This January, musician Jyoti Mishra - aka White Town - recorded "Your Woman" in his bedroom using an old multitrack Tascam and an Atari. Four weeks later, it entered the UK charts at Number One.
__On a dreary day in England early this year, Jyoti Mishra (aka White Town) mailed out five copies of an EP he'd recorded in his bedroom using an Atari ST, free software, and an old multitrack. Without any promotion, his song "Your Woman" - a catchy '80s-sounding slice of technopop - was picked up by BBC Radio 1 and put into heavy rotation. Four weeks later, the unknown 30-year-old from Derbyshire had signed with EMI and entered the UK charts at Number One.
White Town's success has brought backroom production values center stage and left music pundits vacillating between declaring him a hero for lo-fi computer geeks and dismissing him as a one-hit wonder. He has since released the album Women in Technology, made a splash in the US, and left the big labels wondering how long they can hold out before cheap technology and the distributive power of the Net take over their turf. "The future for people like me," says Mishra, "is wide open."__
Wired: Following the success of your single, the media have been quick to portray you as a stereotypical computer geek. Are you?
Mishra:
I would say I'm a geek but not in the English way. English people don't understand what it means. To me, a geek is anyone who has a passion for what they do, yet in Britain the term is only ever associated with technology. In America you can be a geek in anything from horse riding to pottery.
Do you think the British press is still ignorant about technology?
Very. What gets to me is that the papers won't refer to Sting - who plays the double bass - as a PC nerd, even though he uses far more technology than I do. Forget the fact that the double bass has probably passed through countless sampling systems and digital edits; if you do a certain type of music, they will label you under a certain category. But what else are they going to say about me? Big fat bloke out of nowhere, must be a computer geek, must spend all his time looking at dirty pictures on the Net. They fail to realize that the Internet is about more than that.
How have you used the Net?
I had my own Web site, but it wasn't really much cop because I'm not that good at writing HTML. I use the Net predominantly for communicating, through email and newsgroups such as UK Music Alternative and UK Music Miscellaneous. That's how I met Anthony Chapman from Collapsed Lung, who did the remix for the 12-inch. We started emailing each other because we had similar tastes in music; when the chance came up to get a remix commissioned, I asked him to do it. That wouldn't have happened without the Internet. Similarly, there's loads of people I know in America - like my old label Parasol - who I met through Net conversations. It's a different level of experience: people aren't bothered by the superficial things. People buying my records are doing so not because of what I look like but because of the music itself.
The single "Your Woman" is possibly the most basically recorded song ever to get to Number One in the UK. What equipment did you use?
Both the single and my album were made with an old Tascam 688 multitrack tape recorder, an Atari ST, and a free sequencer disc I got from the front of a computer magazine because I couldn't afford a "proper" sequencer. In fact, I just bought my first piece of legal software today - I've never had enough money before.
So are you going to get a state-of-the-art studio setup?
No. Art needs limits. One of the things wrong with contemporary recording is that it's too generic, too sterile. Technology can make things too perfect - it can dehumanize you if you let it. You've got to fuck up the technology you've got rather than let the technology fuck you up. It took me two days to get the beats slightly out of time on "Your Woman." Two days! Getting them in time took two seconds. At one point I was routing the sync signal from the multitrack to my computer through a little box I'd built to put in noise. Today's music is all the same; all the studios have the same gear, their Korg M1s, their Trinitys. You can hear those sounds a mile off. My album is full of pops, clicks, buzzes, and hums, notes I don't quite get to, notes I miss completely - but it's all part of being human. The perfection is in the imperfection.
Ten years ago, it was impossible to produce a Number One record in your bedroom. Is the prevalence of high-quality affordable recording equipment going to change the music industry?
Technology is one of the major democratizing forces for art, especially pop music. If you were a fine-arts painter, for example, how would you get an exhibition at the Royal Academy? You'd have to know the right people, hang out with them, move to London, and then, maybe, after 15 years somebody might sponsor you. Me, I've come from nowhere and gone to Number One with no help at all except for radio play. I know I got a lucky break, but the future for people like me is wide open; we're on a new frontier. Once digital cash is sorted out, we're going to successfully make and distribute the music ourselves; that's going to worry the record labels. If you can publish to the world yourself, why have a record company? They're going to have to give you a really good reason to sign.
So will the geek inherit the earth?
EMI's lawyers don't think so.
