ok the previous week was something amazing for mari people SEMYK IS FINALLY ENDED!!! my family was looking forward for it for about 2 weeks :)

i said in some previous post, Semyk is the national holiday connected with the end of the field and harvest works. actually i mixed two mari holidays up, i’m sorry hahahah Peledysh Pairem is the holiday of the end of field works. Semyk is one of the most important mari holidays of the deads. It lasts for a whole week, but the middle of the Semyk week (Wednesday and Thursday) is the most significant for us. Everything, basically, is going on just like on Kugeche: the altar, the banya, the treatments, etc. I don’t even know exactly, how to explain it, just to say: Semyk is just the bigger Kugeche hahahha BUT OF COURSE there are some differences to determine

I am part of the organisation of the Vondelbunker in Amsterdam. It’s an old nuclear bomb shelter in which we have awesome events. It’s a real underground location. (literally) The thing I mostly do there is the sound, and in the past months I have learned a lot about being an audio engineer. Including the following.

The first thing confronted me is that a concrete bunker has quite a reverb. We often have bands playing and the problem that usually appears is that the drums are too loud. Result, the band puts up their amps so much that they’re louder than our soundsystem so I can’t get the vocals loud enough. Sometimes we have drummers that are actually capable of playing at a lower volume and that solves the whole problem, but most drummers can’t. At this volume it doesn’t even sound good anymore, and while I am busy trying not to blow up the speakers sometimes people dare to sign to me that they can’t here the vocals. I usually respond with a deathlike Clint Eastwood kinda look. I mean, don’t you think I would turn up the volume if I could? I am the fucking soundguy am I not? I’m not deaf y’know, I can clearly hear that there is a problem with the sound but unfortunately I can’t solve it because this band is playing too fucking loud. I don’t usually say that out loud though, that’s just what goes through my head at those moments. Anyway, I decided to put this on the mixer. Now when people ask, I just point to this piece of paper.

So I have been studying music production for about a year now and I really enjoy it. But one thing that has been bugging me from the start is that (most) people care more about marketing than creativity. Although I know that marketing is a very important aspect of the music industry, I think passion and creativity should be what drives you, not money.

I remember a time at the start of my first year in this education when I made a hardhouse track with a real 90′s vibe. Not something I usually make, but I liked it, so why the hell not. Now here’s the thing, when one of my classmates heard it he said this: “Okay nice, but is there a market for that?” WHAT KIND OF QUESTION IS THAT?! We’re not at a fucking stockmarket! Like I’m doing it just for the money. I mean, why are you doing a study like this if all you care about is market? Go study marketing or something! I’m not trying to be popular, I’m just expressing myself, I don’t care about market. Where are the passionate people? Ofcourse, everybody wants to make big money, even me. But if that’s your reason to make music, you’re not a musician, you’re a manufacturer. When people like that make music they think: “Mmh, how can I score a hit and make a lot of money?” whereas people like me think: “How can I express myself?” They produce music like a factory produces products and end up making the same shit over and over again because it sells. As Joel Zimmerman said: “Maximum profit for the least amount of work”. I think the word “product” is being used way too much. (Yes I know “product” comes from the word “production” as in “music production”, I’d rather call myself an electronic musician anyway). Music is not a product, musicians are not manufacturers. They’re artists and they make art.