MASTER OF HIS DOMAIN

This is a one man show. It’s not the best in town, but it would leave you utterly in love with a strange, charming London geek. This is James Sargent, a 21-year-old bass player who’s adopted the trendy Mark Zuckerberg speed-talking style while turning old Game Boys into synthesizers to pay for lunch.

To James, music is noise. It’s anything that makes a sound. Until he takes it apart and changes its sound. “Synthesizers are designed to make music, whereas a Game Boy was never made to play all these notes: It was made to play Super Mario. So I’m tricking it into making sound, getting a completely unique sound out of it,” he explains, while examining the potential in my digital recorder.

How does one engage in such an attempt to fiddle with music, I wondered. James was eight when he started taking stuff apart, just for fun. “I remember it clearly,” he said. “I spilled a drink over my sister’s toy, and it started making these crazy noises. I thought, I’ve gotta know how that works.”

And as James quickly found out, sugary drinks have the same effect as your thumb. “What you do is open it, find the circuit board and just rub your thumb through it, until it makes a contact with some points and changes the way it makes the sound,” to put it simply. “Then you make different interfaces on it. I used to cover them in copper foil to get certain noises. It took me three days the first time I did it, and about a half an hour now.”

From then on, James was addicted, filling his pockets with “old broken toys with five-buttoned keyboards on them”. At 14 he discovered a whole community in America as fascinated about it as he was. But it wasn’t until he met Luke, his band mate in Omega Undigital, that he started making music out of it. “We spent a lot of time listening to Daft Punk, Justice and those French electro genres. We started loving it, brought some toys around, made a drum machine and just jammed out with guitars, basses and these crazy instruments.“

Omega Undigital was James’ first electro band amongst many, until starting his current one, Overlooked, which he describes as “Led Zeppelin meets Foo Fighters, progressive grungy American”. When I asked him about the sudden change in genres, he modestly replied: “As much as I like electro music, I don’t think I’m good enough to achieve the craziness of this electro sound that’s going on in my brain.”

So at 18, inspired by Muse’s “Hysteria”, James bought the cheapest bass guitar eBay had to offer, and taught himself how to play. “My mom made me play the trumpet when I was ten, which taught me how to read music. It’s like a language: how you generate it requires different skills, where actually it’s all the same 12 notes.”

He also sings back-up vocals, plays guitar and “rules” the bongos, apparently. Not bad for a 21-year-old ex-drama student, who discovered his frustration with the education system after an A in physics and an F in arts. “The system isn’t designed for wild, crazy people like me. Getting an A in physics doesn’t mean I know anything about it.” Is this why you ruled out the theoretical way of learning instruments? “Possibly. I may have earned some deep instinctual hatred of learning,” he noted, laughing. “I teach myself. People say I can talk about stuff, and I guess there’s nothing I can’t tell you about chromatic aberration or diffraction, that I just learned off Wikipedia or asking people. If I enjoy something and I don’t understand it, I have to know everything about it, and I don’t stop researching.”

Overlooked was only created three months ago and already rehearsing a 30-minute set for a gig in New Cross Inn on April 6^th. But James seems quite blasé about it all. “I don’t think we have the determination to play Wembley. I always thought living in a mansion and having a harem of beautiful women and a swimming pool on top of a mountain top is just an added bonus,” he said. “It’s all about enjoying the music. If you have fun just getting up there and playing then that’s it, you’ve achieved nirvana.”

But what about the old drama student, who in the beginning of our interview declared his yearning to be recognised and have people applauding him, I asked, the boy who put aside his unique passion of electronic discoveries for his greater passion of performing on stage? “I always preferred being in the chorus line. I’m a nervous individual,” he bashfully admitted.

So, are you still doing it, I asked curiously about his strange hobby. “That’s the reason I bought food this week: selling one for £70,” he replied with a winning smile. “It’s fun. It’s a bit of money. Nothing’s a challenge with electronics, it’s absurdly simple. Slap Pop bass line is a challenge, that’s incredibly hard. The electronic stuff is like bread and butter. It got me into music, and now I’m just making money off it.”

The one man show, ladies and gentlemen: the autodidact electrical artist, still wiping the milk off his lips.

https://www.facebook.com/jameath

Where has all the music gone?

You better keep up, or you’ll end up like me. I used to be a professional music enthusiast, the go-to girl when it came to music news. But the digital age overpowered music as I knew it faster than Paris Hilton’s singing career, and left me hanging behind this new tech-revolving world.

Long gone are the days of the mysterious singer/songwriter knocking on the doors of record companies and recording studios with his guitar. Today’s new striving artists barely need to leave their bedrooms, assuming those are accessorised with a computer, broadband and an affordable mixing and editing program, instruments optional.

I was triggered by Tomer Run’s story, a friend of mine who gained exposure to a new American series, Bar Karma, from the comfort of his humble home in North London. In a matter of days he set up a track with a 1960s sound, using the help of some friends and a lot of technology, and enrolled on an online competition. He was announced a finalist the next day.

“I'm starting to do more of that now,” he enthusiastically announced. “I'm getting loads of work opportunities through music-jobs.co.uk”. The website indabamusic.com, which arranged the competition of composing a soundtrack to Bar Karma, is a great way to pitch as well, he told me. “It offers fantastic opportunities like remixing John Legend and The Roots.”

The home recording techniques are no secret to any musician: with the right programs you could easily record, edit and mix your own material. “The last time I recorded was with my iphone,” said Omri Ran, long time musician owning his own mini recording studio at home. “That was amusing, I was surprised by its quality! It’s nothing professional  and won’t sound as good as something recorded on your computer, but it’s a nice option.” And when it comes down to publicising, well, the options are growing fast.

We all remember Myspace, the ultimate platform for any beginner artist seeking to share his music with a worldwide audience. “The tide really turned with The Arctic Monkeys, who were the first band to be signed to a major label on the strength of their Myspace following, which opened the doors and ears of the people with the power,” Jon Jefford told me, the guitar player for DeepSeaGreen, a London garage rock band. “Music has shifted and the days of the 60s and 70s are almost gone. People don’t go out to listen to unsigned bands unless they are hyped up in a music magazine, so the only way to reach them is through online means.”

The funny thing is, Myspace is not the hottest thing anymore. That too evaporated quickly, as Gil Zausmer, an acknowledged musician and sound designer revealed. “It completely died out. People  aren’t online anymore and it all seems like one big cacophony of monologues instead of networking.”

While Myspace is ‘yesterday’s news’, it did leave its mark on the evolving industry. Websites like reverbnation.com allow you to get your music into online stores such as iTunes and Amazon.

Whether this is a positive change to music publishing or not is debatable. “Getting songs online is essential, but there are so many acts out there it just gets lost,” Zausmer explained. “There isn’t enough focus for a decent period of time – it’s all too instant. With main firms or channels 15 years ago, propagating music to segmented assemblies, you'd have certain groups listening to certain genres at a certain time, with not as many options as we have today, therefore a 'buzz' or a trend could exist. But what you have now is just a mess, defragmentation of those assemblies and main channels, causing inflation in music conveyance. So no trends, no scenes, no buzz – just mainstream regurgitated crap.”

We could choose to look at it as a new age to music industry, for better or worse. I choose to see it as a new genre of music: artists like Jackson and his Computer Band and The Arctic Monkeys, setting up a milestone in home recording and self publishing, created a fresh sound to modern music. Music is swiftly catching up with technology, and we better hurry up as well.