| Issue #006 (December 2003) |
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| Robokoneko |
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Interview by Angela Stengel
Melinda Taylor could often be seen standing at the back of the Hopetoun during Frigid selling CDs imported by Couchblip!. The label was founded by her, Luke Killen (Disjunction Reunion) and Jim Dodd (Bloq) in 2000. Melinda is probably better known for the work she has done as Robokoneko and has recently released the first Robokoneko album, Anembo. All this from a girl who, as a child, spent a lot of time looking up at the stars. “I did a PhD in Astronomy,” says Melinda, as she puts her helmet aside fresh from cycling to Redfern in Sydney. “I got a job there as a research assistant but now I administer the computers which I enjoy more. At high school I decided that I wanted to do astronomy but I don’t really know why. I didn’t have childhood dreams of being an astronaut because I knew I couldn’t as I wasn’t American and I wouldn’t want to land in a Russian space ship.”
“The name Anembo is the street where I grew up. In all the years that I lived there I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t realise that the streets I grew up around were all aboriginal words. I started looking them up and found out that Anembo meant ‘a quiet place’ which I though was very appropriate for my album and the style of music that I do. It was bizarre that these things that I never thought about as a kid can have relevance to what I’m doing now.”
What she is already doing now, after the release of Anembo, is focusing on creating more music. “I’m starting anew since releasing Anembo because this is a couple of years work here. Most of these have already been moved off the hard drive to make room for new stuff. The album was a long time coming as it was meant to be released in November last year, but I have added three songs since then. I think it’s worth waiting to release something you’re happy with even if it takes three years, than to just release it straight away. It’s also a nice way to chronicle your development as an artist.”
Melinda set out to discover how to make electronic music after being introduced to it at raves. “I didn’t actually meet many people who were making music at the raves; it was just from the artists that I heard at the raves which inspired me to find out more about their music and the way it was created. Artists like Aphex Twin, which is a cliché but, he’s one of the people who inspired me to start making electronic music. I began by ordering a Turtle Beach sound card, waited four months for it to come into the store, put it in my computer and started making music . . . It was a long time ago – before good sound cards were the easiest thing to get.”
These days Melinda doesn’t have any problems discovering technology to make music. “I just find that there are so many programmes available. When I want to make music I just want to sit down and make music. I think that while it’d be great to check out that new program and get into it and experiment with it, I never have time. If I did that, I’d never make music I think. If the need arises however, I do – recently I’ve changed from a hardware based sampler to a software based one to make it easier to perform my songs live and so there is not so much gear to transport. There’s always just a slight learning curve to learn how to use the software.”
Although what is sometimes difficult is finding time to write music and co-run a label at the same time as having a day job. “It’s hard to have a real job and do all of the musically related things, especially now that I’m doing distribution as well. It’s just a matter of saying ‘I’m not going to get distracted by someone who has sent me an email about distribution. I’m just going to keep my mind on music today and not do anything else.’” says Melinda.
“The record label was an idea between the three of us – Jim, Luke and myself. We just thought that there was nowhere in Sydney really releasing the music we were making or interested in, so we thought it’d be a good project to start. At the time there was Clan Analogue and Elefant Traks. Surgery Records were in Adelaide, but I didn’t know of them at that time. The distribution thing started when someone from overseas asked if I would be interested in setting up a distribution company in Australia. I thought about it for a very long time because of all the extra work. I thought about it for probably three months before I agreed to do it. Now I really enjoy it because I get exposed to so much new music and you meet so many nice people overseas. The only problem is that there is too much email to write. In fact, the hardest task is getting it out there and convincing record stores that even though they haven’t heard of this label their customers are going to love it. There is a core group of stores throughout Australia that are very supportive of the music we are distributing. A lot of the labels we distribute are small labels and some are a bit more well known like Hefty Records in America, but still there’s a very small percentage of people who have heard of it. That is changing though.”
When there seems to be so much good music out that so few people have heard of, how does a distributor go about finding these new and interesting things? “To find out about new music I still read a lot of mailing lists, people send us stuff and I just browse the internet a lot and read reviews to find new music which is interesting. I don’t really listen so much in record stores anymore because I have so much music in my lounge room that I don’t get to listen to enough. We get so many people just wanting distribution in Australia. I think half of them don’t even realise what a small market it is anyway. If it’s a European based label they should be heading to the US and Japan first and leave us until last. As far as we’re concerned as a label, we do the majority of sales in the UK and Japan at the moment. I’m sure it’s the same for most other independent electronic labels.”
Being a label and distributor also means receiving a lot of CDs which Melinda doesn’t get around to listening to for a good reason. “As far as distribution goes, we get anything from rock to pop. People just don’t read your webpage and they’ll send you anything with a stock standard letter that says, ‘As discussed on the phone I am sending you this demo’ and I think, ‘You’ve never contacted us before and if you had we would’ve explained to you that we don’t distribute R&B, that we specialise in electronic music distribution. It's a shame as it really is a waste of money. As a label owner we never send anything unsolicited, postage overseas is prohibitively expensive’. We never throw anything away, there’s a couple of big CD cases in the lounge room that houses all of these things. But we also get quite a lot from labels who are doing their first CD release and that’s hard because we can’t keep taking on new labels with only one release because the work is already hard enough distributing the labels that are already well set up in the music world. At the moment we have reached the stage where we are going to concentrate on the labels we are currently distributing, most have active, high quality release schedules and provide us with more than enough to keep us busy. As a label we get sent a range of music - some from people who have just done their first demo and sent it off, alongside some really well produced stuff. We’ve got some really interesting demos recently from Russia. There’s a Sydney artist who’s been regularly sending us demos and just from those sequential CDs we have heard his music production progress and change, his techniques for producing music are amazing so we think he’s going to bring out something that we’ll want to release soon.”
Playing a major role in a record label and distributor can have some good connections for one’s own music as Melinda has discovered. “I had a little pre-release on a Japanese label called Electric Avenue. The label connection was a guy who used to work for Rough Trade in Japan. He contacted me about getting our label stocked for Rough Trade in Japan and ever since then we’ve had a working relationship. Having the label does help to get contacts for my own music.”
Couchblip! are now being distributed in Japan by Plop. “They do this pre-order system where they send out samples to all the shops to get pre-orders. I just got so many pre-orders for my CD that I can only presume it was because I’ve got a Japanese sounding name. That was quite bizarre.” Robokoneko is Japanese for robotic kitten and Melinda chose the name based on a project of the same name. “I don’t think the original Robokoneko project is really in operation anymore. It was supposed to be like the Sony dog but a lot smarter, it was meant to grow and evolve, its artificial brain was going to have over a billion modules in its neural network. They never built the hardware version but I think it still exists as a virtual 3d model and I've noticed the artificial brain software is still being used by other research groups.”
While making contacts through distributing has been useful; being female has made little difference to Melinda’s musical career. “I don’t think that being a girl in electronic music has even meant I was the token female for a comp or whatever else. I know Surgery records were working on a female only electronic comp but that is still in the works. But obviously I got my track on there because I’m one of the few people in the Sydney electronic scene who are female. Electronic music – especially live electronic music is definitely still dominated by males. Who knows, there may be more female electronic producers working away in their studios. Whenever someone asks me to name some other female electronic producers in Australia I always get a mind blank and can only ever think of B(if)tek and… who else? I know there are more.”
However, a problem Melinda does point out is the lack of venues for new electronic music to be heard in Sydney. “There aren’t really enough places for people to get their music heard in a live setting. You can count them on one finger really. You’ve gotta have your heart in it and be happy to put all the work into it just to make it a good night because most people in Sydney won’t pay more than $5-$10 to go out.
I actually welcome the change in Frigid. Every time they changed venues it seemed to breathe a new life into Frigid. This change in Frigid, I guess I should really be saying the end of Frigid, I think is going to have a similar effect. Hopefully more people will come out to check out the new format nights. They were already kind of doing a similar thing anyway, by doing the regular dub nights which always seemed to get a good crowd in.”
Before releasing Anembo, Melinda thought she needed more precise feedback than a live gig could provide so she instead turned to technology. She laughs “I did an excel spreadsheet on my friend’s opinions of which ones they like the best and they gave each song a mark out of 5 and I did an average to see which tracks appealed to people. The songs I like are not necessarily going to be the songs that other people like, but in fact they were. I had a lot of more uptempo songs which I’d often composed for gigs and although I liked them I wasn’t sure if I wanted them included. They got good scores but ultimately I wanted to stick with my more mellow music and create a certain feel for the release. The other stuff might get resurrected at a gig sometime in the future.”
But the hardest task of all when creating an album appears to be deciding on the artwork and naming the tracks. “I often think all of those beautiful astronomy images would be lovely to use on an album cover, but to me it’s so corny and everyone at work would cringe. Or if you call song names after constellations and stuff they all sound really nice but it would just make me cringe. Choosing track names is actually a hard thing to do. When I need to save that’s when I need to find a name for it. If I call it “temp” I’m never going to remember which is which. Most of the track names from the album are their original titles. I sit there thinking ‘what can it be..... I really need to save just in case the machine crashes’. I like to pick up a book that’s nearby and flick though it, take a couple of words out of context but sometimes it's a little obvious where I got the name from. Satsuma is one I changed for the release. It was originally called a non-word which I made up. It started with the letter ‘S’ so I had to call it something really that started with ‘S’ so I went to my thesaurus and started reading. As you can see I got as far as ‘SA’. Satsuma is just a tangerine but I thought it was a nice name.” A nice name for a nice track on a nice album.
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