Nine Inch Nails are back with another free release; this time, it’s an upcoming album release called "The Slip". And NIN continue to give us the kinds of formats we like, with the income this time coming entirely from physical sales:

the music is available in a variety of formats including high-quality MP3, FLAC or M4A lossless at CD quality and even higher-than-CD quality 24/96 WAVE. your link will include all options - all free. all downloads include a PDF with artwork and credits.

for those of you interested in physical products, fear not. we plan to make a version of this release available on CD and vinyl in july. details coming soon.

The Slip Minisite (NIN)

Okay, 24/96 WAV files seem sort of like overkill, but it’s nice to have these other options.

Updated: It also seems that NIN has used a Creative Commons attribution / non-commercial / share alike license, so you can remix their track for non-commercial purposes, free. (That’s quite a lot more generous, I’m afraid, than Radiohead in their remix contest — the objection from many observers wasn’t just that Radiohead was charging for the stems of “Nude” separately, but that they retained copyright ownership to remix artists’ work.)

One thing no one seemed to mention about the previous NIN release Ghosts was that the content of the music had taken a different and presumably non-commercial direction, meaning the new distribution method was basically a necessity. I enjoyed that direction, and a lot of you evidently did, too.

But judging by the way this is spreading through the Web, I think we’ve learned that there’s a three-step method to making music distribution a success: 1. give people something free, then hope for sales of something else, 2. give them access to the formats they want, 3. be Nine Inch Nails. Now if only #3 were a bit easier.

Eliot Van Buskirk of Wired points out that RIAA numbers show that records are on the rise again, after two years of declining sales. No, I’m not just using the old-fashioned term "records" to refer to something else — I mean records, as in vinyl, as in big round things with grooves that you put on phonographs. $22.9 million worth of retail value moved in records in the US alone — not a huge industry, necessarily, but nothing to be sneezed at, either. By the way, even though the CD industry is shrinking fast, $7.5 billion of CD albums were sold in 2007. So the record industry has every right to be scared by rapidly-depleting sales — and every opportunity to be intrigued by the money that might be made on digital (which, totaling all different formats, was well over $2 billion).

In fact, here’s one for you: online digital growth outpaces CD shrinkage by a factor of greater than 2:1. It’s tough to project rates forward, but that should be a good sign.

RIAA Admits Vinyl Sales Are Climbing [ Wired.com Listening Post ]

I think the vinyl anomaly, though, is brilliant for a whole number of reasons. What you read in the press about the music biz is pretty one-dimensional. We’re expected to believe the industry is collapsing, and sales are down. The reality is much more complicated. Here are some other factoids you can extract from the RIAA’s 2007 sales figures in the news of the weird category:

• High-def audio formats have completely failed — so much that cassette sales are equivalent to units of SACDs and DVD Audio combined.
• More money was spent on mobile downloads than single downloads elsewhere — thanks to the fact that they’re so ridiculously expensive, of course.
• People spent nearly as much on vinyl records in 2007 as they did on music videos online ($28.2 million).

So, here’s to the cassette and the vinyl record. And what does all this really demonstrate? To me, it’s a blunt reminder that what the record industry has failed to do is successfully transition to new media and new, more diverse audiences. When cassette sales started to deteriorate with the introduction of the CD, no one said the industry was doomed then. Vinyl was a great format, which is why it’s still alive. The online formula is starting to come together, but it’s just not quite there yet. And given that most of the industry’s money still comes from CDs, it seems like it’s likewise time to figure out how to get more mileage out of that format and slow the decline, rather than obsess over it, while continuing to work on new formats.

Photo: Michelle’s House of Disco.

Ready to blow your mind with a little vintage electronic experimentalism? Thought so. UK producer, filmmaker, and light-show artist (among other things) Ian Helliwell decided to crate dive some early pioneering efforts in recording, and Tone Generation, a ten-part podcast series, is the result. So far, Tone Generation has landed in Great Britain and France. Tonight, they voyage to Germany. Italy is up next — and then, beyond.

The creators describe the program thusly:

Don Buchla is another special pioneer whose impact on music technology has been far-reaching. (He turned 71 last week. Happy Birthday, Don!) He’s best known as the Chevy to Moog’s Ford — that is, the other rival US modular synth system in the 60s. Moog and Buchla were so close, in fact, in introducing their modulars and the innovations to follow that it’s often hard to say who was really first — and their approaches were different enough that it probably doesn’t matter. But Buchla also went on to be one of the key pioneers in alternative interface design. His gestural/spatial Lightning system, for instance, used IR-emitting wands to transmit position and acceleration over a decade and a half before the Nintendo Wii took gaming by storm.

If you want to catch up with Buchla’s various innovations, I suspect you’ll need to drink a lot of Red Bull. So it’s fitting that Red Bull, sponsors of the Red Bull Music Academy international educational programs, are interviewing Buchla for their series on musical innovators. Sit back in your recliner, because they’ve got two full hours of Buchla reflecting on music technology:

Red Bull Music Academy Interview

Via the excellent ambient/electronica blog Disquiet

Earlier this week:

Vintage Buchla Easel Action, and Inspiration for Modern Tangible Interfaces

Photo by fr1zz, via Flickr.

When did you make your first electronic composition? Andrew Cordani points us to a find on WFMU’s Beware of the Blog — a CD compiling high school students (and a seventh grader, in the first example) composing electronic music between 1968 and 1984. Brian Turner at WFMU notes that right now the way to get it is via Meat Beat Manifesto’s tour (the compilation is the work of Jack Dangers), but here are some youthful blips and bleeps in the meantime:

Randy Kaplan “Emission-Embossment” (MP3)
David Brown “Willy Reverb” (MP3)
Kenneth Ranales “Mind Clash” (MP3)
Beth Bolton/Mag Johnson “Vietnam-Love It Or Leave It” (MP3)

High School Pierre Schaeffers [Beware of the Blog — great headline, Brian!]

WFMU’s (and Engadget’s) Trent Wolbe also has a write-up of last week’s Tenori-On event, for a take on it from a different angle. Photo below by Trent.

For a walk down when-we-were-younger lane, got any youthful creations of your own? Went to high school between ‘68 and ‘84? In high school now (expect some of you are)?

Few names inspire love from digital musicians quite like Elektron, makers of the Monomachine, Machinedrum, and SIDstation drum machines. So when Elektron’s founder Daniel Hansson passed away in an auto accident last summer, it came as a shock to the tightly-knit, passionate musical community who loved his work and lost him too young. (It didn’t help that it came within weeks of the loss of Argu, the ingenious discoDSP and Image-Line software developer, also in a car accident.)

Tragedies like this are doubly sad, because in that loss we miss the opportunity to celebrate people whose work we love. So I’m pleased to be able to talk about a celebration of Daniel Hansson today.

The artist community who use Elektron’s stuff have put together a really epic compilation of music in tribute to Daniel. It’s all user-driven — Elektron didn’t do the organizing; the musicians did. The lineup has some of our favorite people contributing, famed and obscure alike:

Autechre, Beautiful Planet Earth, Boom Bip, dDamage, Daedelus, Dntel, Erase, Emnine, Future Image, Honey Claws, How Dragons Disappear, John Starlight, Jon Martensson, John Tejada, Kero, Landstrumm, Material Object, Micronaut, Music International, Orsan Kart, Pelektor, Proxy, scutopus, TS3K, and The Brown Moth, Tiga, The Sea and Cake, TreD Grp, Van Basten, AEVSVS, Wanker’s United

Many of these (The Sea and Cake, Boom Bip, Tiga, Proxy, John Starlight and others) are exclusive tracks.

You get 30 songs for US$5, donated to Daniel’s favorite charity, the World Wildlife Fund. (Additional WWF donations are welcome.) You’re even entered to win a SIDstation. (Yeah, I know — some of you are still smarting from not having won a Tenori-On, just as I am from having had to give it away. At least here, you can lose for a good cause, which is what I intend to do.)

45tribute

Another 25 songs are available free — really free, licensed Creative Commons.

(25 + 30 does not add up to 45, it’s true — 45 was Daniel’s favorite number and was in the name of his C64 group, Zone 45.)

Help Spread the Word

The organizers don’t have a PR budget for this, so we’re their PR — and, hey, I’ll bet we can do a better job, anyway. So do spread the word around.

Thanks to Ryan Faubion, the project manager and curator, for putting this together and letting us know about it, and to forum member / compilation contributor Wendell Edwards aka scutopus for the heads-up.

Free, odd soundware keeps on coming — hot on the heels of faux bent instruments and a tape-recorded Roland 606 and 808, here are more sounds to satisfy your need for unusual sounds.

Stephen Haunts was inspired by the cassette-recorded 808, and writes to tell us he’s decided to give something back. He’s uploaded 22 kits from a Korg ElecTribe ER-1, a kit from a Yamaha DD-10 (pictured amusing the awkward fellow at right from the manual), and a Yamaha PSS-80. The Yamahas steal the show: they’re little toy keyboards with a decidedly lo-fi sound. I always admired the Japanese sound designers for their minimalism on these low-end hardware units. You almost don’t need to circuit bend this.

Free Drum Machine Samples by Creature [Haunted House Records]

Stephen, aka Creature, used these samples for his Distant Horizon album featured in Mike Una’s round-up of music from the forums.

Toy drums not to your liking? How about a toy music box instead?

Our friend Tom at Music Thing has repaired and sampled his Fisher Price record player music box, then uploaded the results to the open source soundware site Freesound:

Sampling a Fisher Price Music Box Record Player [Music Thing]

You may remember said Fisher Price kit from the tongue-in-cheek Fisher Price turntable “review” by DJ Tech Tool’s Ean Golden.

What’s great about both these sound collections is they’re actually different enough to give you some real inspiration musically. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think it’s time to take my handheld recorder around the house and grab some other sounds.

Digital samples got no soul? How about digital samples of tape and cassette samples of classic Roland instruments? Huggie from New Zealand (and Goldbaby Productions) has been producing some lovely sample libraries from favorite gear, free and payware. He’s posted two of the best as freebies to the CDM forums. The hook: they’re recorded on analog before being sampled again.

There’s a TR606 recorded to an Ampex 1/2 inch 2-track tape machine, which appeared around Christmas. And this week, we got a superb 808 samples set recorded to a portable Marantz deck. (Funny, I’ve spent some quality time with both recorders, so that adds extra nostalgia.)

Less this all be chalked up to simple novelty, I have to admit you get a nice, warm sound out of the results. I’m dropping these on some Drum Racks in Ableton as we speak.

And here’s what it sounds like in action:
Cassette 808 Demo [mp3]

Free Tape606 sample pack… Merry Christmas! [CDM forums in December]

The Cassette 808 sample pack! Old skool and free… [CDM forums]

Free Stuff @ Goldbaby (other goodies, too, but for these scroll to the very bottom and look for Tape606 sample pack and The Cassette 808)

Thanks, huggie! Good stuff. Anyone else with soundware they want to share, please let us know.