BMC: Musical Highs and Musical Lows
The weekend of Oct. 31 to November 2 witnessed Bahrain's first Music Conference, conceptually the biggest melting pot of the musical and musically-inclined in Bahrain (and in the region).
The Bahrain Music Conference. A wonderful concept, and thus personally a highly anticipated weekend.
The conference is basically split into "days" and "nights," where the days are busy with lectures and workshops, and the nights are for live performances and actual exhibition of the musical talent.
Musical Highs
The majority of the workshops/lectures took place at the Domain Bahrain hotel, and the set-up at the hotel was great. The best thing about the Domain hotel set-up was really the atmosphere that BMC created, it felt like a casual get together of great artists who just wanted to share their experiences.
Even though we were late, we managed to make it to the end of Karim Miknas' talk, "An Underground Perspective on Music in Bahrain" on the first day, and I'm glad we did. He said something that stuck, since we sometimes in Bahrain have the tendency to parrot "support your local talent" to the point where we may feel guilty to look elsewhere,
"Support your local artists, but definitely bring in artists from outside, because they can teach you. After all, it's always an exchange, and artists learn from each other."
Then he played a beautiful song. I wish I could remember whose it was, unfortunately I missed his entire anecdote behind it, but still the song was awesome.
Maybe being high on flu medicine helped.
The next lecture we caught was Maher Daniels' "Music Production in the Digital Era." It was really nice because it wasn't a 'lecture,' it was more of a discussion where Maher and audience shared experiences about music production, and even got into the nitty gritty technical DJ-speak when some audience members were asking Maher for his advice on specific production software and plug-ins.
He concluded his lecture beautifully on the digital era:
"Technology has given us the advantage of taking music to another level, and pushing the boundaries of music. "
As for the symposium, it was also great to see all those musical figures in Bahrain, especially Moh'd AlSadeqi from Osiris, a progressive rock band in Bahrain that got international recognition during the 60s.
Here are some unforgettable snippets from their discussions (based on what we got to listen to before we had to leave in the middle of the symposium):
"We played everything, and that is a must for every musician. Don't just say you'll play your own stuff, play everything." - Mohd AlSadeqi
"I had a sound that I wanted to introduce but it was too harsh to be accepted (underground techno), so this is when I started connecting with the audience." - FawazO
(on music education) "There's a wealth of stuff you can pay for London, what you get from it is down to the individual. " - Steff Manni
"Family is VERY important when it comes to music education. Even though in the society the stigma is still there." - Mohd AlSadeqi
Day 2's conferences started out with the Red Bull Music Academy Info Session, featuring Bahrain's own Hassan Hujairi and Greek And.ID, who also basically sat down and shared their experiences with music production and how it was at the music academy. Despite the overly technical talk that went over our non-music-producing heads, there were some valuable experiences that we can all learn from.
And.ID shared a story about how the musicians randomly started making music with their forks and knives, and ended up recording the sounds at the studio. Basically, creativity means you can make anything you love out of... anything. Hassan talked about his music production process, something about breaking down a sample into thousands of teeny pieces that he could re-arrange or pick apart.
They also talked about the different places they can get music samples. And.ID sometimes records his Skype conversations with his friends and uses pieces of the vocals, cutting them up and adding synthesizers and making loops.
Something we particularly enjoyed about the RBMA session was the Q&A part, an audience member talked about how radio stations only play mainstream music and never play good new music. Hassan Hujairi made a beautiful point with his answer, saying that you can't force people to listen to completely different music. The compromise is maybe to play one hour of the music they like, and then like 15 minutes of music they might like. Do it slow and work with the audience, don't force your music and reject the fact that mass audiences have their own tastes.
The duo concluded their session with advice to artists: Try to mix. "Most people are like 'oh we only like rock music' or 'oh we only like house,' but you have to listen to everything and try to mix things."
That's some good stuff.
As for the conference nighttime events, I got to attend a few of the electronic music ones and the "Pinhead" event at Block 338, which featured mostly blues-y and jazzy live performances. In general, the music was really good and it was definitely worth it to attend at least one of the parties the BMC held during the weekend. Purely musical experiences that everyone can enjoy.
The best part of BMC, personally, was the Big BAMM closing party on Day 3, it was an awesome party that basically started and lasted all day and night at Coral Bay. It was just a chill event with great weather, great people, and an interesting tradeshow of musical hardware in the meantime. The best vibe.
Another fantastic aspect was the chosen venue, the Domain Hotel. It's a beautiful hotel and every room looked nice, and we would love to attend more events at the hotel. It was the perfect venue choice for the BMC weekend workshops. Mezzaluna only had one workshop (the RBMA info session), but it was also a beautiful set-up that set a casual and cozy atmosphere for the speakers and their audience members. Not too shabby as the most popular night-event venue either!
Finally, the branding and logo design for the Bahrain Music Conference were awesome. We personally loved the colors and design of the website/brochures, even though the brochure (or programme?) may have been too big for our liking, the actual layout was something we particularly enjoyed, and the branding and set-up for BMC at all the events were extremely sexy.
Musical Lows
Despite the generally great atmosphere created by the BMC weekend, there were tremendous areas for improvement.
Firstly, before the Bahrain Music Conference even started, we felt that the marketing was weak. Using social media as one of the only marketing channels (besides the press releases and the press conference) means that an online buzz really needs to be created ahead of time, and this means using the help of other already-established players in the Bahraini social media game. We'll discuss that more in the "Missed Opportunities" section below.
Our first clue that the marketing wasn't doing much was the fact that the only people (that we know of) who knew about BMC's events were those directly connected to participating DJs or event organizers. When looking at the BMC Twitter page, only seven tweets were produced by BMC during the entire month of August, and all the tweets are about registration or looking for artists. Where was the information about the event itself? Maybe a feature on each different artist speaking at the event, music recommendations (Bahraini Music Mondays?!), how the general Bahraini audience can benefit from BMC without being DJs/artists/industry professionals, etc. off the top of our heads. The Facebook page wasn't very active, either. If one marketing channel is going to be used, then it needs to be juiced to the core. With the right marketing, we could have seen the big faces of music all around the GCC, like the many musicians and bands around the area. Maybe they couldn't have come, but did they know about the event?
The second clue that the marketing didn't do much was the turn-out at the night parties, or rather lack thereof. Another issue obviously that could have affected the turn-out was the fact that there were just too many parties going on at once. While in theory it's nice to have a range of options when you're going out to party, how practical is it when this is your first event and you just don't know how many people are going to show up? Especially since 3 out of the 4 parties on Day 1 were electronic-music parties (House, Deep House, Tech House, Techno, Deep Tech, etc.). Maybe five years down the line when enough of a base has been gathered, this could be done, otherwise it was a very risky move that didn't end well for many of the parties. Personally, I went to the Freddy Vs Jason party at Zoe around 11PM on Night One (Thursday), and I could count the attendees by hand. The Pinhead Block 338 event, the same night, was actually pretty good in terms of turn-out. It was pretty full, since the weather was nice and outdoor performances were very chill. Did the Relocators go, though? Because I didn't see them (edit: They didn't, they did perform the next day though).
On the second night, the same issue was faced in some venues. The Zoe event (again, one on the rooftop and one downstairs, an idea we didn't particularly go for) had a larger amount of people than the day before, but still a smaller turn out than one would hope for, because the rooftop party did end up with a full turn-out, but downstairs was quite the opposite. I heard the event at Domain fared better than others, and Mezzaluna picked up after all the other parties ended, so it was the after-party (essentially a Red Bull event). Again, 4 out of the 6 parties were "Electric House" parties, one was the "Rock Brigade" and the other was "Rapper's Delight."
So, there's "lack of marketing" and "too many parties" in one night. The next issue I'm going to mention is my personal favorite.
Nothing boils my blood like good ol' inconsistency (see what I did there? Get it? Get it?)
The information on the website/brochure/online/real life/brains was not always consistent.
There were lots of changes in the original schedule, which is normal of course and not in itself a flaw, but there was absolutely no communication of the changes.
The first example of this was the fact that the entire first conference day started an hour late, and they didn't tweet it. They may have tweeted that the lecture was about to start and blabla, but there wasn't a "Excuse me FYI everything's an hour late so plan accordingly if you were coming to one of the later lectures." Also, one of the lectures didn't happen due to an unforeseen circumstance (Salar Ansari couldn't make it to the conference), and it was not tweeted (or Facebooked) that the lecture was cancelled. Why not? Was it assumed that anyone who wanted to attend the lecture would already be at the conference for all the other lectures? Personally, if I wasn't attending as Media, that was the lecture I would have wanted to catch first, so imagine if I showed up to the BMC at 4 o'clock, only to find that the entire day started an hour late AND the lecture I'm there for isn't even happening. Seriously? Yes, you can tell me that the conference crowd are casual and informal (which it was), and so no one was angry about any delays. This is fine, but you need to INFORM the people who are not there yet that this is happening.
This brings me to Day 2.
The website said the Red Bull Music Academy Info Session would be at 14:30 at the Domain Bahrain. So we planned accordingly.
The morning of the event, BMC tweets that the first session is the RBMA session at 2. At Mezzaluna.
So I check the website again, and no that's not what it says.
I check the brochure given the day before and surely enough, it says 14:00 instead of 14:30, but it still says the Domain Bahrain.
So yeah, inconsistency was a huge issue. And this is about the events/lectures that we caught, who knows the amount of changes that happened to the other lectures or parties that we didn't attend? It wasn't tweeted so we wouldn't know. Also, it would have been nicer to have ALL the workshop/lectures at the same venue. It's a bit of a hassle to go to Mezzaluna for one session and then quickly rush back to the Domain for the rest, before heading to Zoe for the last two workshops. Which is one of the reasons we didn't make it to many of the workshops.
One more, monumental, issue: the event was called Bahrain Music Conference, but it leaned more towards Bahrain Electronic Music Conference. Conference Day 1, 5/7 of the lectures/workshops were more about electronic music than anything else. The Symposium mostly featured electronic music producers. Day 2 had 4/7 mostly electronic music lectures. Our calculation errors are +/- 1. Then the nighttime events were a collective 7/10 electronic music events.
This isn't a bad thing, but the term Bahrain Music Conference leaves much to be desired.
You can argue calculations, but the weekend's atmosphere was undeniably heavily electronic.
Missed Opportunities
As outsiders to the events and general music lovers, here are the things we expected/hoped for and didn't see (or some ideas we thought of during the weekend):
1- The inclusion of a more musically diverse group of artists during the daytime events.
We have a huge rock music scene, hip hop scene, and a tremendous folk music/traditional Arabic music scene. Not to mention all the other artists who fall into more alternative and miscellaneous categories. Where were they during the day? Why couldn't we get workshops focused on different genres of music? What about the vocalists?
Especially Arabic music. We have a very rich and deep cultural and musical background in Bahrain. Google "Music in Bahrain" and you get a Wikipedia page that briefly talks about Khaleeji music, Sawt, and rock bands of the modern era (including Osiris, whose Mohd AlSadeqi showed up for Symposium on Day 1). It almost feels like Western music is deemed superior to traditional Arabic music, which is untrue and unfair. It may not be the case, but that's how it felt at times.
All kinds of musical artists should have been more involved during the conference days, otherwise it shouldn't really be the Bahrain Music Conference, since there's so much more to music in Bahrain.
Here are some lecture ideas for the general audience and for non-electronic artists, off the top of our heads: songwriting (for different genres maybe), the history of rock and roll (or other genres), history of the Bahraini music scene, the benefits of self-teaching vs the benefits of classical training (could be a debate), basics of musical theory, how to market yourself (or your band), the connection between visual art and music (this can be done in so many different ways + reach the visual artist base of Bahrain), introduction to vocal training, making music with household items or unusual items (like And.ID's utensil story), the development of music in film (similar to BMC's own Film Scoring but maybe a more historical perspective), soundtracks as a genre, the breakdown of different song elements, poetry and music, psychology and music, etc.
2- Missed Collaborations:
While it was great that there were many sponsors and media partners taking part in the BMC weekend, we couldn't help but notice the absence of many others. Where were the big players of Radio Bahrain? Imran Al Aradi, DJ Mojay, etc.? What about magazines such as FACT Bahrain, who always take part in the Bahraini music scene? Bushido had a very big party on Thursday night, why wasn't the BMC take some part in that? What about Bahrain Music Institute? Why didn't they collaborate with them, their teachers, their performers? And so many others...
The collaboration with Red Bull had an amazing turn out and was one of the most successful aspects of the weekend. Imagine if there were more strong organizations in the music scene such as Red Bull involved in BMC, this weekend could have attracted EVERYBODY in the region.
3- Ministry of Culture/Bahrain Music Festival:
Music is a part of our culture. Bahrain is historically known for its "sawt" music, mentioned earlier, which was apparently popularized pre-World War II in Bahrain and Kuwait. We've recently seen Ministry of Culture enriching the music scene in Bahrain by bringing top international figures to have concerts, and building the beautiful national theatre. Why wasn't the Ministry of Culture involved with the Bahrain Music Conference? Imagine if there was a party at the national theatre. It would have been amazing. Also, the MOC could have at least provided their database of contacts of the local Bahraini artists, or could have provided locations for workshops/lectures/parties. It could have been such a great collaboration with such an outstanding outcome.
4- Tangible outcomes from the workshops:
It would have been nice to physically see something come out of the BMC. An example would be an infographic or standardized guide to which music software different artists should use at different stages of their music production, especially since there's such a wide range of options. Something else that would have been cool would be if the producer giving the workshop had created (or started to create) a new track or loop with the audience to show the process happening live.
We know that all workshops were beneficial and enjoyable just the way they were, but it would have been nice to have seen tangible results for some of them, as it would give the BMC such a stronger reputation and brand power for the upcoming years. Maybe even a workshop about using specific software, instead of just general production lectures.
Overall Impressions
Besides the mistakes here and there, which weren't tremendous screw-ups by any account, we give our detailed critique because we try not to settle when it comes to an event with the name "Bahrain" on it. We definitely wouldn't say that the BMC's standards were low, but we've kind of had enough of the saying "it's X's first time, so it's okay if it wasn't spectacular."
During the press conference prior to the event, it was mentioned that the event was being planned for six months, and we really appreciate the amount of work put into the conference. A lot more could be done in six months. In fact, planning next time should be commenced much earlier just to make sure more can happen. The team organizing the BMC are six people (with day jobs) who really worked their butts off to make the event happen. They need more organizational manpower, because a group of six (albeit hard workers) is too small (and overworked) for a national-scale (we hope!) event.
We do wish more people were involved in the planning, so that it could be more of a "Bahrain Music Conference" than a small gang of mostly electronic-music-based artists. While the event was a success, the name of the event implied (to us, at least) that all the parties of Bahrain's music industry would be there.
Now that it's mostly said and done, would we re-attend the BMC event weekend exactly as it was? Yes. We would.
The timing of the event was great. It was a wonderful experience, and a great change of pace from our usual weekends.
The people were fantastic, and the music was amazing.
We hope for more and improved events, just like this.
Stay updated [Links open in new windows/tabs]:
BMC's Website: bmc-bh.com
BMC's Twitter: @BMC_bh
Red Bull Bahrain's Twitter: @RedBullBahrain
Upcoming event to check out: art.haus at Brazil Lounge this weekend!
Catch the photo gallery of awesomeness:
Desert Head: A short and fucked up Bahraini film
Cupcake War: Round 2
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