A producer has been lauded as a trendsetter after he released an album of music normally without a massively overblown marketing campaign or minimalist unpublicised sudden album drop.
“He didn’t just reinvent the wheel, he broke the previous wheel, erased all knowledge of there having ever been a wheel and then invented it again, only to break it,” gushed one music journalist from faux-intellectual muzak almanac, Pitchfork, in response to the normal release schedule followed by London based producer Guff Talk. “It’s a real statement of intent from someone who actually didn’t want to make a statement of intent but just wanted to release music.”
“Some men just want to watch the world burn,” he continued. “I don’t know how he came up with the idea of just writing an album, then setting a release date, and then releasing it in physical copies and also on the web on that date, but I’m pretty sure it’s amazing and that he’s probably a genius.”
Several other commentators shared similar sentiments calling the normal, long established method of putting the album out as “awe-inspiring” and “one of the most innovative distribution campaigns we’ve ever seen”.
“I heard about it coming out, saw the release date and then went and bought it on that date without having had to sit through months of teases and leaks or publicity stunts, it was so weird,” claimed music critic Alec Phephitis. “I don’t think it’ll catch on but as a one-off experiment I think it says a lot for how music is marketed and consumed. “And after all, isn’t having a pseudo-intellectual discussion about the merits of the music industry better than the music itself?”
“Recently we’ve seen a spate of artists dropping albums without any fanfare but the fact that they were doing it without fanfare that generated fanfare,” continued Alex. “Guff Talk’s gone in the middle of two extremes and just put it out in a way that makes sense from several different standpoints both commercially and artistically.”
Not everyone was pleased with Guff Talk’s revolutionary approach to releasing music in a traditional and non-revolutionary, simple to understand way.
“Frankly I didn’t like it, I like my albums to be teased over months across a variety of media with maybe some treasure hunt style interaction thrown in before I finally get to listen to it and dismiss it as a disappointment,” claimed one music journalist. “I can’t lavish paragraphs of disdain on this because it hasn’t been built up enough, all I can do is kinda think it’s alright and give it a chance to grow on me.”
