THANK YOU FOR LANDING HERE! Chances are you came across this CD by accident or via the referral mechanism on CD baby - because you like a particular style of music, and this one somehow fit a “profile” , e.g., “dreamy music”, “synth based music”, etc. So your musical tastes have likely been (non-criminally!) profiled, and you probably already have a list of “favorite” albums or songs somewhere that further codify your tastes.
Music sellers want to classify and target your musical tastes because the range of musical styles and the number of people making (and consuming) music is large and ever increasing as the technology gets smaller and cheaper. (And unfortunately the music is sometimes too much a product of the technology). This is amazing when you consider there are really only 6 kinds of songs, i.e., songs about friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love (and you’ll find all of these as subjects on Aquarian Blue). Yet while these 6 kinds of songs cover a wealth of human experience, somehow musical styles continue to change and evolve to cover the same subjects over and over again. Look in the pulldown menu for genres or styles in some mp3 encoders and you’ll often see over 100 different musical styles to tag your files with. Many of those “styles” were coined as convenient buzzwords by people in the music industry as a means to the end of marketing a product to a certain demographic (and don’t have much to do with music).
So while CD baby is a positive testament to how easy it is for any “musician” or band to get their music out there and on a CD , let’s face it - the flip side of this is the hundreds, thousands, and ever increasing number of CD’s with really terrible music on them. At least some of these CD’s may be well recorded/produced, but even if all the wrong notes have been fixed in the mix (and too many on CD Baby have wrong notes that stand out like neon signs) - well, the music itself is often not anything you’d want to repeat listening to after clicking on the play button once. The chords, harmonies, melodies may be lacking, and/or the performance may be poor. To put it bluntly, it does not really mean anything anymore quality wise to physically make or sell a CD (or record a CD’s worth of material). It’s just too easy nowadays and there’s really no physical $$ value in an optical disk. We take those freebies in the mail from AOL or magazines and hang them on the fences to keep the deer away (it’s the reflecting light that scares them).
What the frak (vipers are launching now from Galactica) does this mean for this CD, Aquarian Blue, let alone the minions of indie artists making music and/or fans (consumers) looking for new/interesting music? The simple answer is that “more is less” quality wise. There comes a point when too many choices makes it harder to find something new of quality (or something close to professional quality - not necessarily commercial) music that bears up under repeated listening. I can only sift thru previews of maybe 40 CD’s I’ve never previously heard - before getting sick of auditioning new music; posted rating/reviews don’t often mean anything. And its not as if the major labels are using the “opportunity” to pick from the wealth of indie artists as a means to put out better quality music (in fact the opposite is more likely - see the book “The Long Tail”). When quantity increases and quality decreases, then the industry may not be better off.
Given the above, we’d like to say first what Aquarian Blue is not. It is not the product of someone trying to cultivate an image or fit their music into a pre-defined genre aspiring to be commercial or “discovered”. You will not find the obligatory bio or write-up mentioning the musical influences, musical education, performance credits, or comments/reviews by newspapers/magazines, etc. ad naseum.
But neither is this CD a deliberate descent into the (hopefully deceased) DIY “alternative” ethos exploited as a way to excuse mistakes or a lack of musicianship or production. (We pray that somehow all the Yamaha NS-10 monitors in the world will spontaneously combust). Aquarian Blue is what you get when you put a keyboard playing engineer/musician in a single room with a bunch of synthesizers and drum machines with only analog tape recorders.
This is simply Mr. DiCamillo’s first effort to record and produce a number of songs entirely on his own (except for Alise and her vocals on Summer Sky). This CD used no Pro-Tools, Garage Band, loops, Auto-Tune, mixer automation, or computer based DAW software. Everything was head arrangements with actual pencil and paper to write some of the parts down. Samples were made and played back by ear to match the key and rhythm; there was no graphical editor, not even on the keyboards. Analog tape was spliced together. Yes there are flat notes and harmonies (not as big as neon signs); many of the arrangements are too busy; some of the tracks/mixes are distorted/muddy; the drum machine programming is not great; and he’s certainly not the best vocalist. But for what it is - a collection of piano/synth based demos - some of them hang together pretty well. The mixing and use of synth timbres, the interplay of musical lines, and the structures have some real musicianship to them despite the limitations of the recording/performance.
Getting back to the “6 kinds of songs” - there are probably more songs of “knowledge” here from a personal vantage point. Though not a “blue” album it has some darker moments, including a song written around the recorded/edited dialogue from a psychic (“All Here”). References to religion can be found in “Walking on Water” and “Sword’Point”; friendship and love in “Juliana”, “Summer Sky”, “Dream of Blue”, and others. If its the job of Aquarians to share and convey knowledge (including their own shortcomings), then the title fits here. No coincidence Mr. DiCamillo also teaches in the audio degree program of one of the better accredited schools, using this CD as an example of how not to do some things. There’s nothing like putting your own work up for scrutiny by students.
By your command.
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