RINGINGLOW ONLINE

Make Mine Music - final release "Vox Pop"

2012-01-02T14:59:00.000Z

Make Mine Music, the label I co-founded in 2001 and have nominally headed ever since, ceased to exist on 31st December 2011. Our reasons for folding the label were numerous, but stem largely from many of us having busy personal and professional lives, and the current climate in which running and manufacturing costs for small labels have risen considerably whilst sales have declined due to a multiplicity of factors (downloads, the economy and so on). We had discussed folding the label a year or so ago, feeling that it was better to quit than go on with lessened enthusiasm and purpose, but decided to see it out until the end of 2011 to enable the final releases to come out and be promoted properly.

Make Mine Music's final release is a compilation called "Vox Pop" featuring 13 exclusive tracks including Ringinglow and my previous incarnation Portal. The album will be available from 16th January in physical and download formats, but is available to stream now:

<a href="http://makeminemusic.bandcamp.com/album/vox-pop">Vox Pop by Make Mine Music</a>

Ringinglow EP streaming in full

2011-03-10T11:57:00.000Z

News in 60 Seconds

2011-02-20T13:01:00.003Z

There is a hitherto unreleased Ringinglow track "Miranda Grey" on the new CD compilation on Second Language "Minute Papillon". The album contains sixty one-minute-long tracks by the likes of Darren Hayman, Scanner, Textile Ranch, James Brewster, ISAN, Ellis Island Sound, Junkboy, Plinth, Fieldhead, Hannah Peel, Brave Timbers, Seasons (pre-din) and The Boats.

You can buy the compilation here

Document and Eyewitness

2010-12-24T17:31:00.003Z

I have moved my writings about other people's music (and the world of music in general) to a new blog address. I think it unlikely that I will record any new music in the near future, so the Ringinglow blog will be updated less often from now on. However, I will continue to exercise my brain and be inappropriately opinionated at the address below:

Document and Eyewitness

The Guitar and Other Machines

2010-12-01T19:36:00.008Z

I began playing musical instruments, like many people do, as a child. Music lessons at school didn't do much for me and traditional musical notation lost me entirely. It was golf clubs on a fence as far as I was concerned. Even at an early age, I was also struck by the apparent inability of traditional scores to convey the texture of sound. This may well have been because, after early experiments with playing an acoustic guitar strung with fuse wire (arising from necessity rather than any avant garde sensibilities), I turned to the synthesizer as my musical instrument of choice. I got my first synth, in 1982 or '83, a monophonic Eko P-15, bought for £50 from someone at school. It was great at making sounds, and to a 13-year-old boy, this was infinitely more fun than making music.

In subsequent years, I sold the synth and bought a cheap electric guitar, although I still retained an interest in sonics over musicality. I remember arguing with a schoolfriend, a particularly gifted guitarist (who, incidentally, went to write and perform the "Come Dine With Me" theme music), because he favoured the guitar solos of Mark Knopfler over the feedback and sonic chaos of the Jesus and Mary Chain, something I considered myself an ardent disciple of. I played in various local bands during my teens and early 20s, adding effects pedals as I went along, in an attempt to make the guitar sound as unlike a guitar as I could. Arguably, if I'd stayed playing the synth, I might have ended in similar territory, albeit far quicker.

Fast forward several years, and bored of being in bands, I started recording music on my own, using a 4-track cassette recorder that I'd bought using my student loan. These recordings went on to become the first few records that I released as Portal. By the time of 2003's album "Promise", my arsenal had swollen to include about 12 effects pedals, three rack effects, two samplers, eBow, electric 12-string guitar and two 6-string guitars. All of this gear was pretty much acquired for the same quest, to make my guitar sound unlike a guitar. And judging by the number of reviews that cited my apparent use of synthesizers, I'd succeeded.

By "Waves & Echoes", my last album as Portal, I'd consciously stripped everything back, ditched all but one guitar and most of the effects, in favour of a far more minimal sampler-based sound. By the final Portal release, the "Options" EP, the guitars were even further in the background or absent entirely, and all of the other sounds were synthetically generated, bringing me almost full circle as a musician.

After a break from doing music, I decided to start recording again under the name Ringinglow and return to the guitar as my primary instrument. I also decided that I wanted to use a limited palette and try to stretch myself and the possibilities of using just a few pieces of gear. I often think that the more gear you have, the lazier you become and the less you fully explore. I remember reading an interview with Kevin Shields in which he claimed that on My Bloody Valentine's groundbreaking "Isn't Anything" album, he hadn't used any effects beyond an Alesis Midiverb's "Reverse Reverb" setting - most of the sounds had come from experimenting with his guitar's tone controls and tremolo arm. So, on the Ringinglow recordings, aside from a cheap Peavey bass guitar and my faithful Boss drum machine, I use what you can see in the picture above - a Telecaster guitar, Boss Delay, Chorus and Compressor and an Alesis Midiverb (the other box on the desk is a tuner). I now record on computer, using the "lite" version of Ableton Live 6, which I use as a basic multitrack recorder and arranger, cutting and pasting tracks and adding further delays and reverbs in much the same way as dub producers have done for years. Many of the guitar sounds are achieved by multitracking, recording the same part over and over using different tunings, played one or two octaves apart, or using 'inverted' chords.

Musical gear, to me, is very much a means to an end. I'm not one of these people who fetishizes old analogue musical equipment or who scours eBay and secondhand shops for an original Boss Space Echo or a VCS3 synth. Nor do I think that you need lots of equipment to make music. Less is very often more. What you do need, though, is imagination.

EP (Canadian version) now available

2010-11-09T20:09:00.002Z

Chat Blanc Records of Québec City, Canada have released a 3" CDR version of the Ringinglow EP. Limited to just 111 numbered copies, the EP comes in a purple card sleeve with a photograph stitched to the front. The sleeve is stamped and hand numbered. The disc has an additional photograph printed on it.

The EP will be available in the UK, in very limited numbers, from Norman Records.

EP Now Available

2010-09-20T20:35:00.027+01:00

The debut EP by Ringinglow (Make Mine Music, MMM066) is now available to order. You can read more about the EP below in various posts, and listen to some tracks.

In brief, it's a four track EP on a 5" all-black CDR, housed in a recycled card digipak with a cover-mounted photograph, printed recycled card booklet and two of various recycled paper inserts. The release is limited to just 50 copies, with no repress or digital download version to be made available after it has sold out. In the unlikely event that there is ever a Ringinglow album, it will not feature these tracks.

There will be another version of the EP available in Canada on Chat Blanc Records, a 3" CDR in different artwork (but with the same tracks), limited to 133 copies - more details on this release when I get them.

Listen - "Silver-washed"

2010-08-18T22:05:00.000+01:00

<a href="http://ringinglow.bandcamp.com/track/silver-washed">Silver-washed by Ringinglow</a>

Listen - "Clouded Apollo"

2010-08-18T22:03:00.001+01:00

<a href="http://ringinglow.bandcamp.com/track/clouded-apollo">Clouded Apollo by Ringinglow</a>

Cottage industry

2010-08-15T23:16:00.002+01:00

Everything's Gone Green

2010-08-14T22:00:00.062+01:00

Environmental concerns are paramount. For me, it's as simple as this: without a decent, sustainable environment to live in, there's not much point in anything else. Being aware of environmental concerns is something that I bring to all aspects of my life. I've been vegetarian for 20+ years (for a variety of environmental, ethical and health reasons), I buy secondhand clothes when I can, we grow what we can at home and on our allotment, and we get our milk from a local farm, delivered by a milkman who drives an old style electric milk float. We recycle or compost everything we can, including walking to a recycling point to recycle the tetrapaks that our council's kerbside delivery won't collect. And we don't own a car, preferring to use public transport, walk or cycle. "You'll need a car once once you have a child," I was told on more than one occasion. When our daughter was born, we merely bought a child seat for my bike, so she can ride pillion. Flying is, of course, one of the major polluters of the modern age. I can count on one hand the number of times I've flown. Yes, I would like to see other countries of the world, but I'd rather the indigenous people and their descendants have a country to live in, and one that's not been irretrievably damaged by the lazy and "cheap" travel habits of others.

I mention all of this not to gloat about how wonderful and 'green' I am, but because I want to demonstrate that these are core beliefs that also inform how I release my music. Although I never made a big thing of it at the time, all of the releases I did under the name Portal where I had direct and sole responsibility for paying the manufacturing costs - and therefore was able to call the shots - were done with concerns about environmental impact very much in mind. All parts of the CDs and their packaging, where possible, were manufactured in the UK. The booklets and inlays of the releases were printed in the UK on recycled or FSC regulated paper stocks, mostly using soya or vegetable-based inks. None of my album releases on Make Mine Music were shrinkwrapped, to avoid adding to the mountain of instantly-disposed-of and non-biodegradable plastic film. The "Options" EP was shrinkwrapped due to the design of the packaging (the CD would have fallen out of the card sleeve in transit without it), but this shrinkwrap was biodegradable. The manufacturing and transportation of all of the releases was carbon offset, either by me (as accurately as I could work out) or by the manufacturers.

With my new EP, I again wanted to do as much as I could. After much searching on the net, I managed to purchase recycled card sleeves from a supplier in the UK, rather than buying them from Stumptown Printers in the USA, the usual choice for UK indies. Whilst it's better to use recycled stocks than not, having them flown in from the USA seems rather ironic and self-defeating to me. The inlays and inserts for the EP were printed on recycled stock too, also from UK suppliers. Using photographs and photo-mount corners for the front sleeve image was a trickier issue. I looked into printing the photographs myself at home on recycled card using refilled ink cartridges (which I use as standard, anyway). After much consideration, I decided that getting the photographs printed professionally on photo paper at a local store would probably result in better quality prints and mean that less ink would be used. My partner, a photographer, alerted me to the existence of recycled paper photo-mounts, but these didn't look right aesthetically and I wasn't sure that they would hold the photographs in place sufficiently well to cope with shipping and day-to-day handling of the CD sleeves. So, in the end, I settled for sturdy transparent plastic corners, again bought locally. The discs themselves, although Japanese in origin (chosen specifically for their allegedly high specification and glitch-free audio capabilities), were bought from a UK wholesaler and I burned the music onto them myself, one disc at a time, using a stand-alone CD writer.

The manufacturing of CDs is well known to be environmentally dubious, just as it is for vinyl, but as I don't believe that mp3 is a serious alternative as a music medium, I'll do the best I can with these older formats. Yes, it's a compromise, but hey, at least I'm trying. Of course, I hope that everyone who buys this EP will treasure it for ever and always, but I should add that I fully endorse buying secondhand records and CDs, and donating your unwanted ones to Oxfam.

Useful Links:
Friends of the Earth
Vegetarian Society (UK)
Calculate your carbon footprint
Find out more about carbon offsetting
10:10 Campaign - reduce your carbon footprint by 10% in 2010
HDC's range of 'green' CD packaging (UK)
Breed Media - environmentally responsible CD manufacturers (UK)
Stumptown Printers - environmentally responsible printers and suppliers of recycled sleeves (USA)

You can easily find environmentally responsible printers using Google or Yahoo. There's probably one near where you live.

Let's get physical

2010-07-30T10:10:00.008+01:00

According to a letter published in The Guardian newspaper earlier this year, SoundScan, the organisation responsible for collecting sales information from barcodes on physical music formats, stated that "80% of all music failed to sell even 100 copies in 2009 [and] only 2.1% achieved sales over 5000." Issues of methodology and definitions aside (the sample of stores collecting the data, the geographic spread of the sampling, the inclusion of non-bardcoded products, and so on), this is a startling statistic.

It is perhaps worth putting these figures into a wider context. Just how many CD and vinyl releases are made commercially available each year? We're talking many hundreds of thousands, that's for sure. The number of releases recorded by SoundScan and other intitutions providing sales information (Offical Chart Company, Recording Industry Association of America etc) is surely only the tip of the iceberg. It would be impossible to place a figure on the number of non-barcoded CD, vinyl, CDR and cassette releases sold in shops, on websites, at gigs and via mail order. Then there are digital formats, of course. As has been widely discussed elsewhere, sales of physical formats have seriously waned as more and more people prefer to download music. The amount of music available on the internet is unimaginably vast. Thanks to websites such as MySpace, Facebook, Soundcloud, LastFM and Spotify, retailers like iTunes, Amazon and HMV offering download services, and filesharing sites, blogs and torrents, the internet is awash with music.

The advent of music distribution via the internet has opened the floodgates, for good and ill. Anyone with access to a computer can record and upload their music to the internet, placing it in the public domain. Whilst the levelling of the playing field, and the decreasing reliance of artists on traditional record labels, is largely commendable, it has resulted in every Tom, Dick and Harriet placing their music online. The internet is swamped with music and much of it is bloody awful. Musicians are also very often guilty of deludedly believing that people want to hear everything that they've ever recorded, particularly when they are surrounded by sycophantic friends and family telling them that their latest musical doodle is "amazing." Self-editing and self-criticism are skills that many musicians sadly lack, and the internet has only served to give them an outlet for what would (and should) have remained otherwise unheard. Traditional record companies perhaps did perform a valuable role, after all, as gatekeepers, separating the wheat from the chaff.

Another result of the easy availability of music on the internet is that many consumers have become lazy and complacent about what they listen to and how they listen to it. "There's so much music out there, why should I have to try to find things? I can find what I want, when I want." This surely devalues the music, making it more of a commodity, and more disposable.

Where is all of this heading? Will the amount of music available online keep growing and growing, infinitely? Or will there come a point where it reaches critical mass and it all comes crashing down? Or maybe, just maybe, fans and musicians will begin to tire of the easy access and disposability of popular music, and each start to demand a litte more of the other...

As noted in an earlier post, the musical landscape has changed significantly since I started releasing records and CDs. At the end of last year, I gave away everything I'd ever released under the name Portal in mp3 format, to draw a close to the project. In keeping with my current thoughts on the easy availability of music, and wanting to move on, I have now deleted this archive and started the process of dismantling the web presence of my former musical incarnation. I'm sure my old CDs and vinyl will be floating around in secondhand shops for years to come, and as an avid buyer of secondhand records, I like that thought a lot. My debut EP as Ringinglow, due out next month, will only be available in a physical format, limited in number and in handcrafted packaging. I think it's time to reclaim music from the "easy access" public domain, perhaps make it a little more difficult to find, and reinstill more value in it. I'm under no illusions at all - what I do is incredibly small in scale and insignificant in the grand musical and cultural scheme of things. But I want to do what I can. It really saddens me to see popular music in the state it is currently in. It deserves better. And we all need to try a little bit harder.

Defining moments # 8 - Flying Saucer Attack / Tortoise / A Stable Reference

2010-07-27T20:47:00.004+01:00

This blog post has moved to: http://documentandeyewitness.blogspot.com/2010/12/defining-moments-flying-saucer-attack.html

Defining moments # 7 - Summer's Last Sound

2010-07-21T19:45:00.003+01:00

This blog post has moved to: http://documentandeyewitness.blogspot.com/2010/12/defining-moments-summers-last-sound.html

Defining moments # 6 - Under My Skin I Am Laughing

2010-07-19T18:42:00.022+01:00

This blog post has moved to: http://documentandeyewitness.blogspot.com/2010/12/defining-moments-under-my-skin-i-am.html

Defining moments # 5 - Up Home / Sixty nine

2010-07-14T00:15:00.006+01:00

This blog post has moved to: http://documentandeyewitness.blogspot.com/2010/12/defining-moments-up-homesixty-nine.html

Defining moments # 4 - You Made Me Realise/Gigantic

2010-07-12T21:46:00.004+01:00

This blog post has moved to: http://documentandeyewitness.blogspot.com/2010/12/defining-moments-you-made-me.html?zx=5855da7d73ac9023

Defining moments # 3 - The Spangle Maker

2010-07-10T15:30:00.005+01:00

This blog post has moved to: http://documentandeyewitness.blogspot.com/2010/12/defining-moments-spangle-maker.html

Defining moments # 2 - Dare

2010-07-08T23:55:00.002+01:00

This blog post has moved to: http://documentandeyewitness.blogspot.com/2010/12/defining-moments-dare.html

Defining moments #1 - Vaultage 78

2010-07-08T06:15:00.002+01:00

This blog post has moved to: http://documentandeyewitness.blogspot.com/2010/12/defining-moments-vaultage-78.html

The Death of MySpace (slight return)

2010-06-07T00:41:00.001+01:00

In the months since I wrote my last post (see below), there have been some positive changes to MySpace, although I must confess that I've only just noticed them on account of hardly ever visiting the site these days. I notice that Blogger addresses are no longer blocked, the sound quality seems to be better, upload times have improved, and they've broadened the sharing capabilities of the (new) audio player. All good. As an experiment (a low risk one, largely because I suspect traffic to MySpace is a fraction of what it once was) I've now removed the SoundCloud hosting for my tracks and tried the new music player out.

Let's see how it goes... although the phrase "too little, too late" once again keeps coming to mind.

UPDATE: In the weeks following the writing of this post, MySpace's revamps continued to make the site far more sluggish and annoying to use. Adverts continued to clog up the screen and the new design was just plain ugly. Whilst other artists continue to have a MySpace presence, mainly it appears on the assumption that it's still better to have one than not, I decided that I didn't have the time, enthusiasm or patience for it any more. As such, there are no longer MySpace sites for my musical ventures.

The Death of MySpace

2010-01-03T21:32:00.002Z

I saw this a few weeks ago and it certainly makes interesting reading: Happy Quit MySpace Day

I wholly agree that MySpace's days are seriously numbered unless its owners pull their finger out quickly and do something rather spectacular to help those musicians (most, presumably) who currently use its services. MySpace's apparent desire to exert ever-increasing control over what you can and can't do on the site, and its lack of flexibility, are the main driving forces behind my growing sense of frustration.

I often find that links to external sites are blocked (the one to this blog is, for example), and a message that was sent to me recently by a MySpace 'friend' that contained nothing more than a perfectly innocuous advert for a forthcoming release was blocked because it apparently breached the terms and conditions of use. What was this heinous breach, I wonder? Promoting music via MySpace messages? Surely not.

A huge issue for me and I presume other musicians is that the music player seems to have turned to shit, both in terms of both usability and sound quality. The player, I am aware, can be replaced with one from another site and I will be doing this on the Ringinglow MySpace page very soon.

In the last autumn of Portal's existence, I fell victim to another issue with MySpace when I discovered that after choosing the MySpace email address "scottportal", the domain name for the Portal page had been changed to match this. I had no idea that this had happened until it was too late for me to change it back. The domain name "myspace.com/portalmusic" that had appeared on CD sleeves and websites for the previous five years now belonged to someone else who bagged the name once it had, unbeknowst to me, become free.

The final nail in the MySpace coffin, for me, and I say this as a fan of music and a visitor to the site, was the introduction of ubiquitous banner ads and clunky adverts for Hollywood blockbusters that regularly pan over the screen, obliterating what you're trying to read. It's like listening to the radio and having audio adverts interrupting mid-song. These oversized commercial hinderances have turned what used to be a vaguely pleasurable way of finding new music into far more of a hassle. There are other sites that allow you to find new music in a far more unhindered manner, SoundCloud, LastFM or Spotify, for example.

MySpace's downturn was certainly one of the prime motivators for me to use this blog to promote and host my music, with tracks embedded from SoundCloud. I use MySpace primarily as a filter to this site now. Both Blogger and SoundCloud are straightforward, hugely flexible, customisable and user-friendly. And they don't seem to presume to know what is best for you, unlike MySpace.

MySpace should have focused on what it did best, being possibly the biggest online resource for musicians and music lovers. It has long been overtaken by Facebook as a social networking tool and the powers at MySpace seem to deludedly think that they should now be aping Facebook in order to catch up. But they shouldn't be doing this. MySpace's differences and individualities - and the fact that it is known primarily as a music site - should have been (and perhaps could still be) its source of strength. MySpace needs to give musicians and fans a serious platform, and make the site more flexible and less prescriptive for musicians and more user-friendly for visitors.

I have to wonder whether MySpace bosses truly realised what a great resource they had and the enormous potential the site harboured as a dedicated music site. Surely they didn't, for if they had have done, they would presumably have done more to right the holy mess that they made, a long time ago. It seems to me that MySpace is now a sinking ship. Beck, Sonic Youth and Moby have all recently forsaken MySpace for a combination of SoundCloud and other networking sites like Twitter. Surely these high profile defections would have indicated to MySpace that all was not well, and made them realise that if they didn't shape up fast, they could well become one of the first major web casualties of the new decade. Changes on the MySpace site have been promised for musicians, but I suspect that it will now be too little too late.

The future of (my) music

2009-12-09T20:33:00.002Z

We are living through strange, yet interesting, times for the music industry. For many artists and record labels, the current climate presents myriad challenges, but at the same time, it offers many opportunities for creative thought and action.

Although an artist and someone who founded and co-runs an independent record label, I consider myself, first and foremost, a fan of music. I've been buying records for over thirty years and worked in a high street music store for several of those years. During this time, there have been some seismic shifts. Vinyl, the dominant format for most of my years of buying music, was challenged unsuccessfully by cassette, DAT and minidisc, and rather more successfully by CD, which, in turn, has been somewhat usurped by digital downloads. During the mid to late 80s, when I worked in an Our Price Records store, I witnessed the quality and availability of vinyl be purposefully decreased by (predominantly) the major labels to allow CDs to be touted as a 'superior' format for music. The advent of CDs also allowed labels to mass market back catalogue releases like never before, selling to people what they already owned on vinyl, or that which they had previously been unable to find without scouring the back pages of Record Collector and paying hugely inflated prices. This was very much a double-edged sword, to me. On one hand, as a fan of their music, it resulted in me parting with money for Cocteau Twins and Joy Division albums that I already owned on vinyl, often for extra tracks, but more often than that, merely for the supposedly improved audio quality. On the other hand, due to CD reissues, I finally got to hear bands like Can and Neu!, whose music was nothing short of revelatory to me.

I'm not a vinyl fetishist, I should add. I bought into CDs, pretty much wholesale, largely for reasons of space and convenience, as well as their easy availability, and now own several thousand of them. I will also agree that, with my ageing ears and middle-of-the-range hi-fi equipment, some music does sound better on CD than on its vinyl equivalent. That said, CDs never really had the physical impact or desirability of vinyl. Probably as a result of never having much money for records as a teenager, growing up in a relatively poor single-parent family, those records that I was able to buy from my local indie shop or second hand store were cherished items. That I was particularly into the music released by labels like 4AD and Factory, labels who clearly understood the importance of aesthetics, only served to amplify the cherished status of these records. The Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, New Order and Felt were my esteemed touchstones for the perfect union of music and presentation. When I want to listen to these recordings nowadays, as I often do, it's usually the vinyl versions that I reach for.

To my mind, downloads are the complete antithesis of this. They are 100% convenience and there is no aesthetic appeal whatsoever. There isn't even superior sound quality - next to CDs, they sound tinny and lacklustre. I am not a fan of mp3s at all. This opinion is furthered by the fact that I just can't get used to listening to music on a computer, and the two personal mp3 players that I have owned both died within 13 months of buying them, something that didn't exactly endear iPods and their competitors to me. Finally, I don't like iPod users' tendency to randomise their playlists - when listening to music, I generally want to hear the album or EP in the order that the artist intended and presumably, if they're anything like me, spent many hours agonising over. When I go out walking or take long journeys these days, I am once again accompanied by my faithful old Sony CD Walkman and a wallet full of discs. At the same time, I accept that digital downloads are popular, I recognise that many people do want them, and there are definite ecological positives to them.

Then there's the issue of illegal downloads. I will, on occasion, download things from blogs and other websites to hear what they're like, or friends will email me things of interest. If I like them, I will buy them on vinyl or CD, every time. I believe in paying for the music that I listen to. Moreover, I want to hear a high quality reproduction of what the musicians strived for and see the artwork, as an integral part of the release that I might learn something about the music from, or that I can appreciate as an work of art in its own right. But this isn't the main thrust of this post. I reached the conclusion long ago that there are people in this world who will buy music, and there are those who will always download for free, and never the twain shall meet. Blogs hosting music for people to download for free are a reality, and will probably always exist, so artists and labels are merely wasting time trying to curtail their activities. They might as well just accept the situation and get on with it.

The main point of this post is my wondering about how to get my music as Ringinglow out to those people who want to listen to it. My first few releases as Portal, in the late 1990s, came out on 7" vinyl, a format that I still love dearly to this day. In recent years, the manufacturing costs of vinyl have rocketed, putting it sadly out of the reach of artists like myself who pay for the manufacturing of their releases themselves. I'd love to do another vinyl release, but I'd be unlikely to break even on it, in reality. There is also some uncertainty in my mind about the enviromental impact of vinyl manufacturing and this is something I would definitely have to look into further before proceeding with another vinyl release. Portal's CD releases all sold respectably, shifting between 500 and 1200 copies each. For all of the releases, in whatever format, I tried to release them in packaging that was aesthetically pleasing or interesting, and that was a companion to the music, even when financial constraints severely limited what was available to me.

For my last release, the "Options" CD EP earlier this year, I had 500 copies manufactured by a local company who were able to offer textured card from recycled and sustainable stocks, soya ink printing, and carbon offsetting for the manufacturing and transportation involved in the release. At the time of writing, "Options" has sold well, with next to no promotion, and I have literally only a very small handful of copies left. This would seem to indicate that CDs are still viable for me, although I am acutely aware that "Options" may well have sold as well as it did because of the guest musicians who appeared on the EP.

So, where to now? I'm not a fan of the promotional side of releasing music, and I don't particularly like playing live. I write and record music because I enjoy it. I'm not seeking to make a career of it or even make a living from it. Music has always been a hobby, and I am, and have always been, genuinely touched that people like my music enough to hand over their hard-earned cash in exchange for my CDs and records. Much as I love music, it is also just one aspect of my life. I am, first and foremost, a father and a partner, I have a day job and a 'normal' life outside of music. Additionally, I still voluntarily oversee much of the day-to-day running of the Make Mine Music label. It's a simple fact that I can't put as much time into my music as many artists are able to do. I'm fine with that and I readily accept that this reflects on my ability to sell CDs.

In light of this, I am faced with my current dilemma - in which format do I release my music as Ringinglow? I am considering CDs, short-run CDRs in handcrafted packaging, and downloads (either free and via voluntary donation - I wouldn't want to charge a set amount for them). Wanting to do at least one release where I am 'purely' the artist, my first release as Ringinglow will come out on the Canadian micro-label Chat Blanc Records, run by my friend Pascal and his partner Geneviève. I have long loved their releases, their ethos and the obvious care and attention to detail that they put into each of their short-run 3" CDR releases. They are truly a label of love and I am very happy to have the opportunity to work with them for the first Ringinglow EP. But where to after that? I think I am perhaps erring towards releasing short-run CDRs myself, via mail order, in handcrafted, aesthetically pleasing packaging. However, I am genuinely interested to know what you, the listener, would like from me in the future. Please let me know your thoughts.

Favourite Records of 2009

2009-11-28T16:06:00.002Z

Getting us dancing round our handbags this year at Ringinglow Heights have been:

1. The xx - The xx (Young Turks 2CD)
2. Portico Quartet - Isla (Real World CD)
3. Jon Hassell - Last Night the Moon Came Dropping its Clothes in the Street (ECM CD)
4. Tortoise - Beacons of Ancestorship (Thrill Jockey CD)
5. Kreidler - Mosaik 2014 (Italic CD)
6. Depeche Mode - Wrong/Oh Well (Mute 7")
7. Glen Johnson - Details Not Recorded (Make Mine Music CD)
8. Yo La Tengo - Popular Songs (Matador 2LP)
9. Piano Magic - Ovations (Make Mine Music CD)
10. Epic45 - In All The Empty Houses (Make Mine Music CD)

With honourable mentions for:
Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle (30th Anniversary Edition) (Beggars Banquet 2CD)
Bauhaus - In the Flat Field (Omnibus Edition) (Beggars Banquet 2CD)
Bauhaus - Mask (Omnibus Edition) (Beggars Banquet 3CD)

Easily my favourite track of the year

2009-11-20T19:06:00.001Z