Movin' Up From Down Under Loud.com Blog #8

March 6, 2010

Aaaaaand here's the final blog I wrote in the Movin' Up From Down Under series...

Week #8: The Mix

There’s nothing better than the feeling of ‘accomplishment’. Well, maybe there are ‘better’ feelings but it’s pretty damn good, you gotta admit. We were starting to feel like we’d accomplished something just by booking flights for the trip and locking in a bunch of meetings, radio spots and other various musical activities. But in reality, we’d barely started.

So the flights were booked. Accommodation was in the process of being booked. We’d locked in radio spots and stuff. Sweet. This sorta thing would be easy from now on, as it’s just more of a maintenance process, constantly adding to the framework that we’d set up – more meetings, more radio, more everything. Now that we have our dates, we’re good to go.

The one thing that this trip was based on, though, was to promote our latest mixtapes – Notion’s ‘World Domi-NoTiOn’ and Cee & Bekah’s ‘The Soul Movement Volume 2’ – and the fact that The Movement Fam was officially a crew. It was like our ‘coming out’ party. Pause. So around the time we decided to do this whole trip thing, we had both mixtapes in various states of completion. None of the tracks were mixed, we had no DJ’s confirmed to blend the songs, no artwork, Notion had no logo, and we still had a bunch of songs that needed finishing. For folks that work full time, and are trying to plan a trip, that is a huge amount of work to get through in the space of a few months.

Notion is the engineer of the crew. He doesn’t even really like that term much just yet, as he’s still technically only learning. He’s killin’ it, but. At the time of arranging the trip, he was working nightshift four nights a week. This in itself was insane, as generally nightshifts are split up so as not to make you go crazy. He was originally doing five nights a week but cut back, which was a great move. So he’d work Sunday night through Wednesday night, with Thursday, Friday and Saturday off. The catch was he had to convert back to day time hours in those three days, then get back to staying up all night by Sunday. Definitely not good for the body.

So while we were all spending every spare moment writing and recording and finalising all the songs for the pool to select from, Notion had to fit in the mixing of every damn song. In total, he mixed well over fifty songs (which took on average three hours per song initially, and then the changes would average an hour or so per song) in the space of two months. I had us on a tight schedule – as I knew we had so many other things to arrange, we couldn’t afford for the music not to be ready. Dude was sitting on like four hours sleep a night for a while there. Poor bastard.

The mixtape stuff turned out great in the end, but damn it was close. Australia’s only platinum DJ, Nino Brown, kept his agreement with us from the year before to still mix our mixtape, which was a blessing as he did a great job and it was dope to attach his name to our project. The kid DJ Crusador, a DMC finalist, came through in the clutch to mix Notion’s project, and he killed it. The artwork was the problem. The homie who does our artwork is in the UK (haha we worldwide, baby!), so that was difficult to arrange. We had many a long night on MSN finalising every small detail of the cover art and logo, which got changed a gang of times.

Because we pushed it right to the last minute, we weren’t able to press up a full run of mixtapes for the trip – we ended up doing 100 of each with an ‘Exclusive International Edition’ stamp on them to make ‘em something special just for this trip. That worked out pretty dope. But the stress was constant from June until September. Something always went wrong. People always bailed on us. It was a headfuck. Sometimes we felt it would all fall apart. But I think we’re the kind of folks who push things to the last minute and end up coming through with the goods.

The whole preparation stage was an amazing learning experience. I can only imagine what it would be like arranging a huge tour. Fuck that lol. But what came out of it was I solidified my networking skills and am now confident that I know what I’m doing. I know that the Fam can work to deadlines, and that I can rely on the people in my crew to make things happen – they’re as hungry for this as I am, which is one of the most reassuring feelings you can have in this business.

Next up, the trip…

Plug of the week: Gotta shout out our blog, www.TheMovementFam.com. It only really got started in early December, and already it’s killing the Cee & Bekah blog, which we never really pushed but utilised as an information source for The Fam since 2007. It’s got a bit of everything – stuff about The Fam, music in general, comedy, videos, fashion, sport, models…whatever you want!

So until next time, listen to Jazmine Sullivan. One of my Top 10 albums of 2008 (check the ‘Best of 2008’ post on www.TheMovementFam.com blog). It’ll change your life.

Blessings,
Cee.
The Movement Fam.

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Movin' Up From Down Under Loud.com Blog #7

March 5, 2010

We took a bit of a pause from the Loud blogs lately...bringing it back...second last one I wrote too...

Week #7: Locking It In

Things were looking pretty good. We’d heard back from most folks that our contacts put us in touch with by mid to late June, and already we’d locked in a mainstream radio spot in Seattle; College radio, hair braiding session and a photo shoot in Toronto; a podcast and recording session in Oakland; a session with a bass player and an MC (Jermiside from the Lessondary Crew) in Atlanta; possible radio and shows in Denver; possible shows and studio sessions in Minneapolis; possible shows in Jacksonville; and a meeting with Eternia and an influential gentleman in New York (who happened to get us this very blog). We were vibed.

Now that we had enough information to start booking the trip, we skedaddled off to the travel agent to lock this bitch down. We knew that the earlier we booked our flights, the cheaper it would be, but it was hard because we didn’t know where we were going until we had confirmation from enough folks – and even then, some of the confirmations were sketchy at best.

So we rocked up to the travel agent all excited. Here’s how it went down (dramatic license, of course, has been taken):

Travel Agent: So, where do you guys wanna go?
Cee: Um, pretty much San Francisco, LA, Toronto, New York, Atlanta, Seattle, maybe Denver, maybe Jacksonville, maybe Miami. I think.
Travel Agent: Ooookay. Do you know how long you need to be in each city and the dates you want to go there?
Cee: Not really.
Travel Agent: Riiiight.

I think she wasn’t too pleased to have our custom that day. But I gotta shout her out, she was great. It came down to this: in order to get cheaper flights, we had to lock something in soon. And if we went to too many cities, the trip would be stupid rushed and the internal flights would cost a fortune. Plus, we only had five weeks in total, instead of the original six, as Bekah’s work were being assholes and refused to give her the extra time off. So we had to make a call. We ended up cutting Denver as it would have taken a lot more work to arrange shows; we cut Jacksonville as the city is so small, we’d be smarter to concentrate our energy elsewhere; same deal with Minneapolis; and we hadn’t hooked anything up in Miami as yet so that one was reluctantly let go.

Even though it was tough, we now had a basic itinerary. Boom. As long as we had tentative dates locked in, we were good. So long story short, after a bit of shuffling around and triple and quadruple confirmations, we managed to book all the flights. The only thing was if we were going to change a single flight, it would cost us hundreds of dollars. So if shit fell through, we were going anyway. Such is the wonderful ways of the international – and US domestic - airline restrictions. And I realised after that the flight from ATL to NY was on a small ass plane – I don’t fucks with small planes. We wanted to change it; we couldn’t without paying. I said we’d get a Delta flight instead and just miss the original flight, but if we did that, the rest of the onward flights would be cancelled as it was part of the package. Goddamnit.

But once we had the tickets in our hands, we were truly excited. This was real; it was actually happening. It felt like a dream, as I had literally had dreams of being in Canada quite often since being back in Melbourne, and going back overseas – this time, strictly for music – was a sign that we’d been working hard enough to get to this level. And not only were we doing this, we were doing it all off our own back. One hundred percent independent. Man, we were proud as hell.

Bekah and I spent the next couple months slowly booking accommodation whenever we were bored at work and wanted to handle biz (I don’t work where I did at the time of planning the trip so I can say it lol), with the assistance of DJ Grain in the ATL sector. So things were looking good…

Plug of the week: The kid Steve Duck at GroundUpHipHop.com has supported The Fam since the jump, lacing the artwork for ‘The Soul Movement Volume 1’ and even doing the Cee & Bekah logo. He hooked us up with a lil download section on GroundUp for our latest projects:

Notion – World Domi-NoTiOn (http://www.grounduphiphop.com/2008/09/14/notion-world-domi-notion-mixtape/)
Cee & Bekah – The Soul Movement Volume 2 (http://www.planeturban.com.au/download_mixtapes/cee_and_bekah_soul_movement_vol_2)

So until next time, listen to Esthero. She’s a trip. It’s like Portishead, Stephanie McKay and Jill Scott had a lovechild that was reared on Nine Inch Nails and copious amounts of marijuana. It’s good.

Blessings,
Cee.
The Movement Fam.

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Movin' Up From Down Under Loud.com Blog #6

February 3, 2010

Week #6: Getting Busy

So the decision was made; we’re going overseas. Awesome. Just saying it out loud made me excited as all hell. I didn’t wanna come home when we lived in Toronto and travelled for 12 months, so since then I’ve always been jealous of folks saying ‘Yeah, I’m going overseas next month’. Shit killed me. Now I was that annoying prick going on a holiday. Boom. Happy campers, we were.

But this wasn’t just a regular holiday. When the haze of excitement eventually passed, I realised how much work it would be to actually put this together. Not only did we need to arrange the logistics, but we had appointments to arrange. Where the fuck do we even start? That was the first thing that came to mind. So I thought logically. We were only going to visit cities where we had contacts; like I said, this wasn’t no umbrella-in-your-drink vacation. So we knew we had folks in Miami, Toronto, Atlanta (DJ Grain, now part of The Movement Fam, is in the A-Town) and New York that would be worth visiting. That’s a good starting point.

Emailing time. This is where my networking skills (or lack thereof) would really come into play. I hit up damn never everyone I knew to get them to put me in touch with damn near everyone they knew. Now, being that this is the music business and I was dealing with artists, producers and the like, I knew this could take a long ass time. Lucky it was like May and we didn’t plan to leave until September. This was a useful exercise, as it really showed who my friends were. I know that if I had some folks overseas who were coming out here, I’d do my best to put them in touch with everyone possible, so I was hoping for the same.

I gotta shout out Eternia, who probably spent a good hour or two of her precious time (the girl is busy!) putting together a list of damn near everyone she knew in Toronto and New York. That list was one of the most useful tools that I had at my disposal in planning this trip, and I can’t thank her enough. She’s a true friend, big ups! Also, my dudes Kevin Nottingham and Travis Glave (Wake Your Daughter Up! Blog) were invaluable, as they worked real hard to put us in touch with a gang of folks that came through the goods in the end.

So already, after talking with three main friends in the business in the US and Canada, I had things moving. Wow, this wasn’t looking to be so difficult after all. Or so it seemed. I would estimate that in total, I probably hit up around 100-150 individuals in all sectors of the music industry, all over Canada and the US (including Hawaii). I must have spent a week staying up til midnight after work every night sending emails like a crazy person. Not only to the folks I had been put in contact with, but hitting up random radio stations in cities all over the place (which I got a list of from Wikipedia, of all places). Once I had contacted everyone on my lists, all there was to do was wait.

Of course, this wasn’t just a once off activity. This was a constant thing from May until right up to when we left, and even while we were on the trip we were still trying to arrange meetings and stuff. I reckon I probably got a 5-10% response rate, which is probably better than most direct mail campaigns. So I was happy with that. Plus, you can’t really expect random folks to really wanna help out unknown artists from Australia on a whim (or an email); although that was how it panned out at times.

So with the contacting industry heads side of things underway, we had to get the logistics issues sorted (which we couldn’t do much with until meetings, radio spots, etc were locked in), and of course, finalising two mixtapes in the space of two to three months, all the while working full time. Goddamn.

Plug of the week: The homie DJ Hyphen in Seattle has a dope ass blog, The Audacity of Dope, and he featured both our mixtapes after we appeared on his show:

Notion – World Domi-NoTiOn (http://www.theaudacityofdope.com/2008/09/16/notion-world-domi-notion-mixtape/)
Cee & Bekah – The Soul Movement Volume 2 (http://www.theaudacityofdope.com/2008/09/17/cee-bekah-the-soul-movement-vol-2/)

So until next time, listen to Raheem DeVaughn. I am right now. He’s soothing. Pause.

Blessings,
Cee.
The Movement Fam.

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Movin' Up From Down Under Loud.com Blog #1

January 19, 2010

Aight, so like a year ago we were doing a blog on Loud.com called 'Movin' Up From Down Under' via the homie J Master. They ended up posting like three of our pieces but it kinda fell by the wayside, however I wrote like 8 blogs so I thought I might as well share them here.

Here's the first instalment:

Week #1: An Introduction…

So, I’m guessin’ that most of y’all didn’t know Australians even knew much about Hip Hop, let alone be able to make it – and with soul. See, that’s the beauty of coming from Down Under; well, it’s pretty much the only major benefit of being Hip Hop/Soul artists from Australia. We are unassuming to the rest of the world. Most heads couldn’t name an Aussie Hip Hop act off the top, with the exception of a certain producer who’s killin’ it right now. And that, my friends, is what we’re here to change.

‘We’ are The Movement Fam, an independent Soul/Hip Hop collective currently based in Melbourne, Australia. The name might not be familiar just yet, but goddamnit, we’re gonna blog our asses off ‘til it is! The crew comprises of Bekah, the lady of the Fam, who also happens to possess one of the most soulful voices that I done heard in a minute; my little brother Notion, who can flow like a muhfucka, plus he’s putting in work on the engineering and production tip; my dude Tommy Gunnz, a licensed solicitor who kills mics with his uniquely Australian wit; and myself, Cee, who also can spit a lil something, while I handle the biz side of things.

Y’all will get to know all of us each week as we detail our little adventures in the music business. We’ve been through a lotta shit to get to where we are, and we’ve barely started. We recently returned from a self-funded networking trip to the USA and Canada, which was an interesting and amazing experience, and we’ll be telling y’all all about it in the coming weeks, from all our perspectives. And we’ll be letting y’all in on all the struggles, successes, frustrations and politricks that we deal with on a day-to-day basis as Australian artists trying to break into the American market.

I’ma keep the intro short, coz we’re gonna have a lot to speak on later on haha. So you can get a better idea of who we are and what we sound like, head over to www.kevinnottingham.com, where you can download our latest projects – Notion’s ‘World Domi-NoTiOn’ mixtape and Cee & Bekah’s ‘The Soul Movement Volume 2’ mixtape. That’d be a good start. And producers, if you like what you hear, make sure you download the acapella’s and submit a lil something for the remix contest.

Stay up, stay tuned and stay shittin’ on ‘em.

Blessings,
The Movement Fam.

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