Ten Past Seven – It Might Make Noises

One of the questions at the heart of the record is the issue of how it was paid for. The band decided to go down the crowd-funding route of FundIt.ie, looking for the not-insignificant amount of €5,000. The band were completely open about the costs that would be incurred in exploring the avenues they had chosen and the response was overwhelmingly positive though it did mean a whole new set of issues in the run up to the recording. “Obviously it was kind of new territory. For me, I thought it kind of just like Paypal. This is just a functional thing. I think there’s people that think of it differently, like people who see it as an ideology or something, which I wasn’t really aware of. Or even that people would get behind things and be tweeting about it and all that.”

The community aspect of the project was what really seemed to appeal to the band. “What I found brilliant was that a large amount of people can give small money to make something big happen and I thought that was great because that was old school, like we’ll all just chip in. For me it seemed like, instead of having to go to a small label, you could actually go straight to people and if people want the music they can get it. The only thing I did find was that I don’t think I’d do it again in the same way where all the money is virtual, as in we had to raise all the money. Our reasoning behind it in the first place was that we wanted to be transparent about it, where it’s like ‘This is how much we need. If we don’t make it, we can’t do it.’ During it I was definitely a little freaked out because I was going through everything in my head, like who the hell are these lads to be doing this? How can they be expecting to get this much money? Why don’t they just record it down the road? All the kind of things that could have gone wrong. Obviously, at the end of the day, it was only people that wanted it, got it. So feck it.”

It was a close call until the end though, with a large amount of money still to be raised on the final day with the deadline approaching fast. The pressure must surely have had its own effect on the O’Brien and the rest of the band? “I think I was psychosomatically ill! I didn’t realise why but I started getting a serious bad throat and it was really shit because there was nothing we could do about it. All you could do was beg or we could have done a thing where we put a load of money in that we didn’t have, pretending. Because you can actually do that, which is pretty retarded. I could go, I fund a grand and a half and then I get it back in my bank account and it cancels out. It’s a serious flaw in the system.”

As it stands, O’Brien is positive about the experience and sees a lot of possibilities for Fund It and its ilk in the future. Having used it to record and release a spectacularly nuanced, textured and powerful EP, he has no reason not to be. “People should try and use it in interesting ways. The idea that it is people with small money putting in a few quid to make something big happen. It’s not just a way for people to be needy and stuff like that. You can actually do more than you could before, once people use it well and not just to try and get handouts or whatever. I think there needs to be more of those projects, and not shit things either.”

http://www.tenpastseven.net

user_login; ?>