for this band on that consideration. That's the next part of the jigsaw, and it looks to me like it will come via the least contrived and most honest means of all - a direct link to your audience.
Sweet Billy Pilgrim are playing a show at The Lexington, Islington, London on June the 17th. Details can be found here, and tickets, here.
Sign up to the Sweet Billy Pilgrim mailing list.]]>When I Feel Heavy Metaltag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16947012012-07-27T19:00:00-04:002012-09-26T05:12:33-04:00Sweet Billy Pilgrimhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-elsenburg/
I don't make heavy metal music. I guess if I had to label what I do in my band, Sweet Billy Pilgrim, it would be with something wince-inducing like 'progressive ambient pop' written in a tasteful calligraphic hand on expensive washi paper and tied with jute cord to a bonsai tree, probably by a vegetarian.
What I listen to - almost exclusively at the moment - however, is Heavy Metal. And when I say 'Heavy Metal', I'm not suggesting I Get Rocked by Girls, Girls, Girls in Paradise City, or even things getting Slippery When Wet after November Rain. I don't even mean those 90s nu-metal casualties, curled foetally on the floor of that room they all seem to share; the one with the bad plumbing and cockroaches, remembering that time they got dumped by a girl.
No, I've been looking underneath that big rock, at dark, glistening shapes that writhe and grope their way blindly from the light. There's the cursed blackened doom (their words) of bands like Khanate and Burning Witch, the tectonic realignments of Sunn O))), Litany and Krallice's apocalyptic gallop, Meshuggah's piston-precise attack and the ADD spasms of Down I Go and Gorguts. I'm talking about Black Metal. Doom Metal. Funeral Doom. Sludge Metal. Grindcore. Metalcore. Spazzcore. Death Metal. Technical Death Metal. Math Metal. Gore Metal, anyone ?
It's like an inverted Stairway to Heaven... heading downward... only, all that glitters is the lethal grin of an axe, or the chill of surgical steel, or the reflection of moonlight on bared teeth.
As far as I remember, my dark Charon, leaning on his oar and waiting to lead me into the Stygian gloom, cowled in Rothmans smoke, was Martin from next door. He was eight years my senior, had a leather biker jacket and supported a football team, all of which were impossibly glamorous as far as this ten year old was concerned; awareness just dawning, as it was, that not all trousers had to have an elasticated waistband, and that girls weren't just boys with better hair. He had that je ne sais quoi. But then, so does almost everything except Battle of the Planets and Top Trumps when you are ten and it's 1982.
What made my head spin more than the fag smoke and Hai Karate filling his living room whenever his mum was out, were the sleeves of the first three Iron Maiden LPs, which had taken up permanent residence on the lid of their Sony Music Centre. I needed to know what that grinning... thing was, and - more importantly - what kind of music it might listen to. I couldn't know what category the Number of the Beast might refer to in Top Trumps, but I was pretty sure that Peter Shilton wouldn't stand a chance against it.
When I finally got my own Iron Maiden album for Christmas a few years later (on cassette, which may have been a bit less of a drama for my parents to buy in Woolworths), it felt like one of the first things I'd ever owned; and more than that, in choosing it without (indeed, in spite of) the gentle intervention of my elders, for perhaps the first time I'd consciously reached what grown-ups seemed so arrive at so casually: a decision. That that moment involved an undead ghoul transformed into an Egyptian god, and the thrill of a WWII dogfight recreated with pirouetting guitars rendered the whole enterprise that bit more edgy.
In the intervening years, I've worked my way through lots of music, but even when we spend some time apart, there comes a day, often when I'm lost in the ecstatic drift of some beautiful modern classical music from Estonia, or savouring the granular flickers of some glitched-out jazzy electronica from Scandinavia, when every cell in my body seems to rise up and scream, 'fucking STOP THIS NONSENSE NOW !' And that's when I know the time has come. For Metal. Nothing else will do.
In starting to writing this, I became impatient. I wanted to get to the bit where I explain what it is about all that unremitting ugliness, violence and extremity that appeals. Now I'm here, it feels a bit like being caught with a rope around my neck, stark naked; an orange in my mouth, masturbating furiously whilst standing on a chair. And by that I mean to say that I could probably justify my behaviour quite rationally and scientifically, but when all's said and done I'm still a naked man with an erection, standing on chair.
Terrible meta(l)phors aside, the extreme fringes of metal are where I go to escape the ambiguity and grey areas from which so much of contemporary culture seems to emanate. Don't get me wrong, grey areas are not a bad thing. Indeed, I often think of myself as the Marco Polo of greyscale. But sometimes, I just want to commune with my inner caveman, even just for five or six riff-heavy minutes. And, make no mistake, even the most sophisticated extreme metal is just that; caveman music. At some primal level, kick drums and low-end bass rumble are migrating herds of mammoths and guitars the bony cries of circling prehistoric birds above them. Eventually we hear man's inchoate fury rising from frozen earth, up to as-yet unnamed gods... because he's left his fucking front door keys in the house again.
In my favourite Metal songs, dynamics are something that happen at the beginning and end of the song, or perhaps in the micro-silences between lightning fast beats. Technique is all, because control is everything. The palette of sounds I tentatively dip fine horsehair brushes into as I'm writing music, becomes a jack-hammer on a hydraulic arm. Lyrics rarely deal in doubt or abstraction. This is this. That is so. Melody withers beneath the solar flare of blunt force.
See ? It sounds awful, doesn't it... [spits orange out].
But there's a trenchant purity in all of this that I think is beautiful if you look hard enough. In the same way that when I drive past an oil refinery, I see something in those brute symmetries that touches the same part of me as trees and grass and clear blue skies. It's the basic human need to feel something that all good music nourishes, but our rage never earns the same entitlement as our sadness, say, and it's that part that occasionally needs wringing out of our bones before our inner Basil Fawlty threatens the shrubs of suburbia, needlessly.
Metal, for me, is that skull-ringed hand, reaching into my chest. In the tortured cadence of detuned power chords and the anguished, wounded-ox howl of the vocals, I'm forced to invoke the full force of the C-word: catharsis. Suddenly, it doesn't matter so much that I've locked myself out. My inner caveman and I have bumped shoulders and shaken hands. We light a fire, and discuss high protein diets and Loose Women as we watch the sun soften and melt across the horizon.
And as I look across the burning shells of cars, deafened a little by the cries of the damned, I know I'm old enough to know better, but all this wretched torment fills me with joy.
Suggested listening:
Meshuggah - Destroy Erase Improve
Meshuggah - Chaosphere
Krallice - Diotima
Down I Go - Tyrantcore
Sunn O))) - Monoliths and Dimensions
Gorguts - Obscura
Ascend - Ample. Fire. Within.
Electric Wizard - Dopethrone
Spawn of Possession - Noctambulant
Black Boned Angel - Verdun]]>Pilgrims' Progress (That 'Difficult' Third Album)tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.14496972012-05-01T19:00:00-04:002012-07-01T05:12:24-04:00Sweet Billy Pilgrimhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-elsenburg/
My band, Sweet Billy Pilgrim have just released a new album. Semantically speaking, I know that statement is a little naive; it might even sound disingenuous given that music is consumed in so many different ways now. I should amend it to; my band Sweet Billy Pilgrim are disseminating a collection of songs via physical and digital means, and are relaying news of that fact via the mediums of the internet, the radio, sign language, semaphore, morse code, figurative dance and whatever else it might take to get people to listen.
It's a big deal for us. The critical cliche of the 'difficult' third album has been borne out a little by its protracted birth, but in truth this is largely because I had an actual window to look out of this time. I'll explain. Our previous album, Twice Born Men, was made in a shed where the only distractions were the extremes of temperature and the ghostly kamikaze of a thousand pale moths, fatally drawn, twitching dazedly, into my uplighter before they had a chance to think "damn it... sunblock."
Crown & Treaty grew up in a tiny bungalow, cupped in a mossy palm of the archetypal English country garden, where - instead of looking at a blank wooden wall, trying to ignore chilblains and sudden invertebrate death - from my new desk I could stake out a family of squirrels as they flagrantly built their criminal empire, watch my workstation become a through-route on the hourly freight run of laden bumble bees, and witness more pigeon-on-pigeon sexual violence than a man should ever have to see. And so, somewhat inevitably, the workrate slowed to something resembling download times on the Orkney islands.
But something else happened, too. As my view on the world opened up in a literal sense, so the music kind of unfolded its arms and slouched a bit. I'm not suggesting any Dude-esque level of laid-backness - I'm still a suitably uptight control freak with a metabolism that rarely operates at anything less than a notch under 'fight or flight' - but where previous songs would smudge and bleed at the edges; notes refusing to dry as I moved them around in that tiny airless space, the songs on Crown & Treaty demanded the same vividness as that blue sky I could see on a bright May morning: they became open arms to Twice Born Men's clasped hands.
As an aside, I think that the impact of any stylistic leap on a listener will be absorbed somewhat by recognition of the guiding force behind it, but I think that too often in life, we fear straying too far from who we've been, with all the opinions, prejudices and preferences that went with that, so that we feel we can still confidently express who we are, moment-to-moment. I'm beginning to like the idea that these things can be in a constant state of flux. What might be a rivet in the armour of identity for you today, could ping out tomorrow without it all falling apart, surely ? It's just a case of being open to change, and honest about how you feel. Nothing stays the same.
And eventually, that armour will have to come off anyway, even if it's just for a moment. So you can fall in love. Laugh with your children. Or go for a wee.
So, with a little money from a post-Mercury Music Prize nomination publishing deal, I spent a year painstakingly assembling an album I knew would be called Crown & Treaty. I also knew I wanted it to sound like a million dollars, despite costing under a thousand; knew that it would be bolder - a confident slash of primary colour across the canvas. But most importantly of all, I knew that every song would in some way address our ghosts, whose often malevolent, vaporous whisper informs every decision, hope, need and want we could ever know, beyond food and shelter.
I want to believe that we have free will, but history often has other ideas, taking our intentions, bending them out of shape and handing them back to us with a rueful grin, to unintentionally call our own. Experience can reward us with knowledge and power, but somewhere in a corner, the dark stuff still writhes and seethes like something in a terrible nu-metal video, exerting its stealthy influence in long shadows that reach us no matter how many candles we light.
It's these shadows I wanted to identify in the songs; to crack open a metaphorical beer and spend some quality time hanging out with my ghosts, painfully aware that in recognising them and where they came from - be it grief, abuse or merely the baggage of previous generations - with an open heart, I could finally move forward. I just had to crown them all, and then sort out the paperwork.
So that was the title and the theme taken care of. What about the artwork ?
I started by writing an email to David Sylvian, the man responsible for releasing Twice Born Men and for finding the amazing Tacita Dean image that adorned the cover, outlining my ideas for the record, and despite warning me of his incredible lack of time, 15 minutes later he sent me three images by photographer Robert Polidori. The first of the three, as it turned out, was perfect.
Just take a second to look at the man in that portrait. His name is François Achilles Bazaine (1811 - 1888). In his four decades of military service he was a national hero, highly decorated and much-respected, wounded on several occasions due to his insistence on leading his men into battle, rather than pointing them vaguely in its direction from behind the lines. Indeed, he doesn't pose for that portrait from amongst the signifiers of authority and entitlement as so many did. Instead we find him in the field, seemingly pausing for a moment amidst the dust and din of war, his charts spread out, ready to be returned to presently.
But in 1873, after surrendering to the Prussian army after a long and bloody siege, Bazaine was made scapegoat by a nation too proud to face military defeat, and abruptly, the hero became pariah; court-martialled, disgraced and sentenced to death. Eventually, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, but in a final act of defiance he escaped, settling in Madrid where he eventually died, alone and penniless on the 20th of September 1888.
Now look at the whole image. Poor François has been lifted from a crumbling wall and unceremoniously dumped amongst the tangled structural viscera of some early-stage renovation work. We get the sense that his surroundings were once quite grand; walls and panels speaking of better times while resignedly bearing their steady decay. With not so much as a dust sheet to protect him, François' pose now speaks less of dignity than vulnerability in this brutal new context. No one cares what he did or who he was anymore. History becomes - to self-consciously quote my own lyric - just another way to be forgotten.
So, François Achilles Bazaine's voice joins the other ghosts on Crown & Treaty, and I guess if they ask for anything, it's to be acknowledged. Perhaps even to be consulted from time to time. But, believe every whisper, and suddenly we're looking at life through a viewfinder, trying to record the meagre, infinite sweep of achievement instead of being open to the joys of a moment truly lived.
To quote from the same song ('Kracklite', from Crown & Treaty);
Every church I'm building
to a god I'll never know.
Too soon becomes a kiss kept from her lips.
I suspect that kiss is as close to immortality as we can ever hope to get, and sometimes, when sleep evades me, I think I can hear the weeping of ghosts who forgot - in life - to cherish its timeless and present wonder.
(Watch Desperately Seeking Bazaine, a short film detailing our journey into the heart of darkness, searching for his grave in downtown Madrid)]]>Slab! Oratory (Or How Industrial Music Changed My Life)tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.14059822012-04-10T19:00:00-04:002012-06-10T05:12:01-04:00Sweet Billy Pilgrimhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-elsenburg/
"...Like an iron foundry at full volume", promised a bemused NME reviewer of Descension by never-even-remembered UK industrial rockers Slab! I remember peering out at those words from behind a greasy curtain of teenage hair, and wondering why a band would want to sound like that. I vaguely recognised - perhaps as one can only in the vegetal unfolding of a teenage heart - that these musicians and their messy (and often literal) deconstruction of the electric guitar were necessary, because it needed reclaiming from those incapable of playing a note with one leg situated anywhere near the other. But did that justify attacking the thing - that most totemic rock'n'roll artifact - with handtools?
That night, as I carefully removed my cherished copy of 2112 by Canadian prog-rockers Rush from the turntable, I dwelt for a little longer than usual on the three satin-clad men with the Farrah Fawcett haircuts on the sleeve, and shivered, minutely.
A drummer in a kimono was all the justification I needed.
On Saturday morning, I found myself in a record shop in a provincial town with a record token, and nothing to lose but 2112, an Asia album with a sea serpent on the front, and a personal musical defeat at the strings of the Stairway... guitar solo. Trembling, I bought two records that would - hours later - transform two sides of a C90 cassette into something resembling a holy relic for many months to come (and - within weeks - transform my record collection into something with just a fading memorial imprint of what a double Santana live album might actually even be).
My state of the art Walkman took at least nine AA batteries, casually discharging them all in under 40 minutes, but this was just enough time to listen to a whole album. The ferric oxide arranged itself in hyperreal-time into the jagged shapes of Sister by New York noisemongers Sonic Youth on one side, and on the other, Descension.
My parents looked in on me; concerned. To them, it must have seemed like a practical demonstration of how home taping was literally killing Music. In that moment, I felt my Volvo-cradled, rebel heart soaring. At that same moment, incidentally, it sounded like Sonic Youth were actually sawing.
I hesitate to call Slab! an industrial band, because despite lots of non-musical source material, where others (Einstürzende Neubauten, Test Department) simply laid waste to our musical landscape with their relentless clangings, Slab! took traditional rock instruments and the emergent sampling technology and carved out a new one. Snare drums showered rhythmic shrapnel over bass drum detonations, while detuned guitar strings flapped and squirmed. Mutant horns played all the wrong notes in all the right places; equal parts Ornette Coleman and Tower of Power.
And it was here, four songs in, that I found Dolores.
"On the edge of a plateau at the top of the world. The trees as green as emerald. The waterfalls so clear", whispered the singer through the song's steam powered pulse, as fragments of piano ricocheted across the speakers. A thuggish bass guitar elbowed its way into a chorus delivered with sleazy glee: "Wickedly mysterious she looks", he deadpanned as lights in my head flickered with excitement. Then woozy horns wound their way out of the fug, the mood rapidly darkening, with talk of "a great sickness in the water supply", until the narrator finally implored, "Dolores take my hand and laugh", as limbs knotted, teeth bared and the world ended. I was mesmerized.
That's paradise to purgatory in about four and a half minutes. Only Doctor Who could match their ambition. Knowing that the imagination can be a dark place, Slab! fearlessly prodded its darkest corners in the hope of uncovering something beautiful, and it's here, I think, in one of those corners, that Dolores sits - mysteries intact - with black wings furled, quietly flicking lit matches at a dog-eared Rush LP.
Slab! Website]]>Mercury Prize Memories From a Former Nomineetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9516192011-09-07T03:53:11-04:002011-11-06T05:12:02-05:00Sweet Billy Pilgrimhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-elsenburg/
So, in the weeks leading up to PJ's victory last night, I've been pondering our own Mercury experience. We did sell some more records, for which we're always grateful, we got to spend half an hour in the Blue Peter garden after a BBC interview, Newsround asked me who would play me in a movie of my life (Uma Thurman with a beard... She even has the same size feet as me...), I finally looked up what counterpoint was when Jools kept praising ours, and Kasabian were nice about us.
But more than that, the whole thing felt like the Jack Black character in High Fidelity shouting loudly that we were good, to a shop full of interested punters. Where many awards could be accused of politicking and being unduly influenced by the corporate dollar, here was one that was more like that mate who won't let you leave because there's something you've 'got to hear'. That's possibly naive, but I don't care. Since that September night, my knees have remained resolutely piss-free*
Even though it was 2 years ago, our award has really focused my efforts on our upcoming 3rd album, because - for the first time - there is an expectation outside immediate family / parole officers, and we're seeing it expressed by new friends online daily. I've been playing tiny concerts in fans' homes recently which has been great; lovely people invite me into their houses, bring their friends and - best of all - provide me with cake, and this brings me great joy. And great hope. That people are still enthusiastic and passionate about music, and that word of mouth is everything promotionally to a growing band, as people numb out to the sheer volume of aspirational *stuff* they are bombarded with every day.
The Mercury seems to me to be the one award capable of expressing the same passion, and giving that word of mouth thing a massive boost. And yes, I'm sure there are politics. And Jools probably whittles babies into toothpicks in his dressing room. But where else would my Dad have heard about Led Bib ? Or managed to confuse PJ O' Rourke with PJ Harvey ? Jesus, I'd have totally missed The Invisible (that sentence works on a few levels).
So Polly Jane has been victorious. My money was on her, and it is a great record. My heart was with Everything Everything though, for being unashamedly smartarse, and making British quirkiness less about chunky knits and beards and more about playing acrobatic, fearless pop songs in boiler suits. In closing, I feel a tiny flicker of disappointment that The Unthanks weren't nominated, but I'm sure everyone can think of someone who's been overlooked. Might invite them round to mine for some singing and a slice of cake.
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