16 posts tagged “music”
A friend of mine sent me a link to this video which is for a song I wrote and completed just after 9/11. I had been working on it up until that point but after watching TV for almost 48 hours straight after 9/11 happened, I had to do something else and I finished up this song. Here's a video for it that is a lot more upbeat than the description of the timing of the completion of this song:
Youtube video link for the song Starbase Lounge Music from the album Eponyms originally released on Magnatune Records in 2003.
The synth horns in the background of this song were played live over the top of the arrangement. I found a patch in Reason I liked because it reminded me of the gorgeous horns in The Matrix movies that I really liked when I was working on this tune.
I hope the whole Starbase Lounge Music idea makes sense. The original concept was called Summer Madness II because there's an amazing song by Kool & the Gang called Summer Madness and it features a fat Arp synthesizer sound that rises to ear-piercing pitches by the beginning and again at the end of the song, after a couple of solos on the synth and guitar. Summer Madness is just such an amazingly brilliant piece of music that it defies description. If you haven't heard it, you must seek Summer Madness out and listen to it now.
The idea for the song title came from an artist I like called Visit Venus. They had a space jazz, down tempo album out in 1995 that I caught up with much later called Music For Space Tourism that I adored and I liked the concept of making music for the future or that was thinking about what music would be like in the future. So, the name Starbase Lounge Music came from the idea that this is what Summer Madness would sound like in Aldous Huxley's dystopian Brave New World future where people used artificial, synthetic substances to alter and enhance their lives and everyday experiences. As always, your mileage may vary.
On a side note: I've been trying to get my artwork, artist name and remastered music replaced and updated on websites and music services like Last.fm, iTunes and Magnatune.com for some time now and so far, no luck. The artist name on Magnatune.com was initially introduced as Belief Systems but this is actually the name of my record label that doesn't really put any records out anymore. The artist name for Darin Marshall is Mantic for all of the music released on Magnatune.com and soon on Nude Photo Music.
Apparently, it's fairly difficult to change the name and artwork of the music you've released after it's been propagated to various online services because it's been a long time since I talked with my distributor friend at Magnatune and the new music with the new artwork is still not updated on iTunes, on the Amazon MP3 store or any of the other places where my music has been aggregated. I hope this gets updated soon but until then, the old artwork and older versions remain on the web.
There's an entire new album of music called Epigrams made up of stuff that was released previously as well as some new songs that I cooked up and there's one additional song on each of the original two albums. All of the songs on the two albums that were originally available on Magnatune.com have been remastered and reissued with new artwork so, I can't wait for this stuff to get published.
I just got back from the solo eight-hour jaunt down the coast of California to see my dad's new place (see photo) and with the exception of the lack of cell service from his new digs, it was a great place to be for Christmas this year, far away from the communal, hippie-share lifestyle of the house I've called home in Oakland for the last twelve years.
I rented a car from Enterprise, as I've done many times in the past, and my friend Tony over at the car shop called them on my behalf to get me into a better car for the trip.
What I didn't realize abot Monday after 11 or so was how few cars would be left to rent but when I got to the office in Oakland, it was clear from the barren, tundra-esque empty parking slots that slim were going to be the pickins for this year's solo vehicular flight down to the northern part of San Diego County.
When I heard that I was going to get a Dodge Caliber, I said, "a Dodge what? I've never heard of that car before or seen what one looks like." At first glance, the car doesn't appear to be too much to look at either.
The vehicle looks like a squashed down version of one of those SUVs that the American car companies were so fond of before gas prices rose to over $4 and dropped back down again and the the economy opened up its trap door in the floor and gobbled up the remaining money and diginity from all of the struggling brick and mortar stores and essentially killed the car business for the foreseeable future.
The Dodge Caliber R/T though proved to be a real sport on the eight hour road trip. The Boston Acoustics sound system with a sub-woofer and nine speakers as a manufacturer feature made Los Angeles freeway traffic bearable on the trip down and back with the hand full of assorted CDs that I brought with me. This rental didn't have the EVIC module installed (Electronic Vehicle Information Center) which for a short week's rental, is probably for the best.
The reviews I've read of this car's handling and performance aren't that great but the stereo, the cruise control and the especially peppy 4-cylinder engine made this car a nice choice for the trip down. I guess I was right when I said "this Dodge Caliber is growing on me" at Enterprise RAC.
My dad and his wife and I all went out to the movies and to breakfast a couple of times in it and I just wanted to crank the stereo up to show them how good it sounded but I knew that no one else would care as much as I did about how great it sounded.
I just had an idea: When I give people copies of the three CDs of music that I've done over the years, I should rent this car and take them on a three hour drive so that they can hear all of the subtle nuances I heard when I was making it. It's too bad you can't request a specific car when you rent from Enterprise. If I could, I would choose this car just for the stereo alone.
I think this tune still needs some more work with regard to the levels of the individual parts but here's a little sample of what I've been working on lately. This is an MP3 converted from Reason after exporting it directly as a 24-Bit, 96K stereo AIFF file. I then custom tuned the Ozone 3 Mastering Plug-in with the tape saturation simulation effect to get a warmer sound in Peak before I bounced the file with the plug-ins to disk. After the bounce, I encoded the file with Peak to a 320K MP3 file at the highest and slowest encoding speed just prior to exporting the file from Peak.
I think some of the sounds could stand to be a bit louder in the mix but this is yet another sonic experiment. I think I might need to subdue some of the drum parts in the upper mid range of the frequency spectrum and accentuate some mids in the sound clouds that occur here and there during this under six minute song.
All of the drums sounds are Roland TR-808 samples taken from a collection that a friend of mine and I created at Naut Humon's recording studio in San Francisco many years ago for some synthesizer/sampler project. I think they sound pretty nice but I wish I could get my mixes a bit louder without introducing a lot of breathing or pumping like I hear on so many rock/pop style records. Oh well.
Here's the link to the file in case you missed it above:
Okay, I admit it. I'm a geek. A Nyerd. I actually bought an iPhone. The funny part is, someone else stood in line for it and then called me the night they were released and asked me if I wanted one because they had bought two. I said yes, went to his house the next day and wrote a check for $648.42 for the 8 GB model and carried it around with me all day while my friend and I were shopping in the Haight and various other places, looking for melodicas and other unusual, money loser musical instruments.
When I got home, I couldn't resist launching the new version of iTunes [7.3] to see how the activation process would progress. For me, it was painless and without a single glitch. Within 10 minutes of me syncing the Nokia to my computer's AddressBook app, I was up and running making calls with the iPhone with all of the numbers from my Nokia on my iPhone without even so much as a single hiccup.
I really like the phone but carrying around a piece of equipment that has an orientation sensor and a myriad of other sensitive pieces and parts, you get kinda nervous about dropping it. I bought a couple of cases and decided on the Contour clear case that covers the iPhone and includes a belt clip that the sheathed phone clicks into. You have to be careful when you, ahem, pull your pants down with the phone clip in your pocket or belt as the clip will find it's way out of your pocket and the case and phone go crashing to the floor; Hopefully, from not too high of a perch but still, dropping a $650 dollar phone is not a good idea, even if there are videos that show how sturdy the iPhone is on PCWorld's website.
So, the iPhone is awesome. Seriously. It is. Unfortunately, it's also a first generation phone [well, second if you count that Razor thing] and Apple still has the option to revamp the entire interface if they want to since it's a phone with only one button on the face, two on the side and one switch. But seriously, there are some features that a more mature phone company like Nokia have included on their higher-end phones for some time now.
Some of the missing features include video and audio recording, customizable mp3 ringtones, the lack of a Salling Clicker remote control widget that allows me to control all of my computer's iTunes track selection, volume and playback controls from my phone [one of the coolest apps for a phone ever] in addition to providing support for a crapload of other features like iPhoto slideshow controls, Keynote presentation slide controls, iTunes muting/pausing when the phone rings and setting my status in iChat to Away when I move out of Bluetooth range.
Other items that are not supported now but might be in the future include voice dialing, although, this feature was always a pain in the arse on my Nokia. There was some special mode that had to be entered via some secret key combination before I could bark commands at my phone and even then, the recognition of my voice was not always spot on.
I really liked the fact that the alarm clock feature on my Nokia would tell you how long it was until the alarm would go off from when you set it [such as 7 hours 56 minutes until 8:30AM]. At one point I had a crapload of games on my Nokia but the MMC cards [thinner than SD Cards] kept getting corrupted and there's no easy way to back up the Nokia to my disk. The Nokia did have built-in memory and an MMC card slot for adding sounds and photos.
I do have to be fair and say that the video recording on the Nokia was terrible and almost unwatchable but I have seen some phones with fairly good quality recording capabilities. I hope Apple gets on the video recording feature soon. When making calls, the keypad and pause buttons were really nice. Having a speaker phone is great too but the marge calls button; that's new and nifty. My Nokia has a speaker phone feature too.
Visual Voice Mail is kinda neat but I don't get that many phone calls so I don't usually have a lot of voice messages. I also noticed some minor artifacts in the audio recording that sounded like low bit rate or compression in the voice message playback. Compression and low bit rate are hardly discernable by most non-audiophile folks so that's no big whoop.
I did run into one somewhat annoying aspect of the iPhone/iTunes/iPhoto connection; if you have your photos on an external drive and you don't have it handy, you might not be able to sync your phone, if it contains pictures and you want to sync. I had this problem occur when I added a bunch of contacts to my Address Book and a couple of photos on my iPhone. When I connected the iPhone, iPhoto launched and said that it couldn't find my library so I said Cancel [the other options were Find or Create new]. When I launched iTunes, which is where all of the syncing takes place, the iPhone didn't appear in the list of devices in the left column on the main iTunes screen.
Other than these few items, the phone seems to be really well put together and I've been having fun surfing for wikipedia pages while out with friends or watching You Tube videos from home via the WiFi connectivity that's built in; My Nokia didn't have WiFi although I am positive that current models of the N Series from Nokia do include this feature.
Now, if the iPhone just had HSPDA 3G compatibility instead of EDGE 2.5G, we'd start to see some reasonable internet access speeds over the air.
I was lucky enough to get tickets to Autolux headlining the Friday 3/2/07 Noise Pop night that went off at San Francisco's The Independent last week. According to the Noise Pop pamphlet I picked up at Amoeba, Autolux's sophomore album is in the finishing stages and fans in attendance on Friday were given a glimpse into the Future Perfect follow-up album with one or two tunes off the new compilation getting some air during their set. After what I heard on Friday, I can't wait for the new album to hit the stores.
For my friends and I that went to the show, the evening was mostly a band marathon because Oakland locals Death of a Party, Montreal's musically whimsical Malajube and the Joy Division-inspired Snowden all played before the main act ever got off a note.
Oakland locals Death of a Party played a few catchy tunes and featured an exceptionally mobile and at times, seemingly frantic lead singer although several of us commented that the band's sound wasn't all that original in this day and age of bands like The Lovemakers, The Killers, The Bravery, and Louis XIV, already making the rounds on the airwaves. I give the band credit for getting the party started with some energy though and for the fact that the lead singer was sick. Aren't we all right now though? [A-chew!]
After Malajube's set, it was time for Altanta, Georgia's Snowden to take their best shot. This band was a lot different stylistically than Malajube with a more straight forward, lunging beat and chugging rhythms. Their sound could be corked down the vein of Joy Division or Joy-wannabe's Interpol, if they all were taking anti-depressants and had forgotten the rest of bottle. Many reviews have compared this band with The Cure as well but I don't see the resemblance at all. Jordan Jeffare's guitar and vocals, and Corinne Lee's smooth moves, slick licks, backing vox and incredible good looks were reminiscent of the good ol' days of 80s music; New Order, Depeche Mode and so many other bands that were not only stylish, but had the chops and the tunes to keep up with their fashion sense.
The only complaint we all had about the night was that the mixing especially for the vocals from out vantage point at stage right never seemed to be quite right. Either the vocals were too quiet or the guitars were too loud and we witnessed a lot of finger pointing from the bands on stage to the off stage mix engineer while the bands were playing. Autolux bionic-armed drummer Carla Azar even leaned over to say something to the side engineer about someone's level on stage. None of us were quite sure what the front of house engineer was hearing but I hope it was a lot better that what we were hearing from our position.
Snowden was the surprise of the night with the smokin' hawt bass player Corrine Lee who was duking it out with her bass and the floor all night. She has some smooth stage moves for sure. Jordan Jeffares might not win the So You Think You Can Dance contest anytime soon but the So You Think You Can Write Good Songs competition he's got covered and the energy from this band was hot and heavy. Chandler Rentz' kick drum was one of the largest I've seen other than at a Van Halen show and the sound was indicative of its size. Rentz got the beat and kept it strong all night long until Jordan Jeffares introduced the headliner Autolux and we waited yet again for the change over to occur between bands.
Autolux's first album includes a boatload of really unique sounds in between the songs and some very specific guitar noises that can't be replicated exactly like the album sounds and I wouldn't want it to sound exactly like the album anyway. What they did do was put us into a dreamlike trance state with a couple of new songs and the majority of 2004's Future Perfect album including Plant Life, Robots in the Garden and Sub Zero Fun to name a few.
What many people were saying after the show as we walked out was, why didn't they play Here Comes Everybody, their radio hit that originally turned me on to the band via Live 105's Soundcheck show. Towards the end of Autolux's set, someone asked from the crowd "What can I expect from this show!?" and bassist/vocalist Eugene Goreshter replied back: "I don't know... You'll just have to wait and see" and shortly after that, Eugene sat down near his cabinet on stage as an effect-drenched drone emanated from the speaker while former Failure guitarist Greg Edwards was working on some part of his rig that must've been an integral part of the show.
After about 15 minutes that seemed more like a half hour, the band resume playing the last of the set songs and after the vibe killing mechanical failure, I think the band wanted to pack it in and hope for better luck at their next show. Here Comes Everybody does have a very specific sound for it's opening riff that might've been difficult to simulate without Greg Edwards' complete guitar effect compliment in working order and shortly after the last song was over, I saw one of the backstage managers give the universal throat slit sign to the front-of-house sound guy, and the lights came up.
All in all, it was a great night with the exception of the minor Autolux hiccup, the moron who decided to voice his concerns regarding his expectations for the show and the tool set of drunk frat guys in front of us that were either swaying about two feet across the view of the band in front of us or talking amongst themselves about some ridiculous female related nonsense or some homophobic rant or other. We all ignored them and their inebriation and enjoyed the exceptionally intimate show. I hope we get to see Autolux in such an intimate environment again someday and that they feel better about playing the one song we all missed at the show.
Check out the site sampleswap.org, a sample sharing website that is an Ontology project. Samples can be browsed, auditioned and tossed in a virtual "basket" that is up to 20MB. After the files in the basket are compressed, an email with a link to the file is sent to you and the .zip file is downloaded. There's no limit to the amount of audio you can download either and the cost is absolutely zilch.
There's no guarantee that the uploaded samples are "cleared" samples but the service is a great idea. I've already downloaded a basket of sounds that I found there. I guess I should also upload some of the sounds that I've made that I've contributed to many of my friends but never to a public forum like this.
The new Darkel album is due out the 18th of September, 2006. Darkel is Jean-Benoît Dunckel, one half of the French space-rock/electronica duo Air. For this project, JB sheds his Air band mate Nicolas Godin and strikes out on his own with Laurent Griffon on guitars and bass and Earl Harvin picking up the drumsticks for a couple of the album's songs. Check out the Darkel myspace site for more tunes from the new album.
Air's 2004 release Talkie Walkie [shown below] is a fabulous record and the new offering from one half of the duo looks to be interesting and similar on some songs to the Air sound and a departure from the norm on other cuts such as At the End of the Sky, available for preview via the official Darkel site and with the spunky TV Destroy which is a bit more rockin' and rollin' than drum machine programmin' style of music Air fans have become accustomed to.
The Air myspace.com site has a blog news blurb about the Charlotte Gainsbourg album that the duo contributed to as well as the release info for the new Darkel album scheduled for this month. The blurb also mentions that the finishing touches are being applied to songs for the next Air album scheduled currently for release in the Winter of 2007. Michel Gondry's new movie "The Science of Sleep" that Charlotte Gainsbourg stars in is also mentioned in the blurb along with a link to the movie soundtrack's myspace page.
I can't wait for the new Air album but the Darkel release will quench the thirst for now. The complete MP3 of the song At the End of the Sky and a video for it are available at the myspace.com Darkel site.
I'm bored with the political internet banter and RSS feed frenzy so it's time for some new music reviews. I was just perusing the latest XLR8R magazine and discovered a band that many people probably already know about but that I just discovered. Couch, a German Post Rock band featuring Stefanie Böhm, Thomas Geltinger, Michael Heilrath, Jurgen Söder, have released four CDs and one LP [the first, self-titled on Kollaps circa 1995] and several remixes and compilation albums have featured the Kraut Rock-inspired band that has been around for over a decade.
Some of the iTunes reviews of their latest offering, Figur 5, are less than spectacular but it looks like people have come to have pretty high expectations from this band of musicians. There are also some reviewers who say that the people poo-pooing the latest effort must have terrible taste so, I leave this one up to you and your personal taste. If you like Brittany Spears and K-Fed, well, this might not be music that you'll appreciate. Likewise, if you're into Death Metal, Speed Metal, or hard core DIY punk rock, this group might not float your boat.
If you're into hazy, lazy atmospheric Post Rock, shoegazer-ish rhythms and lush dense multi-instrumental tracks, Couch might just be up your musical snout. Fans of Kraut rockers Can, Sigur Rós, Tortoise or even some of the more guitar-focused arrangements of M83 will feel comfy in a musical chair with these guys.
Robots in Disguise is a while different enchilada. Currently comprised of Dee Plume (taken from "Nom De Plume", French for a writer's pen name) and Sue Denim (a play on the assumed name word "pseudonym"), their drummer Ann Droid, and rotating duty on bass usually by Noel Fielding or Chris Corner this band has attitude, swagger and some teeth to bite you with. The band's popularity in the states is still growing in the nooks and crannys of the musical underbelly but Robots are particularly popular primarily in continental Europe and especially in the UK where the two have starred in BBC television's comedy Mighty Boosh. The two electro-punk band members starred in a couple of episodes of the show including the appropriately titled "Electro" episode as two electro girls in a band called "Kraftwerk Orange". I wish I could say that I've seen it but it sounds pretty funny just from the name of the band on the show.
Robots have a myspace site and the profile has upwards of 30,000 friends so apparently, a few people have heard of them. I'm always late to the party I guess. Robots have previously released an EP: "Mix Up Words And Sounds" [not available on iTunes] and two albums: "Robots in Disguise", and "Get RID" [iTunes has two albums with the Get RID title including a new version that was released this year with more songs on it]. iTunes also has the single of theirs DJ's Got a Gun and the Turn It Up EP released this year as well but who would actually buy anything from iTunes with iTunes copy-inhibitor "FairPlay" anyway?
That's all I've got for now. Let me know what you think of my music picks in the comments...
There has been a tremendous amount of news and discussion in online print news articles and on technology blogs for many months about Apple's closed DRM [Digital Rights Management for the uneducated] "FairPlay" and the efforts to disable it via the JHymn Project, how the technology limits the user to a specific number of copies of playlists that can be made, computers that the encrypted files can be played on, and the iPod-only playback restriction and other associated Apple DRM details.
I'm a big fan of Apple and have been a Macintosh user for most of my computer using life. I spent a short stint while at Topica, the web 1.0 mailing list creation and management website, running a Windows NT box using programs like Outlook and IE but I had a Mac at home that was my main personal use computer.
I have to say that I'm a staunch Apple guy due to the slick design and closed loop hardware integration that is not found in most PC offerings. All this despite the fact that many software applications are released for the PC before the Mac and sometimes not at all for the BSD-based operating system.
Despite my support for the Cupertino-based company, I am not at all a fan of the concept of copy protection for software, music or movies but I do understand why it's there and why record companies and movie studios are so freaked about piracy. Clandestine piracy groups in countries like China and Russia are unbelievably efficient at releasing bootlegs of music just after a disc has been released, or in the case of movies, while they're still in theaters.
What I do like about iTunes is the fact that I can use it for research on artists I like, see the new releases as they come out and get a sampling of what the music sounds like before I go to an actual store and purchase the music in it's pristine, albeit somewhat bit limited 16-bit 44.1kHz glory [I won't get into the 16-Bit vs. 24 bit debate here].
There's also an RSS feed generator for the the iTunes music store that can be customized to return a feed that will serialize or syndicate various genres of iTunes music based upon criteria such as Just Added, New Releases [not sure what the difference between the two is], Top Songs, Top Albums, Featured Albums & iTunes Exclusives [it really sucks that some artist's songs are only released in Apple's lossy, encrypted low-bit rate format and there's no way to get those tunes in a high-quality format, yet], as well as controls for determining which iTunes Music store to retrieve the list from [the US, and 20 other countries] and how many feed items are retrieved.
What I don't like about iTunes Music Store is the lack of a bookmarking feature. While I search for gainful employment, I am subscribed to the New Releases feed and I regularly find music that I would like to buy but there's no way to add an album or song to a favorites list like I can on the popular alternative to iTunes, Pandora. Because of the lack of a bookmarking feature in iTunes, I've been forced to keep a text file with all of the albums and artists that I find that I'm interested in saved locally on my computer for later purchase.
Another thing that I don't like about the iTunes Music Store is its lackluster cooperation with the web browser Safari. Albums and artists on the iTunes Music store have web URLs but you'd have to know what you're looking for to find them. If you Control + Click [on the Mac of course, possibly Right-click on the PC] an artist or album name in the upper section of the store where the album thumbnail is located, a pop-up appears that allows you to copy the URL of the item that was clicked on to the clipboard so that you can send that link to someone else that also has the iTunes Music Store installed, or paste the link into a text file for later retrieval.
Another aspect of the store that I find lacking in this social networking age is a social reputation functionality. It might be useful to see what some of my friends or favorite music taste makers on iTunes were listening to. It would also be a really kewl feature to be able to see what some of my myspace.com, Tribe.net, Live Journal or friendster friends were listening to as well; The ones that I thought actually had good taste in music of course.
While I hope that things on the DRM front change someday and Apple decides to license the DRM technology to the myriad of MP3 player companies that seem to be endlessly appearing these days, I serious doubt that will occur anytime soon. The reason for this is that Apple doesn't make much money on the songs themselves. The money for Apple is in the sale of iPods themselves and so it's not in their business interests to do so, even though licensing fees for third party players could certainly argue against that pespective too.
I am a freak when it comes to audio quality and the iTunes Music Store's 128-bit encoded AAC files just don't cut it sonically for me. Many people don't care as much as I do about quality and the iTunes Music Store files are just fine for them. I normally buy a CD and rip it from the CD at the pristine 16-Bit, 44.1kHz rate and then from there, dither the songs down to a 256K encoding rate for later playback on my car's Alpine CD palyer that also features an iPod connector. Every car CD player should have this option or something similar to it.
I have a few songs that I previously purchased via the iTunes Music Store and honestly the quality of the audio during dense sections of specific songs is painful to listen to. A lot of the punch in the music is lost at low bit rates. I find this is most obvious when music is listened to in headphones where the artifacts are most noticeable.
While I mentioned that I'm a huge fan of Apple Computer and have a few friends that actually work there, I seriously doubt that I will ever buy an iTunes Music Store song again. There have been rumors that Apple might someday release lossless audio versions of the tunes on the site but I can't imagine how long it would take to replace all of the albums on the site and how much they would cost if they did. Even Apple's lossless audio codec introduces sonic artifacts, or distortions to the original audio stream that are audible to the discerning ear and I just can't listen to craptacular audio inhibited by the restrictive FairPlay DRM any more.
So, for now I will use the iTunes Music Store to help me create a list of albums and artists I want to purchase to avoid entering a store like Amoeba Music where I am overloaded with marketing and end isle displays and I completely forget what I came in for.
Just as a side note, it's very easy to remove the DRM from an iTunes Music Store purchased file. Simply burn it to a CD and re-rip the disc. Unfortunately, the re-encoding process will add additional artifacts to the file so the quality will be even worse after the re-ripping. Ever since the iTunes Music Store hit version 6, the JHym project app that I linked to earlier in this entry has not been updated to work with the new version of the site. Any music downloaded from iTMS6 cannot be de-DRM'd using the JHymn app. Oh well...
The list of FairPlay restrictions from wikipedia.org's FairPlay page...
FairPlay will allow a protected track to be used in the following ways:
- The protected track may be copied to any number of iPod portable music players.
- The protected track may be played on up to five (originally three) authorized computers simultaneously.
- The protected track may be copied to a standard Audio CD any number of times.
- The resulting CD has no DRM and may be ripped, encoded and
distributed like any other CD. However, as the CD audio still bears the
artifacts of compression, converting it back into a lossy format such as MP3 may aggravate the sound artifacts of encoding (see transcoding).
- The resulting CD has no DRM and may be ripped, encoded and
distributed like any other CD. However, as the CD audio still bears the
artifacts of compression, converting it back into a lossy format such as MP3 may aggravate the sound artifacts of encoding (see transcoding).
- A particular playlist within iTunes containing a protected track can be copied to a CD only up to seven times (originally ten times) before the playlist must be changed.
FairPlay does not affect the ability of the file itself to be copied. It only manages the decryption of the audio content.
An intentional limitation of Fairplay is that it prevents iTunes customers from using the purchased music on any portable digital music player other than the Apple iPod.
I've compiled a long list of music to share thanks to iTunes new releases RSS feed and other off-the-beaten-track sources through which I've been collecting music. Here are a few samples of some of artists I've been impressed with of late:
First off is Mice Parade's fifth album, the 2005 release "Bem-Vinda Vontade" which loosely translates from Portuguese into "Welcome, Will". This album can be considered the sister album, according to Fat Cat Records' website, the label that has released their albums, to last year's "Obrigado Saudade", which again loosely translates to "Thank you Nostalgia."
The music on Bem-Vinda Vontade is somewhat reminiscent of early "post-rock" artists Tortoise to the author and the songs, mostly written by multi-instrumentalist and MP founder Adam Pierce, are recorded "as-is" with no overdubs, usually in one take.
According to the Fat Cat Records website blurb, some of the cuts may have been edited using a computer to shorten songs sections but the musicians playing the songs are all recorded in real time and mistakes are considered part of the natural human experience when playing together.
While it's easy to get that Bem-Vonda Vontade probably isn't for everyone, Mice Parade's latest offering could be the ideal soundtrack for doing one's homework assignment or sitting out on the patio or the front porch on a nice, breezy, summer afternoon.
Certainly, Mice Parade caters to an individual with a discerning, evolved taste in alternative music. A listener familiar with artists such as Kevin Sheild's My Bloody Valentine, or Múm's folkish electronica [Kristin Valtýsdóttir of Múm sings on a few songs on the two sibling Mice parade releases] who appreciates recordings of live acoustic instrumental music captured "as it happened" with no overdubs, or compositing of multiple performances to artificially sweeten the musical experience.
Art Bleek - Between Yesterday & Tomorrow:
Art Bleek, aka Arthur Pochon, is a Paris, France-born and based, Berklee School of Music-trained saxophonist turned recording engineer and producer and with his latest release on Loungin Records, Bleek has entered the elite Hip Hop/Jazz fray with his first full-length Nu Jazz flavored Beyond Yesterday & Tomorrow album.
Following the October 21st, 2005 release of his Wanderer's Creek EP, Beyond Yesterday & Tomorrow pushes the Nu Jazz, hip hop fusion further into the musical stratosphere with several guest jazz musicians and MCs appearing on six of the collections 13 songs. There's also an ample helping of spacey, down tempo instrumentals on the album as well.
While not all of the songs on the album especially appealed to the author, the fusion of jazz with down tempo and electronica is a relatively new genre that is worth getting your head around. There is something here for almost any music enthusiast with a discerning taste, a respect and admiration for Jazz and an appreciation of the melding of down tempo and the improvisational musicianship associated with the Nu Jazz movement that has been expanding and evolving for quite some time now.
Art Bleek also has an ambient/experimental side with his alter-ego B[e]SIDE project that can be sampled on myspace as well.
Beyond Yesterday and Tomorrow's track breakdown:
Vocal tracks:
Another Island: featuring Aida Khaan & Ulrich Miljavac
Between Yesterday & Tomorrow: featuring Airelle Besson
Get Your Weight Up: featuring DJ Pudgemc & Tha Blacknificent
Spicy Cinnamon: featuring B.O.B. and Synna
Dangerous Woman: featuring Charlie Sputnik
Early Memory: Benjamin Degrandsart
Instrumentals:
Wanderer's Creek [check out the stand out remix on the Wanderer's Creek EP, Umodomu's Mix]
Phillie's Special Night
Five in the Morning
Airgasm
Nighthawk's at Phillie's
Art's Mood
Terrace
I was gonna do one more artist but I'm tired and it's getting late. Lots more to come in all different genres and styles though. Let me know what you think in the comments.
