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May 8, 2004. 01:00 AM
Sorry, make that `recording club.' Seasoned and budding musicians alike go the handmade route With self-burned CDs and crafty co
Mark Sasso has a general life philosophy that he's only too happy to share.
"In the mainstream, everything is so pristine and polished, it's almost lifeless," says Sasso, a pensive, soft-spoken 30-year-old with chunky black-framed glasses and an ever-present Detroit Tigers ball cap.
"Anything mass-marketed, like furniture or whatever else, it's product. But personally, I prefer a chair that creaks a bit. It had a life before you. You can't just make it up."
For the record, no, Sasso is not recounting a satisfying afternoon of antiquing. Rather, he's describing the improbable existence of the first album released by his band, Elliott Brood.
Without so much as a notion of the inner workings of the vast recording industry machine, Sasso and bandmates Casey Laforet and Stephen Pitkin took it upon themselves to record the album, Tin Type, a spare, low-fi collection of mournful countrified pop, in Sasso's living room, mix and master it on Pitkin's home computer, and churn out 800 copies of the albums' initial release on a home CD burner.
And then there's the CD itself — a lovingly hand-made volume wrapped in a plain brown wrapper, which on opening yields a small black book complete with antique photography befitting the band's down-home sound.
"We really think of it as part of our story — part of the whole," Sasso said. "I remember thinking when we put this out: The music is only one half of it, and this little book is the other."
Elliott Brood is not alone in its attachment to all aspects of its music-production process. Their self-consciously crafty album, which Sasso and Laforet still assemble themselves in Sasso's living room, is part of a grassroots musical movement blossoming the world over.
As technology allows more and more artists to record, mix, master and produce albums from the safety of their living rooms, an entire parallel music industry is blooming outside the confines of the corporate-dominated mainstream.
"Every city has a scene like this. I mean it's everywhere," said Justin Small, guitarist for the Toronto instrumental art band Do Make Say Think. "When I tour Europe, I get some handmade releases that are totally crazy. One French hardcore album had a 40-page photo book that went along with it. It was great."
With his partner Katia Taylor, Small has been hand-making CDs for their side project, the Lullabye Arkestra. Like Elliott Brood, the album is the product of home recording, mixing and burning. Each package, affectionately festooned with crude scrawlings and oblique figures rendered with thick brushstrokes, paint and ink, is unique; no two are alike.
"It's just a matter of caring, and seeing it not just as packaging, but part of the artistic whole," Taylor said.
Small agreed. "Death to the jewel case," he said, grinning broadly. "It's a dead, boring, terrible scene. That's just junk product. This is more like a gift."
The gift may be more than the simple, dotingly assembled CD itself. Such efforts send the message to the greater world that the do-it-yourself music revolution has arrived — much to the major labels' dismay.
"What it means is you don't have to be on a record label to get your stuff out there," Taylor said. "They're starting to realize that artists can be artists without them."
For the recording industry, it's just one more thing to be nervous about. CD sales in Canada dropped to $881 million in 2003 from $1.4 billion in 1999. Finger-pointing at Internet file-sharing and music downloading have sent major labels in the U.S. into paroxysms of litigious terror, threatening to sue every kid who dares fire up Kazaa or Limewire on their bedroom PC.
If desktop production technology can liberate artists from the stranglehold placed on them by a proprietary music industry that controls how many albums they print, how much it costs and, to some extent, what they sound like, then crisis may be looming on two fronts.
Of course, home recording can't equal the multi-layered sophistication of high-priced studios used to produce multi-million sellers — at least, not yet. But for a particular community of musicians producing simple, straightforward music, it's a liberation nonetheless.
Bob Wiseman was the keyboard player for Blue Rodeo until he left in the early 1990s for a solo career. Since then, he's existed happily outside the mainstream, releasing albums on small, independent labels.
Recently, he entered the burgeoning world of do-it-yourself recording, making his first solo album since 1995, It's True, with a Toronto collective called Blocks. The album's official release is later this month.
Run by Steven Kado, formerly of the indie band The Hidden Cameras, Blocks politely eschews the stamp of record label, preferring instead to call itself a "recording club." Other bands in the club, such as Les Mouches, The Phonemes and Barcelona Pavilion, subscribe to the same handmade aesthetic plied by Elliott Brood and Lullabye Arkestra, distinguishing themselves from the homogenous music industry churn.
"Isn't it great?" Wiseman says. "What that says to me is that it's about community, availability, accessibility, camaraderie. It's such a departure from what we're used to seeing as product from the industry."
Wiseman's album wasn't burned on a home computer, but the CD cover, a folding puzzle stamped with his an image of his face, was put together by Wiseman himself — a thousand times.
"Some people are sort of like, `Eww, you had to do all of that yourself?' But I actually really enjoyed it. I mean, I had my hands on every one of those things. They're very personal in that way, like little objects of art, or a present. I just think it's beautiful."
But Wiseman, a veteran of the music industry from within its corporate structures and, happily, without, is careful not to invest too much faith in a liberation movement.
"I think it's exciting, but in my heart of hearts, I don't think it can last. Corporate mentalities always appropriate whatever becomes successful and claim it for their own," he said. "When Blue Rodeo made it big, it was really interesting to see all that stupid s--t up close, but I have to not be on that side of things, if only for my own mental health and spiritual well-being."
On Wiseman's chosen side, success is measured in personal satisfaction and an authentic connection with an audience, not units sold.
"At arm's length, these records may not look like they're being done on a grand scale, but from another point of view, who cares?" he said. "I know so many people who chase dreams of being huge and famous, and it's embarrassing. Ultimately, it's hollow: If you end up that big, you're completely insulated from your audience. That's your prize."
In the groundswell of the do-it-yourself movement, insulation is deliberately stripped away.
Canvassing their home turf in Toronto, Elliott Brood found a handful of independent record stores that were receptive to placing a few copies on their racks. A smattering of success here led to some carefully placed copies nationwide; now, with no allegiance to any major label or distributor, Elliott Brood is in the Top25 on college radio across the country.
With the help of Weewerk, a Toronto creative collective, Elliott Brood will produce 1,000 more copies to send nationwide.
Subject to a pressing run instead of the exhausting home-burning of its predecessor, each copy will nonetheless receive the handmade treatment. For Sasso and Laforet, there is no other way.
"It's kind of crazy, because it's a lot of work, a lot of hours of pain. Casey has personally licked every corner of every photo we've put out there. It's his thing," he said. "But in the end, nobody is telling us what to do. It's the ultimate freedom to create exactly what we want to create."
As for the gap between his home studio and the big-ticket recording battlestar occupied by, say, Nickelback, Small simply preaches patience.
"Wait until all these guys with their home recording studios get really great home mastering programs," he said. "And all of a sudden, these tiny homemade CDs will stand up against anything. They'll sound like they were recorded at a multimillion-dollar studio.
"And then," Small said, beaming, "we'll have won."
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