The Project
Welcome to 7s Recording Project featuring the music of 7s, a.k.a. Shane W. Evans, lead singer and songwriter, backed by musical talent gathered worldwide to perform and record a debut album entitled “The 41st Day.” These twelve tracks range from straight rock to funk pop touching on mood grooves, and subtle ballads alike.
We invite you to experience this website to its fullest. Absorb the advance music, song videos, and, if you are so moved, to please consider making a vinyl pre-order, a digital tracks purchase, or larger contribution to the 7s recording project, in support of music, art and community.
Give a listen then step out and see how we are all together.
Art, You, and the Digital Countryside
If we could write you a handwritten letter, we most certainly would, but that might defeat the general purpose of all of this, and besides, the digital genie is already out of the bottle.
As these words hit your screen the underbelly of a free-flowing, multi-layered, transitory, cascading, binary-coded, post-truth world rumbles forth, growing, variating, crashing, and reassembling itself into even more unpredictable yet sometimes painfully obvious permutations.
Everything has been amplified. Nothing has been left untouched.
Information, as a form of Art, has never burned so brightly. Art as its own agent, has never suffered so greatly.
In this information age, it’s the artists that seem to bear the heaviest costs. The work to make the invisible visible has never been more important yet, never has it been so easily dismissed, buried under the steady drumbeat of engagement metrics, network effects, minuscule payouts, and sheer volume. If you forget to publish something today the internet attention machine will forget you tomorrow.
It’s not that artists aren’t making captivating work, or that audiences have lost their curiosity, but rather how a strange, nearly imperceptible bias of context takes hold when Art is communicated in digital form; the misconception that Art itself is just another piece of Information and that the volume of this information diminishes any sense of value.
Spotify Music recently confirmed one new song is uploaded to its platform every 1.4 seconds. That’s more than 60,000 tracks per day or nearly 22 million songs added to Spotify in a year. Based on this trend it’s estimated that 375,000 new songs will be posted daily by 2025 for a mind numbing total of 137 million new songs a year. If you were wondering, The Beatles published a mere 229 songs over 7 years.
Who will listen to these millions of songs? Who has time? Who has perspective? What voices will these songs bring to life? Who will know? If we are awash in artistic options what choice do we have but to submit to the familiar? What will become of culture against the demand for mass appeal? What do we give to ourselves, for ourselves?
In the digital frontier it seems art risks to lose its import when stripped of context. Art risks to lose its impact if produced in volume.
"Art risks to lose its import when stripped of context. Art risks to lose its impact if produced in volume."
Even the original Wonderwall of Lascaux loses its own meaning under the commodified success of the attention economy and perhaps so to goes another compass of shared humanity.
What to do? Turn off the noise.
"Turn off the noise."
Return to the digital countryside, before social escalated the salacious, before platforms corralled the herds. Elevate true connections between people rather than the false CON-nection among people.
Resist the lure of aggregators to find beauty. Use the digital realm as a tool built for people and not on people to foster community. Community is still the source by which culture is derived, community will remain the source in which culture will thrive. Then share what you have discovered with someone you know, with a personal message.
As for the 7s Project, You are the community we’d hope to meet in the digital countryside. We invite you to explore this digital destination and the sampling of the art and music of 7s. None of these pieces have any impact without audience, it’s the viewer, the listener, who provides validity. It’s you who provides meaning and advocates its message. These songs are, in essence, our handwritten letters to you. In these songs, we hope you’ll find a connection and let others connect with you.
Peace,
7s