Yes, I am still here. Put together some short clips here from a day at Little River Canyon a couple months ago. Gorgeous day, beautiful spot down by the water. There seems to be little consensus on names or grades here but the overhanging face goes at V7 or something and the highball arete is V9. Music by Kalotone, “Open” from Death of a Speaker

Lisa Rands from Andrew Kornylak on Vimeo.

I love music recorded “in the wild.” To wit: this Hall and Oates cover by SF-based Nicki Bluhm and The Gramblers, recorded in their van

Here is another teaser from A FINE LINE

Tennessee Climber Jimmy Webb explains how he can spend a whole season working on a climbing objective, come home broke, and still love the “dirtbag” lifestyle of the full-time climber.

Boulder, Colorado climber and artist Peter Beal, who narrates much of the film, meditates on the connection between creating art and bouldering.

Music: “Rjanga” by The Brock Scott Quartet

Buy the Film: hdclimbingvideos.com/products/fine-line

Watch the Trailer: at vimeo.com/28677263

I remember the first time I hooked up my violin to an amp when I was in high-school. I played Kashmir about a thousand times, toyed with some Kansas, and that was about it. I’d never play professionally as a classical musician, and it seemed there was no place for a violinist in modern music apart from Bluegrass.

Not that I don’t love the bluegrass. It’s just that I can’t play that fast.

So this month when I discovered the Asheville-based River Whyless, I started wondering where that old amp pickup was. Like my other favorite orchestral-progressive band Little Tybee (with whom River Whyless will be touring this spring), these guys share my love for great classically-trained violin, loudly amplified.

Their debut DIY album A Stone, A Leaf, an Unfound Door is available for whatever-you-feel-like-paying on Bandcamp (I paid $15 I think, a bargain). I’m hearing a little Death Cab in here (Track 4 Cedar Dream Part 1, some Decemberists (Track 8 Widows Walk)… Its just awesome, trust me. Listen to Cedar Dream Part II (Track 8). fuckyeah! It’s all just what my violin wanted out of me years ago but never got.

There’s this trend of putting a lot of craft and effort into album art in this digital day and age, and I’m loving it. Painter Brendan O’Keefe spent 4 months on the art for this one. Day-um!

I love all this amazing hand-crafted modern music coming from the basements and bathroom recording studios of the South. There is a lot of kinship here with Little Tybee (Colin Agnew of Little Tybee played on their record), though maybe a little more on the dark-folk 16 Horsepower end of the spectrum. . It should be an fantastic combination and their tour starts March 1. Follow them on Twitter.  I plan to be there.

photo courtesy Brad Senne

Brad Senne‘s dreamy acoustic track “Drift Gently” is featured in the trailer to our film A FINE LINE.

Another great licensing find from Magnatune, Minneapolis-based Senne has been involved in several projects including Beight and Walker Fields. I also licensed Beight’s track “Cecilia” for a new prAna video, “Holding On“

Weighted Wings by Brad Senne

I caught up with Senne during some downtime between touring and SXSW:

From day one, both child and parent are struggling to become their own person, yet the bond that ties them together is the strongest imaginable. It’s a livelong balance between hanging on and letting go. Like climbing in many ways. Kate explains it well in this piece we did for prAna.

Here are some stills from the video, which I shot over about a week in Atlanta, on the Panasonic AF-100 and Nikon lenses, as well as the new Panasonic AC-160. The interviews were lit with Westcott TD6 daylight banks, and the campus-board segments were lit with Lowell DP lights.

Well in more dumb news, the showdown has arrived. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) copyright infringement and-a-bunch-of-other-stuff legislation currently being debated in Congress has created a schism of sorts. It effectively pits content creators (including large media corporations, news organizations, hollywood studios, and Yours Truly) against content providors (including Google, Facebook, internet providers, news organizations, and, er - Yours Truly.)

The supposed spirit of the bills are to protect the copyright of content creators, and give them more power to go after infringers and piraters (doing what I did above for example, a collage of SOPA blackout protest screenshots, for which I did not ask permission).  It takes existing copyright legislation and gives it more teeth.  The effect would probably be horrible, as most hamfisted legislation tends to do. Not only can you go after infringers, but you can also go after the infrastructure that enables that infringement to happen. Most likely it would shift power to mega corporations like Google and Facebook who would then control what you can do and see on the internet…. (get it?)

It would mean the end of the Wild West Internet (good and bad), and the beginning of some kind of corporate-run war-on-drugs type internet (bad). Lots of companies, like Google and Facebook, have built their business, for better or worse, by ignoring and/or turning a blind eye toward copyright infringement. Otherwise there would be no way to display search engine results or videos of cats dancing to Michael Jackson.

The ASMP (American Society of Media Photographers), long the watchdog and rigorous defender of photographers rights and copyright, is on board with the bills, in spirit, supporting amendments to the text (here) – Click HERE and search “SOPA”. Though they support it, they are not exactly shouting it from the mountain tops.

Photographers have long battled infringement and piracy, with mostly pathetic results. The legislation is probably more about countering the growing power of China Inc than helping us photographers make a buck, and I don’t support SOPA, but I hope we don’t lose sight of the importance of copyright protection. The danger in this Age of Protest is that any talk of copyright protection will be hereafter met with a molotov cocktail.

So take that black mask from Urban Outfitters off your face, read the summary of the bill, think for yourself and Let’s talk:

Atlanta-based Sound of Seventy Three is the one-man cinematic post-rock affair of NY-born Douglas Johnson. So73 is featured many times throughout A FINE LINE which I directed with Josh Fowler.

Usually when I edit I am speed-listening through literally hundreds of tracks, just trying to get some inspiration. When I heard Sound of Seventy Three’s Shields I was piecing together the timelapse and slo-mo sequences from the Mt. Evans section of the film and it was kind of a revelation. When JFo came over and we watched that section it was like, … dude.

You know what I’m talking about.

That track eventually formed the basis for the introspective and philosophical tone of the rest of the film (love it or hate it).

Frank Lloyd Wright plays starting at 5:20, (“New boulders is what’s now”) and then rolls into Shields for the section in Mount Evans. Later, a chopped-up Spilt Milk tracks the whole Warpath section.

I licensed all the Sound of Seventy Three tracks from Magnatune. Check out Sound of Seventy Three on iTunes here.

Johnson is a multi-instrumentalist, been at it since he was a kid. He teaches yoga for a living here in Atlanta. We got together over joe at Dancing Goats in Decatur.

TBM: How did you come up with the name Sound of Seventy Three?

DJ: I was born in ’73.  I love all that old funk – that era when hiphop and electronic music started coming out, just a really weird time in music.

TBM: What’s your musical background?

DJ: I played music from a very young age in school [at United Nations International School in NY]. We had a very strict music program and the teachers took it very seriously. I was maybe 5 years old. When I was 10 or 12 I took up the clarinet and started playing in the band. I eventually stopped the clarinet and lost interest until I heard U2 and shortly after discovered The Cure. That totally turned my head around [about the guitar]. I had thought a career in music was just an impossible dream, but I couldn’t put it down and I just got more and more into it. So after high school I studied music theory in college.

For awhile there I got really into jazz and classical, but eventually I let all that go and got back into [rock]. I’ve played in instrumental funk bands, blues, a lot of stuff.

With Sound of Seventy Three, when I wrote those first few songs, I thought, “this is what I was meant to do.” Everything I listened to in the 80s: new wave, punk, and everything else showed up there. It just felt like the natural way that I played. It’s what someone would play after growing up in New York in the 80s, after marinating inside you for that long.

TBM: Tell me about how you got involved with licensing through a third party like Magnatune.

DJ: I had read an article that mentioned Magnatune as part of the new music industry “Music 2.0”, saying this was the new model of the music industry, new labels, new distribution models and all that. So I sent them an email and I forgot about it. They accept maybe 5% of submissions, so I didn’t really expect to hear back from them. But then I heard back from them, and I realized maybe I should take it more seriously.

TBM: Are you selling tracks through other sources?

DJ: Nothing is exclusive, so you still have freedom to sell through iTunes, etc.

TBM: Mostly selling or also licensing?

DJ: My albums tent to spike when they first release, then it falls off when everyone downloads them. And then there is the licensing. And that at least has the potential to overtake the sales. If you can produce enough tracks that people want to use in film or commercials, the lump sum per track is far greater than how much you can make per track for downloads. The consumer market is actually very small compared to commercial music licensing, and Magnatune is well aware of that.

TBM: How about marketing and getting exposure?

DJ: Generally people like music they already know. So if you want to connect with people with music, you go to shows, and you get in front of a band you already know. That’s usually how it’s done. I don’t really want to be doing live shows at this point in my life. So YouTube has been really great for that. Up until then I would record a track maybe in a day. Tracked, made a video and uploaded it to Youtube in the same day. I had to really get over my perfectionism to do that. Sort of like the new Blues. I thought about this new cottage industry of music where people can make their own studio at home, and like Etsy where people are buying stuff from people made at home, and the lack of quality is part of the charm. I thought maybe I could be part of this industry but for music, where people who listened to your music actually appreciated that low level of production.

TBM: How else are you using Youtube? Music videos?

DJ: One thing I do is video demos about gear, where I actually use the equipment to produce original music, so the equipment is being used in context, so people can see the equipment but also hear new music from me. I think it’s a unique thing, I don’t see many people doing that on youtube, so I’m hoping it’s a good little niche I made for myself.

TBM: What are you working on now?

DJ: I’ve been really interested in acoustic textures lately. I’ve been trying to incorporate them into what I’m already doing without making it too foreign to anyone who may already enjoy what I’m doing. I can make a track that’s all acoustic and really pretty, but maybe it starts to feel like its something else, not quite this music I feel very close too. So its an organic process, where you get the instruments and start playing them and see what comes out of them and how it all fits in. I might do little singles or EPs where I just combine these instruments and I see if its working or not. The internet has allowed me to do that. I can actually release something and see other peoples reactions and just see how it fits with me. When you release something and put some distance between you and it, you can kind of think about it more objectively. So it’s nice to do that before, say, Magnatune picks it up.

TBM: Do you write for other musicians?

DJ: A little. Musicians don’t make much money, and if you are trying to make money off that, its pretty challenging. Plus I get so tired off of working on other peoples’ material that I have nothing left for my own music. If I found someone I really had a synergy with, I would probably just form a band with them. My music has a sort of cinematic, spacey feel to it, and its hard to find a vocalist that works with that feel.

TBM: How about live shows?

DJ: I’ve heard that we rock the house when we play live! I love to play it live. Usually when you play clubs, no ones heard of you, or they are there for someone else or just want to enjoy their beer. Someone might come up to you afterwards and buy a CD, but you’re home at 5 and you have to go to work that day. Playing in clubs… the closest thing to that is being a furniture mover. It seems very thankless. It’s tough. Whereas I can spend all that time at home and finish a track that could end up in a film. All my buddies who are playing Sound of Seventy Three with me are all family men and that takes up a lot of time right now [so we don’t play live much]. I’m single so I am just married to the music.

TBM: Tell me about your recording process.

DJ: In my living room, in the middle of the night. I rarely even mic anything, just direct, very lofi, but for me music has never been just about the highest quality. Nothing I use is the highest quality anything. I get on these gear review pages, and these guys are all obsessed with their equipment and it’s like, “Well, where’s your album? You’re spending so much time and money and you’re on these message boards all the time but where’s the music, dude?” You know? I mean it’s good to care about that stuff, it matters, but at a certain point you’ve gotta just knock it out.

Maybe I’ll be leaving the whole shoestring behind some day, but for my first two albums it was more a mindset of, “What can I get away with?” Sometimes it happens where when production quality goes up I don’t like it as much. Something gets lost.

*All photos music and video on this page courtesy of Douglas Johnson

Germany-based musician Philipp Weigl is a composer of ambient, electronic and downtempo music. His track “Save” is featured on my film A FINE LINE, during the “Dream Sequence” where Dave Graham is waking from another freaky dream about Libya and wandering the Idaho wastes looking for rock (was it just a dream?). The clip is available below:

I spent a lot of time fitting the soundtrack (available on iTunes) to the visuals in the film, and I sourced much of it through the online music licensing agency Magnatune  which has a particularly strong collection of down tempo electronic music. This is where I found Weigl and his music. He is also available on iTunes.

The official soundtrack to A FINE LINE is available on iTunes as well.

It’s interesting to compare notes about content licensing with independent musicians. Photographers/videographers who “use” music on a regular basis often forget that they are in the same boat: working out a system for sustainable licensing is critical.

So back to Weigl:

Courtesy Philipp Weigl

TBM: First, A little about yourself, where are you from, etc and how did you get started in music, and in professional music?

PW: I was born in 1979 in a mid-sized town called Freising in the south of Germany. From an early age on, I was six years old at that time, I took lessons in classical piano. At the age of twelve I grew much interest in composing my own little pieces of music. I took a holiday job working as a harvester, and from the money I bought my first synthesizer-workstation (GeneralMusic S2) to realize my ideas. Later I continued my classical piano studies at the University of  Music in Munich, Germany, but I’ve never lost touch composing my own music. In 2005 I had my debut EP (called ‘Common Cause’) released on the internet-label ‘Comatronic’. Those web-labels were widely popular at that time and after some more releases on different labels, I got a deal with ‘Thinner’, one of the biggest and most influential net-labels. The music there was completely free to download, which resulted in high download rates a wide-spread perception. With the rise of the Web2.0 a great number of net-lables (including Thinner) disappeared from the surface and I had to look for new ways to present my music and that led me to a label named Magnatune.

TBM: Licensing images in this way for example is a very tricky business unless you can work with a good agency. When did you start working with Magnatune (and other sources if so) to license your music?

PW: It was around 2009 when I first came in touch with Magnatune. It is a web-based label that offers music-licensing and membership-downloads for about 1200 albums through all musical genres. Two things were vital for me to get in contact with Magnatune: First they have a fair royalty system (artist gets 50%) and second they are constantly adjusting and optimizing their offers in that very difficult music business-sector.

TBM: Has this been a fruitful endeavor? Do you see yourself interested more in licensing music for commercial/film/documentary production or are you more interested in performance, or something else?

Philipp Weigl – Beyond by Philipp Weigl

PW: Yes, I’m happy with my situation at Magnatune. Approximately 95% of my earnings come from music licensing (for films, homepages etc.). It’s a fact meanwhile that nobody gets money anymore from single music downloads or plays. Even Lady Gaga received only $167 from Spotify for 1 million song plays – that says a lot. So, because I’m not performing live, selling licenses is the most important factor for me at the moment.

TBM: Outside of working with a company like Magnatune, How do you price your music for licensing?

PW: Without a platform that promotes your music, it’s very difficult to get the people to know your music. I have only had one single licensing deal outside from Magnatune and that involved a classical piano piece. The pricings are moderate, the market dictates the prices. It’s a nice appreciation for your work but nothing to support a family with.

TBM: You have a family?

PW: No, I don’t have children. Like most of the musicians (and artists in general) I can’t live from my music.

TBM: What else do you do for a living?

PW: I’m working as a piano teacher in “real life”. And time for composing songs is sometimes very limited because I’m also doing additional studies in music-pedagogy at the University in Munich.

TBM: What is the scene like for indie musicians where you are in Germany?

PW: Honestly, I’m not so much a part of that scene. Music-labels are increasingly losing significance and the ways of music promotion and reception are changing rapidly. But you have now the opportunity to gain attention for your music regardless of where you live. Anyone can post a video on Youtube, which is blessing and curse at the same time. The good thing is you have instant feedback, the bad thing is that that feedback is in 99.99% of cases very poor, which can be discouraging.

TBM: As I understand it, everyone in Europe learns how to climb about the same time they learn to ride a bicycle. So have you ever been climbing?

PW: (laughs)Yes, if you live in the south, the Alps are very near. My parents took me on hiking and climbing trips from a very early age on. Later I did some (basic) bouldering in one the numerous climbing halls established by the ‘German Alpine Association’.

TBM: Do you travel to the States much for music?

PW: No, I’ve been only twice in the U.S. Once as a tourist and the second time with a student exchange program. But I sometimes get some very nice feedback from there.

TBM: Plans for 2012?

PW: Perhaps a new album (would be the fifth), I already have most of the songs finished. I recently also produced some songs in collaboration with a great singer from Geneva, maybe there will be a release. But I learned not to force things to much, it’s better to let them happen.

As part of our new feature climbing film A FINE LINE, co-director Josh Fowler and I spent a week shooting with some of the best boulderers in the world, Daniel Woods, Jimmy Webb, Dave Graham and others in Castle Rocks, Idaho as they tried a landmark climb called Warpath. The nearly 30-move route was established by James Litz in 2007, and was unrepeated. It was thought to be V14 or V15, a grade that would put it among the hardest established boulder problems ever done.

Woods eventually repeated Warpath after a couple days work, grading it V14. Nonstop blizzards moved into Southern Idaho after that, and after a few days of doing absolutely nothing, thoughts turned to exploring the untapped climbing potential in the endless boulders near Castle Rock.

Originally our film was to be called Warpath, and was centered around the second ascent of this route, but once the weather went bad, the real story came out. A repeat of a world-class problem like Warpath may be rare, but finding new climbing opportunities today is almost less likely, and takes just as much if not more effort and single-minded focus. Dave Graham is one climber who takes that focus to the limit. In the last decade he has single-handedly established some of the most important high-end climbing areas around the world and is known as sort of a mad ambassador of extreme climbing. Our time with Graham in Idaho inspired us to focus on the more intangible aspects of climbing at the top levels: this passionate quest for the elusive “perfect problem”.

In this excerpt from the film, which is partially narrated by climber and writer Peter Beal, a cabin-bound Graham wakes from recurring dreams about “Libya, wandering the plains with friends, and sick new boulders.” It’s The Vision of Dave Graham:

More about the film here

Buy it here