First up! If you are in Melbourne, there are a couple of events you can come to next week.
Mindy Meng Wang & I are launching our EP next Wednesday night with a listening party:
And Mindy & I will also be performing a short set alongside Spirit Level friends Happy Axe and Braille Face at the Meat Market Courtyard in North Melbourne, next Thursday night. It is in the courtyard, just outside from where our music studio is. Bring your own food/drinks, and warm clothes. Capacity is limited so if you want to make sure you get a ticket, head here.
TIM SHIEL’S DISTRACTION SESSIONS
All through May, I’ve been live-streaming on Twitch twice a week on Wednesday and Friday mornings.
In fact, if you are reading this between 10am and noon AEST on Friday, I am streaming right now - click that and you’ll see me in the Meat Market studio working.
I’m calling this thing Tim Shiel’s Distraction Sessions, and it forms another part of the awkward jigsaw that I am now calling the “Distraction Season” era - a period of time that started in late 2019 and I think will extend for at least another 18 months - in which I am trying to find my feet again as an artist, finish a lot of music I’ve had in the banks for a while, and figure out what the next ten years of “Tim Shiel making music” will look like. yepppp
I flirted a bit with live-streaming last year, like everyone did.
I enjoy it, which makes sense - it is in a lot of ways a very natural extension of the broadcasting I do every day on radio. I feel very comfortable doing it, but it’s also fun to flex slightly different muscles. It feels a bit like a playground, and a bit like a new hobby - it’s fun to learn the ropes, muck around, make mistakes.
I get on Twitch for two hours at a time (sometimes longer) and work on music. Sometimes it is finessing an existing song in the mix or arrangement - the unofficial tagline for this project is “just trying to finish some damn songs” - other sessions have been trying to create new ideas from scratch, which is actually a kind of vulnerable and intimidating thing to share - but feels good!
There is a steady handful of people who drop in each time, including a few regulars, and it’s just the right amount of people that I can actually have some chat and back-and-forth while I work, and get into some meaningful conversations or answer questions when I can. Watching Twitch streams from big acts like Disclosure, I often find myself thinking that though the dopamine rush of a fast-flowing chat room would be fun in a way - tonnes of fans and trolls and others all vying for attention in a steady stream of emojis, in-jokes, dumb questions, smart questions - that all the noise must make it harder to foster genuine connections, and new connections, with people. As I often do at the moment, I find myself coming back to the idea that smaller groups are sweeter spots to work amongst.
Anyway, do come check out the stream if you are curious. You can watch previous streams or just throw me a Follow on the platform, and (maybe) it will notify you when I go live next.
NEVERENDING ALWAYS ONLINE SHIEL-A-THON
I have also hosted a couple of talks for Spirit Level in the past month:
Most artists do not have ‘teams.’ Most artists do not have managers. People who work inside the music industry tend to send such conflicting messaging around the idea of “building a team” as an artist - artists are often told its in their best interests to ‘build a team’ around them but are rarely given any insight on how exactly to do that.
The honest truth, at least from what I have seen, is that a team tends to form itself around an artist based on what that artist is themselves doing - whether it is being drawn to the artist’s creative output, perceiving a groundswell of activity around an artist’s work, or looking at metrics and numbers, I feel like “a team” finds you, not the other way around.
That appears to be the story with Genesis Owusu - aka Canberra-based artist Kofi Owusu-Ansah - so it feels like a good story to tell. Kofi and two members of his team, Andrew Klippel and Maddy Smith, joined me for a two-hour deep dive into how he has gone from being a scrappy DIY artist working with a collective of high school friends, to now having a multinational team in place. We talked about perception vs reality, we talked about money, we talked about creative integrity. Lots of good nuggets there.
Discussion continued in the Spirit Level Discord where a few of the key fam members were quick to point out that a lot of the Genesis Owusu narrative actually appears quite conventional - manager with deep music industry experience and connections discovers a raw creative talent and connects it to both triple j and international markets. It’s not the most accessible or inspiring story perhaps in a world where many of us are looking for alternatives to that narrative.
But I think for me, even though you can frame the story that way, I think you can also frame it as an intensely inspired and hard-working artist - who has not just talent but also a deep and varied love of music - has attracted support around his work by staying true to himself and finding and nurturing his voice. Kofi is actually quite uncompromising in his artistic vision - and, revealingly, he spoke about how he’d be doing it anyway and loving it, even if some of this attention wasn’t bubbling up around him. I do believe him.
I recommend watching the whole thing if you are curious but there were a few key takeaways - and I appreciated the honesty with which the team shared this info.
You can also watch me in conversation with Charles Damga from NFT marketplace Foundation. Yes - NFTs - I went there. I had been avoiding it, but decided it was time to get into the weeds. Charles was very generous with his thoughts and his experience, and he has such an interesting music background - he is based in New York, a former Warp Records A&R, he launched Boiler Room in the US and runs an amazing label called UNO NYC. He has worked in artist management with people like Blood Orange and Solange, and has also worked with artists like Arca & Mykki Blanco.
Very interesting to put all the hype to one side, and talk to someone who has been working on and thinking about the NFT space for many years, and someone who has a vision for its impact that goes way beyond the recent hype.
RADIO CHATS
So many great chats in the past month, too many to highlight, but here are a few.
Sofia Kourtesis “Berlin gave me the liberty to speak my truth” (Double J)
I can now confirm that it is impossible not to adore Sofia Kourtesis. We had the most amazing and warm conversation, about how her activist parents moved her family from Peru to Germany, where she got into music by forming a hip hop group (she was a terrible rapper, apparently) before inevitably settling into electronic music. During COVID-19, she found herself back in Peru when her father got very ill, and the music she has recently released was developed as she was spending time with him in his last days. A beautiful story, and a beautiful human who I’m looking forward to speaking with more over the years.
Kero Kero Bonito talk video games & Civilisation 2 (triple j)
I had a quick catch up with Jamie & Sarah from hyperpop OGs Kero Kero Bonito - we nerded out about a couple of video games, including a shout out to Australian game composer Chris Larkin (!), plus an update on Sarah’s gran in Japan.
Sahara Herald on mental health in the music industry (Double J)
I spoke with legit Australian muysic industry heavyweight Sahara Herald, tour director for Frontier Touring, about an aamzing new video series that Support Act has launched called Tune Ups - where Australian artists and music industry workers share their mental health stories and how they adapted or coped, to get themselves to a better place.
SPIRIT LEVEL
Spirit Level is an artist-run record label that I am proud to be a part of, alongside an ever-shifting collection of close friends and inspired acquaintances.
Two big singles from the past two weeks! Please check them out -
Happy Axe has announced her second album (!) and shared this new single featuring her friend Butternut Sweetheart:
And our Norwegian friends Wauwatosa are officially back too - their first single in a while is gorgeous modern R&B and has been added to rotation on Norway’s NRK P3 (I think is kind of an equivalent to triple j there).
As always, get closer with the Spirit Level community by joining our Discord.
UNTIL NEXT TIME
Gosh this was long. Like: it’s a lot.
I really need to send these more often.
Shoot me a reply or find me in the SL Discord.
Or on Twitch, possibly even right now haha
👋
Tim