We're Ready To Offer An Opinion On Jai Paul's Bandcamp Thing

A second post about the Jai Paul Bandcamp Album which was released today. Get it here if you want to know instantly what it is like. Alternatively read our opinion.....

Earlier today a certain sector of the internet based music community went a little bit crazy. The reason? Because elusive London producer Jai Paul put out an album. Boom. Just like that.

Or rather there was a Bandcamp page with his name on it and a collection of fully formed songs and some shorter interludes / half ideas. Each track was simply named numerically ‘Track 1, Track 2’ etc.  

For many of those who pay a lot of attention to listening and writing about new music this was A BIG MOMENT. In fact the moment seemed far important than the music itself. We wrote about this ever growing phenomenon of 'event moments' a few hours after the release of the album or whatever it is here.

So what happens now? Well, in the olden days the press were sent copies of the album to listen to a number of weeks before it was released. That way traditional journalists could fully explore the depths of the record and give a carefully considered opinion before publishing a review shortly before the record came out. It helped consumers decide if they might purchase the album they hadn't yet heard.

But with more and more artists beginning to adopt the model of just putting things out there the old fashioned media reviews are being made redundant. Who needs a review when you can just stream or download yourself and form your own opinion? And if the media try to keep up they get punched; the Guardian attempted to publish their review of King Of Limbs by Radiohead the day it was made available and was then heavily criticised for dumbing down journalism.

Yet what was interesting today was that although twitter was awash with the likes of bloggers (including ourselves) and websites (including big sites like Pitchfork) turning the release of the Jai Paul record into an event, very few people were commenting on their initial impression after listening. Maybe it was in part because people are now wary of giving an early opinion and like the Guardian being criticised for that or just worried about getting it 'wrong', which is a bit ridiculous because how can your own opinion be wrong to you? Plus we all have initial impressions about things don’t we? When you meet a new person for the first time you make some first judgements based on how they present themselves or speak. A month or year later you may have a very different perspective about that person. It’s the same with music. It’s OK in our book to make that judgement and quite OK to change your mind later on.

At Breaking More Waves we don’t review albums anymore. We used to a little, in fact this review of the debut Hurts record is one of our most read pages ever. But as an amateur unpaid / unfunded blog with no journalistic skills we have better things to do with our time than attempt to be a critic. We don’t particularly like negativity and prefer to leave that to those who are paid to listen and critique records that they may not enjoy. Instead we act as a curator of the stuff we think is good. By implication the bad stuff gets left out and hopefully if your measure of quality and what is good is similar to ours you’ll begin to trust our opinion.

Which brings us back to the Jai Paul Bandcamp thing.

We've said we don’t review albums, the LP is already out there and so any review is pretty pointless really, except for drawing your attention to the fact that the album exists, which we guess is why today's release became an internet event of sorts.

The event was actually more important than what people thought of it. Which is a bit sad, but probably true.

But because we like the idea of doing pointless things and had some spare time today, we’re sharing our listening experience so far with you. This isn’t a review as such, just some thoughts. In publishing our thoughts we asked Twitter a very important question. That question was 'what's the earliest time it's OK to offer an opinion on a record?'

Thanks to Chris from the Metaphorical Boat blog who clarified that it was three listens, once with laptop speakers, once with headphones and er....once whilst driving around in a Ford Mondeo.




So taking his wise advice, off we went:

Stage 1 – Download from Bandcamp.

Stage 2 – First listen via laptop whilst burning onto CD for enhanced listening later. Note the use of a cheap Asda CD because it quickly becomes apparent through the first laptop listen (and information via our twitter feed) that this album is not high in sound quality; it appears to be akin to a collection of demos.

Stage 3 – Second listen via headphone speakers (Sennheiser) played via a Cambridge Audio CD player

Stage 4 – We don’t own a Ford Mondeo, but our Toyota Auris is nearly as boring.

Job done. Time to offer an opinion.

Our conclusion after these three listens:

The Jai Paul album is quite good. 

That’s non- journalism for you. But is quite good, good enough? Or is quite good actually quite bad ?

We need to clarify. 

On our laptop it was quite good.

On our headphones and CD player despite the slightly muffled heavy sound it became better than quite good especially when played incredibly loud. Track 2 with its Asian beats, video game effects and stop start samples is truly A.M.A.Z.I.N.G. One of the best tracks we’ve heard all year. Apparently it's actually called Str8 Outta Mumbai.

But in our car it didn’t sound so good at all even Track 2 /Str8 Outta Mumbai. Maybe it was because we used a Toyota not a Mondeo. But the lack of enjoyment was more to do with the piss poor sound quality than the tunes. If we paid £7 for this (which we did) on a CD we'd have thought it was faulty.

So there you have it. Jai Paul’s Bandcamp Thing : Quite good, but would have been very good if it was better quality sound. However, if you drive a Toyota we'd suggest you hold on until a properly mastered version comes out, if it ever does.

Let’s see how it pans out over the next few months.

Update (15/04/13 @ 8pm GMT)

Today Jai Paul’s twitter account did its first ever tweet.

It wasn’t “Testing” or “Hello Twitter”.

But this : “To confirm: demos on bandcamp were not uploaded by me, this is not my debut album. Please don't buy. Statement to follow later. Thanks, Jai”

The offending songs have now been removed from Bandcamp although for the time being they are still streaming from websites, which  Tim from The Blue Walrus tells me at a guess is probably because "it's cached on different servers."

According to Twitter and various blogs it is being reported that Jai Paul had his laptop stolen and this is where the tracks were sourced from. However if this is true the gossip on the internet is full of suspicion, with the following two questions being asked:

1. If these tracks were taken from a stolen laptop, why did Jai Paul’s record label XL take so long to get the tracks removed from Bandcamp for download? XL normally have a reputation for being very quick to action illegal uploads, so were they actually behind the release in some way in what could be a very clever publicity campaign. Or did Jai Paul get someone to upload the demos for him to make some quick cash? He’s been reported in the past to be a bit of a maverick when it comes to working with.

2. Somebody who has already stolen a laptop and then sells tracks that they don’t own is playing a very risky game. The chances are that the financial transactions will be traced back to them at some point. Normally album leaks are simply leaked for free so that tracing back becomes harder. So why risk it unless you actually owned the tracks?

We'll probably never know the answer to either of the above.

Anyway the net result of all of this is that Jai Paul has increased his profile no end and those who have downloaded the tracks have got an idea of how the final properly mixed and mastered album, whenever (if ever) it is might sound. It seems like it might sound great. Even when listened to in a Toyota Auris.

Jai Paul - Track 2 (Str8 Outta Mumbai)

Jai Paul And Our Relationships With 'Big Event' Music

Whilst the majority of the UK slept or was late night socialising, new music blogger Josh Dalton from Crack In The Road blog was practicing his (some would say obsessive) passion for finding and consuming new music with what he describes as his ‘daily bandcamp trawl’. On this particular search Josh discovered a newly created Bandcamp album purporting to be from Jai Paul, the mysterious singer and producer signed to XL Recordings who has received widespread coverage on music blogs since he first uploaded his inventive demo BTSU (streaming below) to the web, which led him to being one of the long-listed artists on the BBC Sound of 2011 list. Up to this point Jai Paul had not released an album of any sort.

Having listened to the Bandcamp, Josh was reasonably convinced that the tracks uploaded were indeed by the man himself and tweeted about it. The next few hours saw music bloggers and web sites go into hyper drive as they discussed the release on twitter. Having never courted the press or having rush released material Jai Paul’s persona and music have taken on levels of unprecedented buzz for an artist yet to release an album. Was it possible that he had just dumped these tracks onto Bandcamp without his labels permission and caught the music industry napping?

It was the unexpectedness of the release that frenzied up certain parts of the music related parts of the internet. Not because the music was great / good / bad or indiferrent but just because it was there. This truly was the hype machine in action.

It seems that in 2013 the release event has actually become more important than the music itself. It’s the same with certain larger gigs and festivals; once people are there they seem more concerned about talking to their friends throughout artists performances and documenting their attendance by way of Facebook and Twitter than soaking up the actual occasion. We seem to have lost the ability to actually pay attention to what brought us here in the first place – the music.

Two examples of these release events are David Bowie grabbing huge attention and surprising fans earlier this year with the sudden unexpected appearance of new single Where Are We Now on his sixty-sixth birthday. The day it was released our twitter feed flowed with people all tweeting the same simple news that Bowie was back.  A second is Daft Punk’s forthcoming album which is being greeted with levels of outrageously impossible excitement in some quarters; a recording of an advert for a new song shown at this weekend’s Coachella festival filmed on a mobile device by an audience member has already picked up nearly half a million views on You Tube by early Sunday morning. Yes a video advert seems to have been the best thing to witness at a live music event; doesn't that strike you as a little strange?

Yet once these releases are finally out it seems that everyone quickly moves on to discuss the next big release. One high profile blogger told us he very rarely listens to albums that have been out for more than a few months. This is our concern - not the big release as such but what happens after.

But these increasing levels of hype / big release events only work for established, heritage or hype acts that can generate sufficient online anticipation through established fans, blogs or the traditional media. The average mid-level or small scale musician is finding themselves increasingly forced out to the margins and also records that we’ve adored in the past get forgotten.

The UK singles chart rules are even being changed to reflect these new event releases. It’s now becoming the norm for these campaigns to issue a ‘self-gratification’ track prior to the release of the album. These songs are single tracks given away as a ‘free’ download on pre-order of the album. Such tracks didn’t used to be counted to the end of week charts but now they will. So artists that have an established fan base who traditionally wait for the long-player to be released rather than buy individual singles will be able to make their pre-order count for the singles chart as well as the album chart, increasing their chance of exposure via radio play and media interest and hence further sales.  Meanwhile smaller artists or those who have yet to receive hype will find their releases having smaller chances of exposure.

We’re not sure where this big event / release culture is going to end and what its full implications are for music both in terms of its creation, culture and business. However, we have a genuine concern that it’s creating a here today gone tomorrow fuck-buddy relationship with music that is going to leave us all spent and exhausted and that’s just unsustainable. As ‘lovers’ of music, is that all we really want? Once the romance period for an album is over do we jack it in? Or should we be spending a little more time in cultivating long term lasting relationships that we really value?

So today why not download and listen to the Jai Paul tracks if you are excited about them, but also listen to something from your collection from 2, 3 or 10 years ago that you love? Keep the fires burning.

Jai Paul - BTSU