Champagne People
Champagne People
表演者: Benny Sings
专辑类型: CD
发行时间: 2005-08-22
出版者: Sonar Kollektiv
条形码: 0821730005222
专辑简介
Thursday comes on strong before phasing into distortion, so drink an espresso machiatto or three to re-adjust the levels. If you're knackered, don't worry, you'll soon get the knack of it! With only nine more days of our Roman Academy to go - we have to rinse it, get as much bottom-end and boom-sha-la-la out of our experience as we can.
Our first guest is - guess who. A young man with a plan, from Amsterdam. He's Benny Sings and he made one of the most slept-on albums of late, Champagne People'. The flavour of Benny's champagne isn't exactly what we scoped in the V.I.P. area last night at Club Goa (infra-red I.D. procedure and contraband bubbles with a cigar smoking mack daddy - and I don't mean Victor). Wonder whether he's referring to the phenomena: 'lemonade payroll, champagne lifestyle'? Anyways, the album kinda gives you the feeling of dancing with Stevie Wonder on a Swiss mountain top, after buying a nice springy pair of sneakers and baking strawberry muffins with your sweetheart. Or something similar. 27 year-old Benny Sings gives it a more simple definition: "my cosy kind of soul music." All about getting that feel-good feeling "without getting fake." Benny says the emotional honesty came more easily after after he hit rock bottom and bounced back creatively. "I truly lost myself, and I somehow found the guitar again, and found myself, and Benny Sings was born. Once you've gone through a period like that you really know what you want." At this point his couch comrade Torsten is getting some snap crackle and pop in the mic, and after making a chest hair check, we have to ask Benny to switch off the airport on his computer...technology meltdown. As Torsten says, it's a mad world with all these airports, bluetooths, gold tooths and what-not...Back to the business of 'gezellig soul', which Benny says he discovered under the bedsheets - oh la la! "I really recommend to everyone, start singing under the covers - go undercover, it's really good advice." Benny's epiphany came from banging on them white keys (guess that was before or after the undercover slumberparty). "This whole simple thing came out and it was really an accident. At first I was only making songs on the white notes. The first trick I'm telling you, is that when you are on the white notes, it's very easy, you can make this three chord, hop along on the white notes. When you've got this riff you can just, with your eyes closed, pick the notes." "Most soul pieces are in minor - I miss the major feel, which is the happy chords." Like Boris, Havoc or Akshun might say, 'You're minor, I'm major.' The perfect way to ensure that, even if you don't get proposed to every day yourself, you're gonna get a lot of invitations to play at people's weddings. The other way to make a tune that will inspire wedding bells, is to write yourself a love letter. "There are two ways of making songs and one is starting with the lyrics, which is by far the easiest, because the sentence already has melody." You can also search out counterpoint melodies by scatting. "You make these mumbling noises, which is very easy if you don't speak English, because you did that all the time trying to sing along to songs that were in English." Then later, glue some words on top, in your favourite universal tongue - English, Mandarin, whatever... Benny plays some music that he used to hear when strapped into his car seat as a baby, and later re-discovered as a grown up - as Torsten comments, pretty interesting to listen to The Carpenters again as a walking talking timebomb of testosterone. Benny emphasises that the key to these sweet Pop Soul numbers, wasn't just the key they were composed in. It was also a certain restraint, a certain simplicity. "I think with Brian Wilson as well, you have to do everything for a real reason, you shouldn't add something because you want the song to sound more rich, you should add it because you want to tell something."
After touching on ways to cut costs (you invite one string player and give them a lot of beer - not productive but cheap!) and songs about hang overs (Benny says he's planning an album called 'No More Drinks For Me'), we touch on natural evolutionary cycles in sound. "The most logical way for musical development is people imitating each other. We have a very biological need to imitate each other. I think music develops more with people imitating each other and failing. People like Stevie Wonder weren't afraid of imitating their heroes." Not sure if we got a Neumann M49 microphone in there, but we'll meet Benny Sings in our studio later, for a songwriting masterclass. A lovely cosy gezellig studio it is, too.
Adjourn to the courtyard for beany bosh-ups, or should that be botch-ups. Lorna of Sydney, Cosmo of San Francisco and Florian of Vienna discuss Benny's lecture. Lorna says "That was a really great lecture for me - as someone who hasn't really produced yet, it was really great to hear him say that he's not one of these people who spits out music history. And to see that you don't have to be Bernard Purdie to make a drum track." From there the discussion moves to finding your electronic instinct, and the appeal of a basic beat. Cosmo says that's one of the appeals of the Detroit Databass type of sound to him - it's instant, visible, and the chops aren't high up in the cerebral stratosphere. Cosmo and Florian give us their demo CD's, and Lorna mentions that she's been using Pro Tools to edit her radio shows. Guess you'll soon be flying ahead with production then, girl. All it takes is some time on the platform...and pretty soon, you're driving the train. Or at least, you got a sleeper carriage.
Our next guest is sitting in the courtyard too, hiding behind a pair of futuristic sunglasses. He's our second visitor from the hey day of the Cosmic sound in Italy (right hand man to last term's guest Daniele Baldelli), more recently known for his jazzy project Jestofunk. That's right - he's Claudio Rispoli. Claudio talks about that legendary club of the late '70s, the Baia Degli Angeli - and the sounds he locked together as the Italian counterpart to some pretty famous second and third generation Italian DJ pioneers in New York City: Francis Grasso, David Mancuso, and Nicky Siano. As Danielle Baldelli described last term, the Baia club was everything you could imagine in your wildest disco fantasy. A glass elevator as a DJ booth, bubbling fountains, five floors and "was very very incredible, with the big mechanic thing with a big big laser" - a laser so strong that they got in trouble with the coast guard, for sending strange signals out to sea. While playing everything from Philadelphia Soul, Motown and Jamaican dubs to Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode (given adrenaline at 45, minus the Jeff Mao chipmunk remix). "Not music that becomes like Donald Duck. It's a very emotional thing. It's not a fashion. We was on the dancefloor. In my mind, the music was something like a snake. It's something that comes out and you don't know it." Besides this snaking, funk magic, Claudio says the club was a family affair, that worked because it was done for fun. "We stay together all day, it wasn't like we had one person on the door, one on the coatcheck, non, we were all friends." Our camera man Chico comments that stickers for the club could be seen all over Italy at the time. Claudio concurs, "In all Italy the people knew the Baia, and that's not normal for the place, for a disco."
"It was for freedom, for something magic. It was a place where you didn't take anything from money. If you do the club just for money, you do something that anybody can do." It helps if you do put a little bit of time and money into your project though - "The boss of this club took a lot of inspiration from New York, but he went to Hong Kong and Japan to get ideas for the technology."
Claudio says he hated to be pigeonholed then, and he hates it now. "One of my favourite groups was the Blackbyrds, The Temptations, Smokey Robinson, I liked one track by Queen - one track was so funky and so lovely, You like, you play. I don't say exactly what music I played because now there's this contamination. If I say Acid Jazz, what is that?" Similarly, Claudio likes to have the freedom to play in a nice club, where the crowd will go with whatever he plays - like in the good old days at Goody Goody, a small haven for music that ran for a year between Rimini and Bologna. "(If you play to crowds of 2000), after a while you have a problem - you have a tension, (a feeling of) 'don't lose the dance floor', this is something that's shit. They pay you, know what I mean, so you have to give them something. But this is something that will kill you year after year."
Claudio doesn't like to be too nostalgic though for the good old days - he believes in looking forward for the next fresh thing, without going in for fashion and accoutrements. "The music is a global thing. You play James Brown and you are afro. So afterwards you have people with the bongos everywhere, that's stupid. Everything is great if you don't need to eat to live with the music. If you need to eat from your work, after some time you put shit on your music. If you're lucky you can get success and do what you want, but otherwise you have to run, you have to fight."
Claudio winds up by saying that without music, as certain German philosopher so rightly put it, life would be a mistake. "It's not just in the club. The music gives me this in the car, at home, I just need a little power. If you stop to hear the music, it makes you in a good way, no trouble, no problem, you can live. Every time, every moment is different; what is important that you don't stop to feel music. If I feel good, everybody feel good." And his parting advice - if the people judge you, "Don't care." Like Popeye said, I yam what I yam.
After this peek into the history of psychedelic Italian disco soul heaven, Benny Sings pops into the studio and starts building a song. He gives golden insights into songwriting technique, a perfect taster for some of the students present, who've not yet had a chance to dabble in production. It is a beautiful yet deceptively simple - Benny builds up around sweet vocal lines, and by adding just the rightingredients, ends with a lush orchestrated sound; songs in the key of Sings.
Then we hit our little stomping ground at Metaverso - Cosmo is turning 27 (a wonderful age to be, as I'm sure Benny Sings would agree), and he's battling it out with a problematic Final Scratch set up - technical hitches are not the best birthday present, but Cosmo glides through his set with finesse, and a touch of Techno. Two of last years participants, Roman native Chiara and Danny Bar from Israel, tick-tock and hop their way through more Techno Funk; Ilya from Russia gets very cosy on the couch (cosy seems to be the theme of the day); and 2002 participant Popnebo gets his bones shaken 20 bpms faster than his natural metronome. And now, speaking of rhythms, lets re-visit our circadian cycle, and make a loop at this late hour. One website suggest good pre-sleep activities as including 'reading, sewing, yoga or light TV'. Maybe a light dancefloor dabble will do the trick tonight. (I just don't want to think about what 'light TV' entails...)
written by emma jean
emmajean(at)redbullmusicacademy.com
http://www.redbullmu
曲目
1: Twist You Around - 04:20
2: Party - 04:23
3: Unconditional Love - 04:33
4: N.U. - 03:56
5: Melissa Davis - 04:34
6: We Ain't Going Nowhere - 03:50
7: Together - 04:21
8: Style Beats Liberationfronts - 03:17
9: Dust - 03:08
10: Champagne People feat. Floor van Berkestijn - 03:59