Though indie bands like Fledgling Death, The Savage Ohms, and Bliss Blood & Like Wow may never get their 15 minutes of fame, a new site proves that somebody was listening - once, at least. Alternative Press music critic Jim Santo on Wednesday launched Demo Universe, a huge database of 1,000 reviews of demo recordings by unsigned bands across the country, in an attempt to make "the cassette underground" a matter of public record.
"There's a whole subculture of music lovers - a shadow record industry - that is into demo tapes," says Santo. "They say, 'From the artist to my ears, no middleman. I'm hearing it first and it's raw and that's cool."
While it can seem the formula for indie success is just a catchy name (Homo In A Wheelchair), Santo actually listens to and critiques the avalanche of hopefuls. The site provides contact information and email addresses for the bands listed, just in case there are any A&R lurkers, says Santo, and one pick of the week is available as an audio file for download.
The reviews are the culmination of Santo's six-year tenure writing the demo review column at Alternative Press magazine. "I review everything I get in the mail," Santo assures, noting that he occasionally reviews 10 demos at a sitting, adding two to four reviews a day to the site. "Cassettes get priority, because they don't anywhere else," Santo says. "Too much money and not enough talent goes ... into producing CDs - they tend to be more commercial, and that leads to derivativeness."
Having reviewed some 5,000 bands, Santo easily negotiates the murky waters of post-genre musicology (i.e. "Vampire Nation ... is strange and phat, incorporating goth, trance, trip hop, chant, and old-school space music"), but is still able to put inept musicians in their place (i.e. "Thrill My Wife [will] never be more than a poolside party band").
While most critiques can be dispatched after the first dud track, "The worst ones are the borderline ones where you think there is something going on, so you keep listening and listening," says Santo, "but eventually you don't find anything to excite you and you're just sad."
The site isn't Santo's first exposure to the Net. In 1995, when the magazine had started to reduce his column space because "unsigned bands don't advertise," Santo decided to go to the Web. After publishing a makeshift site for a year, Santo pulled it down when a deal with Alternative Press seemed imminent. When that fell through, Santo kept Demo Universe dormant.
In March, Jon Carson, the 24-year-old CEO of indie music community resource Outer Sound, showed up at Santo's house in Sunnyside Queens with a bottle of Jim Beam. "He came to New York ... and plied me with liquor" to put Demo Universe up at their site, Santo recalls. Demo Universe is now nested among the other four resources at Outer Sound, including indie music mag Scratch, a "university" for low-fi recording, and a studio database.
Santo, in fact, was one of the first to review singles from Joan Osborne, Lisa Loeb, and BioHazard, but most bands he writes about linger way off the dial. While Alaska has a "hopping" scene, indie music isn't entirely a nationwide phenomenon, says Santo. "I've never gotten anything from Idaho or Wyoming," he muses, "and Connecticut is the worst state in the union - too many Republicans."
Some 900 unsigned bands have also found a home at the 4-year-old Internet Underground Music Archive, which oversees a network of indie band Web sites. For US$240 a year, bands can post an entire single and a 20-second excerpt from another. Though most labels are antsy about digital downloading, most indie rockers are eager for any kind of distribution. As a result, IUMA recently licensed Liquid Audio technology to let users bootleg singles from the Net.
From the Wired News New York Bureau at FEED magazine.
