Dec. 23, 2000, 3 p.m. CST—It’s two days before Christmas in Nashville, and an unusually warm afternoon is about to give way to a bitter cold front. Inside the studios of WRVU-91.1 FM, Vanderbilt University’s student/volunteer-run radio station, the local club deejay known as Mindub has just wrapped up his set and is passing the microphone over to John J. Brassil. For over two years, since August 1998, the gaunt Brassil has been spending his Saturdays preparing for and presenting a two-hour show called “The Mixdown,” a program that redefines and reinforces the meaning of “community radio.”
“As far as I know,” Brassil says shortly before airtime, “I’m the only person doing an FM broadcast of music made with consumer-level software.” Or to put that more starkly, Brassil’s “Mixdown” lets the listeners provide the programming. Those in the know—be they Nashvillians who tune in, or Web-surfers who check out the show on the Internet—can, if they have access to the right software, make their own music and send it into Brassil, who more often than not will find a place for it on “The Mixdown.”
The software of choice is Mixman Studio Pro, a 3-year-old product (now on version 4.0) that provides a selection of prerecorded music loops that the user can assemble in a virtual studio, mixing up to 16 tracks into...well, whatever they can make. Most slap together a simple electronic dance mix, but one could just as easily slow the tempo down, drop out all percussion, and make some trancey New Age music. And the software allows for more accomplished musicians to play their own instruments or sample their own vocal tracks and make something akin to a “real” song. Brassil plays it all. The more imaginative, the better. He has only one loose rule: amateurs only.
Then again, what is an amateur in this day and age? The line between pro and amateur is blurring now that the Internet allows someone to present an artistic vision for minimal expense, and potentially have it received by anyone with a computer and a modem. Brassil’s “Mixdown” idea takes that potential and packages it in a more familiar form, bringing a worldwide online community into the rickety old technology of radio. His listeners/musicians truly are spread across the globe, from the American heartland to the former East Germany to Japan. And working out of their bedrooms, often with just a computer in front of them, some of these so-called amateurs are actually making money and developing devoted followings—thanks to the immediacy of the Internet and the efforts of this Nashville-based radio deejay.
“The Mixdown,” Brassil says, is about “not having to go through a large, content-controlling entity. This is lowering the barriers to entry.”
But Brassil is of two minds when it comes to the concept behind his own show. Part of him wants to keep the program purely a dilettante’s ball. On the other hand, he’s a zealous advocate for the Mixman software itself, and to get more people to become users, he needs to draw attention to what the product can do. Which means he either needs respected musicians to start working with the stuff, or he needs one of the hobbyists whose work he airs to break big.
So today, two days before the citizens of Nashville celebrate Christmas amid sub-freezing temperatures, John J. Brassil has stacked up some of the best mixes of the past year to play on his show, to promote a contest he’s running that will name 2000’s Mixer of the Year. The winner gets cash and prizes. It’s like a virtual talent show.
3:05
Already today, Brassil has bent his rules and started the show with local band Venus Hum’s version of “Let It Snow,” a song recorded by professionals, with pro-quality equipment. So the second track of the afternoon is the first by a “real” mixer, Rezzonance’s “Let It Flow (Let Your Spirit Be Free).”
All of the contributors to “The Mixdown” give themselves catchy deejay names, but not all of them are as free with their “real” names. Some of the performers have their own Web sites, and some have pages on MP3.com where they sell their music, for downloading or for burning onto CD and shipping. Under the section for personal details, most defer talking about themselves and instead nod toward their favorite colleagues, almost all fellow “Mixdown” regulars. There’s a sense of togetherness among these people who have most likely never met face to face, whose only real common experience comes from having bought the same software.
While Rezzonance plays on, Brassil talks about the early days of the show, when the Mixman product was still fairly primitive, and “I used to know all the samples by heart.” Brassil claims that back in 1998, he could listen to anyone’s mix and name every element of it. If he’d had the inclination, he could’ve replicated the mix on his own system.
That’s assuming the mixes came from someone using Mixman. Brassil doesn’t accept only Mixman-produced pieces, and there are other companies that make home-studio software with built-in tracks for end-users to assemble into music. But it’s via Mixman’s own Web site that the “Mixdown” show has reached its international audience. The Mixman site has a section where users post their mixes, and it has a link to the WRVU home page, where “Mixdown” shows are stored for posterity. “The Web feed goes everywhere,” Brassil says. “Plus the show is archived, which is good for listeners in Japan. There’s a kid in Yokohama who sends me stuff.”
Now that there are more contributors, and now that the basic Mixman software has been updated to include hundreds of new loops (not to mention that booster discs are available with still more samples), Brassil hears something fresh and surprising almost every week. But he still chuckles when he hears a mix by a rookie, making all the same rookie mistakes—like letting a track run for six minutes or more. “You have to really be trying to do something to make it interesting for more than three or four minutes,” Brassil says. “Most people, the first time they use the software, they throw everything they can think of into one song, which isn’t too pleasing.”
Rezzonance’s cut, conversely, is stripped-down—just a simple beat, some scratch effects, and an electronically distorted vocal over some one- or two-note synth signatures. It would be hard to dance to, but Brassil is right—it’s listenable for the few minutes that it plays. Almost hypnotic.
3:10
PC Big Daddy G’s “Electrocool” spins. G’s real name is George Coulter. He lives in Sheboygan Falls, Wisc., and his self-released CDs are available through a handful of Web sources, including MP3.com, garageband.com, Music Evolution, ReelScreen, and CDBaby. Coulter has his name out on a slew of “unsigned band” resource sites and has made connections far beyond “The Mixdown.” In fact, he’s pushing the boundaries of the show’s amateur requirements. Nevertheless, Brassil boasts that PC Big Daddy G’s music is going to be used over the credits of a feature film (which, until the deal is finalized, can’t be named).
On the Music Evolution site, Coulter acknowledges his past as a rock drummer and lighting technician, and he writes, “I still can’t believe it!! Hell, 5 years ago this CD would have cost thousands to produce, now you can bump ’em out of your computer.... I never thought I would be doing techno/house but it’s a lot of fun.”
“Electrocool” starts with a rhythmic clank and echoing keyboards, evoking the kind of futuristic robot factory one might see between the pages of Heavy Metal magazine. Then a guitar and a sax (or some semblance thereof) give the tune texture, opening it up. The song is clearly the work of a man who’s listened to as much Pink Floyd as he has Kraftwerk—a futurist with a weakness for classic FM radio.
3:14
The mixer known as B.U.P. (short for Beats Unlimited Productions, though he goes by the alternate name of Caliente for this particular project) joins the fray, as Brassil cues up “Moonlight by the Sea (Love and Rain Remix).” B.U.P. operates out of Inglewood, Calif., and has racked up a total of $5,000 in sales on MP3.com since he began recording in February ’99. Today’s contribution is heavy on timbales, sinewy guitar, and synth horns, like the score for some straight-to-video romance flick. It’s nice for what it is. But is it art?
Brassil doesn’t much care. He believes in quality, but he thinks that the judgment of quality is too subjective to be a guideline for who makes it in the music business and who doesn’t—it’s too mercurial a concept to leave up to businessmen. “If you put the time and energy into creating something, I think it shows,” he says. “There’s more creativity in the world than there is talent.”
Brassil’s been volunteering at the station almost from the moment he and his family (one wife, two daughters) moved to Nashville in the summer of ’95, when he applied his master’s degree in computer science to a position as a network engineer at Vanderbilt. One summer, he killed an hour of airtime every weekday by reading novels on the air during his lunch. Anything to help out, anything to be on the air.
3:18
Blue Highway’s “Falling” is playing. Blue Highway consists of two 15-year-old kids from Minnesota (“with a computer, and a lot of time on our hands,” according to their Web page bio), and is not to be confused with the bluegrass band of the same name. “Falling” is a succession of rapid, buzzsaw synth riffs over a high-energy dance track, topped by a sample of a female voice singing, “Hold me when I’m falling down.” More rigid minimalism.
Brassil insists that the pool of available samples on Mixman does not limit the appeal of what fledgling artists do with it. He says the samples themselves can be stars. “You recognize the sounds,” he says. “It’s the same sort of continuity as listening to a favorite artist. With pop, you can recognize a certain artist by the flow of the music.”
Nevertheless, he adds, “A lot of people are creating custom stuff.” And advanced users can rip riffs and choruses from other sources and work them into their mix, though they shouldn’t expect the resultant track to be recognized by the software company. “Mixman is very strict on copyrights and security,” Brassil says. The company works hard to keep its software from being pirated, and it feels it owes the same courtesy to the intellectual property of musicians.
3:25
After the break, it’s another Venus Hum carol, “Silent Night.” Brassil plays Venus Hum because he’s a fan of theirs, because it’s Christmas, and because he’s trying to hook up the band with some comp software, to get them to whip something up for “The Mixdown.”
Meanwhile, he picks back up on the question of intellectual property rights, whether music should be freely available for whomever wants to hear it, copy it, or integrate it into their own new song. After a long, thoughtful pause, Brassil says, deliberately, “Artists ought to be compensated fairly for their work.” Then he smiles, and adds, “The key word there is fairly.”
So he’s flexible.
3:30
As he starts up LoopSonic’s quasi-Christmas tune “Brother Love Cares”—more spacy exotica than Yuletide sentiment—Brassil pitches for the Mixer of the Year contest, urging everyone to listen at the top of the hour for “Mixdown News,” where they can “hear about all the booty we’re going to be giving away...because Brother Love is not the only one who cares.”
Brassil has a polished radio voice, deep and modulated, and he takes pleasure in reading public-service announcements and doing station IDs. He’s also assembled a collection of promotional station IDs sent in by professional musicians and by “Mixdown” regulars, and he usually plays them in the middle of songs, right in the mix. “I got that from the hip-hop shows,” he grins. He also got from rap deejays a habit of giving “shout-outs” and “mad props” to people over the air.
Brassil has always had an affinity for funk and soul, and in fact, his first exposure to the pleasures of home mixing was when he read in Wired about Mixman Studio’s Parliament-Funkadelic edition—software that would allow him to remix his idol, George Clinton. Pretty soon, he had quit playing video games and was making music all the time. Prior to that, in college, Brassil had done some deejaying in clubs. “Music is a big hobby,” he says.
3:36
The Atomic Loonybin, who won a copy of Mixman Pro in a previous contest, is filling the room with “Ice in da Glass.” Formed as a group in 1975, The Atomic Loonybin disbanded in 1976, and the name was kept by its founder, UK-based Garry Brogden, when he started making electronic music on his own. On his Web site, Brogden reminisces about his love of early-’70s prog-rock—and his even greater love for the punk and post-punk that destroyed it—in lengthy essays about browsing in record shops in his hometown of Middlesborough.
“I’ve always been interested in making music,” he writes, “always wanted to be a rock star, since I had my four-string Beatles guitar back in the ’60s. I’ve been in a lotta rotten bands, usually playing ham-fisted guitar and a bit of squawky singing.... Me and my mates were always mucking about...looping amplifiers to feed back automatically, looping tapes, some very primitive sampling, messing with the circuitry of home organs, that sort of thing. When synths & drum machines came in, I was in heaven. I’ve still got my little Electro Harmonix mini-synthesiser.... One of the first things I did when I bought my home PC then was to get a decent music-making package.”
“Ice in da Glass” is kind of a trippy lounge funk, fast-paced and dreamy. “I tend to like the funky stuff,” Brassil reiterates. But beyond personal taste, how does he—how does anyone—make a value judgment about music that was almost wholly created using pieces that were created by somebody else? “It’s the skill of an arranger first,” Brassil says, “then it’s the performance piece.”
Then to whom does the music really belong if it was created by one person and merely rearranged by another? Brassil believes there’s no question. Once you add a personal touch to someone else’s sounds, “It’s definitely yours at that point.” He finds the notion of owning a sound outdated. “I’m not going to go out and build a piano,” he says. “Does that make me less of a musician?”
He continues with another example. “The melody to Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Stardust,’ ” Brassil explains, “it basically just came to him, walking down the street. Musicians get that all the time. It’s like random beauty.”
3:55
ReKwest’s “Nucleus” takes us to the top of the hour. ReKwest won the Mixer of the Year award in 1999, primarily for a very popular track that contained the melody of “Duel of the Fates,” from Star Wars: Episode One—The Phantom Menace. But ReKwest’s biggest influence is hip-hop, from his days busting beatbox battles in Long Island in the ’80s. Both the sci-fi and the electro-funk flavor are in evidence on “Nucleus,” which sounds like the soundtrack to a light-saber battle between ’70s TV cops on a mission in Hong Kong.
This year’s Mixer of the Year will get $900 in cash ($250 from Mixman, $650 from the proceeds of sales of The Best of the Mixdown on MP3.com), plus prizes from MTV and free software—a decent package of gifts for a small radio show on a college station. It just shows how much interest Mixman has in promoting its own wares. If there’s going to be a wave of computer-aided home recording, it wants to be at the crest. Mixman’s drive is impressive enough to have caught the attention of Beatnik Inc.—musician Thomas Dolby’s interactive music company—which made Mixman a subsidiary in December 1999.
4:00
The top of the hour means that it’s time for the “Mixdown News.” Brassil touts a recent New York Times article about music-making software (an article in which he was quoted). Then it’s on to details about the contest for Mixer of the Year (which by this point has already tallied 300 votes since the beginning of December). He runs down the list of prizes, mentioning the Daria watches, clothing signed by Thomas Dolby, subscriptions to Revolution magazine, and of course the software and the money.
While recorded public-service announcements are playing, Brassil talks about the growing popularity of Mixman. “They have incredible packaging deals,” he says. Around the world, Mixman comes bundled with certain hardware and software; the company has gotten CD-ROM demos onto promotional music CDs. Mixman wants everyone to mix.
4:05
Next comes another LoopSonic track, “Sonic Divination (Mysteria),” also a sort-of Christmas song. There are monk chants over an intermittent beat and an electronic hum. It’s undeniably haunting. LoopSonic is the secret identity of Mike Nicholas, from Ohio, who calls what he does “DigitalComposting...an ever-changing process of running sound samples, loops, and mixes through a variety of computer software programs and composing processes.”
What Nicholas describes is not too far removed—philosophically, at least—from recent efforts in pop and rock music to recombine genres. The way gearheads combine tech-based systems of sonic production is the way a Beck, a Badly Drawn Boy, or a Folk Implosion reimagines the traditional folk song. Perhaps home recording, with artificial sounds replacing the acoustic, is the new folk music.
It’s a compelling theory—until Brassil confesses that “my biggest regret is that I never learned how to play a [real] musical instrument.” He’s trying to make sure his own children don’t have the same regret: His eldest daughter plays the viola and the clarinet and has a good singing voice. She recently arranged a Christmas concert for her parents and the parents of other kids in her music classes. She’s a gear off the old machine, organizing musical events at a grass-roots level, just like her pop.
4:27
Now it’s Joe Lambert’s “Butterfly (The B Line Edit).” Lambert is another of the many teens who send material in to Brassil, and another native of the UK (from Hull, in the county of Yorkshire, to be exact). He’s also a “Mixdown screener,” which means he helps Brassil sort through submissions and find new mixers. Lambert’s own work is catchy and warm, thanks to a refreshing variety of rhythmic approaches and a sunny chorus.
Brassil talks a little about the recent article in The New York Times, in which he was quoted as saying, “Some of what I get is junk, but most of it isn’t.” He’s amused that of all the things he said about his show, about his philosophy, and about the future of music production and consumption, the Times chose the one statement in which he acknowledged that not everything he gets is first-rate.
In actuality, Brassil likes that the submissions vary in quality, because he’s been able to watch certain mixers develop their skills. And some, he says, eventually graduate past the Mixman stage. “They find that it isn’t flexible enough,” he admits, although some will continue to use the product as “a scratchpad,” to sketch out ideas that they’ll later try on more complicated equipment.
“I’m hoping one of these days, one of these guys’ll make the big time,” Brassil sighs. His dream is to have one of “his” mixers score a club hit (or a hit hit) and then make an in-studio appearance on the show that started it all. And because anybody who sends something in might be that future deejay stud, Brassil can’t afford to turn people away indiscriminately.
“Get the music to me, and I’ll get it on the radio,” he says. Brassil typically rejects one or two submissions each week because the mixer was “too drunk or too stupid,” but again, he affirms that he’s not big on quality-based refusals.
“What’s good and what’s bad...who am I to say?”
4:31
Brassil plays another track by a “Mixdown” screener—JAG!’s “Len’s Legacy”—as he wrestles with the question of whether the music industry can survive if all the consumers become producers. Actually, he doesn’t wrestle for long; he just pauses, smiles, and says, “Do you know any musicians? Do they have CDs in their house?”
Brassil believes that even as people create their own music, they’ll still want to hear music that isn’t their own. More important, he believes that what non-professionals offer may be more compelling anyway. “There’s a need for people to weave their own stories,” Brassil says. “They might not be as exciting or tightly scripted, but they might be more personal. What do you say about a good movie? ‘It touched me.’ ”
And Brassil thinks that even if the traditional methods of making and selling and buying music all collapse, someone with something to say will always be able to touch plenty of folks. “If you have the talent,” he says, “they’ll find you. If you speak to enough people, they’ll find you.”
Texas-based JAG! has been found by a few. Listen.com describes the mixer’s music as “bouncy dance numbers.... Happy synths surge over beat-ridden atmospheres tied up with pulsating acidlines and thoughtful melodies.” As for “Len’s Legacy,” it’s part of a benefit CD for the family of a deejay who recently died of brain cancer. It’s a passionate track, with deep, surging synths that carry the beat almost by themselves. This is evocative minimalism, tastefully arranged.
4:37
“Mixdown” regular Sir Kobe gets slotted into the mix, with his track “Catnip.” House-y as heck, the song has a head-bobbing beat and that perennial dance floor call, the whistle. Sir Kobe is another Texan, like JAG!, and he’s the house deejay for Sony’s playstationmusic.com.
“This guy stunk for the longest time,” Brassil chuckles. “But I kept playing his stuff.” Now Sir Kobe is one of the stars of the show. “He abuses the vocal sample still, but he’s not too bad.”
4:43
Vonzy’s “It’s Anotha Phonky Track” plays, a cut that Brassil claims has been used in routines by the Illinois and Indiana state cheerleading champs. It’s also the only mix this week that was put together by a woman. “It’s boys and toys, in general,” Brassil admits, a fact that bums him out quite a bit, given the gender balance of his own home. “When you have little girls,” he says, “it makes you more perceptive about what a raw deal ladies get.”
Vonzy comes from Champaign, Ill., and has been featured on several indie hip-hop compilations. She’s also made a couple thousand bucks off MP3.com, which isn’t too raw a deal.
4:47
While he sends out the Canadian sounds of Dubstation Experiment—mellow, insinuating—across the airwaves, Brassil recounts his procedure for putting the show together, which starts with checking his e-mail for the files that have been sent in the past week. After he’s selected about 80 minutes’ worth of music, Brassil typically burns a CD-R with the week’s contributions (unless the mixer has sent in a disc of his own), then does the last half-hour or so freestyle, selecting from cuts that he’s played before. “I spend about six to eight hours a week, steady,” he says. “It pretty much eats up my Saturday.”
Does his wife listen? Brassil smiles and shakes his head. Not her idea of music.
The phone rings. A request. “Play some techno.”
4:57
Last song of “The Mixdown”: Neurotron 606’s “I Cloned Myself for Christmas.” Another multi-thousand-dollar earner on MP3.com, the force behind Neurotron 606—the still code-named Marcel J—operates out of Wilmington, N.C. He doesn’t use Mixman, but “I Cloned Myself for Christmas” is too catchy a number to quibble about its means of production.
One month later
The Mixer of the Year awards have come and gone, and B.U.P. (a.k.a. Caliente, a.k.a. something else in his secret civilian life) has won the top prize, with runner-up status going to two other mixers, Section 68 and DJ Chele. Brassil is still spending six days a week on the Vanderbilt campus, either working or playing, and is still spending time with his wife and daughters (or out at clubs, or playing Frisbee golf, or seeing movies, or restlessly engaging in another of his many interests).
And somewhere in the world, some compulsive Web surfer is accessing “The Mixdown” archives and listening to the show, with its assortment of fairly polished dance tracks and enthusiastic but barely competent noodling. So the surfer drops a hundred bucks (or its foreign equivalent) for the software to make his or her own mixes. DJ Novice submits to “The Mixdown,” starts an e-mail correspondence with some of the other contributors, keeps polishing that sound, posts tracks on MP3.com, and maybe one day becomes what John J. Brassil promises at the start of every show—“The Future of Music.”
Unless that future is already here. But maybe it’s not one person sitting at home assembling a new sound that will captivate the masses and put a stranglehold on the pop charts. Perhaps the future of music is one person making music for a small group of friends who make music themselves, all sharing the joy of creation and expression, and money-making be damned.
That might be an unimaginable new model for entertainment: Everybody saying something, and everybody listening
