Motivated to check in here again and bring things up to date a bit.  The summer here has been so fantastic and things are looking up so it is a good time to write a bit and put it all in perspective.

The first thing to announce is the new date for the Paul E. Phonics release show.  After the first date was re-scheduled and the seconed cancelled at the last minute a third attempt will be made on Sept. 4, 2010.  Third time is a charm as they say!

Work has also begun on a follow-up E.P. and if all goes well that will be released before the end of the year.  You can also look forward to a few more live shows from Paul E. Phonics in 2010, dates coming soon.

On a slightly sombre note, the future of Fine Print Pariah is pretty uncertain at the moment.  The majority of energy and resources here are being poured into Paul E. Phonics right now which hasn't left much time for getting a live band into shape.  But you never know what will happen, perhaps FPP will be rejuvenated in some way, perhaps in a slightly different form and with a slightly different sound.  We'll see how things go.

And things are evolving in other directions here too.  A brand new project is in the works and will be introduced in a few months, the third addition - or dimension - to 5th Estate Music. Exactly what form this new project will take is not yet clear but it will be more than just music.  The goal is for this to be an onging "work in progress" with frequent output outside the traditional restraints of  "albums" or "E.P." (or "singles" for that matter).

So that's it.  Lot's going on here behind the scenes that will be out there for all to see, hear and experience this autumn.   Stay tuned!

Although the title seems like a great idea, obviously not everyone thinks this way, hence the cancelled Paul E. Phonics release show last Saturday.  Other than one occasion when the evening was accidentally double-booked, I can't think of another instance in my experience where the venue has cancelled the gig.  People do get sick, that I understand, but it is hard to swallow the excuse that there was absolutely nobody who was willing to hang out in the shop for a few hours and sell a few beers.  But apparently that was exactly the situation which I was informed of late on Saturday afternoon leaving me scrambling to contact the people who had confirmed that they were coming and to get the word out online in case anyone else decided to come spontaneously.  Not a fun time but the chance you take when organizing gigs in non-traditional venues I guess.

I would like to be able to say that there will be a new date very soon but that is just not the case and it looks like it will have to wait until autumn now which really takes the wind out of the sails.  I'm sure I could scrape something together in the next few weeks but the weather has been far too good and summer is generally not the best time for indoor concerts anyway.  People want to be outside enjoying it - me included! - the obvious reason why open air festivals are so popular now.

But I don't want to dwell on the negative and come across as bitter because I am not.  I learned many years ago that this kind of attitude will get you absolutely nowhere fast.  What I am doing is simply explaining the situation for anyone who is interested.  I am definitely no superman and I am sure it could happen in the future, but so far I have never cancelled a gig and I am very proud of that fact.  Admittedly there have been a few where it might have been better to cancel, but I stand by going through with it and I believe that one way or the other people always got something out of it even if the performance was a bit shaky. 

And besides, the weather here right now is incredible so who wants to sit around and stew in their own juices!?  New songs are in development, plans for a follow-up E.P. are being made and things are gearing up for the autumn when I will be hitting the stages again with renewed energy and even more determination.  Stay tuned and have a great summer!

Special thanks go out to Peter at "Schallgrenzen" ("Sound Barriers" in English) - one of Germany's top music blogs - for his feature about everything that has been going on here at 5th Estate Music.  Here is an English translation...

Everything takes a bit longer with me, but that shouldn’t be your concern.  I’m happy to leave the daily business of covering the “hottest new shit” to the others.  Now I’m going to kill two birds with one stone starting with an album that was sent to me ages ago.  Paul McCormick is Fine Print Pariah.  A Canadian who arrived in Berlin 10 years ago.  Recorded his debut album there on his own.  The result is a raw record with highs and lows, light and dark, the ebb and flow of the city where he lives and musically miles away from stylistic posing.  That takes backbone and stamina.  On the debut album from “Fine Print Pariah”, the connection to the earthy sounds of Black Sabbath, the psychedelic rock of Led Zeppelin, the progressive worlds of Pink Floyd, the rawness of Iggy Pop and the Alternative Rock of 90s bands like Alice In Chains and Soundgarden can be heard.  But the result is also very personal and one hears the passion pulsating, all a bit weird and painful.

Paul McCormick not only took care of all the instruments and vocals himself, but also the entire production and in doing so has created an album that is strangely beautiful with its old-fashioned sound.  Also with his new baby and the E.P. “Shock & Awe” released under the (admittedly strange sounding) name Paul E. Phonics, McCormick has chosen yet again to swim against the current.  Here it gets even rawer, weirder and darker with experiments drawing from stylistic elements of Post-Punk and Post- Rock and who knows what.  Music that despite its twists and turns, the distorted guitar sounds, the electronic sounds and the plaintive voice, remains touching with its uncompromised, pain-filled rawness and drama. 

Considering this uncompromising attitude, it only makes sense that Paul McCormick has started his own label - 5th Estate Music - to distribute his music.

Schallgrenzen, June 17, 2010

I guess the title says it all.  Haven't posted anything here for a while but it hasn't been for lack of things to write about.  In fact, it has been exactly the opposite and there has been very little time for this kind of thing.  But now with a few spare minutes it is a good time to do a quick update of what has been going here over the past couple of months.

The first priority was to get the Paul E. Phonics debut EP finished and ready for release and this has almost been fully achieved.  With the release date finally set for June 15, 2010 there are only a few finishing touches to take care of.  The cover art is finished (see pic below for a tease), the release event is organized (details here) and most importantly, the actual songs will be back from the mastering studio any day now.

The Paul E. Phonics live debut also took place in April and although being far from a smashing success it was a good opportunity to try out the live setup and do a bit of a dress rehearsal for a very small group.  Very intimate and productive in that sense.  The next shows will be a lot more streamlined and we are optimistic that the audience numbers will increase as time goes on.  Onwards and upwards!

And another important development in the Fine Print Pairah camp was a surprise received from a friend and fan.  A couple of weeks ago Micky Tose (aka Pondword) sent in a video that she made for "Toe The Line...Forever!".  Very trippy stuff and it looks like she definitely put a lot of hard work into it and will be entering it in a film contest so best of luck to her!

All for now but lots more to come very soon!

Even though spring still isn't quite here yet you can still feel it in the air and one of the great indicators that it is just around the corner is already upon us.  Yes, it is St. Patrick's Day again and even though it is not really celebrated here in Germany you can rest assured that there will still be people running around with green clothes and painted faces and some craziness will occur in the local pubs, especially the Irish ones.  And not long after that it will be Easter, a bit early this year but hopefully the beginning of an upward swing in the weather.  A good summer is definitely in order after the winter we had here!

So it seems that 2010 is chugging right along at a pretty good pace and we are trying to keep up with things here.  Live shows are being booked for Paul E. Phonics with the first date confirmed, details here.  The goal is to continue with 3 to 4 shows a month around northern Germany and get a short tour together to end the year which should take things a bit further into the south and possibly Poland and the Czech Republic.

There have also been considerations made concerning the Paul E. Phonics debut release which was originally planned as a full album but may now be scaled back to an E.P.  This is not for lack of material - there is actually enough material for nearly 2 albums at the moment - but for other non-artistic reasons.  Releasing an E.P. means fewer songs to get finished and mastered which will allow the release to happen sooner rather than later, a very important consideration.  The idea would be to do a spring release and then another E.P. at the end of the year, maybe late November or early December.  So it would be more like releasing an album in two parts.  E.P.s (and to some extent the singles) seem to be the trend right now with many declaring albums "obsolete" so as much as 5th Estate Music is not here to follow the crowd it is still a good opportunity to experiment with this form of release and compare it to the Fine Print Pariah album release.  Another major difference is that Paul E. Phonics tracks tend to be more "stand alone" productions so it isn't really that important how they are grouped and packaged together which is a lot different than the FPP debut which was created and organized very much as an "album" with the songs working off of each other to create a greater experience.  Not that the Paul E. Phonics stuff is any less artistic, just different.

No final decision has been made but it will be soon and when it is, this will be the place to find out about it.  Until then!

Even though the winter is far from over we figured it was a good time to freshen things up here and get ready for a new chapter in the story of 5th Estate Music.  As you can see, the site now looks a bit better...cleaner and sleeker. 

As for the next chapter, that is the one with Paul E. Phonics as the main character.  The weather has been awful here which has served as a bit of a blessing as far as creativity goes.  With basically nothing to distract or lure anyone outside it has been the perfect time to hunker down in the studio and finally get some Paul E. Phonics tracks finished.  A few preview tracks are ready to be revealed and to go along with all that there is a new website for the project  www.paul-e-phonics.com  It could work out that Paul E. Phonics takes the lead role for the rest of this year but we'll see how things go.  A debut album is in the works and will definitely be released this year, it's just a question of earlier or later at this point.  Work has also begun on a follow-up Fine Print Pariah album so that will be an important priority later on in 2010.

Speaking of Fine Print Pariah, there has been a lot of interest from podcasters recently and there will be updates in the news here when songs are played of course.    Efforts will be made to keep this ball rolling but chances are there won't be that much news for a while. We will try to keep things updated on what is going on behind the scenes though.

All in all, exciting times here.  Until next time!

We're well into the new year now and it's been business as usual here trying to maintain a bit of momentum for Fine Print Pariah and getting things planned for the grand entrance of Paul E. Phonics.

As far as the latter is concerned, it should be much easier now that an infrastructure has been developed and tweaked by the release of the FPP debut.  But as far as the former, there is still lots to do (actually it should be a constant and ongoing effort but we'll see how that works out as the year goes on) and there are always things to do to keep Fine Print Pariah relevant - at least in an underground/below-the-radar kind of way.

One of the main focuses lately has been to get the music into "on-demand" streaming services such as Spotify, Pandora, Grooveshark, Jango etc.  This has already been set up with Jango and has shown some good results so far so obviously getting the music on these other services became a bit of a priority.  But despite the fact that these are all internet services, it does not automatically mean that they are "international".  As it appears, the internet has borders after all - just like the real world!

I found this out yesterday when I tried to get things set up with Pandora which is based in the U.S.A. and is not available for "users" in Germany.  The irony was that it was still ok to submit music to them except for the fact that they require that the CD of the album be available for purchase through "Amazon".  Now, the Fine Print Pariah debut album is available through "Amazon"... Amazon.de that is!!!  For one reason or another (and probably one I will never understand)  items registered on Amazon.de are not automatically registerd on Amazon.com even though the items are available for purchase internationally!  So after a bit of cursing while reading the final consoling email from the support team at Pandora I decided to sleep on it and over coffee this morning I read through the submission process one more time only to discover something of a loophole.  As it turns out, a CD can be available through the "Disc-On-Demand" service at Amazon.com and still qualify for Pandora!  It then occured to me that I had opted out of this service when setting up the distribution with Tunecore because I already had CDs made and wanted to keep the physical product consistent.  In the end I decided that the exposure and the affordable availability of the CD in North America were more important than some dogmatic adherence to form and style and registered for the service.  In a couple of weeks the CD should be available in North America "on demand" and I will be able to get the songs submitted to Pandora...hopefully!

But that is only one aspect of the geography game that has been going on lately.  Spotify is a European service that is new to the U.S. and does not have things set up with all aggregators and definitely not with Tunecore...yet.  The irony here is that the service is orginally from Europe - where 5th Estate Music is located - but requires aggregators to submit music.  5th Estate Music has a U.S. based aggregator that doesn't yet have a deal with Spotify!   And after all that, both Spotify and Pandora are not available to users in Germany - probably because of the insane licensing fees demanded by the record companies and the ridiculous royalties demanded by GEMA (the equivalent of PRS or ASCAP here in Germany). 

I have also noticed the effects of this last problem on a more personal level when I have tried to access certain old TV programs or music videos on Youtube or similar services only to be greeted by a message like "we regret to inform you that due to licensing restrictions this service is not available in your region" or some other such line.  Even though Berlin is a really cool city and has become something of a second home, it still makes me wonder why I remain in a country that is so damn stubborn on issues that are crucial to my business.

Just had to get that off my chest!  All for now...hopefully the next entry will be a bit more positive...

The holiday season is now over and it's time to get on with things and get a good start in 2010.  That is just what has been going on here with a lot of work on the Fine Print Pariah web presence, getting things updated, adding a few new sites and generally doing a bit of new year's housekeeping.  The goal there is to get everything for FPP into a state where it can be left and will need only a bit of maintenance for the next few months while the live act is sorted out.
So for a while FPP will be taking something of a "back seat" and there will be a role reversal for the first part of 2010 - thus the change in priorities.  For various reasons - the most important being the lack of a live presence for FPP - the decision has been made to let Paul E. Phonics take the lead for a while and this will all start in a couple of weeks.  Some recordings are nearly finished and ready to be put out there and the studio work will continue to get an album ready for release in early spring.  One of the top priorities for Paul E. Phonics will be to get out there and do a lot of live performing.
So, it looks like the cat is out of the bag but we'll leave it at that for now.  More details about all of this coming very soon!

Haven't been keeping up with this very well but there has been a lot to do here and time is a precious commodity these days.  But with 2009 winding to close it is a good time to have a look back at what has been achieved this year and a blog post is the perfect way to sum this up.
For 5th Estate Music 2009 wasn't so much a first year as it was a first few months.  Even though it went "online" in September, the first real action only started a few weeks before the Nov.2 release of the Fine Print Pariah debut album and the goal since then has been to keep the ball rolling.  Some of the promotional activities that were meant to do this were successful but this is admittedly an area that needs a lot more work in 2010.  However, Fine Print Pariah did get some radio play and podcast play so the effort was not completely for nothing.
The licensing shop was set up and some physical distribution of the CD was arranged with a local record store here in Berlin.  Not bad for a start and now that the infrastructure is set up the process for future releases should be much easier.
The task now for the next week or so before everything shuts down for the holidays is to evaluate all of this and make plans for 2010.  At the moment it looks like there will be a very significant change in strategy that will take things in a very different direction.  Part of the reason for this has been the unexpected difficulty in getting Fine Print Pariah into a form that can perform live and other artistic factors have come into play as well.  The Fine Print Pariah debut album was a fine achievement but things are evolving quickly on the creative side so expect a few surprises in 2010.
All in all 2009 was a great success but there is still a lot of room for improvement.  The "label" was established, the first album was released and - without giving too much away too early - there is plenty more to come very early in 2010 so be on the lookout!
Have a great holiday season and nice "slide" into the new year as they say here!

The big day is finally here and it is a pretty nice feeling to have pulled this off without any significant hitches.  Even with all the preparation it still meant a long day of website updating and linking and emailing and phone calls but in the end it was all worth it.  The Fine Print Pariah debut album officially exists and is not only available in the FPP Shop but also through Amazon and all the big download stores such as iTunes, Emusic, Napster etc.  We'll see how things go in the next couple of months and will be using the experience as a bit of a barometer of how to approach future releases.  As with any first release this was a bit of an experiment and even though there was a lot of time and effort put into research and planning you just can't account for every variable in the equation.
Anyway, so far, so good!  Time to celebrate!