Go ahead: rip Ripper’s EP

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As technology has altered the music industry and the capacity of storage mediums has become greater, there has been a relatively steady increase in the lengths of many releases. There was a time when a double album was a big deal, taking up four sides of vinyl. Now, a double album can fit onto one CD, so 70 minutes has become a ridiculously common length for releases, often to the detriment of the quality of music—that’s a lot of space to fill with uniformly great songs. And with the age of digital distribution and players like iTunes upon us, it’s likely only a matter of time before some artist has the brilliant idea to release a 17-hour epic rock opera into the world.

But, while some people are pumping out songs for the singular reason to fill up the available space, Eugene Ripper has taken the opposite approach with his latest release, Fast Folk Underground 2.0, putting it out there as a four-song EP.

“For me it seemed like I could get it done with four songs,” he admits. “These songs just seemed to sit really well together and on a creative development level it made a lot of sense, and also on a practical level of being able to—for me at least the recording process and the writing process takes a while. I certainly would never think that I’m really incredibly fast at it, so to be able to get it done with four songs, and it worked with Crackle, the last EP as well.”

It turns out that Fast Folk and Crackle are also companion pieces with Ripper’s 2004 full-length The Ballad of Black. “They’re all actually coming from the same sort of kernel of production and songwriting process,” Ripper explains. “They all exist on their own, but they’re companion pieces too. They’re kind of like chapters of a story, and from the artist point of view it’s also nice to be able to distribute some music that has a really quick beginning, middle and an end. Because I don’t think there’s any point in making an album just for the sake of putting eight or 10 songs on there and saying, ‘Hey, it’s an album.’ I think you’ve got to go a little deeper than that.”

Beyond the unique thematic work that Ripper created with the trilogy, the musician is trying something new out with the distribution of the EP, putting it up on his website for download. Ripper says that the act of doing so has completely set the music free of any of the sort of constraints of the vessels that we’ve always put our music into. For him, Fast Folk is about the music itself far more than the vessel that surrounds it, and he’s excited about venturing into the uncharted waters of the digital world, suggesting that as things stand right now, the listener has the opportunity to become more invested in the music-making process than ever before.

“The playlist aspect of being able to create the playlist with iTunes and MP3 players is amazing,” Ripper exclaims. “I’ll present my stuff to a certain degree; I can carry my inspiration and my muse to a certain point, and I think that’s why I really enjoy making the EPs—I do all the artwork myself, the manufacturing process, it really is a complete story to tell from soup to nuts in terms of writing it, producing it and saying, ‘Hey, this is my presentation of the material.’
“The interesting thing about our era right now from an artist’s point of view is that there’s much more reliance on the listener to actually do something with the music,” he continues. “There’s the proactive sense of just downloading a track, or going and finding your music, and then once they have it they can do anything with this stuff. I mean they could chop it up, they could downsample it, they could make a playlist, include it in a playlist of material with their other favourite songs, they can tag it, they can move it around. It’s an interesting relationship and we’re entering a really interesting time about the way that music gets distributed. “

Ripper likens the current landscape to the age-old practice of making mix tapes and passing them around to friends, only he says that the whole process has been amplified now.

“You can do it really fast now,” he says excitedly. “You can whip a playlist together really quickly and you can distribute it. The ability to send a link or just email a song to somebody, or to your entire address book. It’s a really exciting time to be a fan of music and it’s a very interesting time to be a producer of music—both exciting and a little daunting, because there’s a fundamental change that’s going on between how music is distributed and how it’s supported and how it’s commodified. We’re right in the middle of it right now.

“In the past it’s always been, ‘Hey, sample this sound,’ or ‘Check out this album and then buy it,’ but for this one we really just want to get it around and get it out there and see what happens,” he muses. “I’m kind of curious to see what happens when you just set it free, because I don’t really know for an artist like myself, because I’m still looking to find my audience. It’s still an ongoing process for me.” V

Sat, Nov 24 (8 pm)
Eugene Ripper
With Michael Rault
Axis Café, $10

Go ahead: rip Ripper’s EP

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