From Berlin’s Melissa Taylor and Tailored Communication, for my money, just about the best publicist for electronic music out there, we get one epic playlist. If you’re lucky enough to get one holiday or another (Christmas? Boxing Day?) in the next few days, fire up this terrific playlist. You get a full range, from some favorites of mine in 2011 like best-of-toppers Sepalcure, Ghostly’s Mark E, mainstay Thomas Fehlmann, Four Tet, and many more.

It’s exceptional quality stuff, perfect to settle back and take your ears and musical mind on a much-needed vacation.

http://soundcloud.com/melissa/tailored-xmas-mega-mix-2011

Clocking in at one hour, forty five minutes, you can stream or download via SoundCloud. Just remember, as Melissa reminds us, “music is for life, not just for Christmas. Buy vinyl!”

(Or, uh, this being a site with ‘digital’ in its name, go lossless and make backups, too. Actually – do both.)

Tailored Xmas Mega-Mix 2011 by Melissa

1. Planetary Assault Systems – Movement 12 / Ostgut
2. Deadbeat – Fourth Quarter (Cala´s House) / BLKRTZ
3. Popol Vuh – Schnee (Flow edit) – Thomas Fehlmann Flow Mix / SPV
4. Jonsson / Alter – Acapellan / Kontra
5. Locussolus – Gunship / International Feel
6. Steffi – Yours feat. Virginia / Ostgut
7. SCB – Loss / Aus
8. Matilda – Protea / Exone
9. Mount Kimbie – Carbonated (Peter Van Hoesen Remix) / Hotflush
10. Lucy – Bein (James Ruskin Remix) / Stroboscopic Artefacts
11. Peverelist – Dance Til The Police Come / Hessle Audio
12. Drums Of Death – The Jerk / Civil Music
13. Mark E – Belvide Beat / Ghostly
14. Exercise One – Top Score (Stop Thinking!) / Cocoon
15. Boo Williams – Devil Music / Anotherday
16. VCMG – Spock (DVS1 Voyage Home Remix) / Mute
17. The Black Dog – Heavy Industry (Shifted Remix) / Dust Science
18. Four Tet – Locked / Text
19. Untold – Sweat / Hotflush
20. Sepalcure – Pencil Pimp /Hotflush
21. Roll The Dice – Cause And Effect / The Leaf Label

Tailored Xmas Mega-Mix 2011 – mixed by Exercise One

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.

As Christmas revelers head out for last-minute shopping in the last surge of pre-holiday capitalism, they might catch over piped music the ouvre of one Mannheim Steamroller. For all the electronic artists we might imagine as representing the genre, this guy has sold one heck of a lot of Christmas records, in a strange brew of hyper-active electrified timbres and New Age. How many records? Well, enough that he is able to, from his Omaha home, raise wolves.

Not yet fully grown, they require a full-time trainer (they now respond to commands in German), walks up to three hours long, acres of space to roam and a professional meat grinder to create their diet of sushi-grade raw salmon and whole chickens ground up with their bones.

And thus begins the tale of how Mr. Steamroller – erm, Mr. Chip Davis, in fact – lives on the fortune of his musical output, one that might be described, fairly, as a bit eccentric. Hence, the Egyptian artefacts and replica sarcophagus, and crystal balls and cape (yes, he’s worn it while producing, at least on occasion), and apparently flown-in female companionship. Even the wolves get their own iPod speaker and framed pork chop artwork. (Come to think of it, actually, I could go for a picture of some pork in my living space, so maybe I’m not so unlike the wolves. I’m, meanwhile, learning to respond to words in German.)

A must-read article in The Wall Street Journal Real Estate section. (This will be the first and last time you ever hear me say that.)

A Wild Holiday Home: The eclectic Omaha property created by the founder of Christmas-music group Mannheim Steamroller

Eat your heart out, Skrillex. Here’s what a real crossover electronic artist looks like.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m suddenly craving salmon.

Have an uncommon yule with tools and music from the Commons.

That’s the pitch (so to speak) of the Ultimate Christmas Songbook, an iPad app built with 50 Christmas songs and a fully free and open source notation engine. Making use of public domain songs, the number of songs available continues to grow as the community contributes tunes. (Those contributors got the app for free.)

As notation proliferates on tablets, the app also suggests that “commercial” doesn’t have to mean “closed.” The scores themselves are available in open, cross-platform formats (MIDI, MusicXML, MuseScore, and PDF). But by generating revenues, the app can support further development – something that’s often been missing in open source music software projects.

And if you’re looking for a way to help family and friends play music, and they have iPads, the score reading features are quite reasonable. You get lovely display of scores, audio playback, tempo change, transpose, and the all-important font resize with reflow so you don’t have to squint.

The app is on iOS now, but other platforms are planned; an Android version is already in testing. And we hear lots more is coming from MuseScore, too, hot on the heals of a release that earned half a million downloads:
A Christmas update from MuseScore

More resources:
Open source code for mscore at SourceForge
Contributed scores to download
Ultimate Christmas Songbook, US$1.99 at iTunes
http://musescore.com/, software and community, including the desktop software for Mac, Windows, and Linux

For reference, here’s a look at how the desktop software works:

It’s that time of the year, when the halls echo with the sound of … horrible electronic synthesized Christmas tunes, playing on endless loops from strings of lights and other cheap electronics!

But wait – what if you could take those sounds and embrace their low-fidelity, chippy sounds to more inventive musical purposes?

Turn to our friend AfroDJ, who has gradually built up several dozen Ableton Live racks. The latest samples Christmas tree lights for a festive, chiptastic holiday timbre.

I just put up my Christmas tree and put on some lights that play Christmas songs. The songs are comprised of very simple monophonic melodies, coming out of a tiny little speaker, but as soon as I heard it I was transported back to my youth sitting around the tree late at night. Naturally I had to sample it. So I put my AKG C3000 right up to the speaker and let it play. I selected four different notes to use in the instrument.

With reverb and the wave shaper inside Ableton’s sampler, those samples get a bit more creative. (If you don’t have a copy of Live, you can use the samples and add your own effects chain.)

The results are good fun, and could be just the thing for an improvised track while fiddling with your laptop, the warm glow of Egg Nog spreading through your fingers. Enjoy! (And if you make a track with this, do send it our way!)

Want more inspiration? AfroDJ is selling packs at 50% off through January 1. So take that holiday, and make some music.

Ableton Live Rack #39: Christmas Tree Synth

Desmond Dodecahedron has the craziest way of celebrating the season I’ve seen this year: just build a giant Christmas tree from LEGOs, then use visual programming environment Max/MSP and some custom electronics to trigger tunes. Desmond writes:

Once I discovered that the word “advent” was actually an abbreviation of “audio event” and the fact that we have had lots of snow in London – I decided to create this Christmas Carol note filtering tree. (in this case it is actually a midi event tree – but you get the general idea). Each pitch class of a Carol i.e. all the Ds or all the Fs are allocated to a Lego door. When the door is opened, a midi file is played and the notes are sent to a vst synth in a Max Patch. The doors have small magnets which trigger a reed switch. I built a couple of resistor ladder multiplexers so that I could use nine doors with just 3 analogue ins of a Make Controller. This device could be used as a sophisticated “Name that Tune” device – fun for all the family – if that’s what your family considers to be fun – unlike my own. Keep up the good work with CDM – and a festive maximum to all your readers – Des

So, spread the love to someone you know and care about who hasn’t heard of Max/MSP or physical computing – they won’t be hard to find. I’m sure some of them will find it fully fun and festive! (“Do they know Max/MSP at all?”)

Hmmm… I hear some faux Band Aid lyrics coming on.

It’s visual programming, there’s no need to be afraid
At holiday times, we banish light and we patch in the shade

And in our world of plenty, we can spread a smile of joy!
Throw your arms around the world; it’s geekster time

Geek the world
Let them know how to code and patch and program synths and
Geek the world

Sorry, I’m going to blame the decongestant I’m on; my family’s dog is looking at me funny so I’ll take that as a cue to stop.

With takes on the Vince Guaraldi Trio and Tchaikovsky, the sound-slicing members of the monome community have turned their button-encrusted devices to spreading holiday cheer to you, for free. A new, CC-licensed album is available for download. (One caution: CC licenses don’t cover sample clearance for works sampled on these albums, so beware.)

They wouldn’t be geeks if it didn’t have an acronym:
http://mcrpmusic.bandcamp.com/

There’s some really creative stuff in there. I’d love to hear this live.

Found other favorite holiday downloads? Let us know in comments and we’ll do a round-up later this week.

Melbourne, Australia-based acid music lover dyLab posts 303-made goodness on the Acid Box Blues blog. And here’s a great way to get in the holiday mood — well, that is, if acid music gets you in the holiday mood. It’s a pattern laid out on paper, ready to program into your TB-303 hardware, software emulation, x0xb0x, Pd patch, or however you get your real/fake 303 on. The pattern is the work of Honeysmack (Soundcloud site), a fellow Melbourne-based artist.

The December Acid Pattern

I’m rather hoping that putting patterns and presets on paper catches on; I dubbed our MeeBlip version “hipster patch storage.” As it happens, in this case you can download the blank template for your 303 activities. There’s something about committing something electronic in nature to actual paper. And once you’re done, you can share with others with a SoundCloud group. Or, better yet, if you have enough music-making friends, make this your holiday card. (Start on that New Year’s card now, kids.)

There’s more in the way of giveaways, too. Try on a free TR-606 sample set and check out other goodies on the rest of the site.

http://acidboxblues.blogspot.com/

In Christmas We Trust by Honeysmack by DyLABs

It’s an old piece (Christmas 2004), but if you find your ears are ringing with retailers playing Christmas tracks on endless loop for the past few weeks, I can think of no better time for this. A Singular Christmas involved sixteen processors working for two weeks to compress the essence of Christmas music into sixteen singles. The results: tracks of droning, glistening sonic ice sculptures, like an ethereal pipe organ got caught in a wormhole.

Confused? See the easy diagram below. Now, didn’t that make that make a lot more sense?

The endless drones may put you in a sleepy trance, but that could be just what you need to recover from another holiday season. (Well, that or possibly dreaming about using Processing to code up A/V-synced Christmas lights next year.)

Best of all? The titles, like “Radiant bells,” “Hail the shining star” and “Berries sleeping.”

A Singular Christmas

An interview about what it was all about

Creator Brian Whitman: current site

As it happens, Brian Whitman hasn’t been sitting idly. He took all that machine listening knowledge applied to this project and went on to found the Echo Nest, conceived as an API for all of music. I need to catch up and revisit this project soon, but here was our first look, including an interview with Brian:

Musical Brain API: An API for Music on the Web – And it Makes Pretty Pictures

Feeling a warm, holiday glow – or is that just nostalgia for simpler times, times when less digital information was needed to capture sound? Bits were real bits; sampling rates were low enough you could count to the top of them. Kids walked uphill through the snow both ways to buy a new Casio keyboard, and they didn’t yet believe Nintendo’s R.O.B. was a gimmick. They had none of your Grand Theft Audio nonsense: they hummed along to annoying tunes and watched sprites dance across the screen like a derezzed Sugar Plum Fairy.

These should put you even more in the mood, then.

8-bit Jesus is a work-in-progress by Doctor Octoroc, applying the style of an NES game to each Christmas favorite – think “Super Jingle Bros.” Unfortunately, the good Doctor’s server has been overwhelmed by holiday cheer, or his server admin has been drinking too much Egg Nog. Anyone got an alternative link? Found at:

8-bit Jesus, the NES themed chiptune holiday album [boing boing Offworld]

8-bit collective, the all-powerful assemblage of chip artists, has their own holiday creation: a virtual musical advent calendar, in which each day is a new tune. Best title yet: “Joy is all up in this B*****.”

8-bit Advent Calendar [8bitcollective]

Fans of 8-bit or newcomers wondering what the fuss is about, Weekend America did a story on the Blip Festival that just concluded here in New York:

Blip Festival Radio Story

Lastly, Bohus Blahut at Retro Thing points to the album Kasio Kristmas, as seen in the video at top. It’s not free, but it does feature freaky-looking fellows dressed as coneheaded aliens. Bohus’ copy is ready for them to add to their press clippings:

With more than a touch of Devo (and that’s a good thing), vintage electronics, and oodles of out and out weirdness, these AA battery powered tunes re-electrify the holiday classics.

Enjoy!

And just to round this out, I’m running this photo by Scott Beale of laughingsquid, because I didn’t photograph my bottle, and because it seems somehow appropriate, and will likely inspire someone’s own 8-bit (or 64-bit) album.