The UK heavyweight will be streaming live from Ibiza via Awdio at 21:15 GMT.

As the BPM Show in Birmingham swings into action, Allen & Heath have released teaser videos for the forthcoming Xone:DB2 and something they're referring to as "Special K."

Beatportal looks at the recent fascination among house producers with sampling Moodymann.

Hot Waves upstart Josh T offers an extended trip through 100 BPM music, ranging from disco and electronica to hip-hop, R&B and classic rock.

BOMBAY DUB ORCHESTRA are compiling a new remix release featuring remixes of both BDO albums by New York City based remixers, dj’s and producers. The release is curated by New York based songwriter, producer, dj and artist extraordinaire Tony Grund. The project will features a host of up-and-coming underground remixers, dj’s, artists and producers as well as a few [...]

JUST RELEASED Delhi 2 Dublin EP: Delhi 2 Dubland. For a limited time, you can purchase this collaboration and remix album, all on the reggae and dubwise tip, on Bandcamp for just $5 bucks!

The French jock recalls his best and worst experiences on the road, including a long list of gigs filed under the word "frightening."

Octopuses are stars of the Crosstown Rebel producer's new video for the single "Can't Leave You."

The dates for comments on the FCC proposed rules for the captioning of Internet Video have been set.  Comments are due on October 18 with replies due on October 28.  An associated Federal Register publication also notes that comments can be filed with the Office of Management and Budget about the compliance of the information collection requirements contained in the proposed rules with the Paperwork Reduction Act. OMB comments can be submitted through November 28.  As we wrote last week, this proceeding is of importance to television stations and cable operators, as the rules will initially apply to video that has already been captioned to meet some other FCC rule, and is later repurposed for the Internet.  It is also important to all operators of websites that distribute such video programming.  A more detailed summary of the proposals in this proceeding is available in our Davis Wright Tremaine advisory on the NPRM.  The full text of the FCC proposals is available here.

This proceeding is on an extremely fast track, as Congress has charged the FCC with adopting rules by January to implement the statutory obligations set out in the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010.  Already, groups representing the hearing impaired as well as certain Internet video aggregators have visited the Commission to lobby for their particular positions on the proposals.  Those representing the hearing impaired community have been very active in this proceeding, as well as in connection with the filing of objections to television stations who do not meet their obligations to provide video accessibility through captions or other written information during over-the-air programming providing emergency information (see our note here on an FCC reminder on that subject).  TV stations and other video providers need to be similarly active in explaining to the FCC what can and cannot be done technologically in a cost-effective manner to meet the needs of these citizens.  The just announced comment deadline provides video producers with that opportunity. 

The pair are offering the chance to stream and download a compilation featuring tracks (some of which are unreleased) from Actress, Zomby, Burial, Pinch, Cooly G and SBTRKT.

Tune in this evening from 20:00 CET to catch Steffi, Nick Hoppner, Norman Nodge and Barker & Baumecker playing live from the German capital.

Music from Saharan cellphones is a compilation of music collected from memory cards of cellular phones in the Saharan desert. And it's coming to vinyl.

In much of West Africa, cellphones are are used as all purpose multimedia devices. In lieu of personal computers and high speed internet, the knockoff cellphones house portable music collections, playback songs on tinny built in speakers, and swap files in a very literal peer to peer Bluetooth wireless transfer.

The songs chosen for the compilation were some of the highlights — music that is immensely popular on the unofficial mp3/cellphone network from Abidjan to Bamako to Algiers, but have limited or no commercial release. They’re also songs that tend towards this new world of self production — Fruityloops, home studios, synthesizers, and Autotune.

In 2010, returning to the states, I released a handful of cassettes. Many of the songs were unlabeled, giving no insight to their mysterious origins. But in the past year I sent out hundreds of emails and calls across six different countries and even returned to West Africa. I’ve tracked down enough artists and I’ve got their approval to collaborate on a commercial release.

Niger Autotune (Emsitka) — Gulls Edit

The cassette was ripped onto the internet and has circulated around the world, featured in the The Guardian, BBC Worldservice, The Fader, Pitchfork, as well as a number of other blogs, but has never had an official release. The vinyl release is a chance for the artists in the compilation to get paid and be properly credited. The record will be accompanied by liner notes with a short bio of each musician and group — artists from Ivory Coast, Mali, Algeria, and Niger.

Funding

The funding makes this release possible — covering a portion of production costs, mastering, distribution, and payment for the artists. Help to fun this project here.

More Information

Music from Saharan Cellphones: Vol 1

Music from Saharan Cellphones: Vol 2

Remember the dude who spent 17 months building a Daft Punk helmet? He's now gone and done it in four.

Why DIY, anyway? As we prepare for a special Handmade Music afternoon hosted by Amsterdam’s STEIM research center, my co-curator Takuro Mizuta Lippit (dj sniff) asked me to answer that question. Here’s what I wrote for STEIM’s international Patterns and Pleasure festival.

“Do it yourself.”

In the world reshaped by recording, in which music is ubiqiutously available on demand and even bare-bones DJing qualifies as “live” entertainment, the act of just making music surely qualifies as “DIY.” Add the fact that distribution, promotion, and booking of music often falls increasingly on the artists themselves, and it’s hard to see any part of music that isn’t DIY.

So, given all that, what would drive artists to make or modify their own musical tools? One might as well ask why make music in the first place. (Because you can? Because it’s fun? Because it’s the most satisfying way to realize an idea or feeling — often the two together?) I believe some of the separation between “music” and “tools” or “gear” or “technology” is arbitrary. That independence is itself a recording-centric notion, in which musical content as artifact is imagined as independent from how it was made. During the process of production or performance, they’re inseparable. The evolution of musical practice, meanwhile, is intertwined with the technology of playing and representing music. Musical instruments in archaeological records appear alongside the first human tools. Those instruments, like the musical materials themselves, are vessels for expression of human thought. We can make our body an instrument, via percussion or voice, but as with so many other elements of our human life, we extend that body through invention.

When you play an instrument, whether a flute or an interactive music software patch, what you express is mediated both through musical language and the tool. I know as a child, it was what first drew me to music: I could press my fingers to the keys and hear something very much other than what I could produce myself. It’s easy to see the connection to the synthesizer and the computer.

When you want to realize (or discover) new musical and sonic ideas, then, it’s necessary to become involved with the way in which those sounds are produced. As composers for acoustic instruments and voice, you dive into the realms of harmony and rhythm, but also the mechanisms of the instruments and standard and extended techniques. Working with the computer, you employ interfaces — whether simulated knobs or code or graphical representation — to realize your ideas. With electronics, wires and resistors and diodes become compositional. With both, the container you fashion, the handcrafted cases or user interfaces, becomes part of the musical identity you design.

There is no such thing as an instrument built from scratch. To quote Isaac Newton (in words adapted by countless electrical engineers and computer scientists), “if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” We inherit a great body of knowledge and tooling. Whether a commercial DAW or a modular development environment or the circuit that makes a filter, we connect with the ideas, imagination, and expertise of generations of engineer-artists. Notably, we lost Max Mathews this year, whose lasting legacy, even more than breakthroughs in computer synthesis, may be his influence on decades of students and colleagues in chasing the limitless potential he saw in digital sound. Thought is the greatest technology there is.

I think we can easily become overly worried about the rise of digital tech. Computers and electronics are here, and for all their dangers — misuse and toxic waste being foremost among them — they are fundamentally a compilation of human ideas. If you like people, you’ll like computers and circuits when you get to know them. We can also become overly concerned with “new”; the great implication of the maturity of electronic sound technology to me is that we can begin to go from novelty to repeatability and expertise. That’s not to discount discovery; it’s simply that discovery can’t exist in a void. At the same time, in our appetite for mastery, we can devalue the novice. I’m excited by seeing projects that don’t quite work yet, that are only at the stage of technical demo or proof of concept, because to me it’s seeing the first steps on a path that could lead a musician into years of practice and refinement. It’s seeing the chicken popping out of the egg. Potential is stimulating when you believe it has a future.

Here, designing one’s own instruments is much like learning to play an instrument. You repeat the ideas of others, just as you repeat the sounds of others when you learn a musical scale. You make sounds that, at first, are, well, awful, but that then grow up. Whether arguably innovative or not, you make discoveries that are inherently personal. And the degree of that progression is dependent in large part on learning from others, playing with them and sharing their experience. As people share that experience, in the end there are breakthroughs to the genuinely new. Collective progress is what allows those individual eurekas.

With economies from Amsterdam to New Amsterdam slowing, with growing unfilled demand for the ability to actually make stuff and not just push abstract numbers around, and with technical problems that demand solutions literally to ensure our survival, all those strange noises we make take on a new meaning. Tools and technology enabled our civilization; now we need them to make humanity sustainable. Silly sounds and musicians’ racket and din may seem distant from that. But we can sing this necessity as a song. We can celebrate the spirit of experimentation by making things that make immediate noise. A bridge or a jet plane isn’t a great place for experimentation or on-the-job learning; music is the perfect playground because errors are always okay. If any community could help encourage free innovation in our culture, music is a strong candidate; today’s young synth builder could be tomorrow photo-voltaic breakthrough. And even if not, we’ll make a wonderful noise.

“Open source” and the “Web” are significant tools to make sharing expertise easier, but at the fundamental level, it’s simply “sharing” that matters. And this is where music’s makers and inventors are helping resurrect the principles of music as community. We have to share ideas and sounds to be able to move forward.

We do it ourselves, together.

After two highly acclaimed string driven, predominantly acoustic projects, Natacha Atlas returns to the Global Dance-floor with the Mounqaliba Remixes. Globally celebrated singer Natacha Atlas’ latest release Mounqaliba was a decidedly acoustic affair, recorded with a 20-piece Turkish ensemble and a chamber orchestra & integrating western and Arabic styles. Mounqaliba (which means being in a state of [...]