Sound of Fractures on Bubbles and releasing NFT music: “You end up on this treadmill of making records on other people’s terms”

Jamie Reddington is Sound Of Fractures, a London-based electronic artist and producer who is driven to forge a new path for creating a sustainable music career for himself and other artists. He’s not afraid to speak out on streaming platforms that don’t pay a penny, and social media platforms that make money off the back of musicians’ content. After the success of his early single Real Friends and experimenting with blockchain technology to sell his music, he brings us Bubbles, his new single with an interactive project built around it entitled Scenes that invites listeners to share photos and memories with the song that eventually becomes part of the artwork.

Music technology, and the tech that is emerging to help artists promote and sell their music is a key part of what Reddington does, while centering around a very human story. Making modern, forward-thinking UK garage and electronic music, he is one of the most prominent artists fusing his work with web3 platforms, which use blockchain technology to enable musicians to keep more of the profits from their music that would otherwise go to middle-men and the traditional gatekeepers of the music industry (record labels, streaming platforms, managers, take your pick).

“I started out very much into hip-hop and soul music,” Reddington says when asked about his earliest music days. “I started playing in a band when I was a teenager. But in that period, drum and bass and garage were just having this massive moment, and that felt like the one thing that was ours in the UK. So I got drawn into that and I was going raving a lot. I guess the whole Bristol sound was really big for me. I was already into music like Massive Attack, Tricky and Portishead. That to me was really exciting – mixing electronic music with the indie sounds.”

Besides the aforementioned teenage band he was in at school, Sound of Fractures is not Reddington’s first taste of the music industry. He had tasted success as part of the production duo Money Adam, who secured a publishing deal and had their beats appear on albums by the likes of UK emcee Skinnyman. But it was an experience that gradually left Reddington disillusioned: 

“You just end up on this treadmill of making records on other people’s terms. Now, I’m all about making music about how I felt in that moment, whereas a lot of people in the pop industry just become really good at churning it out. It sounds disingenuous, but it’s just this ‘more more more’ culture.”

Sound Of Fractures was then born out of Reddington’s need for greater authenticity in his music. However, this isn’t just to say he wanted to release music that was more personal to him, but also born of a craving for more authentic and less transactional relationships with fans and people in the music industry. It just so happened that releasing one of his earliest singles, Real Friends, coincided with his discovery of the web3 music scene – the new phase of the internet which uses blockchain, the technology behind cryptocurrency and NFTs.

“The main thing that drew me to it is that everyone’s experimenting,” Reddington says. “And that I can do something new for every release. For one release I released 200 editions and they were all cheap, and then I tried a release where it was just five editions of the song and they were more expensive. There’s a really engaged group of people who are keen to collect music this way, just as there is with vinyl or trainers. 

"I’d be making, say, a grand and a half — which is around 300 or 400 thousand streams! Which is incredibly hard to get as an independent artist. It got me thinking about the demo versions of the songs on the Real Friends EP, and about why we often think demo versions don’t matter. So I had a go at selling the demos as single edition pieces, and people bought them for a substantial amount of money, like 700 or 800 dollars.”

This leads us to the new Bubbles EP, one of the most personal Sound Of Fractures projects to date. The track Willow’s Heartbeat samples his child’s heartbeat throughout the track, and the title track samples one of his kids laughing at a bubble, as uplifting electronica begins to swirl around the sample. In this spirit, Reddington invites listeners to become part of the web3 project for the EP, entitled Scenes, to anonymously submit photos and memories that the music evokes for them.

“It’s free to take part,” he explains. “And the idea was that from all the photo submissions that people sent in, I’d choose one to be the official artwork for the release on Spotify and Bandcamp. So it’s not just me putting my memories into these releases, but everyone else is too. 

"People told me it’s been very emotional for them, like people telling me they were crying as they did it, and revisiting feelings they hadn’t felt in ages. And prompting them to say things to their partners that they hadn’t before because of the memory they chose.”

Waves plugins form a concrete part of Reddington’s music and production: “My go-to plugins from Waves appear in every single session I do.” He promptly loads up his DAW session for Bubbles and goes through the many Waves plugins he used on the song: “I use the Kramer plugin all the time, I use Abbey Road saturator a lot, and I use the J37 Tape a lot as well. I like a lot of tape saturation as you might have guessed. I like some of the classic ones as well — I use the C6 Compressor on lots of sessions. The C6 and the C4 have always been plugins I go to often. The Doubler is one I find really hard to beat. I love the flexibility of that one.

“I use the H-Reverb on a lot of vocals. I like some of the quick-fix plugins as well; I do like to mess around with the Maserati plugins. And I still find the easiest way to create the effects I want is by using the SuperTap Delay plugin. I love some of the functional things on the SSL Compressor, some of the old SSL channel strips, because they just do what I want them to do. 

"I use the R-Vox Compressor quite a lot, and Meta Flanger a lot as well. I still use MaxxBass if I'm dealing with trying to pull sub out from places. And the L1 Limiter — I don't use it for the same thing that everyone else uses it for but I still use it, even though I do have the L2 and L3.”

“It’s the same with, for example, the H-EQ,” Reddington continues. “There are certain stereo and mono things that I know I can load up and I know what I can do with it. I like the CLA compressors because they always do what I need them to do. I use quite a lot of the API ones. I think the most common stuff I use are the ones that I find it hard to find anywhere else that does the same thing — for example Doubler, MaxxBass, and Renaissance Bass. 

"There are lots of plugins that say they can get the same results, but I always go back to these Waves plugins. I use the X Noise ones, they are so handy. I also find that Waves plugins are really really good in terms of usage — the balance of usage compared to CPU usage and sonic output is still so well-built.”

It’s fascinating to stop and think about where all this will take Sound Of Fractures, with Reddington being one of the earliest and most prominent adopters of web3 technology and using it to create deeper connections with his fans. It’s very early days both for him and on-chain music, but his pioneering path could be completely pivotal for his music career. In the meantime, Bubbles is available to listen to now, both on streaming platforms and on the Scenes website Reddington has created, where you too can submit your own cherished memories to the release.