You might not expect a handheld game console, the gadget kids use to play Pokemon, to prove much worth as a musical instrument. But even in the age of readily-available computer plug-ins and iPhone apps, the DS holds its own. In the hands of two sets of artists, we find music that stands alone, independent of the gimmick of the device on which it was made. For these artists, the limitations of a fold-up touchscreen – entirely independent of doubling as a phone, or a computer, or a Facebook-browsing engine, or a powerful 64-bit DAW – apparently prove enticing. Beginning with Korg’s DS-10 cartridge, they use a stylus-operated software synth with its own unique character.

On some level, I almost hesitate to wax poetic about the fact that these were made with a Nintendo DS at all, because what these are, really, is love letters to synthesis.

And as it happens, both are available as free downloads from Bandcamp.

First up: AuxPulse is the duo of Rutger Muller and Michael Vultoo, based in Amsterdam and Kockengen, Netherlands, respectively. Late last year, they debuted their first album at Amsterdam’s prestgious Stedelijk Museum of modern art, playing a big set (two and a half hours) on small devices. Primarily employing the Nintendo DS, they nonetheless produce sounds that are rich and layered, sometimes even tending to the ambient exploration, not just the rawer chip-music sounds regularly associated with Nintendo handhelds.

Their music is trippy but danceable, unapologetically electronic, fully exploiting the DS-10′s idiosyncratic sonic character, one that’s slightly lower-fidelity than many soft synths (or even iPhone apps), without being “chippy” in the sense of retro devices. Dark textures collide with precise, clockwork rhythms, in sounds that sometimes tend to acid techno and sci fi game realms. (Lo-acid-fi, anyone?)

As you watch them live, you also see the value of the interface compositionally, both in terms of its pattern banks and its more conventional synth controls, all manipulated with the added precision of a stylus.

As they put it:

We aim to bring experimentation back to the dancefloor by expressing a psychedelic atmosphere through the use of a variety of rhythms and moods. Some of our inspirations are analogue synthesizers, acid, IDM, hardcore, gabber, ambient and oldschool electro.

Right now we mainly use the KORG DS-10 synthesizer for Nintendo DS to compose and improvise our music. When playing live we fuck with the synths as much as we can, trying to surprise ourselves with new sounds.

Our first album was recently released in Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam! Now we perform regularly, trying to open up some minds and move some feet.

The album, on Bandcamp:

And on SoundCloud:
Dream Stages (FREE ALBUM!) by AuxPulse

Bonus: an interview with them (in Dutch, naturally)

In a very different direction, Princeton, New Jersey-based DJ and producer Christian Montoya (love and tonic records) produces music on the DS-10 that’s drier and more exposed, as he programs intricate bass music on the unprocessed Nintendo cart. Christian works as a game designer by day, and channels some of the DS-10′s game music and so-called “chip music” heritage. The results, though, are a perfect marriage of game chip-waveform rawness, nude bass and synth and percussion sounds, and carefully-concocted grooves. For anyone concerned that game systems could hinder moving your butt out of the seat, this album is required listening. It’s utterly stripped-bare dance goodness – and it turns out the DS bass sounds fantastic.

Grab the record for free:

DS-10 users, got any tips for us on getting the most out of a Nintendo handheld and this KORG synth? Let us know.

Also, from comments but worth pointing out, Rutger directs us to good resources for getting the most out of DS-10:

If you’re interested in making DS-10 music you can check out http://www.ds10forum.com

I (Rutger, DS-10 Dominator, 1/2 of AuxPulse) run it with Harley (http://harleylikesmusic.com, superb DS-10 composer!) and we try to help out beginner’s and advanced users as much as we can.

I’m saddened to learn of the death of Richard Lainhart, the New York-based composer and artist who has been inseparable from the experimental electronic scene for many years. I knew Richard to be a gentle and imaginative soul, an inventive technologist, someone capable of dreaming up endless soundscapes and auditory worlds. He was also a great contributor to the CDM community, including playing one of the early installments of Handmade Music at Etsy Labs in Brooklyn. (Photo above; full video at bottom.)

I think it’s fitting to illustrate Richard with a terrific self-portrait on Polaroid, one that illustrates his sense of humor and artistic adventurousness:

Richard’s wife Caroline posted a note with the news, which most of us found via Facebook:

Richard Lainhart February 14, 1953 – December 30, 2011

Dear friends of Richard,
It is with a heavy heart that I that I must tell you Richard Lainhart, composer, musician, technologist, filmmaker, and digital artisan died Friday, December 30, 2011.

On December 17, Richard complained of pains in his side and was admitted to the hospital for tests which showed an intestinal cancer. He was operated on on December 21. After the surgery (which showed the cancer had not spread), there were infectious complications which took his life on December 30.

He struggled valiantly to overcome his infection, but it was not to be. We are all in shock and cannot grasp the idea of his not making music, talking music, teaching, posting and playing.

Caroline Meyers
Richard Lainhart’s wife

Richard leaves behind a massive body of work and digital footprints; I’ve selected some of those below, including music, a wonderful set of images working with digital manipulation and Polaroids via Flickr, and his series on creative sound design tutorials.

Playing Messiaen:

Audiovisual work:

Richard’s most recent album, via Bandcamp:

Most recent SoundCloud contributions, including the winds after Tropical Storm Irene (that sound certainly is part of my sonic memory of 2011)

Sounds of my World – Post-Irene Winds 8-28-11 by rlainhart

200e-Continuum Percussive Study 2 by rlainhart

Sounds of my world – Rainforest V, New York Electronic Art Festival, 7-30-11 by rlainhart

I adore his photographic work:

A bio:

Richard Lainhart is an award-winning composer, author, and filmmaker – a digital artisan who works with sonic and visual data. Since childhood, he’s been interested in natural processes such as waves, flames and clouds, in harmonics and harmony, and in creative interactions with machines, using them as compositional methods to present sounds and images that are as beautiful as he can make them.

Lainhart studied composition and electronic music with Joel Chadabe at the State University of New York at Albany. He has composed music for film, television, CD-ROMs, interactive applications, and the Web. His compositions have been performed in the US, England, Sweden, Germany, Australia, and Japan. Recordings of his music have appeared on the Periodic Music, Vacant Lot, XI Records, Airglow Music, Tobira Records, and ExOvo labels. As an active performer, Lainhart has appeared in public approximately 2000 times. Besides performing his own work, he has worked and performed with John Cage, David Tudor, Steve Reich, Phill Niblock, David Berhman, and Jordan Rudess, among many others. He has composed over 100 electronic and acoustic works. In 2008, he was commissioned by the Electronic Music Foundation to contribute a work to New York Soundscape.

Lainhart’s animations and short films have been shown at festivals in the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, and Korea, and online at ResFest, The New Venue, The Bitscreen, and Streaming Cinema 2.0. His film “A Haiku Setting” won awards in several categories at the 2002 International Festival of Cinema and Technology in Toronto. In 2009, he was awarded a Film & Media grant by the New York State Council on the Arts for “No Other Time”, full-length intermedia performance designed for a large reverberant space, combining live analog electronics with four-channel playback, and high-definition computer-animated film projection.

quotes

“Lainhart crafts sounds in a tonal, musical fashion – sustained tones, drones, melodic fragments – and electronically manipulates them into beautiful tapestries of sound.” (Waterfront Week)

[His] “music reflects the spirit of possibility that once defined electronic music, bringing with it a sense of past, present and future that transcends time, technology and cultural assumptions. The spell- binding music seemed to evoke feelings that can’t quite be named, and suggest music I might rather imagine for myself in silence than trust most composers to compose.” (The Village Voice).

“He’s evolved a singular vision as a composer, performer and engineer of darkly seductive minimalism.” (Peter Marsh, BBC)

And here is Richard’s performance for us at Handmade Music on the Buchla 200e synth and Continuum Fingerboard, from 2007:

http://www.otownmedia.com
http://www.vimeo.com/rlainhart
http://www.youtube.com/rlainhart
http://richardlainhart.bandcamp.com/
http://soundcloud.com/rlainhart
http://twitter.com/rlainhart
http://www.facebook.com/rlainhart
http://www.downloadplatform.com/richard_lainhart

If you can find a spot in the rotation with your Mannheim Steamroller collection for something a bit different, CDM reader Leigh Walsh of Cork, Ireland sends in her work. She describes it as “punky gothy electronic … for Christmas,” with any proceeds benefiting Autism research. The single sounds crazy, but for me, things get good with the game world-like, shimmering “Secret Inside the Ice Level” and “Melody for the Sewn Princess” tracks.

I can find myself mentally wandering an 8-bit ice cave level right now…

Loving her work, hoping to here more, hoping not to get folks’ genders wrong next time… oops.

Heck, let’s take this playlist a little further out.

One darned trippy Christmas: HAPPY XMAS PEBBLES LAILA ROCKET YUSUF! By London-based artist Affie Yusuf, via SoundCloud:

HAPPY XMAS PEBBLES LAILA ROCKET YUSUF by AFFIE YUSUF

Thanks, Laila!

If that doesn’t cleanse your palette after hearing too many of the Christmas standards on repeat, I just can’t help you.

Now, go and use this to freak out your families and friends.

In the midst of all this talk of intangible digital intellectual property and arcane licensing and Internet policy, there’s something comforting about thinking of music and art as something you make with your hands and give to someone. It was a discussion of that – even in the context of technology – that first led me to the discussion of “Handmade Music.” (Tip of the hat to my friend, Etsy’s Matt Stinchcomb, with whom this discussion has crossed the Atlantic from Brooklyn to Berlin.)

Via Cool Hunting, here’s an old-fashioned way of making a music object. The music is on vinyl; the book is carved into blocks and hand-printed. Any sense of nostalgia or twee hipness is instantly forgiven once you see the results: the book looks absolutely gorgeous. Kids will have to compete with their parents to get it.

Two stories in a single canvas-covered volume that reads from the outside covers inward, ending at the center. There, a two-song 70 gram 7″ vinyl inside a hand-cranked copper block printed sleeve.

Stories written, illustrated, carved, and printed by Micah Middaugh at Cavern Lantern Wonder Welding (Jordan River Valley, Mich.)

Songs by Breathe Owl Breathe

The story sounds wonderful, too. As CH’s James Thorne tells it:

“The Listeners” is a comic tale of the friendship between an ostrich and a mole who meet by chance one day in a hole. The mole with sightless eyes and the bird with flightless wings join to form a band called “The Listeners,” and perform together in an underground concert for their friends. “These Train Tracks” is a story of metamorphosis, in which a set of train tracks transforms into everything from a caterpillar to the night sky to a set of pajama buttons. Its mood is both whimsical and soothing, a perfect end to a child’s long day.

The Listeners / These Train Tracks: Music and animal hijinks come together in a handmade children’s book by Breathe Owl Breathe [Cool Hunting]

The music is available by Bandcamp, which you’ll see allows you to sell both a digital download and physical copies. Of course, you may want to do a trailer on YouTube to promote it, which means you’ll have to contend with giant lobbying groups and collection agencies trying to destroy the Interne– okay, that doesn’t make a very good bedtime story. Let’s get back to the ostrich and the mole. They’re more likable.

Have a listen to the music:

http://breatheowlbreathe.bandcamp.com/album/the-listeners-these-train-tracks

Soundtracks for Everyday Adventures [Bandcamp Album Page]

Lullatone – duo Shawn James and Yoshimi Seymour – have a way of wiring directly into some wonder-filled, joyful place. And we know as artists that requires not just an impulse, but a way of connecting emotionally with ideas. With their release earlier this year, we heard their terrific Elevator Music – but also noted that they spent a little effort even on creating a comfy workspace to keep the music coming.

Lullatone Have New Music to Make You Happy, DIY Keyboard Stand to Make You Tidy

Shawn writes to let us know their newest release, soundtracks for everyday adventures, has arrived. It keeps the hypnotic, charming minimalism of past works, but to me, there’s a new maturity here both in the sound and writing, as the tunes become wordless, poignant ballads on day-to-day life. (“Buying strawberries” is oddly melancholy; “finding a leaf in your girlfriend’s hair” and “the best paper airplane ever” takes on some urgency. That airplane might inspire someone to become an engineer for Airbus.)

In the wrong hands, this kind of music could veer into “twee” sweetness, make your tooth ache, or even be cloying. But that’s why I love Lullatone’s work: it’s unpretentious, un-ironic, serious fun. It’s overwhelmingly, genuinely heartfelt.

And the duo are serious about keeping their life and happiness as high-quality as their output. Check out a feature on how they’ve integrated music in their “work/life” balance while parenting on the Herman Miller blog, going into greater depth on the ergonomics of their setup as we covered it earlier:
Ideal Live/Work Space: Shawn James Seymour and Yoshimi Tomida of Lullatone [Herman Miller Lifework blog]

That’s something I think we can all appreciate.

What’s also great is seeing their music inspire other joyous expressions, like this montage of laughter (seriously):

If you’re still grumpy, see a doctor.

And now, newly happy, I think us kids should be really good and go clean our studios so we can make some music.

Global availability of music may not have silenced the usual gripes about musical quality and diversity, even if they should. But the Web is providing a place for people to share music with other music-making enthusiasts, sharing the craft of constructing it with the relish of chefs talking over drinks at the end of a long day.

Anyway, that’s my excuse for mentioning fellow blogger, music software developer and musician Chris Randall, again. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the meticulously-concocted sounds of his new micronaut EP, Particulate. Ticking away leisurely, with thick alphaSyntauri pads set against cool, understated metrical rhythms, it’s the as though the machines themselves are enjoying a calm weekend afternoon.

On the Analog Industries blog, more description

Chris admits something I’ve been hearing increasingly in whispers among producers from a wide variety of genres – he’s getting away from the DAW. The dominant computer software model, even in more restrained incarnations like Ableton Live, still involves an overwhelming set of tools and sequencing apparatus that can get you away from, you know, actually playing your machines like instruments. Instead, Chris uses “good old-fashioned playing,” and gating from analog outputs from an Apple IIe-based sequencer. It’s nothing new (quite literally so, as the gear is from the 80s), but it’s a discipline to which I hear many producers return again and again. (I got to read them talking about it in the 80s and 90s, too, as I edited old Keyboard stories for an upcoming book – sometimes you have to turn the sequencers off and focus on really playing the machines. Think that bit in Star Wars with the flight computer.)

The gear:
Roland CMU-800R + Apple IIe (kids, ask your parents)

alphaSyntauri, also based on the Apple II

Korg 770, which has the best vintagesynth.com description ever: “Aside from being very old, there isn’t much else to say about the 770.” Assuming I take care of myself and survive to be a senior, this is I hope what I can someday make my epitaph.

Korg MS20, about which much could be said

Euro-Rack modular

Korg Monotribe

iPad running Curtis (granular app) + Alesis iO Dock

Lexicon M300 (now-discontinued hardware reverb), and ValhallaRoom and Chris’ own Eos, as reverb

I love the polish of the EP, but it’s also revealing to watch Chris tinker with his rack of gear, as in this more recent image:

By the way, for my part, I’m also enjoying not sequencing materials. If you don’t want to go to tape, you can take the same approach in any software. Hanging out with King Britt in his studio, he tracked live playing and CV-gated sequences into Ableton Live; I’ve taken to using Propellerhead Reason (formerly Record) for the same purpose. (Hint: that absence of MIDI output? It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.)

All of this is relevant, as there’s a big Synth Meet tomorrow in Los Angeles put on by those connoisseurs of analog, the blog (and sometimes-artists’-collective TRASH_AUDIO. And certainly the idea of investing in all this shiny is, eventually, to actually make something resembling music with it. Chris, look forward to seeing you tomorrow.

Also, fans of alphaSyntauri — I’ve been watching this growing, open group on Facebook devoted to that instrument:
The Alpha Syntauri Group

They point to a big load of documentation someone has collected.

Now I’m nervous, because typically when I ramble on about something like this, commenters get angry. It’s a Friday. Don’t hurt me. Go listen, and if you don’t like it, it’s a Big, Wide Internet. In fact, go make something.

It barely seems as though it’s been that long, but synthesis pioneer Robert Moog died six years ago this week. That has brought a whole new wave of remembrances, including a great new EP you can remix. And if you still don’t know what the fuss is about, or want to refer a friend somewhere other than Wikipedia, a guest essay popped into our inbox here at CDM HQ, so I’ll add that, too.

The best news, from where I sit: Tara Busch has donated a three-track EP entitled The Rocket Wife to the cause of bettering the Bob Moog Foundation’s work in history, archiving, and education. You may know Tara as the writer behind AnalogSuicide, or from her synthesist/vocalist career. Regardless, give this EP a listen. It’s a fanciful, dreamily optimistic album, recalling grand pop songwriting traditions. “Motor Crash” channels another Bush (Kate) in a very good way over its all-too-brief yet oddly satisfying minute and a half amuse-bouche. (Amuse-Busch?) “Calendura” is a gliding waltz set to angular, sparse percussion. But “Rocket Wife” is my favorite, a wonderland soundscape that sounds like some sunlight of the two afternoon suns on your foreign planet streamed right into a rack of Moogs in the studio of your dreams.

And, anyway, if you think you can do better with these raw materials, you can try to prove it. 17 tracks of stems are available for purchase, too, also as a benefit. Grab them, give them a remix, and winners will receive prizes like Bob Moog merch and a collaboration with Tara. You’ve got until October 15 to make it happen.

The Rocket Wife EP

The Stems and Contest

SoundCloud-based Contest Submissions [great idea!]

About Tara Busch

What else is new in the world of Bob Moog’s legacy?

Michelle Moog-Koussa (Bob Moog’s daughter) has her own blog, Moogstress. (Does that make us dudes Moogsters? Maestroogs?) See also a great new limited poster for donors.

Here’s a beautifully-shot video about what’s now called Dr. Bob’s Sound School. It’s just this kind of engineering-rich effort I think we need now in the US and worldwide to restart the economy, though that’s perhaps a story for another post.

Finally, writer Jennifer Helfrich sent us an unsolicited bio essay on Bob Moog. I was delighted to see it show up in my inbox, and it has the Bob Moog Foundation’s technical editing applied to it, so here it is – a great introduction to Bob Moog’s life.

Side editorial: I think it’s notable that Dr. Moog was a product of New York public education, beginning his educational journey at Bronx High School of Science and receiving his first BA – in physics, initially, not electrical engineering until later – at Queens College of The City University of New York. (Disclosure: I’m a PhD Candidate at CUNY’s Graduate Center.) It shows the power of public education to help support the people who innovate — just at a time when, in many places int he world, public education can be targeted for cuts.

Here’s Jennifer’s nicely-compact story:

Robert Moog is the godfather of modern electronic music, the man whose genius and passion made synthesizers accessible and put electronic sound generation on the musical map. This past Sunday, the 21st, was the six year anniversary of Bob Moog’s passing. Let us take a moment to remember his life and his legacy.

A New York native, he was born in 1934 to a mother who taught him piano and a father who puttered with house-hold electronics. Moog showed exceptional intelligence from an early age. He built a simple Theremin on his own at 14, and the experience made music his focus. At the tender age of 19 Moog founded R.A. Moog Co. to manufacture and sell Theremin kits. The business, begun at such an early age, exemplifies Moog’s incredible productive capacity and perhaps even a desire to share the joy he found in building his own.

During his bachelor and Ph.D. studies Moog began to develop his version of the synthesizer. Electronic synthesizers commercially available at the time were made of vacuum tubes and magnetic tape – they were huge, difficult to set-up, and often had to be custom made. With the 1964 presentation of his synthesizer Moog ushered in a new era of electronic music. Smaller and easier to use, with multiple modules for modifying voltage controlled oscillations and an organ-keyboard interface, the Moog synthesizer was ready for the music studio. Moog synthesizers hit the big-time with the success of the 1967 Wendy Carlos album Switched-On Bach. It was among the first classical albums to sell half-million copies, it hit the Top 10 and stayed in the Top 40 for 17 weeks.

As Moog synthesizers improved throughout the 60s and 70s they were featured in numerous albums by a wide variety of artists. Moog’s synthesizer helped shape disco; it showed up in the Beatles, the Doors, and the Monkees; both Stevie Wonder and Tangerine Dream loved the Moog synthesizer; it made appearances in genres from country to rock to jazz.

R.A. Moog Co. began to produce the Minimoog (Model D) in 1970 – an extremely popular smaller version of the synthesizer that was better suited to live performances. But the 60s had bankrupt Moog as other producers with larger factories outstripped his namesake firm. Moog sold the company and rights to the Moog name in 1972. Five years later Moog left the company, now Moog Music, frustrated with weak marketing and bad management. For the next 30 years he continued to develop and produce analog and digital tools for synthesizers, but during the time he could not produce under his own name Moog made no new instruments. Until, in 2002, he won back the rights to produce under his own name and returned to Moog Music. He designed and improved instruments at Moog Music until his death three years later in 2005.

The Moog legacy is a powerful inspiration for innovation in electronic music. His life was dedicated to the creation of quality analog and digital sounds composed in beautiful, interesting, and instructive ways. His understanding and appreciation of sound manipulation and the joys it can bring are carried on by the Bob Moog Foundation. His daughter, Michelle Moog-Koussa, as the Director, remembers her father as a quiet, introspective, cool, quirky, funny guy with a rambunctious laugh who loved to teach. The Foundation teaches science through music, has a Grammy recognized archive of the Moog legacy, and plans to build a museum. They recently released Mooged Out Asheville, Volume 2, an album exemplifying the many ways Moog changed music with songs spanning far-flung genres from hip-hop to avant electronica, from dub-step to rock. To learn more about Bob Moog and how his life still touches ours, visit http://www.moogfoundation.org/.

By the way, since this tends to come up – CDM welcomes suggestions for innovators you’d like us to cover. The Bob Moog Foundation archives alone cover lots of early designers, inventors, composers, and musicians, not only Dr. Moog himself. If you’ve got an idea, let us know.

Watch for, at long last, a series remembering the history of Max Mathews shortly — I’ve been editing it. It’s great the assemblage of people who helped build the tools we use.

Sometimes, to quote Depeche Mode, words are very unnecessary. Instead, lose yourself for a few minutes in the vibrating mathemagical lands of numbercult, audiovisual immersions in which sound and geometry fuse in a strange, abstract dance.

Their most recent creation, found via Richard Devine’s prolific Facebook wall and posted earlier this summer, explores an actual audiovisual sequencer. See it at top:

Connected is a graphical/musical sequencer system. a three way flow of information, between graphics, sound and external triggers shape the composition. Recorded in real-time.

But actual functioning interfaces aside, I’ll leave you with some other video clips that traverse similar territory, these syncing up separate visual and audio systems.

These folks make music, too – have a listen to their album, at bottom. And that shifts to body candy, as in, for your butt, with danceable grooves.

All three of the above videos combine vvvv – the Windows-only, graphical patching environment for powerful 3D effects – with Ableton Live for sound.

But lest you think it’s all abstraction, have a listen to their excellent dance release on Bandcamp. Downloading:

http://www.numbercult.com/

By the way, ever wondered what visual software people are using? So did we. Don’t miss this look on our sister site, Create Digital Motion, including where vvvv fits on the spectrum:
What Visual Software Readers Use: Some Clear Favorites, Plenty of Diversity, in Census Results

Artist Tricil sung the praises of Topspin in April. Since then, I did my own LP release on Bandcamp, about which I hope to share experiences soon.

But how do the two compare? And how might they even be combined? Recording/mastering engineer and artist Jimmy Ether recently posted some thoughts to his Google+ account, shared here by permission:

Topspin vs Bandcamp mixed with other options
I was pretty sold on going with Topspin for the back end store and promo features for the Headphone Treats site I’m rebuilding. Until today. I’ve always been a big Bandcamp supporter, but they were just missing a few features I felt we needed for the more full-scale assault I’m hoping to make:

1) An integrated store across artists – actually, both services sucked at this (until today). It was possible in Topspin, but you had to get hacky with tags to have multiple bands in one account. Which I never really wanted anyway. Now Bandcamp lets you span any artist on their cart system, which is brilliant. Lets the bands manage their stores and I can just tie them into our site. Exactly what I wanted.

2) High-Resolution, 24-bit FLAC – Again, Topspin was going to be hacky, but doable. But wait! Bandcamp is now allowing 24bit files up to 192kHz??! How did I miss this? I’ll have to see how the download options work, but this is awesome if all pans out acceptable. With what I’m doing, it’s literally two different masterings per album (fully dynamic 24bit/88.2k… slightly more compressed 16 bit for regular lossless down to MP3), so I need to see how that’s going to work. Hopefully I can select formats to be made available for each album and just offer two versions.

3) Campaigns – this is a pretty cool aspect of Topspin which may or may not have been beneficial. Kinda nice to be able to offer a free download of an album for an email signup or Facebook like. But there are other services I could use for that… or I can just roll my own using Bandcamp download codes. And now we have G+ possibly stealing some thunder from Facebook, so it’s reminding me of all that time I spent on MySpace building followings for all the artists. Yeah, that panned out. Social media is wonderful, but you have to keep things centralized and in your control.

4) Mailing list – ummm… Mailchimp? Emma? I’d much rather integrate either of those into my site than use Topspin’s more limited interface. Mailchimp is especially interesting with their killer API, which I’ve used a little bit. I’m a reseller for Emma, so I can send mail way cheaper through them but their integration is a tad clunky and requires more coding on my end (done it before though). I’ll have to weigh that.

So, that’s my current thinking on all the music tech offerings. Speak up if you think I’m missing something though. Discussion is good. Or if your curious what I’m on about with any of the above. Happy to clarify.

That seems a good conversation starter to me, and a jumping-off point for a more in-depth discussion. The competition is certainly heating up: Bandcamp just unveiled a merchandise store, and Topspin is enhancing their features, as well. (Correction: I originally claimed that email capture at Bandcamp was a recent addition, but a reader points out it was unveiled in 2008. I could say time flies, but I will instead just admit I was mistaken. And in fairness, while competition drives enhancement, arguably user requests are the prime motivator.)

So, other users, we’d love to hear what you think, or if you have other questions about either service we can investigate or direct to the sites themselves.

And while we’re at it, Jimmy’s own site has a growing archive of information, including some recording tips – and, oh yeah, some music to hear:
http://jimmyether.com/about/

If you’re looking to give your ears one last adventure this weekend, I highly recommend the stream of an upcoming full-length from Joshua Kay and Romulo del Castillo, recording as Phoenecia. On Josh’s Schematic label, the work hits the far reaches of electronic sound design, in an always-satisfying, soundtrack-like tapestry of musical exploration. It has the feel of exploring imaginary landscapes, to steal a phrase from Cage. The album comes out June 14; the duo is already taking advantage of Bandcamp’s recently-unveiled preorder purchase system, and you can listen in full on either Bandcamp or (embedded here) SoundCloud.

Hope to talk more later this month as it comes out, so feel free to ask questions or share constructive thoughts.

Details:

Recorded by Josh Kay & Romulo Del Castillo
Design by Josh Kay
Mastered by Dietrich Schoeneman
Fernando Subirats sings & plays tabla on Frendano
Dogness contains samples from Kettel’s “My Dogan”

Available for pre-order on bandcamp:
http://phoenecia.bandcamp.com/album/demissions

Phoenecia – Demissions by phoenecia