Cornelius: An Unlikely Musical Hotbed

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Wolfdog-plays-Bella-Love

A vibrant music scene can spring up anywhere, and disappear just as suddenly. In the back of our minds we know this, but instinctively just sort of assume, without giving the matter much thought, that the nearest large city is where we’re naturally bound to find such. So it was that after a number of years living in the Charlotte, NC region, those of us here at Exquisite Noise Records, thoroughly underwhelmed by the scene, gave up on finding good bands, figuring it would either happen someday distantly down the road or not at all.

But then out of nowhere, almost by accident, we began discovering a number of great musical acts in the smaller towns immediately north of there – Huntersville, Mooresville, Statesville and even Cornelius. In the past year, we’ve signed and featured one such act, Pinko, an up and coming three piece whose raw and bizarre yet catchy rock dirges recall early 90’s grunge, as evidenced by their debut CD, Snuggle Buddy. On this year’s edition of our label-wide sampler, meanwhile, we were also able to feature Statesville native Kyle Ketsdever, a multi-talented soul with far ranging interests, from acoustic to straightforward rock to comedy to 3am basement style jams, all of it incredibly interesting.

At the center of this burgeoning scene sits Bella Love 2.0, a unique live music space located in the older downtown section of Cornelius – yes, Cornelius. As by far the most forward thinking and active (not to mention warmer, as in the musical vibe within) venue in the area, Bella Love has made it their mission to both seek out existing talent within the region and to promote a better awareness of local music. Recently, we had the opportunity to pick the brain of Bella Love founder Case Warnemunde.

“There is a need for a venue for local talent to be showcased and Bella Love is happy to bring it to the public,” Warnemunde says, “Through interactions with musicians at these Open Mic nights, both through their performance and through actual conversations, a few things have become clear. Bars and restaurants are not always an ideal setting for emerging bands to share their sound. Bella Love 2.0 is an alternative to those types of venues. Here it is all about the creative process leading to a pleasing result. Bella Love can be part of the process as well as highlight the result.”

In addition to its primary purpose as a live music venue, Bella Love also functions as a workshop. One-on-one musical instruction is available in this space during the day, and available to rent for bands seeking rehearsal space, or room to bring in their gear and record. Also, while not strictly related, there’s an event the 2nd Friday of every month – named, well, 2nd Friday – in the Old Town section of Cornelius. Hosted by the Bella Love team, it’s an art crawl featuring live music as well as food trucks and local vendor specials.

While, clearly, if you are reading this, you probably maintain an active presence online, getting out from behind the laptop and seeing what’s going on around this region is vital both for your own well being and that of the community itself. Now that the scourge of karaoke fever has apparently run its course, live music does seem to be staging somewhat of a comeback, and this is one important piece of the puzzle. While pay-to-play schemes have unfortunately taken root over the past decade, showing no signs of relenting (basically, bands must buy up tickets to their own shows in order to perform there, theoretically in the hopes they can resell these to friends and fans), it’s refreshing to see that not every owner or promoter has embraced this questionable tactic.

“Bella Love is creating a new way to approach community in the 21st century,” Case continues, likening that they are doing in this space and beyond to “an actual, physical social network. It is a reason to meet your neighbor, a venue to discover talent, and a way to support local businesses.”

One of the paradoxes of big city live music sites – those which actually book local talent, that is – seems to be that they need larger draws to pay the rent and keep the electricity turned on, which in turn leads to more predictable and codified acts. You can bank on x number of attendees most nights by booking some pleasantly bland singer-songwriter type, or even worse, a polished but paint by numbers cover band. But during a recent night at Bella Love, I witnessed Wolfdog play, a solo performer who somehow blended 60s protest folk music with, like, heavy metal, but then often comedic lyrics – and most of this even actually worked. He was in turn followed by Tecate Sunrise, a sprawling yet musically gifted rock group, and then the indescribable melodic mayhem of our very own Pinko. Sure, we are biased, and maybe this is a shameless plug, but there’s a reason we signed these guys in the first place, and released their CD; simply put, though undoubtedly such an experience exists somewhere, sometime, at some venue down in Charlotte, it’s safe to say that in years of going out to scope that music scene, we never had a night as fascinating as this one.

A rising tide carries all ships, as the saying goes, and we believe that one positive development fed into another and another, leading to the current vibrant state of lower Iredell/upper Meck music. We here at Exquisite Noise do feel we’ve played some small part in this, though to be honest it wasn’t planned that way – again, that larger city to the south seemed more logical a place to expect this explosion. Maybe Bella Love had it mapped out from the beginning, but whatever the case, their impact has been far greater, and seems poised to only grow from here.

“(The) current local musical landscape is full of possibility and budding with creative, authentic interactions. Bella Love hopes to continue to be a platform in which local artists and musicians can share their ideas and skills,” Warnemunde concludes, “by bringing attention to the vast resources that are all around us and highlighting the area’s exceptional and innovative talent, Bella Love is securing a creative future for generations to come.”

Cornelius-NC-venue-Bella-Love

Mike The Punk’s Bold New Strategy

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Mooresville, North Carolina’s Mike The Punk recently announced plans to issue one single a month for the next twelve months. A relatively recent signee to our roster, Mike (that’s Michael Robert Adams II, formally, if you’re keeping score), as his moniker might imply, combines something of a gritty Social Distortion-esque vocal delivery with catchy pop hooks…but then these are delivered, predominantly, with an acoustic guitar as his sole accompaniment, and yet the entire package does somehow manage to sound like, well, punk rock. Understandably, the instant we heard Mike’s recordings, we knew he was a must have for our lineup.

His first offering in this Single Of The Month club, Don’t Tell Her, is streaming before you can buy it at select online radio stations now, last.fm (http://www.last.fm/music/Mike+The+Punk/Don%27t+Tell+Her) and Rdio (http://www.rdio.com/artist/Mike_the_Punk/album/Don%27t_Tell_Her/) the major ones among these. You can also check out a YouTube clip the artist himself has posted himself here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMDoe_tsnv4

As always, stay posted for future updates. Mike The Punk seems poised to deliver a string of quality tunes, which update and expand his core sound without straying too far from his punk roots. We’re excited about what the future has to offer for this exciting new performer, and look forward to sharing this with the world – be it our label’s small yet rabid niche following, or the mainstream audience (we hope) at large.

Fresh New Sounds Of Punk

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We here at Exquisite Noise are pleased to announce our latest addition to the roster, Mike The Punk from Mooresville, North Carolina! Though his career arc is just beginning, this young artist has already brought some fresh sounds to his chosen niche, incorporating metal and pop smarts and dare we say a hint of new wave, plus some cutting edge twists for which there are yet no names. Needless to say, we are stoked about our partnership and looking forward to what he comes up with next! Check out his latest offerings here:

http://www.reverbnation.com/mikethepunk

And for those of you in the area, definitely check him out live, playing November 8 at Diverse Expressions in Mooresville, and November 23 at the Bonu5 Room in Huntersville.

Val Barin’s Vegas Based Folk

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We here at Exquisite Noise are thrilled to announce our latest signee, Val Barin! A seasoned Las Vegas based folk artist, Val has a great singing voice and terrific composition skills. His melodies drew us back for repeated listens, which is how we knew we had to have him on our roster.

Give Val a few minutes of your ears – and when you get a chance, drops him a congrats!

http://www.reverbnation.com/valbarin

Terrific Article On One Of Our Own

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Check out this fabulous piece by Ruth Martin, about Exquisite Noise’s very own Zayed Hassan….http://www.howtoplaykeyboardonline.com/chance-to-be-with-you-music-video-by-zayed-hassan/

Having the Right (Low Budget) Gear

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In this post I will officially begin my series by discussing some of the programs/tools we have stumbled across, all either free or fairly inexpensive, that will make getting your muisc out there tremendously easier. As I’ve alluded to before, this isn’t to say there aren’t better and more modern solutions out there. But the whole point of what I hope to accomplish with these posts is to provide some terrific low-tech and/or low budget options for those of you who are like we are, either cash strapped or not exactly computer proficient.

One constant I have found that seems to hold true when dealing with computers or the internet is that you are almost always better off finding the OLDEST program you can that works and is compatible with your computer. This would seem to fly in the face of common sense, but it’s a mistake to think that to keep up with a hyper modern landscape, that you need the most cutting edge tools. The reality is that a software update often only makes for more confusion, or provides a bunch of bells and whistles you don’t need, when an earlier version would provide exacly whay you’re looking for without the distractions and hassles.

Unless you’re Mac users, most of you have operating systems that come factory loaded with the Windows Media Player program. This is an okay accessory that does have its uses, but for the most part is a prime example of exactly what I’m talking about – unnecessarily complicated and surprisingly little use in getting your music released.

Which brings us to the point now of discussing what I feel are some absolute essentials. Again, if you are living high on the hog with top shelf gear and Pro Tools and are a computer whiz, you would surely laugh at the advice given here. And lord knows if you are one of those fortunate souls and are reading this and have some SIMPLE input to offer, we’re all ears. But this isn’t really aimed at such an individual, and chances are few of you are reading this.

Start by downloading a free program called Real Player. Again I would recommend finding the OLDEST version you can, and even better, if you can download it onto a computer that you don’t need for internet access and can thus disconnect it from the internet, even better – fewer distractions and a lot faster load time. Real Player is an easy to use and handy device for converting “mp3” files to “wav” files and vice versa, which you will need.

Next up I would recommend finding a Cakewalk Pro Audio program. The one we’ve been using for literally a decade is the same old Pro Audio 9 disc, which has been copied probably onto a dozen different computers at our various members’ households through the years. Either you are recording music onto a computer program, or you are recording music onto tape and thus need a means of importing it – either way, you can use this program, and you should be able to find it dirt cheap on e-bay at this point.

Lastly, I would recommend trying to find a free version of a program called Audacity, available as of this writing at audacity.sourceforge.net. It’s still the best thing we have found for cleaning up static. We’re kind of in the middle in that we record directly from our p.a. onto the hard drive these days, but at the same time have a bunch of old tapes we’ve slowly begun importing and cleaning up with this Audacity, and it really is a breeze to use.

Armed with these three, and a normal 1/8th inch cord, a flash drive and a couple rewriteable CDs, you bascially have every tool you need to make your music sound as good as it can on this end of the equation, and with almost no headaches at all. In my next post, I will discuss what to do with all of this.