Cristian Vogel + Joe Muggs
Joe Muggs has an interview with Cristian Vogel up, and it's really essential reading for anyone interested in the problems that musicians face in the current wintry economic etc. — not just problems of business, or distribution, or aesthetics, but all of them tangled up together. An excerpt:
Cristian Vogel: So where I’m trying to aim for is to have that but with my studio recordings and studio work – because I really value studio creation, I think it’s one of the most important aspects of modern music and I think that this new emphasis on [the idea that] musicians have to make their living through concerts and give their records away for free – this idea where everyone seems ok with that and says “oh yeah that’s the way it’s going to be!”, you can talk to a taxi diver and they’ll tell you this, it’s their theory of how it’s going to be…"
Joe Muggs: People think we’ll have a return to some kind of honest archaic roaming troubadours…?
Cristian Vogel: Yeah, people are really OK with this: “mp3s should be free and musicians get paid doing concerts” – this cuts out the entire art of creation in the studio! Completely and utterly! This whole art which is completely responsible for everything from You Really Got Me through Sergeant Pepper through Lee “Scratch” Perry to any great record you want, especially electronic music which is completely dependent on it because it’s not performance linked necessarily.