Unola

With Unola Todd’s life being all about the kids right now, and Unola Bob having another band and an increased workload, and Nick trying to finish his Phoresis recording project and raise some kids too, and Kade being a professional visual artist (in addition to poet and musician), Unola is effectively……..on hiatus for an indefinite period of time.

The only news to report (which is not really too compelling) is that we have now sold over $20 of digital downloads through CDBaby. Three full album (that’s 10 CDs for like 9 bucks) downloads were transacted at I-Tunes (two domestic and one European) and a few odd songs as well. Unola does no advertising or marketing of any kind. We’re not proud of it, we’re just so lazy!

This is The Meat Joy’s punk rock version of Up Where We Belong. It was recorded around the time that Unola was active. Or is it Hard Rock for a Soft World?

In 2003, well after Unola ended its active life, and while still drummer/songwriter for The Meat Joy, I had an epiphany. I no longer wanted to strive for a place in the music business. Why, you ask? Because it doesn’t serve music, I answer. It exploits music for profit. It crassly commodifies an art form and thereby takes all of the art out of it. These are all things i had known for a long time, but to which I didn’t give much weight in my desire to try to make a living playing music.

Mostly the Biz churns out hollow facsimiles of art, revealed on closer inspection to be unsubstantial sound candy. That’s not to forget that many great musical artists have had long, successful careers on major labels. But their success is/was mostly due to the fact that long ago (most of) the labels started out being as interested in the music and artists as they were in the business. Then they progressively got greedier and greedier, growing and merging and becoming giant corporations. Now there aren’t any real artists on major labels, except perhaps for older ones who somehow persevered through the years.

Many stories have been told by musical artists that go to prove that the price of success in the Music Industry is constant frustration with the system, and constant vigilance to ensure that they aren’t ripped off (too much). Some artists haven’t taken enough care or notice and have been royally jerked, or worse financially ruined.

The Music Industry is all about greed and adulation. Marketing, advertising, product placement, and artist endorsements are just a few ways that they feed the greed. Signing sexy rock stars to sell units is the main way they feed the adulation. With so much money at stake, labels will do anything to increase the bottom line, and the artists are way below that; they are the last to get paid, and receive the lowest pay of anyone in the chain.

I’m glad that The Meat Joy never got far enough in the biz to get offered a contract with a major, or even a minor label for that matter. We made two strong independently released CDs. We got to record with some real cool engineers. And we had a blast playing at the local and regional level. But we never had any debts that were forced on us. And we were always in complete control of what we did, artistically and otherwise (and we still are).

If you haven’t heard of The Meat Joy (or Unola) I’m not a bit surprised. There are tons of really cool artists that will never attain mass recognition. Never confuse Art with Industry. The Music Industry is not necessary to the Art of Music.

As I become further removed by the years from the Unola project, and after many repeated listenings (I’m probably their biggest fan), I seem to regard the whole thing as a kind of Spinal Tap-ish performance art piece. Of late, I’ve become obsessed with extracting the pieces from the box set and organizing them in to single disc (and a few double disc) albums, which I have come to realize is just how I prefer to listen to them.

’ve been pondering the overview of how we proceeded as a band, and in particular the decisions we made about how to release the material. At every step we flew in the face of the standard practices inherent in the Music Industry. We recorded a career’s worth of albums in a little more than one year. We played less than a handful of live gigs and didn’t tour at all. We compiled a boxed set anthology to be our first (and at the time we intended it to be our only) release. We offered a free 2-DVD set of videos to anyone who would buy the set. We made the release limited edition, and priced the set to ensure no profit margin, but rather we counted on a loss. We purposely failed to market ourselves in any way; creating a website was the closest we came, but not many, if any, people read it (yet). And finally we made no attempt to “get signed”, because let’s face it, that would just be silly. We have so small a fan base that all this work has effectively been done for nothing. It’s a labor of love; a dedication to making art for art’s sake.

Now I’d like to make available, at some point, these individual album length releases from the set, albeit merely self made on CDR. It’s a project that will come to being slowly, as many other projects are in line in front of it. It seems that by doing it we would be proceeding in reverse order from Industry standard. Usually a band builds a catalogue of releases over many years and then puts out an anthology at some point when they are well known. It’s just one more way that Unola is getting it wrong on purpose.

Unola would be considered by most Industry people to not be a “serious” band because of our lack of adherence to accepted standards. But we were serious about making quality music, and putting out a quality release. Although recorded with a Tascam 4-track Portastudio, which uses cassette tapes, already an anachronism here in the 21st century, the sound quality is very high. This is surprising since we didn’t take an undue amount of time with microphone placement and other recording considerations, but just found basic recording levels and then launched in to the playing.

It was in mixing, mastering, and so-called post-production that the highest level of studio technology and creativeness was used. That’s in part why it took 5 years to complete the set to finally see its release in February 2006. Nick and Bob really took care to make all of the pieces sound sonically good, and indeed most of the recordings sound as highly professional as most CDs you’d hear on major labels, even if the music is often difficult listening for the average person. Some of the pieces do sound appropriately DIY. A simple design was implemented for the artwork and packaging. Black glossy pages with white lettering for the artwork and a clear 10 CD jewel case (which we found online) make for a well thought out, well executed, and overall professional looking set.

posted by Unola Todd

I’d like to say the disc release is being held up by the ridiculous machinations of a bloated, greedy, anchronistic dinosaur trying to manipulate every facet of pre-production with overinflated marketing expectations in an unrealistic, crass attempt to maximise profit potential with no regard for the artistic process (aka a record label).

But the truth is we’ve just been draggin’ our feet. The music is mastered and sequenced but the cover art is still being converted to files that the disc maker can use.

I know there are just so many eager fans awaiting this release, but patience my pretties…..Unola lives in a time of their own.

The piece we recorded is instrumental, as is everything from Unola2000, but i subsequently wrote these lyrics and planned to fabricate a song using loops and extracts from the original track. But i haven’t got around to it yet.

Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiilll Nugent is a fugitive in every blankin’ way. You see, I made him up and now he won’t shut up. He’s got a right to say nothin’ cuz he’s nothin’. Nothing further from the truth. I made a point to point to him. Oh yeah, he was a saviour of my youth. I’ll pat him down and see through him and all he represents. His reputation is affirmative and formative, and further more….and further more I’m telling you he’s getting on my nerves. He is the one who does define the indefinable. He’s emblem of a problem and the very same he poses. He has the knack for reeking and still come up smelling roses. I gave him attributes and qualities that I saw fit, and then before he even came to life he put an end to it.

he is a figure in my imagination

he is nothing, not corporeal

he is a ghost, but in no machine

he has no pulse and no heartbeatHe’s nervy

and topsy

and turvy

i love him

and I’ll see

right thru himI’ll boo him

he’s nothing

from something

i made him

yet one thing

So soothing

he’s not dead

not alive

and not Ted

that’s no jive

Bill Nugent has no life it’s all his own he has no wife and no queen on a throne aqain he has no home i’ll say it one more time his time is mine and he is taking up a lot of it it makes him mad that he can’t have the things he wants to have and so he torments me and tries his best to get under my skin and that is wearing thin the shape he’s in is very sketchy he is stretching on the truth as well and it may finally just break the spell

by Todd Osborn

At least about music, he is. He’s currently assembling all of the Unola2000 tracks in to shorter, album length CDs. Why Todd, why?

Todd: It’s how i like to listen to them. I based them on the “old school” model of vinyl albums, with two “sides” of between 17 and 25 minutes each. The box set anthology heeded 13 albums, but with a total of 16 discs, with my new configuration realizing three of the albums as double disc sets. Also, I compiled a 17th disc featuring remixes and versions not featured in the box set.

I’ve been pilfering one of the NASA websites for thumbnails of planetary photos to use as cover art. Not to worry, it’s unlikely that this will ever lead to a cease and desist order from NASA as Unola was never a commercially viable tool of the man. Even if a few of these CDR-quality self releases were ever sold (highly unlikely), I think we could stay under the radar of copyright infringement.

Damn, Osborn! You are one completist MF! If it’s so unlikely that you’ll ever sell any, then why do it? Isn’t it just a giant waste or time?

Todd O: I’m compelled. Art is life and life is Art. There’s nothing in life more important than Art and the pursuit of Art. It’s what separates us from the lobsters. In the world of Music, historically there have been artists at one end of the spectrum, and major label executives at the other end, and a whole range of musicians, singers, marketing people, spam, songwriters, sound engineers, roadies, more spam, guitar techs, breakfast cereals, drum techs, receptionists, even more spam, and producers in between.

This huge world can also be mapped in terms of the Industrialized World versus the Non-Industrialized World. In many Third (and Fourth) World countries, playing music is an important cultural activity; it’s not entertainment, it’s a vital part of language. In point of fact it is a language all its own, used for storytelling, historical record-keeping, and for communicating with the creator.

The Industrialized Music World population, on the other hand, is made up primarily of people who want to make a living creating, playing, and recording their original music. And that’s fine until one is asked to water down one’s Art in order to commodify it. A large percentage of these people have no problem with that, because the music they are creating doesn’t have much real artistic merit to begin with. They sold out long before they even began their careers.

The smallest percentage of this population is made up of people for whom music is a serious art form, and they are unwilling to compromise their artistic vision in order to sell more units. These people are viewed by the larger percentage as being “pretentious”, while themselves viewing the latter as being “sell-outs”.

An even smaller percentage of the already small percentage of serious artists would stoop to including rock music as being potential for Art. Most members of the serious music population play Classical Music, or what i like to call Academic Music. Most people who have educations in Music are not fans of Rock, nor would most of them think of Rock as being Art.

This deduction process finally brings us to the very small population in the giant World of Music that is a tiny island chain called Art Rock. This is music that can be, at times, very difficult to listen to. It’s music that is (and was) created by people who want(ed) to hear something new. And that is getting harder and harder to achieve since all the possible melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic permutations had been written and performed by the time Beethoven died. And then along comes Jazz which began adding shadings and textures which the Classicists hadn’t come up with. Then Jazz went electric, and there were many scenes and movements directly influenced by Jazz: Psychedelic, Krautrock, Canterbury, Fusion, and Noise. And then let’s not forget Protopunk, which had its roots as early as the mid-60’s with the Velvet Underground, and then much later proto-New Wave and the early electronic experiments which led to New Age (a means to an end, but certainly not an end in itself), and not least, nor necessarily last (except of this list), the exotic sounds of Dub Reggae. All of these Rock oriented movements added sounds to the musical palette that weren’t available before.

For me, Unola populates one of these tiny islands, a long with perhaps few hundred others, of musical Artists who don’t care about making a living at it. The pursuit of Pure Art is their agenda. The Art of Rock. Having been shipwrecked off the coast in the early 21st Century, the 4 members of Unola swam ashore and spent a year and change recording their distinctive blend of the aforementioned. And although time, distance, other projects, kids, day jobs, and more have kept Unola from being an active band, the possibility still exists to play again.

In the meanwhile, i’ll always have Unola2000.

Oh Todd Osborn, you’re such a wanker!

There are several places to purchase downloads of individual Unola2000 tracks. This is the first few fruits of our association with CDBaby digital distribution. CDBaby is an awesome artist oriented resource. They give good advice and provide an easy way to help you market and sell your music.

Buy.com

Tradebit.com

Payplay.fm

Musicishere.com

South Side Sandy is the first finished song to surface from Todd’s band The Meat Joy in quite a while. They recorded it among other tracks back in 2002 but abandoned the recordings due to their singer Stacey moving on. They then started another round of recordings with the new line-up (bassist Heather stepping up to sing lead) only to go on a sabbatical for a few years while Todd raised his “youngins”. They expect to be getting back to finishing the next CD this year.

Todd and Unola’s NickJ recently mixed this song for a compilation on Brutarian Records. It hasn’t come out yet (it seems) but we thought we’d post it here.

We finally have some MP3s from the box set posted. Check out the Track Listings section and you’ll find some hyperlinked song titles. So far there are nine, one from each disc except for Disc 8. An attempt was made to post the track Death Camp, but either it was too long or there was some other error which prevented it from uploading. We’ll figure it out or post a different piece.