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2017: sets of the year

December 18, 2017 · by · in

Ben UFO, Four Tet, Floating Points & Pearson Sound – Hessle Audio, Rinse FM, 2017-07-13

This set is so obviously four people just fucking around, and yet also a total benchmark in how far afield you can go without things coming apart into total chaos.

Björk – The Cover Mix

“it is most definitely flute and air themed and perhaps reveals the sonic environment my ears were in last year”.  We don’t deserve Björk, but maybe we deserve this astonishing 45 minutes.

Vektroid – FACT Mix

You think you’ve heard everywhere that post-dubstep and vaporwave and etc etc can go, and then something like this comes out and whaaaaaaaaaat.

Deathprod – FACT Mix

No, you want some crackly and lush mountain music while you live in a giant city.  I’m fine.

Honors out to The Black Madonna’s RA 600, to Mike Servito’s acid-tinged work for The Bunker podcast, Powder’s sublime Beats In Space mix, and Courtesy’s scorching-through-below-the-waves RA podcast.

2017: concerts of the year

December 17, 2017 · by · in

Hite – Light Of A Strange Day album release at C’Mon Everybody

I was lucky like the stars to see Julia Hite Easterlin do her thing maybe five times this summer – each was amazing in its own way.  The album release, however, with the full band and the dancer, was the mystical, magical winner.

Tanya Tagaq at the Appel Room

Seeing Tanya Tagaq as part of “The American Songbook” series was a little ironic … but oh my god, what a performer and what a musician and what a singer.

Maalem Rachid El Hamzaoui, Asmaa Hamzaoui, at the Essaouira Festival Gnawa

We saw a lot of Gnawa and a lot of fusion and a lot of that shuffly 6/8 beat – but we also made it to one “proper” sit-down indoor concert, with Maalem Hamzaoui opening, and then his daughter and her band (who are the only female ensemble in Morocco) following up.  She can, of course, shred – both players had a few people in front of us literally entranced.

Shout out to Leila Bourduiel at Issue Project, Thomas Adès Exterminating Angel at the Met, Alan Gilbert doing Beethoven 9 and A Survivor from Warsaw with the NY Phil, and the Christophori piano hall in Berlin for their Ravel / Bartok joint.

2017: shows of the year

December 16, 2017 · by · in

Perverelist, Steevio & Suzybee at ://about:blank

I’ll level with you: I had a weekend in Berlin, and I meant to go to Berghain. But a huge & static mine at 0100 lead me to about:blank. I knew Perverelist would be at least good – he was great. I was skeptical about Steevio & Suzybee – instead of bringing hippie noodling, they summoned up super tight, Mathew-Jonson-esq techno.  And, of course, Berlin never lets me down.

Jlin & Foodman at Brooklyn Bazaar

I hope I’ve talked about Jlin enough that you know she is amazing – and she was.  Jlin is maybe post-footwork … whereas Foodman adds at least one more “post”.  He also stole the show a bit, if the dude in front of me shouting “Future of music!” was any indication.  Beats that you can’t count, weird FM melodies, production so clean it becomes polite, and so on.

Mr. Sunday at Nowadays

Justin Carter & Eamon Harkin have so much to be proud of, and this is such a great party.

Actress, DJ Marfox, Via App, at Good Room

Three great people at the height of their powers – especially, DJ Marfox should be shouted out for playing three accordion-based bangers near the end of his set and freaking us all out in the best possible way.

Honorable mentions to that one salsa band in that one bar in Paris, to The Black Madonna at 1896, to Planet Giegling at Good Room, to Egyptian “The Dick Is Real” Lover at Fabric, to running into The Drifter at Farbfernsehrer seven years later, and to Ellen Allien & Kim Ann Foxman at Good Room

the internet vs music, 2017

October 2, 2017 · by · in ,

How do you release music on the internet in 2017?  We’ve got at least:

  • Bandcamp
  • Spotify / Apple Music / Tidal
  • SoundCloud
  • iTunes
  • Resonate.io
  • Mixcloud
  • YouTube
  • Patreon
  • DropBox
  • Self-hosting
  • ?????

Now let’s look at the tape:

Bandcamp is probably my favorite, but it lacks a bit of jazz, and is more of a store than a place where things can gather momentum.  

Spotify and the streaming services are not really great for bootleg stuff or for things aimed at DJs. (Disclosure:  I’m a Spotify employee, and it’s not perfect, but I don’t think it is bad.)

SoundCloud is probably dying.

iTunes is boring as six horses, and most people don’t buy music.

Resonate is adorable, but is even more niche than Bandcamp.

Mixcloud is designed for radio sets (and has iffffyyy design).

 YouTube makes you no money.  

Patreon doesn’t work for shy people, and has no hosting.

Dropbox and OneDrive and Google Drive are pedestrian.

Most people can’t self host.

So is the answer, as ever, for artists, to do everything?  Cut your 200 vinyl or cassettes, push it to Spotify and everywhere else with DistroKid, put a video on YouTube, link it all to your Patreon on Twitter / Instagram / Snapchat?  

It probably is, really.  As someone who’s been around this field for a minute, it is sort of frustrating that there is no easy answer for me wanting to upload a few edits where they might get a tiny amount of attention organically.  (I am, of course, probably just a lazy old man.)

But along these lines, what’s an instagram record label?  What’s a Snapchat record label?  Is AR / VR stuff going to do anything?  What about Twitch?Will there be a boom in compact-disc (or minidisc!) nostalgia soon?  What about the newsletter trend?  The blockchain?  What’s next?

Drones

March 4, 2017 · by · in ,

Saw a Leila Boudreuil show at Issue Project, which had some lovely guitar x cello drone moments going on.

Also had my eye on the (visually) great stuff by Walter Giers, this excellent pass at physical scores, and the fact that Tidal is allowing users to do pitch & time changes.

I am very late on Joue, but it is a nice idea.  (Expressive!  Oh man.)  Likewise Eve, which is a very different sort of expression.

I’ve had a lot of interface stuff on my mind of late – both in terms of APIs for computer systems, and interfaces for controlling sound, music, musicians, etc.  Where’s the line between too much flexibility and not enough?

software & experiments: every second saturday on kpiss

January 31, 2017 · by · in , ,

Pleased as punch to say that I’m going to be doing a show on kpiss.fm, every second Saturday night, from 10 to midnight Eastern.

Expect some general warmup vibes:  house / techno / post-etc, with maybe some album specials, composer specials, and some pals dropping in from time to time.

Archives will be on Mixcloud, promo and sass will be on Instagram.  Let’s dance.

two to the one-hundred and seventy-sixth power

January 21, 2017 · by · in ,

 

… is the number of patterns you can make* on a 909 drum machine.  Inspired by a dinner talk with my friend Mike Dean, I made a nice little thing that is going to play every one of them back, from now until a very long time in the future**.

Given that I had a sequencer lying around, this was not that hard to do – when the page loads, I calculate the current time-since-start (January 21, 2017, ), turn that into a binary number, and then that number as the pattern.  Each bar, I increment the number, and ta-daaaa!  Music that will take more than a trillion trillion trillion thousand years to finish!

I saw somewhere recently the line that “music is counting without thinking” – this project sure makes the counting bit obvious.

 

* A real 909 can have either an open hat or a closed hat – I went with both, because it is much easier to make work.

** I was going to use Bignumber.js to represent the time, but I forgot that everything will get weird in 2038, so I just used typical timestamps.

2016: tracks of the year

December 31, 2016 · by · in ,

Let’s make 2017 better, team.

DJ Nigga Fox – Untitled

So, that’s some awkward googling.  This is a six track white label, only even given an artist by the record store I found it it – but it is nothing but insane rhythms and fuck-you samples.  You probably were not sleeping on the boys from Lisbon, but man, don’t sleep.

Ember Isles – Embers

A total 180 from the above, but 100 kinds of gorgeous from the Brooklyn indie/folk/harmonizers.

Maggie Rogers – Alaska

Blah blah Pharell blah blah hype blah blah what an amazing record.

Hannah Epperson – Circles (Iris)

The violin, the voice crack, the space, the timbre magic.

Charlotte Day Wilson – Work

It’s gonna take a bit of work.  Oh oh, ohhh work.  Is it ever.

Honors out to Hollas Longton’s firebreathing 4 Caprices, Siriusmo – Nights Off, Weekend Affair – Duel (Part 1), The Westerlies – Saro, KONCOS’s amazing cover of The Whistle Track, Krrum – Evil Twin, Emmalyn’s  cultural moment of #FreeTitties, and the music we need for the next four years – Tim Maia’s Rational Culture.

2016: shows of the year

December 30, 2016 · by · in

Let’s talk about sh – fuck 2016! – ows.

Objeck @ Batofar

I went to Paris, and ended up at a boat party … inside the damn boat.  Nothing quite like feeling the dancefloor tilt from side to side.  Objekt was, of course, excellent – electro, bass/techno, and acid house making perfect sense together.

RBMA Technopolis

Just your every day Bushwick warehouse party, with buckets of production by RBMA, and the leading lights of Brooklyn techno doing their thing.  Galcher Lustwerk killed it, Aurora Halal and Umfang were great, etc etc etc.

Discotechnique @ House of Yes

The rogues at House of Yes baited me in with the promise of Danny Krivit, then just played great disco all night long.  House of Yes can push the “we’re weird because we do circus stuff” a little hard, but they’re great people.

Honorable mentions to Mumdance & Logos playing to 25 people at Slake; to DJ Harvey’s freakout at Output; to Powell & Silent Servant at TBA; to Bunker’s party with DJ Nobu at Good Room; and to Brian Whitman’s going away party at The Echo Nest.

2016: albums of the year

December 29, 2016 · by · in

Yep, fuck this year.  Albums:

Roomful of Teeth – Partita for 8 Voices

Caroline Shaw.  What the hell.  I don’t want to say that this piece single-handedly restored my faith in “new music” … but this piece and this recording kind of did.  Astonishing.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith – EARS

Thank you Spotify and Fresh Finds for the introduction to Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, who’s music is everything I want from modular synthesis nerdery and has some mean saxophone parts.

Tim Hecker – Love Streams

Hecker moves a bit away from drone and a bit towards bass, noise, and processing, and the result is 16 kinds of excellent.

Honorable mentions to:  Suzanne Ciani – Buchla Concerts 1975; Mary Lattimore – At The Dam; James Holden & Camilo Tirado – Outdoor Museum of Fractals; Radiohead – A Moon Shaped Pool; Carla del Forno – You Know What It’s Like, and Oliver Coates – Upstepping