A MUSIC ALBUM?
IN 2021?
IN KENYA?
IN ITALIAN?
I like to contradict myself, I'm a lover of oxymorons and so today I'm going to talk (1) about the album "C'ERANO UNA VOLTA GLI ITALIANI IN KENYA", which I'm working on together with my partner Freddie Del Curatolo and then I'll talk (2) about why it doesn't make sense to make records nowadays.
Make yourselves comfortable if you have time to read, if not, go to your facebook profile and post me a smiley face and then I will rejoice that you have more important things to do.

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(1) RECORDING A RECORD

Well yes, here we are in Malindi licking wounds we don't have, forced into a non-constraint and so what do we do?
But yes, since we can't perform, we gather the best of our output into an album.
At my age, I don't waste precious time counting the profit/loss ratio, I prefer to waste it as I please. So I'm going for it.
I confess that I am having the time of my life squeezing the lemon out of the meagre, malfunctioning, Africa-sick technology I have here.
If you drop by to visit me in Malindi in my repurposed studio flat, you might witness some remarkable scenarios:
- I make unbelievable jumbles of cables and gizmos that the day before yesterday worked, yesterday didn't, today miraculously yes, tomorrow who knows, while I give vigorous smacks on the headphone mixer that, usually, stops the annoying 50 hz hum after the third or fourth beat.
- All the jack and cannon sockets on the cables that connect instruments, microphones and mixers to each other live a life of their own, allowing them to function according to the apparent direction in which the planet Mercury travels in its orbit.
- My poor Mac, considered old by the conventions of the market, coughs, has a fever, strange colours appear on the sides of the screen but, undaunted, does its job, rarely implanting itself. Obviously, it only implants, causing me to lose my work, when I have forgotten to save for at least an hour.
- The MIDI interface (another gadget that made the mac communicate with the electronic piano I have at home) bought in October with Jumia (local Amazon) on offer for 700 shillings, just yesterday overheated with the only force of the 5 volts of the computer's USB and stopped spreading delicious coloured lights like a Christmas tree (useless function - if not to understand if the interface is working - but evidently essential for the Chinese).
While I was throwing the irreparable device in the rubbish, I was thinking to myself: holy crap, there is only one Chinese thing that lasts... whoever guesses what it is wins a mask with a treble clef drawn on it.
- About my precious Korg keyboard I don't talk for superstition.
- All this in the hope that Kenya Power (the local electricity company) will grant the power supply for the duration of the session.
- When we record the voices, out of desperation, we decided to ignore - because they are there waiting silently for me to press the "REC" button to explode - croaking crows, screaming children, parents shouting for their children, mame's arguing animatedly while sitting right under the window of the studio room, trucks doing engine tests, upstairs neighbours pushing heavy furniture and various animals suddenly becoming talkative.
- No recording on Sundays. The nearby Seventh Orb Prophet Baptist Church holds masses so loud that Metallica performs lullabies in comparison.
Soundproofing the studio? And then die of heat? Please!
Between a warble and a solo you will hear a crow cawing... strictly in time.
Time in Africa is an abstract and secondary concept... the album should be out next autumn but if there are no longer any half seasons in Italy, there never were in Kenya.

(2) WHY RECORDS ARE NO LONGER MADE

Once upon a time, there were round objects which, thanks to a microgroove or laser engraving, offered the possibility of listening to music.
Once upon a time, there were record shops, where young people of all ages browsed through hundreds of offers, chose, bought, took home and listened to their favourite music.
What has happened? Where have they gone?
Who buys them any more, apart from the maniacal collectors browsing the stalls at vinyl fairs?
I read a book by Stephen Witt that I highly recommend: "Free: The End of the Record Industry and the Beginning of a New World of Music", it is enlightening.
I quote the description:
'The greatest story ever told about how music began to be pirated, the music industry was brought to its knees and our lives were permanently catapulted online. Three incredible and never-before-explored stories. That of the powerful record company Doug Morris. Karlheinz Brandenburg, the German engineer who invented the MP3. And above all, that of Dell Glover, 'patient zero', the greatest music pirate of all time. Because, in the end, great revolutions are made by a handful of people. The result of years of research and halfway between an investigation, an essay and an action novel, "Free" retraces every stage of the piracy era: from the first file-sharing platforms to the FBI investigations and subsequent trials, up to a sort of legalisation that allowed Apple to turn the clandestine mp3 market into a business, forever changing the way we think about music.
Personally, I would add that Apple's "business" is not that profitable for artists.
A few crumbs come from Itunes, I can confirm this from my works which have had a good following, but money.... I've never seen any money because, if your name isn't Mina Mazzini, you never reach the minimum quota that triggers the payment of fees. It has to be said that there were thousands of downloads of the songs I wrote for Albero Azzurro in the 1910s (of the third millennium, obviously).
In the book 'Free', it is told how the record industry collapsed in 2005 while people took it for granted that music can be downloaded for free from the net. Oh, yeah. So how the hell do musicians eat?
In a very simple way, they stop playing music or relegate it to a hobby and find another job.
I have seen dozens of recording studios go out of business in the first decade of this century, whereas in the last century, musicians and composers could not only make a living from royalties from record sales and copyrights, but also enjoy life. Now they struggle to buy a musical instrument on installments and line up at jam sessions where they play, obviously for free.
It is the system that has decided that musicians (and all the categories related to music production: authors, sound engineers, arrangers, producers, etc.) are a second-class category: the only way to produce music today is to "give" your works to the net (Youtube, Spotify, Itunes, or other) and to "hope" for an exorbitant number of views to pocket some crumbs of the advertising business. Records? No, those are no longer sold, people are starting to stop having even a CD player in their homes.

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But we're as countercultural as the boatman and we don't care. Soon we'll start a pre-purchase campaign (we're trying hard not to call it "crowdfunding" like everyone else does...) to at least pay back the healthy Tusker baridi we drank during the recordings.
If you don't have a CD player, we'll email you a (sigh!) digital copy of the album.
If you don't have a computer, we come and play a private concert at your house.
And then we give you a round of applause.