Author: Seb Chan

Because of Cyclic Defrost (and before that, Frigid) I have often had the chance to hear music well before it got released – people’s early demos, sometimes live shows with new material, sometimes promo stuff.

Of all this enormous farm of potential ear worms there are just two bits of music that I know exist out there on hard drives of the makers and really wish would see the light of day. They continue to bug me all these years later.

Back in the mid 2000s I saw Matthew Curry/Safety Scissors play at Sonar. Part way through his set he played a lovely cover version of New Order’s Age of Consent. It was fantastic and yet as Curry has faded from the release schedules of labels it will probably never appear as anything other than a fantastic ephemeral moment. Even trying to track down a recording of the set at Sonar seems impossible.

The other is a rumoured remix of an unnamed DJ Krush track by Jel from the Anticon stable. I was part of a bunch of people who toured Anticon (well, at the time, Sole, Dose One and Jel) to Australia in 2001. They played a bunch of shows and did some production and rhyming workshops as part of the Sound Summit events. Coming off the back of 9/11 the whole tour nearly didn’t happen as they were stranded on the East Coast when they were supposed to be boarding planes to fly to Australia. But happen it did. In one of the many frantic phone calls between Sydney and the USA, this remix was mentioned and played down the phone line. It probably exists on a DAT or hard drive somewhere gathering dust.

No doubt if I heard them again they wouldn’t be as good as I remember.

Audio fingerprinting tool Shazam is one of those auto-magical things that impresses pretty much anyone who sees it working on an iPhone (although it is available on other devices albeit at a cost).

Usually you’d use it to identify music playing in cafes, bars and clubs, or on the radio. But given that most of the music I actually want to find out more about isn’t often what is playing in these sorts of venues (the occasional earworm excepted), I’ve not really had much use for it in a day-to-day setting.

(Side note – when I was playing a set at the recent Optimo gig in Sydney I noticed the girl working the sound desk at the Oxford Art factory continuously loading a Shazam-equivalent on her mobile phone to try to identify what they and others were playing!)

However . . . I’ve been watching a fair few TV series recently, catching up with stuff I should have seen whilst otherwise engaged in parental duties, and the the best use of Shazam is to find out the details of songs featured in soundtracks. For example, the UK teen series Skins is notable mostly for its eclectic musical choices but the DVD releases feature different music to the broadcast versions as a result of bizarre rights issues that I can’t quite fathom. And like most TV series you can forget about getting the music listed in the credits – but with Shazam even a 10 second clip of sound used to set the mood of a scene can be identified pretty reliably.

Now if there was a similar tool for quickly identifying sample sources . . . .