Louis Barabbas

Writer · Performer · Label Director

Menu

Menu

Archives for March 2018

All posts from March 2018

post

So What Happens Now?



The quietest room in the world is also the least peaceful. The anechoic chamber in Redmond, Washington has a background noise level of -20.6 decibels; sit inside with the door closed and you can hear your blood circulate and your joints grind. Most people can’t stay in there more than a few minutes, the longest anyone has managed is an hour. Humans simply weren’t made for that degree of stillness.

There wasn’t much of a gap between writing my musical Jocasta and recording the soundtrack album. Indeed, the last song was written in November 2016, the book’s first draft completed in December and studio production began in January. Recording happened in the daytimes throughout February and March and I worked on the second and third drafts of the script in the evenings. Once the album was mixed and mastered we went straight to the live show and record release; when that was done it was time to promote and tour. I like moving about so this kind of schedule suited me pretty well, but I must admit towards the end I was looking forward to some proper peace and quiet. After nearly three solid years spent on this one project, however, the quiet that awaited me was far from peaceful. It was like I had found my own personal anechoic chamber.

The default (but usually unconfessed) feeling among most British people is that they are either a fraud or a failure or a messy mixture of the two. Very few of us feel we have any inherent value and what precious value we hesitantly suspect we might possess tends to fluctuate at the mercy of cultural whims and fashions. Nothing feels very secure so we do our best to insulate ourselves from the uncertainty and angst with all sorts of complicated distractions: earning lots of money, writing ironic love songs, developing an interest in steam engines, substance abuse, voting to leave the EU… the options stretch out into infinity.

But silence is something we are never prepared for. After all the Jocasta fuss was over I have to admit I struggled. I wouldn’t go so far as calling it a breakdown – more of a slow puncture – but whatever happened, I lost my momentum and my imagination and the confidence to reclaim either from whatever had snatched them away. The very city I lived in (Manchester – a place I’d moved to fifteen years earlier specifically because of its inextinguishable creative spirit) was a constant humming reminder of all the ways I was failing to pull myself out of this quicksand.

If you follow me on Instagram you’ll know what happened next. I moved to a hillside on the Isle Of Skye and filled my days with scything bracken, mending fences and feeding birds. Many would suppose such an environment cannot compete with the excitement of Manchester but the other day five lost cows got into the garden and no amount of Hacienda memorabilia can help in a situation like that.

 

Anyway, bovine trespass aside, the fresh air and change of rhythm revived my spirits and I began work on a new musical, this time about Theatre Workshop founder Joan Littlewood. Years ago I had played the MC in a production of Oh What A Lovely War (pictured) and her philosophy on modernising/reshaping theatre, breaking down the stubborn class divisions and generally giving UK drama a kick up the arts resonated with me a great deal. So how about a musical in the style of Theatre Workshop all about her?

So I read a bunch of books, made a lot of notes and put together the beginnings of a treatment; I was starting to get a real sense of the colour of the thing when one day the RSC announced their brand new musical: Miss Littlewood. I grabbed the scythe and trudged up the hill, imagining every bracken stem to be the neck of Miss Littlewood‘s perfectly innocent composer.

My friend Andrew Ab once told me ideas don’t belong to anybody, they just float around and land on people, sometimes a lot of people at once. So one cannot feel too thwarted by these occasional reminders that one isn’t necessarily as fresh and original as one might hope (indeed, the very same week I launched my Jocasta musical Natalie Haynes’ brilliant novel The Children Of Jocasta was published – the particular muse responsible for retelling ancient myths was clearly hedging her bets in that instance).

Still, this blog is not designed to be a “I would have done this but that happened”, rather an explanation of recent quiet after so much buzz in previous years. I am happy to announce I am now working on a new musical, this time about the final years of Antonin Artaud, provisionally titled No More Masterpieces. He is a fascinating individual, simultaneously a crazed monster, terrifying in his passions, yet also a hapless innocent, pitiable victim and relentless self-saboteur. He never achieved any of the things he set out to do but ultimately made a profound impact after his death. Psychologists could no doubt draw conclusions about why I am drawn to this subject – I freely admit this tangle of personal failure and public legacy appeals to the petty ego of my own caged ambitions, ugly stunted creatures that occasionally need feeding. Mostly though I am attracted to the period – that amazing time between the world wars when so many philosophies and artistic movements are breaking through only to be smashed down once again by fascism, creaking empires and the deadly frictions of opposing ideologies.

Not so very different from the times we find ourselves living in right now.
And in such times the one thing we must not do is stop.

 

post

Debt Records: Future Of The Label


Tags: ,

When we started Debt Records we felt that labels were passé. The idea was to adapt to a world in flux and weather the changes creatively. Over the years we got more and more label-shaped in the classic sense but the core belief that such businesses are anachronistic has never gone away. Now with streaming comfortably ensconced as music’s primary delivery mechanism and titles like “jogging playlist”, “upbeat tunes” and “housework compilation” installing themselves as the soundtrack to most people’s activities (rather than traditional artist curated LPs) our way of operating has become as old fashioned as the companies we were railing against in the early days.

The most tempting next step for people like us is to wage war against the wrong kind of progress: double down on physical formats, resurrect defunct distribution systems under the guise of words like artisan or vintage, sell overpriced limited edition presses to a dwindling audience scrabbling for a sniff of authenticity in a rapidly fossilising market, tint the world nostalgic and say screw you to change whilst clinging to a self-awarded relevance that owes more to stubbornness than genuine cultural appetite. But of course there is no wrong kind of progress, only progress. Whether one accepts it or not is up to the individual. When we started out we were that progress, or at least a splinter of a larger movement that prized collaboration, co-operation and creative cross-polination over the traditional scorched earth marketing of yesteryear. We were fresh, energetic, irreverent and made the news more than once. But nothing ages faster than the new. The sense of narrative/context Debt was designed to provide artists with worked for a while but no longer has the impact it used to. We wanted to be part of the music landscape and we got our wish, but not in the way we imagined – not as something that blossoms and bears fruit, but rather as an embedded immovable relic gradually blending into its surroundings. Our inbox used to hum with messages from radio producers and journalists thirsty for more information, now it’s full of bottom-feeding marketing startups extending their poisoned chalices interspersed with “great exposure” offers from shortsighted underfunded showcase events, not to mention the truly depressing slew of internship requests from panicking music management graduates that almost outnumber the swarm of demos from desperate guitar bands who haven’t noticed the world has just plain moved on. The label inbox has become a grim ode to a system that must be broken into rather than broken down. It’s been like this for a while now and it really is time to take stock.

We realise Debt benefited some people more than others and no one as much as they’d hoped, but we are proud of everything we have done or attempted to do; often it has felt like a lot of push resulting in very little motion, but in this so often stagnant industry any motion is worth the effort, however small. Debt directors Biff, Dan and I (and in the early days Chris and Gemma too) have felt immensely privileged to work with all the artists on the roster (past and present) – everyone’s different approaches to creativity have remained a constant inspiration. Being a part of this label has been an ever-renewing and often thrilling learning exercise in an industry that can never make up its mind.

But when those learning curves start to feel more like straight lines it’s time to rethink your trajectory. None of us got into this business to untangle algorithms and second guess the whims of facebook, we got into this business to make music and you don’t need to be a label to do that. So we decided that’s it for being a label. No compilations, reissues, Best Ofs or retrospectives. Done.

Still, we will not be disappearing completely. Our technical division at WR Audio is going stronger than ever and the artists associated with Debt continue smouldering with undiminished genius – long may they carry on doing so. Of all the things we did over the last nine years the Open Recording Sessions persist in sizzling with an unfakeable positivity, so we’ll be keeping them going (check our events page for upcoming sessions). Plus we’ve got plenty of ideas for one-off projects of varying shapes and sizes – live, visual, aural, immersive and interactive. We just won’t be releasing albums/singles etc and dreaming up evermore farfetched excuses to write press releases detailing why so-and-so is the most important thing since such-and-such. Have you seen the world recently? It definitely doesn’t need any more bullshit.

 

This article originally appeared on www.debtrecords.net