Arvid's blog about music, rhetorics, programming and everything

It´s true - Blogs are no more!

2009-02-28 10:09:00

My first idea was to use Type O Negative´s title "Everything Dies" as header, but that just seemed TOO depressing. So now I reuse the title of my last post concerning Lack. The gist is that we are removing the blogs. In fact we are removing the entire front page. Why? Play/Rec is slumbering. Last year we released Lack and Barra Head and that took energy, time and money. Now it´s time to do the things that we postponed while doing the records: Family, work, studies and so on. And that does not leave a lot of time for Play/Rec and writing blogs and news for the front page. I am sure you have noticed :-) Therefore we have decided to remove them until we are releasing records again. The shop is still active, so feel free to order :-)

As for me I´m spending a lot of time studying and working on my firm Ars and Usus which is my take on a company that does webcommunication. I want to use my rhetorical angle to do websites that communcates clearly, and I´m spending a lot of ressources thinking of how to sell that notion. But i´m babbling - visit the site if you like. I will remove the blogs and old news on the front page during the week I think.

It´s true! Lack is no more.

2008-08-29 02:14:00

What a sad thought. In Barra Head we have for a long long time had a close to the band. Therefore it doesn´t really come as a big surprise for me that they have broken up, because I know what challenges they have been fighting. They are not at all intirely unlike the ones Barra Head are facing. One thing is that there has to be creativity, motivation and passion which is important, but another thing is that life has a lot of other things to offer besides going on the road playing shows. I am of course talking about stuff like jobs, education, family and all that stuff :-) And there has to be a balance. This balance is extremely hard to master which can make it quite difficult to have a touring band. For Lack the balance could no longer be upheld it seems. I´m just so very glad that I got to tour with Lack and release their records while it lasted. Be sure to come to Stengade 30 on the 27th of September for their last gig in Denmark.

In Barra Head we have no plans of disbanding, but sure - there are some aspects of our lives that require attention now which cannot be ignored, which is why Barra Head will be taking it slow and only play a few gigs before spring next year. So if you are in dire need of a Barra Head fix now is the time to act and show up on Stengade in September.

Back in black

2008-08-15 12:35:29

First of all I am not going to make excuses for the vast amount of time this blog has had no new entries. Sometimes there is something to tell, sometimes there is not and sometimes there is neither time nor energy to write. But I´m back!

So what happened during the last couple of months? Taking it backwards there is some vacation. And then there were Roskilde which was great this year. Great weather good concerts. Especially Battles blew me away totally. The drummer of that band (old drummer of Helmet) is maybe the tightest drummer I have ever seen. He was nothing short of unreasonably tight. Wow! If you have the chance check it out live. Really! Other great moments were Neil Young, Band Of Horses, Radiohead and Slayer. Only disappointments were Bonnie Prince Billy and Cat Power. Cat Power is still a little too weird on stage for my taste. Good music (and fantastic backing band) but she needs to relax. Yes you are on stage. Yes everybody loves you. Deal with it. I’m not sure what happened with Will Oldham, but this was by far his worst performance on Danish soil. I know that the concert at Vega may have given unreasonably high expectations, but being grumpy on stage really doesn’t do a lot of good for the audience. Many have complained about the rockish version of BPB on Roskilde last time (which I actually enjoyed a lot), but this was really not working. Good thing Will felt like letting us know that he will never ever come back to the festival, because if that is the effort he puts into it, then I’d rather go without.

And then there were the tours with Barra Head. It had it’s moment. Especially Fusion, Berlin and Potsdam :-)

Back from tour.

2008-04-04 03:17:00

Yeah – I’m back. I’m sorry that I haven’t written anything on the blog while touring, but I had promised my services out Gaffa, where I wrote a tour diary. In between that and playing music there just wasn’t time for writing. The tour was great! I had some instrument problems, but all in all it was nice to play live again. I even managed to get through the tour without back pains. Yay!

Here back at the Play/Rec camp, we’re busy with our 3 new releases: Barra Head, Lack and Little Jimmy Reeves. My god – next time I plan 3 releases with only one month between them AND going on tour at the same time will you punch me, please? If you just want to kill me – let me just go ahead with the plan and let the stress do it’s thing like now ;-)

No but seriously – it’s good to be back! The sun is shining and I’m trying to take it easy and relax. Yesterday I went to see our friends in Delbo from Berlin who played in Vanløse Kulturhus (!?) – that was great fun. Not only because I have never heard of the place or of anyone playing concerts there but because the whole idea of making a “ Berlin festival” in that part of town is somewhat weird. I have never heard of concerts with foreign bands in Vanløse (nor domestic for that matter) and all the people I know who moved there were small families that wanted a more peaceful neighbourhood. Once you went inside they had put up chairs and tables under a big parasol and with the coloured halogene lights and fake grass it resembled something like a freaky indoor german biergarten(!!?). I tried to explain that this was something I had never seen before and we have regular venues in Copenhagen also, but I don’t know if they believed me ;-) Anywho: The audience liked the music and didn’t seem to mind the surroundings so all was well. Daniel had even practiced some Danish sentences which were received with great applause so all in all I think people got what they came for and a little more! Good times :-D

Tonight I´m going to see Portishead and I´m really excited to see how it´ll be after so many years. I´ll get back to you on that. Not more to say right now – guess I’ll write again in a couple of days. Until then…

Barra Head touring Germany...

2008-02-29 07:28:00

So! We are heading off for the tour and I am really excited. The record has received good reviews in germany, but will people show up? Will they like the new songs? Lots of questions and the answer is only one day away because tomorrow we head out on the first tour with Go Get Beat Up. I am actually going to report from the tour for Gaffa, so if you understand Danish (of course you do – I know that no one reads this blog but you, mom ;-)). No but seriously - you can swing by Gaffa and have a look on what’s going on. I might also do a couple of posts on this blog if I have enough time with Internet, but knowing how tours are this will not be the case. We’ll see. Other than that take care until we meet again - on the road or the blog.

By the way - the Lack release party yesterday was awesome. Thanks to everyone who showed up!

About selling records

2008-02-21 14:17:03

So what’s happening?

Soon Barra Head goes on tour which is very cool and something we all look forward to. Before that we have some business aspects of the Barra Head record to take care of. The record is out and has received pretty good press (especially in DK). It is unknown what kind of sales we are talking about as of yet, but hopefully it’s ok. Let’s not kid ourselves: Selling records is not easy. I’m not whining or anything – but we do have a lot of money riding on this record, so it’s only natural to be a little concerned and we want as many who want the record to have as long as we can pay the bills. This is harder than one would suspect. There are a lot of considerations around selling records that need to be discussed. In Barra Heads case we have many different people working on this project which means that the budget is rather large (inevitable if you want to record in a studio with a producer) – money that needs to go back in to the Play/Rec if we want to release new records. But how?

Do we use the good old formula with selling CD/LP/MP3
Should we go for a low album price and hope that more people buy the record?
Or do like Radiohead and let people decide what to pay for themselves?

For this record Play/Rec has decided to go with the traditional model with mediumpriced albums on CD/LP/MP3. We still feel that this is best way to make sure that Play/Rec can continue to release records. We used to go with lower prices with the older releases (which was possible because the budgets were smaller back then), but that didn’t really increase sales. And since we have to have at least the money in we gave out – we can’t afford to sell it too cheap. (It’s still cheaper than your average record from a major label of course). The Radiohead gimmick is very interesting and reported to be a huge success. It was also done by Saul Williams when he released the record produced by Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails. But let’s face it – Radiohead and Trent Reznor are BIG names. Would that work for a small time band / label also? For my part I downloaded (and paid) for both albums, but I’m unsure if this method would work for Barra Head and Play/Rec. If it was up to me we would gladly give it away like that, but since we need a fixed amount of money to pay the bills for studio, producer, mixing, mastering and all that stuff we need to choose a method that generates enough money to at least pay the bills. Would you pay for a record from a band you didn’t know very well? It´s already possible to buy MP3s alone but very few use this option. The people buying Barra Head tends to buy the physical product. I´d do the same myself. I buy a lot of records but I haven’t ever bought mp3s besides these two aforementioned bands so it’s hard to figure out if it worked for Radiohead because THEY are awesome and huge or because the IDEA is awesome. Questions Questions Questions :-)

Which method would you use?

Guitar Hero party!

2008-02-11 04:35:00

I had to.

Invite people over for a Guitar Hero party, I mean.

And saturday was the day. After the interview with me and Jakob was published on Det Elektriske Barometer (which we are still on, btw!) I felt it was only fair that I got to do something I actually know how to do ;-). Hmmm ok – the interview went pretty well (good, but by no means great), but let’s just pretend that I earned my GH party ;-) And let me just say that it was by no means the last time I’ll be doing that. We had a lot of cancellations in the last minute, but we were a large handful of very eager players, so it was a nice start of what I hope will be series of Guitar Hero / Jam sessions in my flat! Here is a picture taken with my mobile phone.

We quickly ganged up in pairs and battled each other. Petten from Menfolk and Jesper from Janosch were by far the best team of the night. Jakob from Barra Head and Per from Menfolk were the most entertaining with stage antics such as synchronized jumps, “shoot with the guitar” and “foot on the monitor”. Me and Anders were just trying to get by ;-)

Play/Rec wise we are in full swing with promoting the Barra Head release and preparing the Lack release. We are beginning to get reviews from so that’s cool. Our German intern Silke translated a few and it’s seems that the record is also appreciated south of the border. Cool! And speaking of appreciation south of the border: Thanks to all of you who sent “get well” comments to us after the Hamburg show where Jakob got sick. Thanks!

All for now.

Release photos

2008-02-06 02:32:00

Jakob made a fancy slideshow from the pictures from Loppen. Take a look here:

That´s all for today from me.

Release shows

2008-02-03 05:55:00

Yeah yeah - I know! Blog posts are supposed to be short, but what can you do when you have a lot to tell and it´s all about the same thing? SO! It´s going to be one of the longer posts - bear with me, it has been a dramatic couple of days. Wednesday was release on Loppen. A lot of people showed up (250?), so the scene was set for a good evening. We had invited a lot of bands to play a couple of tunes and the fear I got during the day, that the focus of the evening would be shifted too much from the release because of all of the guest was vanquished during the evening. We started with the 3 of us in Barra Head giving an introduction to the evenings program, which generally translates to me stammering through an unprepared and not exactly glib welcome to the audience. (Sometimes I wish I was better at improvising). Around 23.30 we went on and played a small set. The sound was really good: Compact and intense! This is a photo our friend Thomas Kaare Smith took. I secretly wonder if this isn´t a personal record for me - the distance between my feet in the photo I mean. :-)

After the show we really wanted to go partying but since we knew it would be a long drive to Berlin, we just went home. Next day we had the release show in Berlin. It was planned as a double concert with our friends from Delbo. We had emailed about playing some songs together (both bands on stage), so we were really excited. Again a lot of people showed up (250?) so again we had a wonderful time. It was very fun playing with Delbo again. We are an odd pair, I must admit - the music they do seems somewhat more complex and lyrically driven than ours, but all in all I think the audience enjoyed both shows. The playful vibe about the whole arrangement with 2 bands on stage got me into a good (and silly) mood, and afterwards Maiken and Nagel both swore that my stage presense was beginning to get influenced by Guitar Hero. (me flailing the bass around and all). Thinking back maybe the place in Paranoia Twist where I gave the audience "the horns" could have come from Guitar Hero. Ahem ;-)

Next we had the final show in Hamburg. During the day Jakob got more and more sick and finally we had to face the fact that this was not a mere hangover. This was food poisoning of a sort. He started throwing up and the evenings show was beginning to look somewhat uncertain. Being us we decided to go forth with the concert. About 120 people showed up and we were really happy with it. The show went surprisingly well, but after 4 songs Jakob started to look really bad. In the sixth song I could feel he was at the edge of what he could muster and as soon as the song was over he staggered off the stage to go throw up. We waited for him to see if we could continue, but because he had trouble with his vision and sitting up straight we had to cancel the rest of the concert. People were very understanding (thank you!) - we have to get back to Hamburg soon and make it up to all of you who showed up there! How do we do that? Playing songs until you beg us to stop or what? ;-)

So this is it - the record is out and we start touring for real in less than a month. Wow! If the shows can match the ones we just played I´ll be the happiest thing alive, as they say! (Hopefully we will avoid sickness next time!).

Another exciting monday!

2008-01-28 11:49:00

More review have ticked in, and it seems like the danish reviewers really like the record! Now Soundvenue, Gaffa and Undertoner have all joined the 5/6 frenzy! Seriously! What´s going on? Who bribed all the reviewers? ;-)

We advanced to 4th place on Det Elektriske Barometer!

Carsten Holm from Public Sunday on Danmarks Radio called Undermine from ´Go Get Beat Up´ "one of the best danish songs he had heard in a long time". (!)

Needless to say that I am extremely satisfied with all this. This monday truly competes with last monday (which is no small feat).

But what really tops it off for me is this:

Yesterday I completed "One" in Guitar Hero III on ´hard´. YES!!!

Iron & Wine

2008-01-26 06:25:00

I saw Iron & Wine at Vega yesterday. It was a nice little concert. I kind of got off the wrong foot with it as I played Guitar Hero with Jakob right before, so during the first couple of songs I still had Anthrax "It´s a madhouse damdamdamdamdamdamdam and I´m insaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaane" in the back of my head. A little confusing (and very discomforting now I think of it - not as much as the VERY silly video of it I just found on youtube. Very eighties thrash!). Anywho: After I got into the mood I really enjoyed the concert. Sam Beam really has quite a voice. I was however very surprised that the new stuff was funky!!? I hadn´t heard the new album, so this was quite a shock. The ones I have is quiet lo-fi and here stood a band eight man high!? At times I actually missed the minimalistic approach a little. The many instruments made the music a little too nice at times. It could have used a little Will Oldham´ish fragility or something, I think. But generally it was nice. Peak of the concert was when a fan in front started shouting requests and the following exchange took place:

Sam Beam (apologetic): I can´t remember how to play that song
Fan (enthusiastic, pleading): Arhh come on!
Sam Beam (musing, ironic): Ok - you come up here and play it then
Fan (pleading): I´ll give you cigarettes!
(Sam Beam stops dead in his tracks, considering)
Sam Beam (slowly, still considering): Hmmmm... what kind?
Fan (hopeful): Marlboro Lights?
Sam Beam (face distorted): eeeew no thanks!

Me (and most of the crowd) roared with laughter. I love it when the band can handle hecklers like that. Makes the whole thing much more fun. All in all a nice evening.

Shopping and blogging...

2008-01-23 01:56:00

Had some time to work on playrec.dk yesterday!

I managed to put in an email notification when people enter comments on the blog - that way I won´t have to use time to check for comments myself (which was beginning to eat away my time for important endeavours like Facebook and Guitar Hero).

Besides that I tried to fix some shop issues. The most important thing is the "pickup" feature where you can pick up the records at our office on Nørrebro. Post Danmark keeps cranking up the prices and it feels idiotic to SEND a record from Copenhagen to Copenhagen right? Records are expensive enough as it is! So now you can select "pickup" when selecting the region to ship, and pickup is of course FREE. Only catch is that we have to coordinate each pickup by mail, as we don´t have people at the office 24/7. If you order and anything (anything!) goes wrong let me know. I mean - who knows how the system acts when you try to order a record while watching stuff on youtube, listening to music on myspace and playing Company Of Heroes at the same time like you crazy kids do (why else would my system fail? ;-) )

What a start!

2008-01-21 11:13:00

Wow - this week really has potential! One always has a hunch of how the week is going to turn out after a couple of hours monday morning. Is it going to be drowsy or energetic? If this week keeps up the good news I actually think it will be the latter! (Yes there IS a hint of surprice in my voice).

First: Barra Head is featured on Myspace as "band of the week" which basically means that for one week you can stream the whole album! I am totally unsure of what effect this has, but I ~~hope~~ am convinced that it´ll mean that ~~a lot~~ millions of people will drop by this blog and post ~~nice~~ ridiculously enthusiastic comments about the ~~music~~ musical genious that is I. No but seriously. I hope a lot of people is going to hear the music and, preferably, that some will also like it :-)

Second: We actually got on the Barometer list as number 5! It is unknown how many years the average age of the DR online community SKUM was raised to accomplish this. My guess is quite a few ;-) Thanks to everyone who voted - feel free to do it again if you can find the time. Given time we may actually get listeners younger than 30!

Third: I just saw a review in "24timer" (page 16) which gives "Go Get Beat Up" 5/6 stars. That´s great. I always aim for not being singled out as the worst bass player in the history of music. Everything after that is really just perks ;-)

It will be interesting to see what the other papers say. Meanwhile go listen to the record on myspace.

Wow - what a start! Have you ever had a week start out that great?

Now WE are the grown-ups!

2008-01-18 02:24:00

I keep thinking of THIS cartoon each time people go ballistic when I tell them that I have an electronic drumkit in my 1 room apartment. I love the line "We´re grown-ups now, and it´s our turn to decide what that means". For me it means spending money on toys without feeling the least guilty! Or wait - is that what being single means? ;-)

I can by the way really recommend that webcomic (xkcd) - I guess you need an inner nerd to fully appreciate it, but to me this one explains all of my encounters with the term "love" in one simple picture! ;-)

Barra Head is being tested on "Det Elektriske Barometer"

2008-01-14 12:37:00

I just heard that Common Ground by Barra Head is being tested on "Det Elektriske Barometer" on P3 - that´s totally cool. I actually wanted to tell all my friends to go vote for it, but now I´m not so certain. One thing is that it is kind of a nuisance to have musicians telling you to vote for them, but to top it all off, you have to register with "SKUM". And what is that? DR´s online community for people between 12 and 20 of age! And how many friends do I have under 20? ZERO! I wonder if you can get on Det Elektriske Barometer without spamming your friends? If the amount of times I have been urged to vote counts for anything, then the answer is no. It does not bode well for Barra Head :-S. I hope a lot of the listeners votes for us, and the competition doesn´t have too many friends ;-)

On an unrelated note I saw a video of Scott Ian screw up one of his one his own songs on Guitar Hero. There is also one of Dave Mustaine. Funny!

Recommending stuff for GEAR

2008-01-09 10:55:05

We were contacted by GEAR yesterday. They want Barra Head to write a little about what´s spinning on the mp3 player. I both love and hate that kind of jobs. I love writing and I love recommending music to friends, but I hate picking out 5 songs from the many many songs I listen to each day when I don´t know the audience. You want to push the audience by giving them something they don´t know, but when you don´t know what they know or not, you are kind of in the blind. I am considering picking only from 2007 albums to make a "personal highlights of the year". That way I can also choose songs from different genres and still maintain some sort of consistency. - and now I only need to find 5 favourite albums from 2007 :-)

A new year!

2008-01-02 10:11:00

It´s here - the new year. I celebrated with a couple of friends, and had a great time. I don´t know if it was an omen but I kind of "fell" into the new year. You know the tradition that you "jump" into the new year from at chair on the stroke of 12? It´s not something I usually do, but Peter talked me into it. What happened next was that we were down one chair, so me and Martin got up on the same chair and at the stroke of 12 the (IKEA) chair collapsed under us. Ooops. I hope it was not signifying anything bad :-)

So another year has started. A new year much more interesting Play/Rec wise than the old one. This year we have several realeases on our plate. For starters Barra Head 28/1 (release show 30/1 at Loppen!) and Lack about a month later. Barra Head starts touring in march and then Lack some time after that. Interesting times! I can´t wait to get the album out and start touring. It has been too long. I have played so much Guitar Hero, that I have started thinking of coloured dots when I am listening to music. Seriously. It can´t be healthy :-D

Hey baby - say the the three sweet words and I´m yours!

2007-12-29 03:43:00

"Wanna play ´GuitarHero´?".

That´s what I need to hear.

So I need a woman. Or a man. Or really just anybody who can join me in coop mode for my newest toy: A PS2 with 2 plastic guitars ;-)

Yup - that´s right: I have joined the Guitar Hero frenzy. If you don´t know what it is you have spent way too much time on Facebook. If Facebook is not the reason, then you have spent too much time IRL which is even worse! Shame on you. Anywho: My brother introduced me to it some months ago and I was hooked instantly. And guess what he and my family got me for christmas: Guitar Hero! While the rest of the family were still dancing around the tree, I was playing Unsung by Helmet! (Warning: Situations described may be altered to fit comic narrative, so please overlook the anachronistic touch of me playing with a present that was not opened at the time of dancing around the tree, ok? Yes it was a small lie, no I am not changing it. If I had had my way they WOULD be dancing to Unsung ;-)). Were was I? Oh yes. Toys. I´ve been playing for 4 hours now, and this blog post is me taking a break while eating. It´s addictive like #!!$$. Right now I am stuck at the solo part in Cowboys From Hell which is killing me. Really! Love the song, hate my skills on the fret buttons :-)

Oh there´s lots more to tell, now I think of it: I have another toy also! I bought an electronic drum kit just before christmas, so I have spent a lot of time drumming also. I was drummer in a band a long long time ago. It was called "Unreal". We sucked so much :-D Ah those were the days. And I´m reliving it all with my new drumkit. Sweet memories and shitty drumming - just what the doctor ordered after the bachelor. Which is finished and handed in, by the way! Heidi and I are pretty satisfied with it. Time got a little tight in the end because it was so long (and dry as the desert!), so the draft took several hours to read which slowed down the proof reading. But it is done! It ended up being called "Dialogisk erfaringsdeling på Arlas blog ´Omtanker´- Retorisk analyse af dialogens persuasive potentiale på virksomhedsbloggen". Yes it an academic paper, so it has to sound boring ;-) But look at the illustration I got Katrine to make.

Well that´s it. Enough about christmas and pre-christmas activities. A new year is approaching!

A nightmare before a Play/Rec kind of Christmas

2007-12-17 18:38:46

It ended well, but it started with a nightmare, when Littly Jimmy Reeves cancelled in the last minute (critics would argue it was really somewhat past that minute also, but the guitarist got very very sick so there really wasn´t any choice) So we tried to find a replacement, but that´s not entirely easy 5 hours before the concert. So we ended up with only having Lack and Barra Head on. With Lack having said yes to play another concert that night also(!?) we were stuck between a rock and a hard place. They would arrive at midnight and there was only one band to fill the gap until then. Lucky for us the free cookies, glögg, snaps and presents set a mood that could last undtil Barra Head went on at 22.45. The concert was nice. People seemed attentive to that new songs which was cool. I was a little nervous about playing mostly new songs, because I know that everybody secretly just wants you to "play some of the old stuff" (I know I often do when I´m at a concert). I had also a sneaking fear that something could go wrong because we hadn´t practised for 5 months before the 3 short sessions that led up to the concert, but luckily it didn´t. And when Lack showed up and delivered a very convincing performance I was genuinely happy. What a night. Bad start, quiet middle and a great end.

Now we´re streaming. For real!

2007-12-14 10:08:38

The other day I got an email from a person that couldn´t stream music on playrec.dk. We have long been using the m3u format for streaming, but when I found out that all the mac users I know actually couldn´t hear the song because of this I decided it was time to go the Flash way. So now all audio on playrec.dk is being streamed by a Flash player - I have tested it in several browsers and OS´es and it seems to work. The big problem was finding a player that suited our needs. The "wimpy" player is cheap and seemed reliable, so we chose that as our player. It also has different skins, which is nice when you have to adapt it to several different layouts (the individual artist´s pages and the media page). I know that the skin on the artistpage is not the most dazzling design wise, but give me some time, I will try to cook up something better. Sarcastic comments about the design of the player can be posted as comments on this blog :-)

Play/Rec Kind of Christmas

2007-12-09 22:46:16

Another year has passed and it is once again time for the Play/Rec christmas special. This year has been very active behind the scenes for us, with both Lack and Barra Head doing new records. Therefore there won´t be any band battles this year. Instead the evening will be filled with new exiting stuff! Personally I am really looking forward to seing Lack perform some of the new stuff, which I have only heard on their new recordings. Not to mention how much I am looking forward to play the new Barra Head stuff. We have songs we have never done live before. And we haven´t played concerts since around the recording, so the evening will be exiting for us also, I think. I really miss playing music, during all this bachelor stress. We´ll see what happens. It´ll probably end with people who have had a little too much snaps ordering us to play "some of the old stuff" ;-)

A post that for once is not about Facebook!

2007-12-03 11:39:00

It´s true. I have something to tell that is neither FB nor bachelor related. Don´t get worked up now - it´s not THAT exciting! To make a little suspense I shall, however, not tell what it is straight away. Instead I will apply what the greeks called retardation and tell you all sorts of other stuff to kill the suspense. (Hey it worked for Homer in the Iliad, so why shouldn´t I try it also!?).

Anywho: Thursday was kind of magnificent for me. First I got a ticket to a theatre play called "PIS" at Takkelloftet on Operaen. It had been sold out for weeks, but by sheer coincidence I checked it one night and saw that there was one (1!) ticket for sale thursday and the play was taken off saturday, so it was in the nick of time. It was 5 men on a bare stage portraying 5 typical male characters, showing "men" as the silly, sensible, funny, delusional and loveable beings they are. Constantly exploring the fine line between the tragic and humoristic. It was beautiful, touching and very very funny. I left the Operaen with a broad smile on my face and went straight to Loppen to see Okkervil River. You might remember Okkervil River were supposed to play in Club Play/Rec last year but the concert was moved to Vega due to water damage at Huset i Magstræde. The concert was very good and this time I got to buy some of their brilliant records. I never got around to it last time which is a scandal - when you listen to For Real you instantly know why you have to own AT LEAST the record Black Sheep Boy. Not to sound like a music fascist (but sometimes I am, so there ;-) ) but you got to love that song. It got kind of late and as always I knew I would feel the bachelor coming on in the morning, so I had to leave quickly after the show.

And now we arrive at the thing I was hinting in the beginning of the post. Because Søren had texted me about the urgent need to bring back shipment in the shop on playrec.dk, so I had to start programming when I got home. Wonderful. For quite some time we have been losing money on all records sold through playrec.dk due to the steep prices from Post Danmark. With the new Lack / Beta Satan 7" we knew we had to do something. So we brought back shipment on playrec.dk. But the talk about how it drained the Play/Rec economy got us talking about the stupidity of the fact that so much of the price you pay is for shipment. We have talked about making it possible to let people pick up their records at the Play/Rec office on nørrebro. We are not there so often (due to studies and day jobs) so we would have to make individual appointments for pick up but it would save the shipment for those living nearby. Would that be a good idea?

Critical mass on Facebook...

2007-11-25 15:02:09

I have not yet reached critical mass on FB.

This is my conclusion after having spent these last couple of days writing bachelor with Heidi. How do I know this? Easy - every couple of hours Heidi will get the craving to check her FB. I have the same thing with mail, but I am pretty relaxed about FB because there really isn´t a lot going on in there for me (except of course quizzes!). But that is probably because of my modest amount of friends. When you have 200+ friends like Heidi something is ALWAYS going on in there, hence the craving to check it out. Lucky for me, there is long way to the 200, so I am safe for now.

Old friends becomes dotcomrades...

2007-11-21 10:51:00

Yeah - I´m still in Facebook land, and now old friends I haven´t seen in many years are starting to add me, which is kind of nice, since you then get a chance to chat a little. Urban dictionary defines a "dotcomrade" as a friend you have no physical contact with, so I guess it qualifies as the kind of friends you (re)become with people from your past. I haven´t yet added any of my real dotcomrades yet - I guess that if you broaden the perspective on what you call "friends" enough the term can hold anything. So for now I only add people I have or have had IRL contact with. Maybe that is why the kids from my study group have more than 100 more friends than me? Hmmm...

On a more serious note I am in full swing (I love that this expression exists in english too!) writing my bachelor, and it seems like it´s going the right way. I has to, because the administration section of playrec.dk is broken to many of the jobs updating the website has to be done manually. By me :-S I got to have a look at it as soon as the bachelor is done...

I have been Facebook´ed!

2007-11-15 14:27:34

I´m not much into community stuff on the Internet. Or at least: My myspace account haven´t been accessed in ages. It´s just commercials and friend requests from people you don´t know anyway. Don´t get me wrong - I love to talk with people I don´t know, but on Myspace there´s always some sort of agenda, and people don´t really talk. They just plug their own bands. So when Facebook came around I was, shall we say, hesitant about creating a profile. But here the other day I did it anyway. What happened was this: My good friend Peter, who is WAY more "offline" than me told me that he had one. And then like a kid who just found out that he is about to be picked last on the soccer team I hurried in and signed up, to be with the cool kids. And there I am. Taking quizzing, poking friends and all that stuff. It´s strangely addictive in its own mindnumbing way. That is good after the election the other day. Can´t bear to think what will happen the next 4 years. I remember when Bush got elected, I actually said: "It´s bad, but how much damage can he possibly do?". Let´s just say that THAT is something I will never say again. Oh no! I started to think of politics again. Gotta go - I have a Star Wars quiz to finish! ;-)

And THEN depression set in...

2007-11-14 12:00:00

Yes. It certainly bodes well for Denmark, now we get to keep our beloved government. Especially in the cultural area, where the current minister has proclaimed that "Phantom of the opera" is his favourite opera(!). Yup. It really seems that they REALLY know what they are talking about. Where was I? Oh yes. Depression...

I have put up a spamfilter

2007-11-10 19:54:04

I created an intermistic spamfilter to rid us of all the comment spam here on the blog. When you post a comment you will be given at simple question you must answer. I think (hope) it enough to keep the spam away. We´ll see. And yes - this is actually what I do on a saturday night. Sad, sad, sad.

Arvid fighting the evil battle robots

2007-11-09 09:38:36

I have been away from the blog for a while du to me having a lot of other work and the spam problem on the blog. I actually think I have a solution now, but I need to implement it also. I seems like I have to choose between partying tonight and getting it done. Not a nice choice. Well, We´ll see what happens.

Btw: I went to see Arcade Fire wednesday and after their disappointing act on Roskilde I was blown away. Here was a band that actually WANTED to play and were having fun. Strange how that can change everything completely. Only backdraw is that now I am forced to play their records constantly again ;-)

Beta Satan on playrec.dk

2007-10-29 04:44:00

I have created an entry for the newest addition to the Play/Rec family, Beta Satan, to the artist section. There´s not a lot to look at at the moment, but it´ll come as soon as we have stuff to put on. I promise.

Right now I am listening to the mastered version of Barra Head´s new record and I can´t believe it´s finally done. We only need to finish the cover and it´s almost done also. After having worked with the record for so long, it feels strange that it´s soon finished and ready to be put into physical form! It´s funny how it´s impossible to predict which songs you´ll like the most when all is said and done. Some of the songs which I personally would have thought worked better live than on record ended up with more energy than imagined. Other songs which seemed ideal for records now seems better suited for live performance. This will maybe change again over time. I guess that´s why I love music: No absolute answers (except if you´re a crrrrrritic, that is ;-) ).

Whats spinning

2007-10-22 13:30:41

At the moment I spend most of my time on my writing my bachelor assignment about corporate blogging. Being new to blogging myself, there is quite a lot to learn.

One of the things are how to ´get connected´. I would have thought that if I searched for music + recommendations + blog I would get a million posts with people recommending music. I didn´t really find this to be the case. There are plenty of posts alright, but they mostly belong to musicians who recommend themselves. When people do have recommendations they are often handled by last.fm. I am wondering if blogs are not suited for the particular activity? What I am looking for are people writing about music like Jeph at the almost legendary indie web cartoon Questionable Content, who has turned me on to several bands I have grown to love. I wonder where to find more people with that kind of open minded love of music? I really enjoy trying out new stuff, but the random surfing on myspace is a little too time consuming for me, so it´s always nice to have people recommend stuff. For now I´ll have to keep searching it seems.

I can also start recommending stuff myself. Here is one:

Of Montreal: Hissing Fauna are you the destroyer. We had them in Club Play/Rec at some point, and I remember that I made a mental note to myself to remember to check them out more thoroughly which I of course forgot. But now I have refound them when I bought their new album "Hissing Fauna are you the destroyer". It´s indie rock with a synthy danceable twist. I might as well admit that I am really into happy-go-lucky indie rock at the moment, so if you hate this you might as well pass on Of Montreal also. But if you do like stuff like The Shins and Mates of State you should definitely check them out

How NOT to approach a record label...

2007-10-15 21:58:12

We got an email the other day from a(nother) band that wants to get signed. We get a lot of mail like that (especially snail mail with demos) so this is not a unique thing. I don´t often have time to check it out (the other guys in Play/Rec usually does this. But this day I was at work and had some time to check out bands. The first one I got out of the pile had a press release that claimed that they were "Denmark´s best live band". Damit I think. There goes Barra Heads chances at the title ;-) No but seriously - these guys are like in their early twenties and seems to have played no more than 10 live shows. We often get press releases like that and I always wonder what musicians are thinking writing that stuff. Studying rhetorics I find it particularly interesting how bands approach writing press material. Sure you want to sell your band, but it is easily overdone. Because how much is needed to get attention and what is too much? Labels as good as never write back to you, and I guess it´s fair to say that we never mention your press material, but now that we´re blogpowered why not give it a go? If you are up for it let´s have a look at press material and discuss it. I can´t do a "does and don´ts" list as it there isn´t any real rules about it, but if we can get into a dialog maybe along the way we can compile something that resembles guidelines that you can follow if you don´t know how to start :-) I´ll start off with a few pointers...

First off: All the guys in Play/Rec are musicians ourselves, we have all written countless press releases and know it´s difficult, but let me tell you this: In my experience the press release doesn´t really do much good for you, but they can do something bad. To get noticed keep making music and try to get gigs and send us your stuff. Press releases can inform about the band and to a certain point raise interest (if you have pegged out the labels musical profile and your band fits you can show it), but it´s naturally the music that counts. Writing that your band is "the band the whole country has dreamt of" makes it seem like you are not serious and will - for a small label like ours - probably lessen your chances of being heard. If a man approaches you on the street and wants to sell you something and when you ask why you should buy it, he explains that he is the smartest man in the country would you believe him? Would you buy anything from him? I wouldn´t. It´s the same with bands approaching record labels. Be informative. Learn what sort of label you are communicating with (why do you want to be on THIS particular label?). Be honest. That will get you much further!

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2007-10-12 06:05:00

What am I blogging about

2007-10-12 01:53:00

I´m living in the same part of Copenhagen as the other guys in Play/Rec. Being single I am living alone, which is entirely opposite the other guys that all have kids now. Wow. They really do have kids now all of them! What´s up with that?

I am probably the one who does the least "normal" record label work for Play/Rec. This is because I´m quite busy with studying rhetorics at University of Copenhagen, working at an IT-firm and playing in a band also. And since I am the only one who knows anything about computers it gives me some leverage when work is being assigned ;-)

This blog will generally be about what goes on in my life and what happens at the Play/Rec front. Feel free to ask questions if you have any.

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