Joshua Van Tassel

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I really, really love working on remixes for people, and especially when the songs are as good as the one I’m doing now. It’s for Fredericton’s handsomest band Olympic Symphonium for a tune from their latest record “The City Won’t Have Time To Fight”. Beautiful tunes and amazing melodies throughout the whole thing, highly recommended for fall listening and leaf kicking. Here’s the original, and below that a rough mix of part of what I’m working on.

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(on Facebook? Go to www.joshuavt.com)

photos courtesy of Steve Dagg, more to come!

Playlist –
Elbow – the seldom seen kid
Fleet Foxes – helplessness blues
Traveling wilburies – 1
David Myles – Into the Sun

(on Facebook? Go to www.joshuavt.com for the full post)
I got woken up by a sheep this morning, that was nice. At the start of vacation, had a great drive yesterday except for the fact that I left my only sweater and jacket in Ottawa, and I’m heading to the maritimes for about a week and a half. On the north shore of the St. Lawrence river in Quebec for the day today, and loving the coffee and the view. Driving playlist for yesterday
Taylor Swift – Speak Now
Gillian Welch – Harrow and the Harvest
LCD Soundsystem
Chad Van Gaalen – infiniheart

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Last week when I released my album, there were a number of questions in my mind, some answerable and some a little trickier to pin down. Is this any good? Will people like it? Is there a point to making a physical cd? Do people only buy downloads? Should I have done vinyl? Is the cover too weird? One very large question that I somehow naively overlooked is ” do people buy music at all in any format?” Due to bandcamp’s pretty handy Stats feature I got a pretty interesting answer to that question.

Last Saturday, John Sakamoto and the Toronto Star listed one of the tunes from my album on their weekly Anti Hit list. I’ve always had a lot of respect for the list, so it was a real treat to have the first review of something from the album come in that form. On their website and in print, they list a web address to my bandcamp site where one  can very quickly have a listen to the tunes, and then buy them using a credit card or paypal. Bandcamp keeps pretty comprehensive statistics for you, and the most important ones in this case being

How many people came here to check out your music?

Which songs did they listen to?

and most importantly How much did they listen to?

The busiest traffic day happened for me last Friday; I had sent around an email/facebook/twitter blast, and the Star article came out online. All together, about 300 people came to the bandcamp site that day. Out of those people 139 of them listened to the album in it’s entirety, 105 listened to half of it or more, and 66 skipped through a bunch of the tunes. That’s a fair number of people sitting down and listening to a large part of the album. How did that translate into people purchasing the record? One cd and one download.

Please don’t think the point of this post is to whine and complain and try to shame people into buying my record, it’s not that at all. I’m just presenting you with pretty concrete proof that the way we view music that’s available online is that it’s free. This not a new concept but my first experience with it in a direct way. People spend so much time in front of their computers at work or home with a wifi connection, that there’s no need to purchase something because you can just stream the whole thing at anytime. I’ve actually had emails from people now that took the time to write me to tell me how much they love the album and have listened to it multiple times, and how bandcamp is awesome because it lets you stream music to their iphones.

I had a great chat with a friend about this yesterday who brought up some valid points, like a lot of people will stream it in bandcamp, but maybe buy the record on itunes because they trust the security of it, or they’re waiting to buy the album at a cd release in physical form. If that’s the case that would be lovely, but to be honest I’m not holding out for a big apple pay check 2 months from now. I think there are fewer and fewer music buyers out there in the world, but probably more listeners then ever before. Still working out what that means in terms of good or bad, but let me know what you think, by all means….

One of the best parts of living in my neighbourhood in Toronto is it’s super easy access to Soundscapes, my favorite record store. It’s a rare day that I leave there without buying not only what I went in for but usually one or two other things I’ve never heard of as well.
My latest previously unheard obsession came from a tip from David Myles, who I seem to be telepathically linked to musically. If he says buy it, I do, that day, and generally get my mind blown. It’s a compilation called “Brazil Bossa Beat : The Story of Elenco Records, Brazil“. Just to be clear, this isn’t your played out Girl From Ipanema ( no offence to Stan Getz, his tone is amazing). It’s 23 songs that are super exciting, challenging, and recorded with pretty astounding quality of sound. The cd version comes with a beautiful full color booklet explaining the fascinating history of the label and more about it’s aesthetic and artists, and is actually really inspiring. Anyway, that’s the musical public service announcement for the week. Go buy a record yes?

(on facebook? go to www.joshuavt.com for the full post)

but Bjork is up to something amazing. I think.

björk: road to crystalline from Björk on Vimeo.