I couldn’t go without saying a few words of support for Created In Birmingham, who did a brief post a few months ago on Surface Unsigned a while back. CiB did a bit more digging and to keep a long story short, and it seems that in order to progress through the competition you need to sell tickets to at least 25 of your fans (friends) at £6 a pop, and in return you get a few guitar strings and the vague promise of peck on the cheek from the music industry.

To back this up, they put up some of the terms so that people could read about how the competition works - which Surface Unsigned weren’t that happy with, and asked CiB to take down the post with a strongly worded letter threatening legal action.

You can follow all this (and get the story much more better-ly explained) on Pete Ashton’s post about Surface Unsigned. The best thing is the re-write of the Surface Unsigned terms and conditions in Lolspeak.

My big thing is that you don’t need battle of the band events (which frequently descend into how-many-cows-have-you-got-yeah-Ive-got-104-friends wrongness) to enjoy music, or even to “make it” if that’s your aim. If you’re not playing with bands that you like, or releasing records, then the best advice I could give to anyone is to give it a go yourself.

It’s never easy, but it’s you trying to make a difference - and if we all did that then I’m fairly certain that events where 25 of your friends are charged £6 to see you play a 20 minute set wouldn’t exist.

I’ve been looking for support for the Andersens & Starlets gig on 12th July and stumbled across a nice collective of local bands called Adventures In Static Monochrome. It’s kind of like a record label but without the records, in that it’s a statement of intent and beliefs by a collective of bands who like each other, and like any good indie label, liking one band makes you want to check out the rest.

Hopefully good things will happen as part of this - there’s already talk of a compilation CD and it seems that various collaborations take place too.

These are the bands currently in the collective -

Bavarian Country Singers and Comrades
I’ve not seen these play live yet, but hopefully I will soon if they can play the Andersens gig. They’re kind of a folk lo-fi in the same way as Andersens which makes me think it’ll work really well. They use a good mix of instruments to great effect - the banjo works really well on A Stormy Day At Sea and I love the brass instruments which kick in about a minute into Hooks Pt 1.

Dan Hartland
Solo acoustic performer who plays a lot around Birmingham and has a residency at The Queens. He’s joined by a cello player from time to time too by the looks of things, and there’s some songs with more arrangement on his myspace too if you want to have a look round.

The Sleuths
Former Autumn Storeists who played at the Monkey Swallows The Universe gig just under a year ago. They’ve got an absolutely brilliant track called The Other Sleep on the Adventures in Static Monochrome page at the moment. *tries to click on it to download it and keep it forever*. Hopefully it’ll make the CD.

Jay Krause
He’s from Manchester so not as local as the rest of the collective, though you can download his songs from his myspace. It’s reflective solo songwriting, and he does some short film soundtracks too - there’s a Youtube of one on his myspace.

Mellow Peaches
I’d not had chance to listen to these before today but I’d heard good things. They’re quite bluesy with some lo-fi thrown in for good measure. I quite enjoyed the bouncy tune of ‘Fireflies’ which is on their page at the moment, and there’s some nice guitar work going on.

Gurdan Thomas
I accidentally walked in on a Gurdan Thomas gig a while back and stayed for most of the set. He’s got a really inventive use of melody and there’s a great song called I’d Have Her which you can download off his myspace. Ooh, and his myspace has recently filled with loads of local gigs.

Just come across handy guide on the Jonson Family Records website, it’s about how to get your songs released once you’ve got them recorded - with a big bit about putting them out yourself.

Ok, I’ll kick off by telling you a brief history of time as I understand it. If cartoons have taught me anything, it’s that music started in the olden days when cavemen hit the amazingly-in-tune-ribs of dinosaur skeletons for the general amusement of their tribes, and to pass the time in between sleeping and eating and inventing fire. Everyone enjoyed a good old wail and music was born.

Later came the days of sophistication, and instruments which didn’t use rib cages were invented along with proper songs that people wanted to hear. The ‘best’ musicians could also get their music heard by more people than their local village, as there was a distribution system – roads! Troubadours would go from town to town singing their songs to whoever would pay them money – as Troubadours have to eat – but you could also make a pretty penny from the landed gentry.

Skip forward loads more and you start to get the first instances of recording music, and playing it back. The technology evolved and music became a lot more accessible, but there were overheads of printing pressing and marketing. I can’t imagine the logistics of being one of the early companies selling 78s as production costs would have been massively high and relatively few people could play it back! Headache.

Skip forward again to the late 70’s and early 80s (I did tell you it would be brief AND I’ve missed the bit that goes on about The Beatles) and technology gets cheaper still. Some vital things happened to music here. Firstly, it becomes cheaper and feasible for anyone to press up a load of vinyl and start a record label – Spiral Scratch is a great example of how the process of starting a record label was massively demystified and secondly, a bigger use of fanzines allowed music fans to talk to each other without having to go through the established media.

Ok, well this deliberately selective history brings us up to now. The starting up cost for a record label is as low as it’s ever been since the invention of CD Burners! More and more I find myself getting EPs from bands on CD-Rs at gigs.

But it goes further than that; we’re starting to see the CD-R label becoming a part of the landscape and I genuinely hope that this is the latest iteration of the burning DIY ethos. Some examples for you –

Cloudberry Records. A wonderful label based in Miami which specialises in jangly indiepop on 3” CD-Rs, the releases are limited to 100 and I daresay they send them to the four corners of the world. Popkids of the World Unite! The ethos is on the front page – Cloudberry believes in; unrequited love, systems of resistance, sense of community, DIY ethics and international socialism. You can get loads of free MP3s from their site too.

Asaurus Records. They say it’s alright to refer to them as the Wal-Mart of CD-R labels, and they have put out a large number of amazing bands. It’s run by musicians for musicians.

WeePOP Records. Back to the world of 3” CD-Rs, these come lovingly hand made and assembled in lovely brown paper bags. Look at their latest news and the pop-up sleeve and tell me that it isn’t something special.

And that’s just it, they’re something special. I’d rather have a CD-R in a lovingly hand made cover (the same care should be taken over the packaging as it is the music, unless you want your CD to look like everyone elses) than another proper CD with a printed top in a jewell case which is at least three times more expensive. I’ve used this blog to rave on to you about the fold-out-pirate-map Jesmond Villas CD-R cover, and the WeePOP-UP CD-R above is a good example too. I also got a lovely Wave Machines CD-R recently where the CD-R fits perfectly flush into a 5” circle cut in some cardboard. There are loads of ways to make your CD-Rs special.

There’s loads more examples well outside of indiepop too. I was browsing through the racks at Mono a few months ago to see that some noise bands in Glasgow such as Kylie Minoise are using CD-Rs too. Even Radiohead are doing it.

So there you go. Music has brought us here, to a place where you can ‘manufacture’ CD-Rs, hand-make-them-lovely, and pop them up on a website where it can be seen by everyone with internet access, and post them off to people round the world. You can build a community by starting a CD-R label of your band, and putting out stuff by bands you like too, who share an ethos or a sound. It’s now easier and cheaper to own a label now than it ever has been before in the history of music. Get one.

Here’s 100 CD-Rs. Now Start a Record Label.