Experimental-poppers Yacht will be releasing their new album Shangri-La this summer, on the illustrious DFA label. This will be their second long-player for DFA and their fifth in total. The album is a fun slice of oddball dance disco, recommended if you like Chairlift, Antony & the Johnsons or Chicks on Speed.
Seems the guys have being doing some serious thinking, themes on the album play right into current chaos plaguing the world et al. They mention in their press statement, 'Dystopia (The Earth is on Fire)' is our post-apocalyptic fight song, a cautionary tale, a science-fiction story for our particular eco-socio-political landscape. We face a crisis of Utopia.....We believe that the only real sustainable paradise is in our minds, and hence creative output can be a tangible piece of the Utopia within each individual."
The album was recorded in Portland and California and the above image for the album was illustrated by Jim Burns, three-time Hugo Award-winner.
DFA has also started a series a new project called “White Out”, it centres around putting their freshest wax to the test in their own office. You can see below the reaction and sneak-peek for Yacht's upcoming physical copy of Dystopia (The Earth is on Fire), a limited-edition 7″ that will only be available on our upcoming North American tour.
Have a listen to the track 'Dystopia (The Earth is on Fire)' here:
Bass heads rejoice: just six months after Mary Anne Hobbs signed off her final broadcast for BBC Radio 1, she has announced her return to the airwaves—and a prime-time slot, at that. On July 9, the iconic radio DJ will be taking up a Saturday evening slot on XFM.
As it turns out, that's the very place that Hobbs got her start in radio, 20 years ago, broadcasting under a temporary license on a former pirate network. Now, she says, "Xfm have given me the opportunity to deliver the music that I am so passionate about on a primetime platform. This is such a victory, not just for me, but for all the artists I believe in and all the live listeners who care so deeply. I’ll broadcasting from Manchester across the world at XFM.co.uk bringing future sound and guest mixes from the most forward thinking artists on earth. Dubstep, UK funky, minimal techno, deep house, hip hop, electronica, grime, neo-folk and art house rock... no holds barred."
Check out Hobbs' site for her full statement.
Tonight, Beatport celebrated the fourth annual Beatport Music Awards, and—in our own admittedly not-entirely-unbiased opinion—it was our biggest and best event yet.
For one thing, this year marked the first time that the BMAs were presented live and direct. The ceremony took place at the close of five days of sunkissed vibes at the Beatport Beach Party at Miami's Gansevoort Hotel, where thousands of revelers were on hand to celebrate their favorite artists' considerable accomplishments. (After all, what's a dance-music awards ceremony without a party?)
And, in our humble opinion, this year's results were the finest we've seen in four years of the BMAs—a comprehensive overview of the best and brightest in electronic dance music and club culture, from the underground to the superclubs. Read on to see all the results. But before you do, we'd like to offer huge thanks to everyone involved—artists, labels, PR, booking agents, and of course you, the Beatport community.
Broadcasters are inevitably moving toward a digital future - exploiting new Internet and mobile platforms to supplement their traditional over-the-air operations. Last week, I conducted two sessions in Salt Lake City for the Utah Broadcasters Association, one on the legal issues to be considered in connection with broadcasters' use of the digital media, and a second updating broadcasters on all the legal and regulatory issues that they face from Washington with their over-the-air operations. Slides from the digital media presentation, Broadcasters Online: Legal Issues in the Cyber Jungle, are available here, and those from the broadcast update, the Top Ten Washington Issues that Should Keep Broadcasters Awake at Night, are available here.
To show how quickly things move in Washington, since the seminar, there have been two new developments that relate to topics discussed at the seminar. On the day of the seminar, the Commission's Enforcement Bureau came out with a policy statement about a certification that broadcasters need to include in all of their advertising contracts certifying that the advertising was not sold with a discriminatory purpose - as there will be a specific question about the certification in all license renewal applications. We have summarized the requirements for the clause to be included in the advertising contract here.
At the seminar, we also discussed sponsorship identification, and how stations must acknowledge the sponsor of anything of value that they receive in exchange for any on-air statement. On Friday, the FCC fined two television stations for receiving video news releases that were used on the air. These cases made clear that the broadcaster must acknowledge who paid for the production of a video news release that overtly promotes a commercial product - even if the station received nothing from the sponsor except for the video news release itself. A summary of those decisions can be found here.
Other material of relevance to the broadcasters who attended the seminar include the following:
A guide to the contents of a station's public inspection file can be found here.
A guide to preparing for the upcoming license renewal can be found here.
An article on the required on-air disclosures about the material rules of a broadcaster's contest can be found here
Slides from last year's Utah seminar on the FCC's EEO rules can be found here, and a guide to EEO compliance can be found here.
Information about the issues being considered in the FCC's proceeding on potentially repurposing some of the television spectrum can be found here.
The FCC's call for stations to register by April 5 their translators, LPTVs and the paths to cable head-ends and satellite receive locations to protect them from white spaces devices is summarized in our article here.
Other issues of importance to broadcasters are routinely summarized the blog.
Israeli funk musician and producer Kutiman, creator of the famed Thru-You, is back with an encore. Once again, he’s mixing the best performances of YouTube into a single video. Calling it a “mash-up” is perhaps unfair: this is really mix and remix. It’s no different than laying down multiple tracks in a studio, except that the players were working independently in different parts of the world. “My Favorite Color” is a jazzy, soulful number, particularly carried by those incredible vocals on the original song “Green.” The rest is really arrangement, and it works pretty darned-near perfectly. (An occasional ragged rhythmic edge seems only fitting to the form.)
This raises a question. I don’t think anyone would question that the ability to work musically in the same room, to pick up on physical gestures, eye contact, and inhabit the same space together is the ideal for collaboration. But there’s no reason that shouldn’t stop musical expression from taking place in less-than-ideal circumstances, too. You could think of it less as a poor substitute for playing together in a room, and more an improvement upon lonely solo production, a chance to add collaborative musical experiences to, say, time late at night after a long day of work. It could the ability to share something with someone who would otherwise be separated by geography – as imperfect as a letter from a pen-pal, but also as intimate.
As the above video hits my inbox this week, so, too, does a new video from the creators of Ohm Studio. Among other ambitions, they hope their software production workstation, now in progress, will be Internet-connected and collaborative. In its execution, it represents nearly the opposite of the YouTube video above: whereas a tool for simple YouTube sharing is mixed together by hand, an accidental session, this software is engineered with intricate connections of workflow. On the other hand, they both represent the same idea: cloud-connected creation, across geography, between human beings.
Software workstations have traditionally not only emulated studio hardware, but assumed one person in front of one computer working in isolation. So part of what the Ohm crew have to do is to answer how one piece of software can be used by more than one person across the Internet. They make an effort to do that in this video; it’s best to watch. (Thanks to Cid Andrade from Ohm for sending this our way.)
They write:
Ok, the Ohm Studio brings real-time music collaboration. But when two people are working together in the same project, how exactly does it look like?”
We’ve just put online a sneak peek of it, a video capture of two people starting a track from scratch. We see both screens, listen to both audios, and understand how artists will be able to compose/produce as if they were together.
I still think there’s value in solo creation, but that doesn’t have to exclude collaboration. I’m curious – YouTube upload or sophisticated DAW, does any of this look practical to you? How have you collaborated online, if at all? (Or is it back to a rehearsal room or studio to work face-to-face?)
A fabulous mix by none other than Pathaan. This mix is a never release before groovy, exotic, downtempo mix filled with eclectic electronica and global beats. Pathaan says : I’m not a politician but am human and sickened by the current world affairs………. During a time of religious conflict, war, oppression, famine and racism etc etc, [...]
Want to see a very 90's era music video? Look no further than the new video from New Zealand's Die! Die! Die!
"Daze" features the indie-pop punkers performing the tune while multiple scenes flash in and out of focus. The blurring scenes look like they're right out of 1994 MTV (like when they used to show videos).
"Daze" is from the trio's album FORM which is out now via Flying Nun.
Ready to cut the cord and go wireless? With mobile gadgets getting involved in music-making, it seems a logical solution – maybe not reason to throw away your MIDI cabling, but worth at least trying. Bluetooth could be an answer. In fact, it could work even without all those pesky, pricey mobile tablets and phones lying around, just with good, old-fashioned MIDI gear. (‘Bout time.)
Bluetooth and MIDI are a logical match; the big surprise is that these two haven’t paired off (cough) much earlier. We’ve seen the occasional implementation or paper or rant, but not much real-world usage. That could be about to change – that is, provided ample real-world testing.
Bluetooth mobile sync: First off, owners of Korg iOS software just got a Bluetooth-based update that provides sync. (See video below, shot by tipster and reader Danny Fluck.) Entitled “Wireless Sync-Start Technology,” KORG promises their Bluetooth feature now enables two iPads running iElectribe or iMS-20 to sync with one another with zero latency. (The update also includes perhaps more widely-useful features – SoundCloud support and AudioCopy, says Synthtopia.)
The name suggests that what the “sync-start” technique does is actually to match any latency between the two devices so that they start at the same time. That’s how multiplayer gaming typically works, and it applies easily to musical applications: you ping connected devices, then delay the start points of each of them to match the slowest device so that they sound together. (I think I’m saying that correctly and clearly; it’s Friday.)
Danny reports that it works perfectly and “instantaneously.”
Okay, so cool, as long as you only use iPads, and you’re lucky enough to have two iPads handy, and you only use KORG apps, you’ve got a nifty solution – but that’s a little limiting.
Bluetooth MIDI on Android or any hardware device. A bit further-reaching is something Peter Brinkmann, primary author of libpd, has been testing. (See video, top, which is much snappier than my explanation.) Now, Peter is no MIDI fanboy; when several of us talked about adding MIDI to libpd – an embeddable version of the open source patching environment – he described MIDI as a “plague upon humanity.” (I don’t recall seeing that quote anywhere on the MIDI Manufacturing Association website.)
But here’s the thing: MIDI is obsessively compact and simple, and absurdly easy to implement even on the cheapest microcontroller. That makes it ideally suited as a means of making inexpensive hardware inter-operate, and without using up lots of power or bandwidth – just as MIDI was designed to do.
Furthermore, as Apple tablets and phones demonstrated USB MIDI connections, it got Peter (and some of the rest of us) thinking. Yes, it’s too bad that Android devices lack key USB host capabilities that would let them talk to hardware. On the other hand, once you start attaching lots of cables to a device, you might as well use a (more powerful, more flexible) computer in place of the tablet. So low-power, efficient wireless – like Bluetooth – seems the way to go.
In part 2, he describes latency and jitter. Here’s what I’ve been told by mobile engineers to whom I talked: performance has greatly improved in Bluetooth implementations in recent years. That means that part of the reason Bluetooth MIDI may have been adapted is that, when people first began testing this a few years ago, the implementations weren’t yet good enough – and no one has checked since. (Until now, that is.)
Since then, Peter has released free software for the Android platform, all under a free Apache license, so anyone can try it out. And since it works natively with Pd for Android, this means you can very quickly hook up a Pd patch to Bluetooth support on any Android device. There’s even a sample patch and code to get you started!
As far as I know, Apple doesn’t let you implement a similar solution on iOS, so this would remain Android-only. (Hey, come on – iOS can’t have all the fun.) I’m curious to hear if I have that correct, though, so please do share.
The next step: refining the hardware rig and interface design and most importantly, testing. Correction: I claimed that the MIDI interface was not opto-isolated; it actually is.
Hacklab and testing: With that spirit in mind, on Saturday April 2 from 1p – 6p, we’ll have a free, open hacklab in New York. It’s mainly an informal get-together, but there will be short demos as we go. It’s the first step in broader testing and experimentation with these ideas. If you’re in the NYC area, you can RSVP on Facebook. (just went up, so it may be quiet) The plan is to play a bit with hardware and software and different Android devices.
All are welcome to the hacklab, regardless of experience.
This isn’t just an Android thing, though. Part of the reason to use Bluetooth in place of WiFi is that it’s much simpler and cheaper to implement, and has more modest power requirements. As such, providing Bluetooth MIDI interfaces for other music gear is more manageable than it would be with WiFi.
Synthtopia reports on iOS MIDI WiFi, in the case of MoDrum and Bassline, using Apple’s own network MIDI framework. I’m assuming it claims it’s the most extensive such implementation because of the sync functionality.
SoundPrism Pro, in the trailer below, also recently added network (as well as wired) MIDI compatibility.
Incidentally, there are already compatible frameworks for Windows and Linux (in addition to Mac, of course), and no reason Android couldn’t also do WiFi MIDI, too. The advantage of Bluetooth remains doing so with less power consumption, and as direct serial communication over the wireless link.
And yes, devices like The Missing Link provide this kind of functionality over WiFi – though the Bluetooth radio could be cheaper and more power efficient. (As for performance, we just have to do more testing.)
Just don’t forget, all of this is a plague upon humanity and an abomination, so try to keep that in mind. Have a good weekend!
For those of you who don't already know, Radiohead has decided to commemorate the physical release of The King of Limbs by releasing a very limited edition newspaper for free.
'THE UNIVERSAL SIGH' newspaper is being distributed worldwide. Literally. And it will not be re-produced. Once they're gone, they're gone. It will be released in the US on Tuesday, March 29th.
The band will also be releasing a "newspaper edition" of the album on May 9th. No other details on that yet.
Click Here to find the nearest distribution location that will have THE UNIVERSAL SIGH.
The King of Limbs arrives March 29th via TBD Records.
Below is a list of all US locations (Since we are in LA, those locations are bolded).
Boston, Harvard Square - 22 Jfk Street Cambridge, MA 02138
Boston, Newbury Street - Outside Newbury Comics, 332 Newbury Street, Boston 02115
Chicago, Ukrainian Village - 1957 West Chicago Avenue Chicago, IL 60622-5580
Chicago, Wicker Park - 26 East Madison st. Chicago, IL 60602 Los Angeles, Hollywood - 6400 West Sunset Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90028
Los Angeles, Silverlake - 3700 Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90026
Minneapolis, Dinkytown - 1308 4th Street Southeast Minneapolis, MN 55414
Minneapolis, Uptown - 3001 Hennepin Avenue S., Minneapolis, MN 55408
Montreal - Peel and Ste. Catherine - outside of HMV - 1020 Ste Catherine O, Montreal, QC H3B 2V5
New York, Soho - 560 Broadway New York, NY 10012
New York, Times Square - 1515 Broadway New York, NY 10036
New York, Union Square - 4 Union Square South New York, NY 10003
Philadelphia, South Str and S. 6th - 538 South Street Philadelphia, PA 19147-2219
Philadelphia, University City - 133 South 36th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104-3246
Portland, Hawthorne - 3610 Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard Portland, OR 97214-5144
Portland, Mississippi Studios - 3939 N Mississippi Ave. Portland, OR 97227
San Francisco, Haight St - Outside the Amoeba, 1855 Haight Street San Francisco, CA 94117
San Francisco, Mission District - 3004 16th St # 303 San Francisco, CA 94103-3462 Santa Monica - 1248 3rd St. Promenade Santa Monica, CA 90401
Seattle, Ballard - 5449 Ballard Avenue Northwest Seattle, WA 98107-4052
Seattle, Capitol Hill - 917 East Pine Street Seattle, WA 98122-3843
Toronto - Yonge and Dundas Square – NW corner
Vancouver - Robson and Burrard - NE corner - outside of HMV, Vancouver, BC V6E 1B2, Canada
Washington DC, Jefferson and 7th - 784 Jefferson Street Northwest Washington DC, DC 20011
Washington DC, Union Station - 50 Massachusetts Avenue Northeast Washington D.C., DC 20002
As reported a while ago, Fucked Up have recorded and are releasing a rock opera titled David Comes to Life. Today we get a tune from that album and cover art.
"The Other Shoe" is an anathematic tune that features frontman Damian Abraham swapping vocals with a female and it seems to work perfectly. There will also be more singles according to the band's website. "A Slanted Tone" will arrive on April 15th, "Ship of Fools" on April 26th and "One More Night" on May 3rd.
To read Abraham's quick explanation of the 18-song, 78-minute album, Click Here.
