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From the Bolton Evening News 24/7 section Jan. '06
Who are
you? We are Merchandise. Brad B. Wood on guitars and vocals,
and Conrad Astley on keyboards. To be Richard Branson.
From CITYlife (Manchester's culture/ listings mag) Oct. '04 Made
in Manchester: Merchandise Who:
Duo Brad B Wood and Conrad Astley who have shared a love of fusing
electronica with acoustica, matching lo-fi vocals, tinkly pianos and jazz
riffs with inventive sampling. Bolton born and based Wood takes care of
vocals, guitar instruments, bass and production while Manchester based
Astley looks after keyboard instruments, sampling and programming. What
to expect:
The pair formed a goth band when they first met at York University
in 1994, their name is taken from a Fugazi song and their recently
released second album, Lo-tech Solutions to Hi-tech Problems, begins with
a 1½ minute jazz solo. Safe to say they like a bit of variety. The common
thread through their tunes, though, is an idiosyncratic, sunny mix of the
stripped-down, plus an exacting use of the variety of instruments, live
samples and sounds used. Collaborator Roger Williams’ lyrics give their
songs a kind of everyday poetry, and tracks on their album range from
joyful to hypnotic to mournful and back again. The
struggle so far: Because the duo use a multitude of
instruments, samples and techniques to create their songs, they don’t
perform live. “The only way of getting round it would be to change the
music completely or play to a backing tape – which neither of us wants
to do,” explains Wood. Because they aren’t really part of a scene, the
band have received good reviews but “people don’t really know what to
do with it. It’s like two strange blokes in a little cottage
industry.” What next: After recent good press, Merchandise have re-released their single ‘Swallowing Curses’, which shows their quirky style and Wood’s simple, worn-velvet vocals off to good effect. Each album has taken four years to make, so it might be a while until the next one. You can see why: “We went to the Isle of Skye to master the CD and I made the guy spend about ten minutes on the silence between the tracks. Then we listened to the album and made him redo practically every one. He used to do all the big EMI stuff – Frankie Goes to Hollywood, The Eurythmics… I don’t think he had as much hassle off them.” Album Lo-tech Solutions to Hi-tech Problems and re-released single Swallowing Curses are out now. Nicola Mostyn
From LODOWN Magazine (Berlin) August '04 Maybe it's because Bolton Wanderers played a fairly good season in the Premier League. Maybe it's because Brad B. Wood and Conrad Astley, the masterminds behind Merchandise, successfully resisted in forming a goth rock band back in the day. Maybe it's because whimsical is the new tough. Whatever it is, fact is that the third album from Bolton hailing duo Merchandise, is combining luscious acoustic loveliness with the wonders of the electronic (r)age. Although they're adoring Ian Mackaye and Fugazi, "Lo-tech Solutions to Hi-tech Problems" is sounding part Marcus Acher, part Damon Gough, part Richard Brautigan. Gorgeous. Pure. Pop. Indeed, Summer is finally here. I find it pretty unusual, that Merchandise somehow seems to work as a trio, because Roger Williams is responsible for (nearly) all the lyris. How does this work out? Are you doing the music first and he's coming up with some lyrics that fit the vibe? It's really more the other way around most of the time. We've tried working with Roger in a few ways but the usual method is just to collect his lyrics and when we come up with musical ideas go through them and see what fits the mood. Recently though Roger said he wanted to try to write to a tune so I gave him a new guitar led idea and the results are sounding really good - should be a catchy one.
The early plans to form a goth band were short lived and ill-advised! We met at university in York and got drunk together at a band jam session which led to more drinking and listening to music. We'd met a guy and his girlfriend who wanted to form this band with us, so when me and Con had a rehearsal to see what we could put together for them we discovered we just didn't really want to do that sort of stuff. So we decided to just experient and see where that took us. We've got the early tapes somewhere but there's no way you're hearing them!
Great music is great music and it would be a sad old world if we only listened to bands that sounded like us . Fugazi were one of the bands that bonded us in the first place and I think that one of the first times Con came over to Manchester was to watch Fugazi. Roger's also a massive fan and the name was his suggestion as is Alan who drummed on 14:53.
I'd say that we've always had a willingness to let ourselves make the music we want to without worrying too much about where it's going until it's got there. Both of us love all kinds of music so it's pretty natural for that to shine through. We're not the sorts to do all this for a fashion or lifestyle statement so you can forget the matching sharp suits and sound alike songs, we'll just write what we think sounds good and what we want to listen to.
We've only released one album and two singles before. It all started off with a 10" of dark instrumental electronica that I put out on Cityscape before we even had a name - it back fired a bit as catalogue numbers aren't so memorable! Once we'd settled on Merchandise though we spent a fair while putting together the first album This is . . . Merchandise which, looking back on it, was probably a little too varied and lacked focus in parts. It helped us decide on the direction we wanted to go in and there are some good tunes on there, but they did tend to be a bit harsher - more like Sunday Song on the new album which was the first song started for Lo-tech Solutions and the last one finished.
By the time we did the Swallowing Curses single we had really started to find our voice and were sounding as we wanted. We'd started to use acoustic guitar, piano and sampled drum loops a lot more and I'd settled on a vocal style I was happy with. That was the stepping stone to the new album which took a long time to make but I think we can say we're really happy with how it's turned out. What's even better though is the new stuff we're working on now which is even more catchy so we're really excited about that at the moment.
The idea came from a conversation Roger and I had where I was going on about the story that during the space race NASA spent loads of money trying to develop a ball point pen that would work in zero gravity and the Soviets had got around the problem by using a pencil. I don't know how much truth there is in that but Roger said words similar to the album title and we rang Con and he also liked it so that's what it became.
We just felt that it fitted in with the whole way we make the music and I suppose it could be an attitude to life if you like - not to be taken too seriously though, we always like what we do to have an element of tongue in cheek just so we don't disappear too far up our own arses.
As for the titles - all of them have a story and if anybody really wants to know any particular ones they can feel free to email us through the site and I'll bore them to death with them. They weren't intentionally themed but like the lyrics they seem to work together - so we liked that.
Brad and Con Interviewed by Sven Fortmann
From Diskant ezine April '04 http://www.diskant.net/talentspotter/labels/cityscape.htm Cityscape Records is a record label based in Bolton that has been running since 1996. They've put out records by Merchandise, Mazeppa and Microcosm, though I'm assured that they are not restricting themselves to bands that have names starting with the letter M. They're releasing an album by Ian Jackson later this year! We talked to Brad B. Wood, label founder, owner, runner, and member of at least two bands that have names beginning with the letter M.
Cityscape comes from Merchandise's wordsmith Roger Williams from when we were in sixth form. He had written a set of lyrics which I had set to music called Cityscape, and it was supposed to be a play on city and escape and came from looking over Bolton and Greater Manchester from the all surrounding moors near where we lived. We both had the feeling that we wanted to travel, but felt pretty hemmed in at the time - I'm glad to say we both realised our teenage dreams of travel, and I suppose when I set up the label as a student I felt that the label could be my way of escaping creatively. All very earnest stuff - I've cheered up a bit since!
I have always loved listening to records from all over the globe and hearing something private and intimate to the people who made them. I've particularly always had a thing about 7" singles and finding gems that get released and so often overlooked. So when I set up the label on a student loan back in '96, I wanted to put out one of these obscure gems that people I didn't know would come across and hopefully love. Fortunately I met Con (the other musical half of Merchandise) at uni and we started to put together this dark electronica which I put out as a 10" without so much as a band name to identify it, only known by the catalogue number. I have since seen the problem with this policy! We did get one fan letter from a bloke called Geoff in Dudley and another from an old bloke who had misread the article in the local paper and wanted to buy classical vinyl so we did manage obscure, but we'll let other folk decide if it was a gem or not.
I've always liked labels with a cohesive image and the idea that they'll put out whatever they like if they think it's worthwhile, so that if you generally like what they do you can be pretty sure to like something new from them and take a punt on it. The labels I like and look to are plenty and varied, but here are a few: Thrill Jockey, Dischord, Factory, Blue Note, ECM, Saddle Creek, Sub Pop, Warp, Domino, Jeepster, Soul Jazz...
I suppose I was a little late getting on the net, and the first few releases were done by more old fashioned means - typewriter, phone, fax, etc. But I knew I was going to have to get it sorted, so I bought the domain name www.cityscaperecords.co.uk well before I got around to buying a computer and writing the website. I've had a computer for just over a year now and it's changed the way I work completely - I'm able to get in touch with so many more people, and so much quicker than before and I'm pretty positive about it all until the bugger plays up when I swear a bit. But I'd find it difficult to go back now as everyone expects you to be up to speed with computers.
I don't download music myself because I just like to have the physical product, but I suppose a lot of people do. I think we can help matters by releasing whole albums that are good instead of a couple of good tracks filled out with crap nobody wants anyway - though with a high speed broadband connection, you can get whole albums pretty swiftly. I do think it's wrong to rip musicians off but I also think it's a matter of scale. Before computers, people always taped things and photocopied stuff without consent and if it's the odd album you're doing for yourself and you still buy the originals of the ones you like, I can't say I have too much of a problem. If it gets to ripping off whole back catalogues and effectively distributing them to everybody else on the web then I think it's not really playing the game - not quite cricket! The result of that will be that the big companies will have to cut costs even further by releasing even more pap that guarantees a profit, instead of developing new artists over a period of time. It will also mean that the money will have to be made from branding and merchandising and I think we've got enough of that. On the good side, it could mean that more bands have to make their money playing live but it will turn a lot of serious people into hobbyists who can't get a proper wage out of it. The knock-on effect of that is that the smaller people won't have the resources to make their music in the way they want or the time to develop new material, as they have to do other jobs to make their money. If the RIAA help stop large scale free distribution I think it'd be a good thing, as long as they don't take it too far. Pay-per-download sites are the only way you can ensure that the small labels you like will have the money to record and release new music.
There is definitely a loose scene of people who care about music, write fanzines and e-zines on it, and generally live it. I spend a lot of time e-mailing enthusiastic people who care more about the music than the image. I don't feel we're particularly connected to a local scene but we are part of this larger, more disparate scene of creative types flying the flag for our music.
Oh yeah! When you've put so much into something and someone doesn't like it or is just very nonchalant, you can get pretty dispirited. Every time the computer plays up I have mini transient crises but I tend to get over those! Getting through the glass ceiling from indiedom to getting your music into mainstream shops takes some doing as well, and you often want to yell "just listen to the music" at industry sorts who are more worried about such prosaic things as advertising budgets! Ultimately though, good reviews from people you respect and the feedback from those around you keep you going, but you can't get away from the financial worries which either allow you to carry on recording or mean you have to stop and rely on someone else to release it.
Merchandise is the band I formed with Conrad Astley and is the band the label was formed to release. I had always wanted to set up a label anyway but Merchandise gave me the excuse and the reason. I was later in a band called Mazeppa and it seemed natural to release those records through Cityscape as well. I've always intended releasing music by other people, but having the money free to invest is always a problem. We'll be releasing two EPs by Ian Jackson later in the year and I hope to find more people I'm interested in working with. I do get sent demos and they're appreciated but they'd have to be pretty special for me to get the chequebook out!
Well obviously I'm excited about Ian Jackson's stuff or I wouldn't be putting it out. He's from England but now lives in Perth, Australia and can be seen live down there. We're hoping to get a few gigs booked here though to tie in with the release of his music in summer. As always, it's pretty difficult to describe the music but I think Bonnie Prince Billie, Violent Femmes and the Pixies are fairly close. But you'll just have to wait and see!
I'm afraid I'm a bit of a control freak and I do design the sleeves. Photography is a hobby and like some of the labels I mentioned above I want some cohesion between the releases visually. Obviously I come up with ideas and everybody has a chance to change this and that but I have to be happy with it before it goes out and I am a pedantic, fussy bastard - but I think that's good for quality control! (Though I do admit that the inside cover to the first Merchandise album was unforgivably bad, and can only say in my defence that it was an early effort!)
We supply the mastered CD and film artwork to Lemon Media in Bridgwater, Somerset and they do the rest. They've always done the job on time and well so yeah, I'm happy to recommend them!
Obviously, the more people who find out about your music the better. The most difficult thing is to get your music heard by people in the first place, once they've heard it you've got a chance, so the more people read about you and hear your name, the more likely they are to look for your music and give it a go. At our size good reviews are everything as they are what can guarantee decent distribution, which ultimately gets your music to the people who want to hear it. Without press coverage the distributor can't sell it to the shops because if the shops haven't heard of you why would their customers have? As for how we get it, we look for magazines, fanzines, e-zines and radio shows whom we think will be sympathetic to our sort of stuff and we get it to them. Then hopefully the music does the rest and if they like it we get some great coverage. With that we can put it on the site, later press releases and on it goes. It's frightening but it seems that many writers seem to be afraid to be the first to say much about a new band either way until they've read the opinion of someone else. That seems to give them a reference point to hang their own review on, so good reviews tend to beget good reviews.
We'd love to have our music noticed by the sort of folk who can get it distributed all over the world, get it playlisted and on movies and obviously we send material and reviews to those folk. We've got a few irons in the fire and hopefully something will come of it so keep your ears open!
You've got to be in it for the love of it and you've got to realise the amount of thankless hard work that goes on behind the scenes to a) create the music and the product carrying it, b) get it noticed and reviewed, and c) get paid by your distributors! If you can hack that and aren't just in it for the image you'll be okay, but if you think it's a quick way to kudos forget it!
I can't believe how many American Music Club albums are out of print. If I could afford it I'd make sure California was available again - probably my favourite album that you just can't get at the moment. I had my copy nicked in a CD case from my car and it couldn't be replaced - I did copy Roger's copy and I think that was justified! If that ever becomes available again I'll be getting it for sure and if I'm ever rich enough I'd love to be the one putting it out!
From Planet
Sound on Channel 4 Teletext Feb '04
Every week we plough the mountain of demos which invade Chiswick daily - in the hope of unearthing a new and true gem. And guess what? Occasionally we do! This week we turn the spotlight on the latest CD to catch our ear. The keyboard player who dresses as Princess Diana, a disaster in the Czech Republic and a hatred of Alex Ferguson. We give you Merchandise . . .
Current line-up
with ages? Brad B. Wood (vocals, guitar, bass) Conrad
Astley (keyboards, piano, programming) both 27 Where from?
Bolton based First gig...
We don't play live, all our music is written just for that Best album ever
made... Kind of Blue - Miles Davis (Brad),
Deserters' Songs - Mercury Rev (Con)
From www.kidjuxta.tk
We write the songs together usually and the lyrics occasionally come from myself but more often from Roger Williams, a good friend of ours who writes lyrics such as those to Swallowing Curses in between writing his first novel. This usually works best as we just pick from a bank of lyrics that he's written and put it all together with our music until we're happy with the result: A sort of modern alchemy, except maybe Roger gives us gold and we turn it to base metal.
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