ADAM: Now, Gramophone was pretty patient-and pretty thorough-in the recording of this album. You don't seem to be the type of band that holes up for a weekend in the studio and slaps out a new disc. But you also strike me as the type of producer who still wishes he could go back and tinker with the album. Am I correct in my suspicion?
JON: I wrote a long reply to this, but then I went back and edited it outŠ.ADAM: Much has been made of the role the Internet is having in the music industry. While it certainly makes it easier for bands to get their music out there, the flip side is that many listeners don't know where to start. Music fans complain of drowning on sites like mp3.com, where a couple bad songs can leave a bad taste for the entire site. In your mind, what's the best way for a casually curious music fan to come across new music?
JON: Personally I rarely hear about interesting new music via any other means than word-of-mouth. There's simply too much unfiltered flotsam out there on the net, and the mainstream media have become hopeless - although here in the UK at least Radio 2 and 3 (traditionally the slippers and pipe station and the classical station respectively) have both recently found a new niche for themselves by playing unusual, interesting contemporary music which is too intelligent for Radio 1, and I find that reassuring.As for the internet though, to me its democratic nature is both its blessing and its curse - I find it a very inefficient way of finding new music, but a very efficient way of finding out about music which I have heard about via some other medium. Although most musicians complain about this, I think we do all need some sort of quality control filtering to occur, or there is simply too much out there to digest. Currently some other medium than the internet needs to be involved to do that filtering because everybody and his uncle has a website recommending good music to others and it's impossible to know who to listen to. A good example would be the website of an
