Josh Tillman is a joker, and may be he has a point? If you go to his website Father John Misty you will be able to stream his upcoming album ‘I Love You, Honeybear’, but there is a twist, and a big one: you will hear an extremely lo-fi version of the album on ‘SAP’, a new streaming service! A sort of fake Spotify which gives you a MIDI version of the new songs with no vocals of course…. I tried for a few seconds then I gave up.
‘I am pleased to introduce SAP’, writes Tillman, ‘a new signal-to-audio process by which popular albums are “sapped” of their performances, original vocal, atmosphere and other distracting affectations so the consumer can decide quickly and efficiently whether they like a musical composition, based strictly on its formal attributes, enough to spend money on it. SAP files sound incredible when compressed and streamed at low resolutions over any laptop speaker or cell phone. They are cheap to produce and take up even less space than the average MP3. They contain just enough meta-data to be recognized by sophisticated genre aggregation software. Everything you love about discovering and sharing free music, minus the cost to anyone: artist or fan.’
‘Even less space than the average MP3’? Oh, I feel the irony! He is a funny guy, and is he making fun of the way we listen music these days? Or does his irony make him sound totally pretentious? He is actually a guy very protective of his material, I saw him three years ago during a solo performance at Origami Vinyl, before he had taken his Father Misty John outfit and he asked me to take off the videos from the website! So may be this is also a way to mock the streaming culture. But in this case, I don’t understand why his songs are on Spotify.
However, despite the cheesiness of his SAP streaming service and its music for elevators, I can still hear the melodies which means that this album is gonna be great. Father Misty John’s ‘I Love You Honeybear’, is out on February 10th via Sub Pop.
