Music Club Launches Live at Peter Gabriel’s Real World - Susanna Grant

Thanks to Real World for hosting the launch of our Music Club last week in the aptly named Big Room of their Wiltshire studios. Seeing Grindhouse playing acoustic versions live of what I’d been listening to for weeks on my iPod was brilliant but nothing prepared me for the improvised genius of Skip McDonald (Little Axe). His set involved a bizarrely successful mix of virtuoso guitar playing and audience participation following in a long line of eccentric performers such as George Clinton and Bootsie Collins.

There has been much discussion on the collapse of traditional business models within the music industry. It’s easy to forget that good live music rarely loses its impact and really can’t be replaced or updated.

Cassandra Wilson explains elsewhere on this site that the location for recording her albums is as much a part of the sound as the score itself hence recording 2002’s ‘Belly of the Sun’ in an abandoned Mississippi train station. A number of the Music Club sessions have been recorded almost entirely live and I’m excited by how this really comes across, the production is fresh rather than polished to within an inch of its life and you can hear the energy from the musicians in the studio.

I’ll definitely be pointing to where you can go and see our Music Club artists out live later in the year, and in the meantime, if you haven’t already, check out this month’s Music Club podcast and vidcast for a taste of what Little Axe are like in the flesh. Read more

Listen with Prejudice - Susanna Grant

I have been thinking a lot about listening. I don’t have time to listen to music properly any more - I always seem to have a pile of new CDs I haven’t got round to listening to - when I was young I listened to each new record for hours on end every day until I knew it back to front. No matter how hard I try, MP3’s just aren’t the same as a CD or vinyl. The best way to listen to anything is with your eyes closed - some people seem to only listen to music on their mobile phones on the bus.

And that’s exactly what we’re addressing with the Music Club. The idea of having one beautifully recorded album a month that you can download without any compression and then burn onto a disc so you can have an actual CD with artwork is really appealing. You can listen to it properly for at least a month before even thinking about the next one.

This is a really creative time for the music industry, it has needed to change for a long time, everyone has agreed the old business model is obsolete and this leaves the door wide open for people to try new ones –something that Radiohead proved effortlessly with their In Rainbows album. Giving the rights back to Music Club artists once the month is up means they can record something unrestricted by any label and then distribute it as they want to.

We’re trying something new here, and in the words of the redoubtable Freddie Laker, come fly with us. Read more

The World in Sound - Benjamin Lehmann

Bowers & Wilkins mission since its inception has been to offer a means of accurately reproducing recorded sounds. We refer to it as ‘True Sound’. This new section of the website you are now looking at is another step towards introducing the world to True Sound.

Through a series of articles, podcasts and vidcasts in the Lab, and through more regular posts on this page we are going to be exploring why sound is important, and why we need to protect the aural quality of our lives in an increasingly noisy world.

When you walked down the street today what did you hear? Did you notice what you were hearing? If you concentrate on what is going on around you right now you will be able to distinguish any number of sounds, for instance the sound of cars passing, the sound of people talking. If you know those people you may be able to identify them from their voices. Similarly you may be able to identify the size, and speed of the car that just passed. Perhaps there is more that you can hear. We are always engaged in an immersive relationship with sound.

Bowers & Wilkins has always aimed to equip people with speakers that can provide a faithful reproduction of sound. Today message trumps medium, and it is the immediate availability of highly compressed sound (more on this in the Lab) which has proven the most important development for the music industry this decade. In this Blog and in the Lab we will be discussing how sound is affecting our lives and how we might make better use of it, control it, and protect our experience of it. In short, we will be looking the world as it exists in our ears.

Join us here. Read more