A studio, a website and the DIY ethic – The talk and tunes of Daytrotter.com (feature)
“Railroad tracks, shacks, small downtown section” – this is how Jack Kerouac describes Rock Island in his 1957 novel “On the road”. Located in the northeast of the Midwestern state of Illinois, Rock Island is, funnily enough, home to one of the oldest symphony orchestras in the country, The Quad City Symphony, as well as, (not so funny) in Rock Island Arsenal, an active producer and supplier of military equipment.
In the downtown area mentioned by Kerouac, however, the headquarters of one of the most typed-about independent music ventures can be found: Daytrotter.com’s studio and office. The concept of Daytrotter is incredibly simple: A band, who might be on tour in the region or a local act, is brought into the studio to record four songs, live, without overdubs and straight to tape. Then, those songs are uploaded to the Daytrotter website and offered to everyone free of charge. Too simple? Dozens of blogs disagree, comparing the spirit of these sessions to those of the late Radio 1 DJ John Peel. Is Daytrotter really worth all the e-praise, then?
As is so often the case with the Internet, there are no complex corporate or ambitious forces at work behind the project, just two guys and an idea. The guy with the idea is Sean Moeller, 29, a former music journalist and today responsible for many of the features, reviews and interviews that make up the “webzine”-aspect of the Daytrotter website. “I first came up with the idea for Daytrotter years ago, just in a very different vest”, he says. “I thought it would be cool to have a record store/venue based on our location – in the middle of every major Midwestern city – that I could entice bands in for a short noon hour set of songs, give them another opportunity to sell CDs and shirts as they drove right by us on I-80 [an interstate highway connecting California in the west and New Jersey in the east] to their next gig.” The lack of funds to go through with Moeller’s original vision, coupled with the continuing development of the internet and the possibilities it held, meant that Moeller modified his idea to create Daytrotter as it exists today. Patrick Stolley, a 37-year-old sound engineer, was Moeller’s partner in crime, providing the technical know-how as well as, crucially, a fully set-up recording studio.
The next step was inevitable: Daytrotter went online in 2006 and indie rock bands Catfish Haven and Someone still loves you Boris Yeltsin recorded the first sessions on March 23 that year. Two years later, more than 2.5 million songs by bands as diverse as Australian funk-pop outfit Architecture in Helsinki, singer-songwriter Kevin Devine, one-man-electro pop act Casiotone for the painfully alone, afro beat newbies Vampire Weekend and Oregon punk band The Thermals have been downloaded from the website.
Daytrotter seems to have struck a chord with fans and musicians alike, something that is demonstrated by the fact that, from time to time, bands contact the Daytrotter staff rather than the other way around. Moeller: “We write to them, we call them, they write to us, they call us…it just seems to happen now.”
Except that it doesn’t just happen. Bands and listeners, are drawn to Daytrotter by its honest DIY ethic and sometimes even just the vibe that is given off by the design of the site, with illustrations of the featured artists instead of press photographs and its distinct, almost poetic writing style. The style of writing was a conscious decision, says Moeller: “When I sit down to write, I want to make literature, not something fleeting and empty. Pat and Brad [Kopplin, another sound engineer] try to record masterpieces and our illustrators try to paint masterpieces.”
Speaking to Kevin Devine, a singer from New York City, the appeal of it all becomes a little clearer. “From the first time I looked at the site I was interested and saw it as something legitimate,” he says. “Something smart and passionate and creative. They process and consider your work and add something that's wholly their own to it.” Hutch Harris, the singer and guitarist of The Thermals, offers another, slightly less idealistic point of view. Asked what, in the end, persuaded his band to record a session with Moeller and Stolley, he says: “We need to be convinced to do anything that doesn't make us money. A lot of good bands have done Daytrotter, so they [Daytrotter] have a good reputation. We were convinced.”
Taking its name from the label on which Stolley’s old band, The Marlboro Chorus, released an album, Futureappletree Studio 1 certainly seems like a fun, if a little odd, place to record. It is located two blocks up from the Mississippi river and above a pizza joint, and radiates a cosy, welcoming atmosphere, something that Sean and Patrick do their best to enhance. “They [the bands] usually get comfy quickly,” Patrick says. “We're very laid back and we always have lots of beer and coffee and whatnot, and we ask them to make themselves at home. The atmosphere is usually upbeat and fun.” The bands seem to enjoy themselves, too. “Everything was handled confidently but relaxed, it was real easy,” Kevin Devine says of his session in Rock Island. “We spent probably two hours there, got warmed up, recorded 4 songs and did a couple takes of each, hung out for a bit, smoked a few cigarettes and drank some coffee and drove off. I definitely enjoyed it.”
Now, to think that the Daytrotter recordings are the product of alcohol- and nicotine-fuelled fumblings with out-of tune instruments and an old tape recorder would be a gross misconception of both the working conditions in the studio and the all-important end product, the recorded songs themselves. The equipment list of the Futureappletree studio reads like a sound engineering’s wet dream: It includes state-of-the-art microphones and analogue 24-track tape recorders, vintage tube amps from the seventies as well as a mouth-watering variety of instruments such as electric and acoustic guitars, a whole drum kit, two pianos, cowbells, whistles and even a mandolin. Or, as Patrick succinctly and modestly puts it: “Lots of old stuff, and some new stuff.” According to its Myspace, most of the studio’s gear is custom-made, modified or refurbished. These pleasantly retro surroundings, together with the snugly, almost nerdy clutter of the “live room” [where the acts are recorded] and the “lounge” [a few sofas put together around a coffee table], create an environment in which most musicians feel at home and at ease.
Owen Ashworth, the man behind the electro-pop act Casiotone for the painfully alone, was deeply impressed: “We were amazed by the studio. There was almost no need to load any of our own gear in because they had nearly everything we'd ever want in there already. We loved being there.”
Despite the soothing and homely atmosphere, Daytrotter sessions are no school band rehearsals. “We don't have time for bullshit”, says Patrick. Hamilton Leithause, singer and guitarist of New York band The Walkmen, also pays tribute to the staff’s professionalism: “We were sort of in a rush so it was quick,” he says, “but they were ready for us and had everything sounding great by the time I was ready to start checking tones. We're used to getting drums tones over a period of days rather than hours.”
It seems as if a weight is lifted off the musicians who record in the Daytrotter studios. Mistakes are allowed; there is very little room for egotism and very much room for experiments. The Walkmen, for example, recorded a set of Leonard Cohen covers, with Moeller even providing some backing vocals (even though Leithause says that you can’t hear him), and The Thermals laid down a rumbling version of their “theme song”, ‘Everything thermals’, which was only available on their very first 7-inch (and, Harris concedes, on iTunes). Kevin Devine put even more thought into his session: “I did two newer songs because I thought it would be cool to give them something semi-exclusive”, he says, “It seemed like a sort of special forum for something like that.”
Despite its independent credo, Daytrotter won’t just work with anyone, oh no. “ I choose every band solely on the basis of whether or not I like them”, Moeller says describing the selection process. His past as a journalist and blogger has certainly helped him in terms of contacts, he concedes: “All of the contacts I needed to form Daytrotter were a decade in the making and most of them stemmed directly from people I met through my job at The Quad-City Times [a local newspaper in Davenport, Iowa] and through the various freelance outlets that I would have never found or been appealing to had it not been for my work at the newspaper.” While he speaks fairly positively of the newspaper industry, he has a lower opinion of the writing that can be found online. “Writing professionally every day for 12 years I hope makes me more credible and a better writer than most of the horseshit on the Internet that passes as whatever it passes as”, he says. Given Moeller’s dismissive view of music blogs, it is slightly ironic that it is webzines and other online music publications that have been sounding Daytrotter’s trumpet the loudest. “Daytrotter is a revelation of a website - an e-zine centred not just around indie rock and reviews, but around original music”, writes the Wired.com blog, while Sound Generator calls it “a place to discover great indie gems, like the basement club only you know about”.
Asked what record labels make of the fact that their client’s work is available for free download a few weeks after they have completed a Daytrotter session, Patrick says: “They think it's great. We're helping their bands, not hindering them by posting tracks from the record.” And he’s right. What is on offer on the website is something created independently of what has gone before or will happen later, a product of a few hours taken off from touring or promoting, unique and, to quote the website, “entirely collectable”. Owen Ashworth puts it thus: “I hope the listeners take the sessions as a document of what the band has sounded like at a specific point in time. It's a very honest and transparent view of the live experience of making and listening to music, and I hope the sessions help to bridge the gap between the albums and the live shows.”
With live concerts taking over from record sales as the main source of revenue for labels and bands alike, this is a shrewd concept. Music aficionados who still prefer paying for physical CDs or records can use the site to sample up-and-coming or virtually unknown bands, while cheapskates can build up a vast digital indie music archive for absolutely no money.
While almost none of the bands are household names, Sean insists they are not an online-version of an elitist, music-snob shop like, for example, Nick Hornby’s ‘Championship vinyl’. “We couldn't be further from being elitist,” he says, “There are enough people like that involved with music. We're not holier than anything, and every band we invite in for a session we'd love to become the biggest band in the world.”
Their uncomplicated approach has won them many fans, and their idea has successfully avoided to get intertwined in the tedious discussion on music piracy. It’s just a bunch of guys in a studio, playing around and not worrying about rough edges or sore throats. Patrick, once again, puts his finger on it: “I think people like to hear musicians hacking away, it's more human. That's what we're really going for: humanity.”
By Matthias Scherer
www.daytrotter.com
In the downtown area mentioned by Kerouac, however, the headquarters of one of the most typed-about independent music ventures can be found: Daytrotter.com’s studio and office. The concept of Daytrotter is incredibly simple: A band, who might be on tour in the region or a local act, is brought into the studio to record four songs, live, without overdubs and straight to tape. Then, those songs are uploaded to the Daytrotter website and offered to everyone free of charge. Too simple? Dozens of blogs disagree, comparing the spirit of these sessions to those of the late Radio 1 DJ John Peel. Is Daytrotter really worth all the e-praise, then?
As is so often the case with the Internet, there are no complex corporate or ambitious forces at work behind the project, just two guys and an idea. The guy with the idea is Sean Moeller, 29, a former music journalist and today responsible for many of the features, reviews and interviews that make up the “webzine”-aspect of the Daytrotter website. “I first came up with the idea for Daytrotter years ago, just in a very different vest”, he says. “I thought it would be cool to have a record store/venue based on our location – in the middle of every major Midwestern city – that I could entice bands in for a short noon hour set of songs, give them another opportunity to sell CDs and shirts as they drove right by us on I-80 [an interstate highway connecting California in the west and New Jersey in the east] to their next gig.” The lack of funds to go through with Moeller’s original vision, coupled with the continuing development of the internet and the possibilities it held, meant that Moeller modified his idea to create Daytrotter as it exists today. Patrick Stolley, a 37-year-old sound engineer, was Moeller’s partner in crime, providing the technical know-how as well as, crucially, a fully set-up recording studio.
The next step was inevitable: Daytrotter went online in 2006 and indie rock bands Catfish Haven and Someone still loves you Boris Yeltsin recorded the first sessions on March 23 that year. Two years later, more than 2.5 million songs by bands as diverse as Australian funk-pop outfit Architecture in Helsinki, singer-songwriter Kevin Devine, one-man-electro pop act Casiotone for the painfully alone, afro beat newbies Vampire Weekend and Oregon punk band The Thermals have been downloaded from the website.
Daytrotter seems to have struck a chord with fans and musicians alike, something that is demonstrated by the fact that, from time to time, bands contact the Daytrotter staff rather than the other way around. Moeller: “We write to them, we call them, they write to us, they call us…it just seems to happen now.”
Except that it doesn’t just happen. Bands and listeners, are drawn to Daytrotter by its honest DIY ethic and sometimes even just the vibe that is given off by the design of the site, with illustrations of the featured artists instead of press photographs and its distinct, almost poetic writing style. The style of writing was a conscious decision, says Moeller: “When I sit down to write, I want to make literature, not something fleeting and empty. Pat and Brad [Kopplin, another sound engineer] try to record masterpieces and our illustrators try to paint masterpieces.”
Speaking to Kevin Devine, a singer from New York City, the appeal of it all becomes a little clearer. “From the first time I looked at the site I was interested and saw it as something legitimate,” he says. “Something smart and passionate and creative. They process and consider your work and add something that's wholly their own to it.” Hutch Harris, the singer and guitarist of The Thermals, offers another, slightly less idealistic point of view. Asked what, in the end, persuaded his band to record a session with Moeller and Stolley, he says: “We need to be convinced to do anything that doesn't make us money. A lot of good bands have done Daytrotter, so they [Daytrotter] have a good reputation. We were convinced.”
Taking its name from the label on which Stolley’s old band, The Marlboro Chorus, released an album, Futureappletree Studio 1 certainly seems like a fun, if a little odd, place to record. It is located two blocks up from the Mississippi river and above a pizza joint, and radiates a cosy, welcoming atmosphere, something that Sean and Patrick do their best to enhance. “They [the bands] usually get comfy quickly,” Patrick says. “We're very laid back and we always have lots of beer and coffee and whatnot, and we ask them to make themselves at home. The atmosphere is usually upbeat and fun.” The bands seem to enjoy themselves, too. “Everything was handled confidently but relaxed, it was real easy,” Kevin Devine says of his session in Rock Island. “We spent probably two hours there, got warmed up, recorded 4 songs and did a couple takes of each, hung out for a bit, smoked a few cigarettes and drank some coffee and drove off. I definitely enjoyed it.”
Now, to think that the Daytrotter recordings are the product of alcohol- and nicotine-fuelled fumblings with out-of tune instruments and an old tape recorder would be a gross misconception of both the working conditions in the studio and the all-important end product, the recorded songs themselves. The equipment list of the Futureappletree studio reads like a sound engineering’s wet dream: It includes state-of-the-art microphones and analogue 24-track tape recorders, vintage tube amps from the seventies as well as a mouth-watering variety of instruments such as electric and acoustic guitars, a whole drum kit, two pianos, cowbells, whistles and even a mandolin. Or, as Patrick succinctly and modestly puts it: “Lots of old stuff, and some new stuff.” According to its Myspace, most of the studio’s gear is custom-made, modified or refurbished. These pleasantly retro surroundings, together with the snugly, almost nerdy clutter of the “live room” [where the acts are recorded] and the “lounge” [a few sofas put together around a coffee table], create an environment in which most musicians feel at home and at ease.
Owen Ashworth, the man behind the electro-pop act Casiotone for the painfully alone, was deeply impressed: “We were amazed by the studio. There was almost no need to load any of our own gear in because they had nearly everything we'd ever want in there already. We loved being there.”
Despite the soothing and homely atmosphere, Daytrotter sessions are no school band rehearsals. “We don't have time for bullshit”, says Patrick. Hamilton Leithause, singer and guitarist of New York band The Walkmen, also pays tribute to the staff’s professionalism: “We were sort of in a rush so it was quick,” he says, “but they were ready for us and had everything sounding great by the time I was ready to start checking tones. We're used to getting drums tones over a period of days rather than hours.”
It seems as if a weight is lifted off the musicians who record in the Daytrotter studios. Mistakes are allowed; there is very little room for egotism and very much room for experiments. The Walkmen, for example, recorded a set of Leonard Cohen covers, with Moeller even providing some backing vocals (even though Leithause says that you can’t hear him), and The Thermals laid down a rumbling version of their “theme song”, ‘Everything thermals’, which was only available on their very first 7-inch (and, Harris concedes, on iTunes). Kevin Devine put even more thought into his session: “I did two newer songs because I thought it would be cool to give them something semi-exclusive”, he says, “It seemed like a sort of special forum for something like that.”
Despite its independent credo, Daytrotter won’t just work with anyone, oh no. “ I choose every band solely on the basis of whether or not I like them”, Moeller says describing the selection process. His past as a journalist and blogger has certainly helped him in terms of contacts, he concedes: “All of the contacts I needed to form Daytrotter were a decade in the making and most of them stemmed directly from people I met through my job at The Quad-City Times [a local newspaper in Davenport, Iowa] and through the various freelance outlets that I would have never found or been appealing to had it not been for my work at the newspaper.” While he speaks fairly positively of the newspaper industry, he has a lower opinion of the writing that can be found online. “Writing professionally every day for 12 years I hope makes me more credible and a better writer than most of the horseshit on the Internet that passes as whatever it passes as”, he says. Given Moeller’s dismissive view of music blogs, it is slightly ironic that it is webzines and other online music publications that have been sounding Daytrotter’s trumpet the loudest. “Daytrotter is a revelation of a website - an e-zine centred not just around indie rock and reviews, but around original music”, writes the Wired.com blog, while Sound Generator calls it “a place to discover great indie gems, like the basement club only you know about”.
Asked what record labels make of the fact that their client’s work is available for free download a few weeks after they have completed a Daytrotter session, Patrick says: “They think it's great. We're helping their bands, not hindering them by posting tracks from the record.” And he’s right. What is on offer on the website is something created independently of what has gone before or will happen later, a product of a few hours taken off from touring or promoting, unique and, to quote the website, “entirely collectable”. Owen Ashworth puts it thus: “I hope the listeners take the sessions as a document of what the band has sounded like at a specific point in time. It's a very honest and transparent view of the live experience of making and listening to music, and I hope the sessions help to bridge the gap between the albums and the live shows.”
With live concerts taking over from record sales as the main source of revenue for labels and bands alike, this is a shrewd concept. Music aficionados who still prefer paying for physical CDs or records can use the site to sample up-and-coming or virtually unknown bands, while cheapskates can build up a vast digital indie music archive for absolutely no money.
While almost none of the bands are household names, Sean insists they are not an online-version of an elitist, music-snob shop like, for example, Nick Hornby’s ‘Championship vinyl’. “We couldn't be further from being elitist,” he says, “There are enough people like that involved with music. We're not holier than anything, and every band we invite in for a session we'd love to become the biggest band in the world.”
Their uncomplicated approach has won them many fans, and their idea has successfully avoided to get intertwined in the tedious discussion on music piracy. It’s just a bunch of guys in a studio, playing around and not worrying about rough edges or sore throats. Patrick, once again, puts his finger on it: “I think people like to hear musicians hacking away, it's more human. That's what we're really going for: humanity.”
By Matthias Scherer
www.daytrotter.com
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