Adam Scrimshire - T-Jay
Adam Scrimshire is a London-based composer, producer, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and DJ. He’s released 3 albums as Scrimshire, as well as a lot of disco and funk “edits” and several EPs.
He’s produced, mixed and been A&R for several albums, including work from Fela Kuti collaborator Dele Sosimi, British soul artists The Milk and Stac, jazz funk from The Expansions, electronic hip hop with Paper Tiger, singer-songwriter Daudi Matsiko and many more. He created Modified Man with Dave “Deoke” Koor - a duo which, as he says, “celebrates the synthesiser and any boxes that deliver beautiful or terrifying sounds”.
He also released a unique version of his song Convergent on a new physical/digital hybrid format: a t-shirt with cover art that plays the song when scanned using the T-jay app.
Adam Scrimshire joined Michela Magas - MTF founder and the inventor of T-jay - on stage at #MTF Stockholm to talk about his life in music, and new strategies for sustainable independent music in the digital age.
AI Transcription
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
t shirt, music, artists, adam, people, track, label, michela, programme, buy, wanted, scan, record label, multidisciplinary, bit, kinds, run, vinyl, programming, week
SPEAKERS
Andrew Dubber, Michela Magas, Adam Scrimshire
Andrew Dubber
Hi, I’m Dubber, on the director of Music Tech Fest and this is Scrimshire. What you’re hearing is an exclusive version of a song called convergent. A version that’s not available on vinyl CD streaming or download. It’s only on a T shirt or rather, a new physical digital hybrid format called TJay. Have a listen. (song plays) Convergence by London recording artist, composer and label manager Scrimshire also happens to be one of my all time favourite songs. We were lucky enough to have Adam Scrimshire join us at MTF labs.com Music Tech Fest founder and the inventor of the TJay format, Michela Magas sat down on stage with him to chat about music scrimshaw, his music, in particular, of course, but also what it means to make and release music today, and the kind of innovation that we need in order to address things like sustainability of independent music in the digital age. Here’s Michela Magas. At MTF Stockholm with Adam Scrimshire enjoy
Michela Magas
I have to rewind a couple of years to three years even Adam, wasn’t it. It was such an incredible sport. First of all, we were huge fans of his music. I’m gonna embarrass you know, because we were like, We just so he’s, he’s now he’s now a colleague, a friend, but we were such huge fans of his music. And there was this moment when I said to Dubber, we’ve got to do a T shirt has a track. This is just this is just got to happen. We’ve got the kind of tech that would make this happen. And we need to choose the first artists who could carry this off. And this concept will tell you a little bit more about we’ve got it here with us. But Dubber said, I know exactly. I know who will, who will go for it. And it was Adam Scrimshire. So warm applause for Adam Scrimshire. I’m gonna tell you more about it. So, yeah. We leapt into the sort of future of music publishing here immediately. But when I look at your bio, again, I’m just gonna read it. It says Adam Scrimshire started making music on an Amiga 500 with a Yamaha tone generator and an eight bit sampler at the age of 14. Yes. How could this even happen?
Adam Scrimshire
I guess it’s quite late, in some ways, but there was a lot of music in the house, but no musicians in the family at all. So I never got really introduced to that to that side of things. But there were records playing all the time. And my memory of it essentially is one night. My mom was paintings. Some old early George Benson, I think. And I remember sitting up I’ve been leaning up I’ve been I’ve been about 12 12 or something 12 and a half. And I remember sitting up and pretending to play along on my pillow, playing piano on my pillow. And I got the following day and said, I really want to learn to play piano. I want to play keys. I’ve never played an instrument I really wanted to. And I got really into it and but I didn’t really go on with lessons very well. I really struggled with that. The guy who was teaching me insisted I was too old to really do it anyway, which was kind of mad and frustrating. And but yeah, my dad was really into networking. He did a lot of various Very early computers training at the back end of the 70s. And that’s where we’d moved up to Cambridge. And that was part of that. So he’s mad into networking and, and software development. And he, rather than buying me I wanted, I wanted like a Yamaha keyboard with like all the buttons and crap on it. And instead, he wants to buy me a little synthesiser and a MIDI interface and cables and make me put computers together and do instead. So that was that was how I came in that way. My dad just yet decided to go complicated way rather than just getting me cheap keyboard.
Michela Magas
That’s a great dad, because we have all through tomorrow. And the next day families at this festival and fathers were bringing their children. And of course, when they get presented with some of this music tech that happens here. It’s like Lego bricks to them, or is this totally kind of they just just just basically I mean, they’re they’re fearless. Yeah, all this new stuff. Yeah. So you started work, but you started writing music immediately? Or? Yes.
Adam Scrimshire
Yeah. So he got me a thing called optimate off the cover of a computer, Amiga magazine. And big because I wasn’t really getting on with lessons, I just wanted to actually just, and I could I could play a little bit, I could recognise melodies and stuff. But I just wanted to programme stuff. So I got immediately into using tracker programmes and programming stuff. And spent, I guess, about a year and a half whatever, just every night coming home from school, and just programming beats over and over and over again, terrible, terrible, horrible stuff. And, and yeah, just gradually learning this process, because again, there was that there was just no connection to that. I sort of I didn’t have many friends that we’re writing music. And yeah, it was kind of a solo journey, really. But yeah, it was it was just something I did. I, I became quite obsessed with and just spent hours and hours doing it, and then would buy CDs or whatever stuff and learn how to transcribe them essentially, and programme copies of those of those things, which kind of helped me learn some of the principles, I guess, of composition.
Michela Magas
Amazing. You say that you had some trouble with lessons? Did you have trouble in school in general, the way it was set up?
Adam Scrimshire
Um, no, it was, it was more of a private teaching, I had a classic classical piano teacher. And he was just he just he was of the opinion that there was there was no hope for me at 14 to learn to play piano. So So and after six months of persisting with that situation, I kind of agreed with him, really. I love playing the piano. But I absolutely just sort of detested those lessons and having to go and do that. But was actually great. I was really, really lucky, I went to an amazing school, outside Cambridge that did a lot of Performing Arts. So I also studied dance and ballet and contemporary. And so did a lot of composition involved with dance and for the dance department and that kind of stuff. So no, I was actually really, really lucky and got into the kind of situation where like, well, we want to get into buying some more technology for the music department. And I would get involved with helping them get stuff in and set that up. And I’d be given the keys to the room and stuff. So that’s kind of I used to go back when the cleaners were cleaning and just go into school and like play drums and learn all the bits.
Michela Magas
But do you think that when you started playing with some of these technologies, it was actually open up new kind of literacies for for you. I mean, you were training on new kinds of ways of expression as a suspect.
Adam Scrimshire
Yes. And it led in both directions. So I wanted to learn more instruments because I wanted to understand what what is what it is that defines how an instrument sounds, how a drum works in a particular way or how a guitar sounds because I was just programming using MIDI and very, very poor quality, like old, you know, just a cheap little MIDI instrument. So I was learning how I wanted to learn other instruments in order to understand how how when you strum a guitar, not every note sounds the same or not every night at the same velocity or whatever, and things like that. So, so yeah, it it. It really, I became, I would say pretty much 100 times more curious than I ever was, before I had that MIDI interface. I became completely lost in asking questions about about how things work and how that moves, and how to put those together.
Michela Magas
Actually, in a way it’s a shame that are all hackers and track athon participants that are actually having a meetup upstairs because I mean, they’re totally in your mindset. Every single one is got has got that kind of zest for it. But what’s, what’s interesting is then, of course, as I say, You’re one of my favourite composers. I can say that. I really care. But, but you’re a multi instrumentalist, and we can see how you got there. It was through both influence availability, because and this is what less than for any school, making things available, accessible to students, but also through curiosity, as you say, but then you actually took a leap into record label your label management. I mean, how does that mean? That’s kind of quite a different thing, isn’t
Adam Scrimshire
it? It is. But as Ali was saying earlier, you know, there’s that there’s, there’s a lot of challenges at an independent level for making money. And there’s a lot of people that are branching into multiple areas in order to be able to find some way of having a kind of some way of making money come in. And, and that is coming from lots of different areas. So there’s, I mean, being multidisciplinary, I used to think it was something special, and I don’t think it’s that special anymore. I think everyone’s so multi, multidisciplinary those days, especially in the independent industry, everyone has has a lot of different things in there by running labels was was a part, it was something I kind of wanted to do. When I was 14, when I first started getting into the music, I had a kind of grand dream that I would do music, that would run a record label, and I’d have a recording studio, that we would do community based projects and bring people in and do interesting, creative things where we would then be able to release them very quickly and, and do that which is close from getting there. So that somewhere along the line, it was an idea. And then further down the line, I thought that’s crazy. It would be stupid to on a record label, it looks horrific. And it kind of is but it’s but it became an inevitability. It was partly taught myself. And then once I started doing it, I realised that there was this huge responsibility to help artists. And I became quite effective with that idea that I wanted to bring more transparency to the business that we do. And to more honesty, and, and yeah, just kind of, well, this is first sort flowing into an hour, I’m really looking at how we can turn a record label into work working more in a cooperative level, and actually having the artists as investment specialists and do that. And I know there are precedents for that. But I’m trying to get to a point where we can create something that’s a benchmark for doing that, that we can sort of spread around because there’s so many people starting labels now that it’s it, they are springing up. Every week, I’m getting promos from people saying we’re starting a new label, now we’re doing a new thing. So there’s a lot of that going on, and they’re working with artists. And yet, there’s still a fairly surprising, actually quite flabbergasting lack of understanding about the legalities that work within that and just the technicalities of doing it. So getting into the label, side of things, very quickly became about trying to one by one at least solve that problem. And now I need to kind of amplify how quickly we can solve that problem.
Michela Magas
Well, as you probably know, and some of you may know that we have been running Mycelia blockchain labs run by Imogen Heap this week. And people have been actually literally prototyping new kinds of applications for it. I know there are huge, huge challenges. And when you actually get your hands dirty, I mean, it’s alright to talk about it. Even when people talk about it. Yeah, there’s this kind of kind of real big misconception by some as to who should benefit who’s the first person who benefits should or should everybody benefit? And last night, she did. intimate gig for for for our laps, participants. And yes. And she gave everybody a QR code, right, which allowed the everybody to be an investor in her next track. Oh, no. Yeah. And so basically, if this track does well, it’s basically like having shares in a track. Yeah, kind of CO investing. So I hope that you guys can can join join up here, because I know that you have been in that sort of same mindset of looking at how we do this. But I suppose because you have been thinking so hard about how do you run a label? How do you make a more democratic situation where artists gets to benefit? I guess, that led to TJay right when we called you about this T shirt as a track thing, and you just jumped immediately in just when
Adam Scrimshire
Yes.
Michela Magas
I mean, it’s not like the most natural sort of thing that you would expect people to say.
Adam Scrimshire
No, but you are you’re both people I trust even even. I mean, especially Dubber, who’s he’s, you know, he obviously I got to know you through him. And, and he, his writing was very influential to me. And you know, when Bandcamp was starting and, again, going back to what Ali and Dubber, were talking about earlier. I was very much watching that as that was happening as well and reading his work and and understanding About the free flowing of music and what we can and can’t control and how we should feel about that. And, and numerous other nuances within that. So yeah, so when he, when when you guys approached me it was like, Well, yeah, you know this I believe in them.
Michela Magas
They say he’s such a great sport. So maybe we should tell you what this this darts did you want to explain it maybe?
Adam Scrimshire
Yeah. Okay. So the seat I guess, is its purest form, there is a T shirt with an image on the front. And the image performs, I suppose, in a way like a QR code. And in terms of the it’s, it can enable second
Michela Magas
album cover.
Adam Scrimshire
Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of extra beauty about the whole package. But But functionality wise, that image can be, can be scanned by phone, and then released to you a track that is unique to this T shirt. This one, yeah, I recorded this a special version of this song. But then it’s packaged up in this beautiful way like like vinyl as well.
Michela Magas
It even has liner notes on the inside, as well, there’s a story attached to it. So you can go like in the old album. And the cover can also be scanned. It has the whole story, like the old school vinyl. And so the T shirt comes in this, this goes into your vinyl collection. And the T shirt can be worn. And if it’s in the wash, you can still scan this one and you can still hear your track. But the beauty of it is that and you said how do we share? Yeah, your mates can scan you in a pub or in a bar. And wherever it is you’re meeting them and they can hear this exclusive track and they can download the TJay app. And all of a sudden, you can start being an influencer because they can if they love the track, they can go and buy one themselves. But then there’s quite a few other things that then come into it right? Because what then happens is that we all love the fact that Bandcamp connects the fan and the artists Yes. And this does, of course, not only connect to the fan who has downloaded the app and has bought the the T shirt, but it will also connect all of their mates who have liked it. And you start to detect how it’s spreading how the kind of tastes spreads through all the people who get engaged with it, which is really quite extraordinary. And then there’s the money bit,
Adam Scrimshire
right, yeah.
Michela Magas
Which is pretty good. So we were talking about sort of being democratic. So in fact, I don’t even know Adam, if he gave you the full figures of how this works. But it’s somewhere between 40 actually, maybe Yana knows even better, she’s just been looking at the figures just recently, between 40 and 50%, that goes to the artist, it’s like ridiculously high. So try imagine this scenario you have, you have a product, a fashion product that gets sold in a store, High Street store, down in central Stockholm. And the store will put a 50% markup on the product. And you’re used to paying X amount for a T shirt or a garment. Well seeing that this is basically done through crowdfunding. So you just order one in advance and it gets shipped to you within two weeks. And that 50% goes direct to the artists now the amount is pretty considered
Adam Scrimshire
is is definitely and it I mean, it’s just I’ve been thinking recently about how more important something like this is in terms of, I see a lot of the moments of a lot of reaction, a lot of distaste for social media within young musicians and artists that are hanging out and are a part of very, very active local communities of musicians and and groups. And they are looking for ways that they are networking that aren’t within those traditional social networking forms because they just find it aggressive, unpleasant, on social, compared to going to a jazz session in Deptford in South London and getting really sweaty all night and, and sharing that sort of thing. And this is something that is physically more within a community kind of space, which is what’s really exciting about that, and then put on top of that the financial aspects and yeah, it’s it’s something interesting,
Michela Magas
also incredibly important, both sort of sense of humanity, connectedness with our fans, and, and also the fact that and the fact that you do actually you can actually live off something like this. Yeah. And I think there’s been a lot of people who have really loved this. And just earlier we had a chat with Stephan Plank. Yeah, who works with Nina Hagen, and with some other like people like Annie Lennox and stuff. So watch this space. We’re going forward with this format. We are on the mission out we had absolutely. And also Oh, you will, you’re really curious. Let me let me let me give you the mic so people can issue one second. Hello, I’m Francesca is actually just a practical question that who finances the production of the actual product? You know how crowdfunding works, right? So basically, the artists announces the new release, the fan base, buys orders a T shirt in advance, and the money is given to the production. And basically, the profit, after the product of the T shirt is delivered goes to the artist, as simple as that. No stock sitting in warehouses, and no waste whatsoever. It’s actually no outlay up front. It’s pretty good. So, so basically, as I say, watch this space, Adam will be with us tomorrow. Again, actually, we’ve given you slot to do whatever you’d like. And is a wonderful artists and you should hear his music. If you’re interested in teachers. They’re available in all kinds of sizes at that desk upstairs, which is still rather chaotic, because all sorts of developers have been picking up t shirts and all kinds, but it is there and feel free to get one. You can see one of the people who will benefit directly from it. So we support our assets and we encourage you to invest in them. And thank you so much, Adam. Scripture has been a great add on scripture.
Andrew Dubber
That’s Adam Scrimshire with Michela Magas. And that’s the MTF podcast. The good news is that Adam’s finishing work on his new album, I can tell you that it’s sounding amazing, and it’ll be out a little later this year. If you’re interested in finding out more about TJay, check the link in the show notes or drop me an email Dubber at Music Tech fest.net. And I’ll point you in the right directions. That’s it for this week. Don’t forget to share like subscribe rate review or just say nice things about us and telephone conversations. If you still have those. Talk soon and have a great week. Cheers.
