Mike Frasier

Slapsauce Music has gone LLC!

Slapsauce Music, the independent music production company I founded with Alex Surdu, has officially been registered as an LLC in the state of Illinois! This opens up opportunities for us to do bigger and better things than ever before.

Slapsauce Music is dedicated to building careers for independent musicians and artists. We make everything from music videos to merchandise and beyond, and our D.I.Y. business model allows us to provide custom-tailored services without breaking the bank.

Email slapsaucemusic@gmail.com if you’re interested in taking your music career to the next level!

Slapsauce is now on Patreon!

Slapsauce Music, the D.I.Y. multimedia production team behind Smooth Tuba Tuesday and Feature Friday, have launched a Patreon page!

Patreon is an excellent platform that connects artists and creatives with patrons all over the world, allowing people to support independent art while gaining access to exclusive content. These connections are more important than ever with the recent shutdown of live music venues due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

You can see our Patreon membership tiers at Patreon.com/Slapsauce

Southwest Tour with Presidio Brass!

I’m going on tour with Presidio Brass for the first time in 2020! We’ll be giving a keynote performance and a clinic at the Oklahoma Music Educators’ Association conference in Tulsa, then traveling through Texas. We’ll finish up our quick tour with a full show in Hobbs, New Mexico, for the Southwest Symphony’s subscription series.

Looking forward to some decent weather!

Momoland – Great!

More K-pop! How am I not sick of this music by now? Last time I listened to the boy band N.Flying, and now I’m switching over to some female idols, because #feminism. Normally I wouldn’t care about gender in music (except for singers, whose voices are obviously affected by gender), but in the case of K-pop it seems especially important to get to know the players for who they are.

In true Western fashion, these girls were chosen for the group on a reality TV show, Finding Momoland. Normally, when music groups come together they already possess some cohesive musicality, or at the very least have good rapport with one another. The girls of Momoland, however, probably didn’t even know one another before entering the show. I wonder what the group chemistry in Momoland is having been formed so artificially. I know that these kinds of groups are usually formed by entertainment corporations anyway, but to do so via reality TV adds the chaotic element of the mass public to the equation. I’d also love to watch Finding Momoland just to get a better idea of what people like in their K-pop. Was the winner selected by judges, by viewers, or both? All of these questions could be answered with a little research that I could pursue, if only it weren’t on to the next album tomorrow.

Maxo Kream – Punken

Now that we’ve heard some good old New York boom bap from Dave East, it’s time to switch things up to that Houston trap. Maxo Kream sounds great in his debut here, flowing over crispy Southern-fried beats with confidence and ease. Like Dave East (and most rappers, for that matter), he’s heavily invested in proving his own authenticity. Also like Dave East, he accomplishes this by telling real stories of his life on the streets. Maxo’s stories are more like quick anecdotes, though, none of which as far-reaching as Dave East’s track-length epics. This is because Maxo Kream is a man of the streets, and he makes it clear that he doesn’t aspire to anything greater than that by keeping things as simple as possible.

In Ben Westhoff’s book Dirty South, he attributes the rise of Southern hip-hop in the last few decades to their popular appeal. Rather than dazzling with quick-fire lyrics and complex rhyme schemes, Southern rap focuses on hard-hitting hooks that are simple and accessible. Maxo Kream captures that spirit perfectly.

Dave East – P2

Now here’s a true hip-hop gem, of the kind that you don’t hear much of these days. The storyteller MC is a lost craft, with today’s rappers focusing on hard-hitting hooks and quick punchlines. Today’s ADHD society doesn’t have time for the epic yarns spun by the likes of Slick Rick, Raekwon, the Notorious B.I.G., and Nas, and I think that’s a shame. These rappers create the most sublime kind of hip-hop, especially when they possess that level of realness that engenders authenticity. Dave East certainly has no problem convincing me of his authenticity, with vivid street tales that could only come from a life truly lived. He’s also musically authentic, as he enumerates his myriad hip-hop influences in “What Made Me.”

He isn’t all old-school, though. Dave East lays down some smooth trap à la Travis Scott in “Woke Up” and “Annoying.” He’s definitely at his best, though, when he’s telling stories, like the brutal crime cut “I Found Keisha.”

N.Flying – The Hottest: N.Flying

A couple of weeks ago I explored J-pop with Shuta Sueyoshi’s solo debut, and today I’m trekking across the Pacific once again, this time to South Korea. I think K-pop and J-pop share some features, but it’s important to remember that they’re not the same thing. While both are based on the Western model of the corporate-manufactured boy band, they vary in the way that they treat these influences. K-pop seems to embrace rapping more readily, as this group exhibits. Perhaps K-pop has more dance influences and less of a rock bend than J-pop, but I’m really not qualified to say that with any certainty. Indeed, the more I listen to this music the less I seem to understand about it.

I mentioned in my earlier post about Shuta Sueyoshi’s album that I considered forward-driving harmony a staple of J-pop, but N.Flying also has this tendency, particularly in the opener “Don’t Forget This.” As I listen to more K-pop and J-Pop bands, I’m sure I’ll develop a more accurate idea of what differentiates these kinds of music. Of course, the only thing that really makes this K-pop is the fact that the members are Korean. Much like the dreaded “singer/songwriter,” I’m cautious of genres like these that are defined by non-musical factors. K-pop is such a cultural phenomenon, though, that I can’t really see this music being described as anything else.

Anderson East – Encore

The title “Singer/Songwriter” seems like a death sentence—anyone garnered that title occupies a gigantic pit of musicians who seem to have nothing in common other than the fact that they ostensibly write songs and then sing them. To think that Anderson East is in the same category as Paul Simon, Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, and Sufjan Stevens is kind of absurd when you think about it. East’s music fits much better into the category of blues, with plenty of soul and Southern rock to make it his own. There’s something about the frontman, though, the singular musical force who is the voice behind all of the musical material, that is stigmatizing to us as listeners. In other words, people would rather know that this is a one-man show than have any idea what kind of music it is. As a music nerd, I’m always intrigued when extramusical factors like this play into people’s perceptions of music. Would this album be received differently if it were released by the Anderson East Band? What if Anderson East wasn’t even in the band name?

With the exception of the Beatles and maybe a few others, almost no band has ever achieved the iconic status of singular artists by the likes of Michael Jackson, Elvis, Madonna, Prince, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, etc. So it would seem like the title of “Singer/Songwriter” is no more than a cheap attempt at that kind of glory by association. None of the above artists, though, would be considered singer/songwriters (though most of them did, in fact, write songs and then sing them). This is because they transcended the category, inspiring future imitators and eventually becoming entirely new genres.

Tonight Alive – Underworld

My first thought when cracking open this album was, “since when did Underworld play rock?” Indeed, had I realized that Underworld was the name of the album and not the artist, I probably wouldn’t have listened. That’s no diss to *double-checks artist name* Tonight Alive, it just means that I have my listening predilections just like anyone else. This is exactly why I listen to as much music as I do—it often forces me into strange new corners that lie outside of my musical comfort zone.

My second impression was that this was a pretty decent Christian rock band (wrong again). The hyper-slick production quality, conventional song forms, square riffing, and vague lyrics about love and spirituality all seemed to point to one of the world’s most despised genres. Again, I need to temper this by saying that I myself don’t mind Christian rock, it’s just that those who don’t like it seem to hate it passionately. Once religion gets added to a musical idea, it opens a whole can of worms that incites opinions far beyond the music. I personally respect people who use music as a vehicle of praise and worship.

This, however, is not Christian rock. Somehow, knowing that a band sounds like this and doesn’t even have a divine mission is especially disappointing.

Jiří Bělohlávek & Czech Philharmonic Orchestra – Smetana: Má Vlast

This is interesting for a change. As someone who studied classical music theory through six years of college, I should have sound opinions here. I would never claim nearly the same expertise as the Czech Philharmonic, though—Smetana is their national composer, their J.P. Sousa if you will. And this is Smetana’s most admired work, even if most of us today only know the second movement. It was written at a time in which the Czech Republic was pining for statehood, and Smetana quickly became a voice for his people. Má Vlast (“My Country”) is full of this nationalist passion, a sentiment that was extremely fashionable in European music of the time.

The orchestra performs the piece incredibly well—they obviously know the piece thoroughly (they’ve also recorded this in the past with Rafael Kubelik at the baton). The Moldau flows as effortlessly as I’ve heard any orchestra perform it. Through the impeccable smoothness of it all, though, it’s sometimes difficult to hear that passion that fueled the work’s composition. You almost want to hear this orchestra become a little emotionally unstable as they perform their crown jewel. This is a Decca recording, though, and they have a reputation of high-quality productions to maintain. Now I wonder how the orchestra would sound live, free from the slick hands of studio producers. Probably awesome.