Sad week

I won't talk about Japan as if I thought fondly of families and victims of this tragedy.

I only focus on musical area which is not so good today.

When people talks about French electronic scene, they generally refer to Ed Banger or Kitsuné.

But Institubes is also one of the BIG name of our generation in techno and house music... well I should say "was a BIG name".

This morning, the official tumblr of the label announced the end of the Institube's story after 8 yeas of entertainment.

Here come the press released published this morning

"So, the next Institubes record is not coming soon. And I can’t tell you how much it pains me to write these words. We’ve released many records in our (almost) eight years of existence and managed to introduce a number of excellent artists to the world. Good times were had and accolades garnered. I’m not so conceited nor high on my own supply that I’d try and talk up our “legacy” but I don’t think that in five, ten or twenty years I’ll look at our discography and cringe. Now I get to tell you, Institubes fans, friends and allies, that we have to wrap it up. Party’s over.

I could write ten pages about the realities and difficulties of the music business but you’ll only get about two paragraphs and not much whining. We never lived those halcyon days some industry elders tend to rave about. We always moved through a post-apocalyptic, terminally pauperized landscape, complete with irradiated A&R zombies and mutated eyeless bloggers. It’s always been a bit of an uphill battle. But it got worse and worse. At first it was fun to figure out ways to get people to check out our music. But once that’s done and you have something resembling an audience, it becomes apparent that this is not really your job. Your job is to reconcile the public with the very idea of buying records. All the power to you if you can bear it.

We’re closing shop because the operation is losing too much money, this much is clear. Most of what we could have done to prevent or delay this outcome reside in two words: lifestyle and branding. Investing in t-shirts and co-branding, scoring “collaborations” or sponsorship deals with deep-pocketed companies. I have but a regret: we actually did it sometimes. We should have said no more often. Bands struggling to get together with brands, artists and audience deriving more validity from corporate interest than from anything else, bands happy to learn that in the future they would have to “take charge of their own promotion”: this wasn’t for us. In other words, on our small scale, we should have been able to carve a non-capitalist niche within the larger corporate world. I thought, being young and naive when we started, that “underground” meant just that.[ ... ] "
http://institubes.tumblr.com/

RIP Institubes (2003-2011)

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One other bad news today, was to learn the death of one the biggest artist of the west coast Nate Dogg.

RIP Nathaniel Dwayne Hale (1969 - 2011)

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I promise I'll post something more gay for the next article.