jumping beans & .tape. from la bisogno on Vimeo.

What might a jar full of Mexican jumping beans sound like if composing their own ambient music? Scott Worley points us to a musical experiment by his labelmate Daniel Romero aka .tape, on netlabel yo.yo.pang!.
.tape programmed a sound environment in the free multimedia patching environment Pd (Pure Data). Contact microphones listen for the beans to jump, then use Pd’s onset detection (an analysis for transients) to trigger the sounds. Daniel reports the technique is “easy, but wholly effective.”

I’ll say – the music winds up being quite lovely, and rather than having a boring software-based random event generator, there’s something mesmerizing about watching the beans. You can download a free MP3/OGG file of the track, as well (and it sounds as though more projects may be coming):

pet-o-matic [asociación cultural la bisogno]

Descripción original en Español:

empezamos esta serie con la picante unión entre el músico Daniel Romero (aka .tape. ) y Pancho, Emiliano y Marcos, tres frijoles saltarines mexicanos

Sonidos y programación por .tape. secuenciación en directo por los 3 frijoles saltarines mexicanos micrófono de contacto + un “onset detection” en pd para disparar los sonidos. fácil pero rotundamente efectivo.

In other Pd news, the creators of the RjDj interactive/generative iPhone music app, which employs Pd patches, will be holding another sprint. This one will be located in London October 2-4.

Remix contests are all the rage lately, but quality is another thing altogether. I’m happy CDM is involved in a new contest with Dancetracks, however, because the ingredients of a contest that’s worth your time all all there.

First off, Seattle-based [Dave] Pezzner on freefrange is an artist worth noting. He’s a talented producer, has a great sense of sound, as has moved from commercial and television sound and music into being a breakout dance artist – something to which many CDM readers may aspire. He’s assembled just the kind of smart track we like:

Valldemossa was inspired initially by a tape recording I found of a boys choir recorded circa 1982, which was piped through an analog tape delay. The ending result of this tape recording was outstanding and left me with a gold mine of sounds to pick from. I built this song using a handful of my favorite tools, FL Studio, Ableton Live, Native Instruments Battery, Reaktor, D16 Phocyon, some sounds from the Mellotron M400 tape banks, Klanglabs Stompbud collection and Mixed in Key (as well as some keen direction from master and chief, Jimpster). Feel free to let loose and let your inner artist speak loudly. We’re excited to hear what you do!

Pezzner

Valldemossa

Freerange Records

Download M3U »

With the weakened world economy, content in general faces plenty of gloom and doom. Advertising models are severely weakened. But, oddly, in the world of music, there are some positive signs that the shift to decentralized, online distribution might actually be going well — and maybe economic pressures are simply ensuring the parties involved find some way to make the adjustment.

And music distribution is becoming wonderfully weird and diverse – maybe far more so than in recording’s so-called golden age, an era in the past dominated by racial division, predatory labels, and a few dominant big businesses. (Money is tough as always, but it does make you wonder why we complain so.)

We’ve heard lots of ideas for alternative musical distribution in the digital age, but this has to be a less popular idea:

How about “releasing” your album as a blank, recordable CD-R?

If you think about it, it’s the natural evolution of CDs. After all, in the age of widespread digital download stores and file sharing, if you bother to buy a physical CD, aren’t you really buying it just for that jewel box and liner notes and packaging, for that satisfying snap as the disc hits the plastic spindle? Aren’t you just doing it to flirt with the CD shop girl … erm, or to look into the morose, cynical eyes of that guy who knows way more than you do?

In this case, though, the blank CD has a simple function: it’s the only way to get around legal troubles with record label EMI.

New Danger Mouse CD Released As A Blank CD-R Due To Legal Fight With EMI [techdirt, via atariboy on Twitter]

Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse unveil new album – a blank CD-R! [guardian.co.uk]

Danger Mouse has flirted with legal troubles before, with the landmark Jay-Z – Beatles Black Album / White Album mash-up, and has flirted with success as Gnarls Barkley with Cee-Lo Green. The new album is a departure, an audiovisual experience that adds photography by David Lynch inspired by the music. Yes, that’s the David Lynch, he of Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet and Eraserhead.  Danger Mouse works with Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse and a host of guest vocalists.

Update: Whoops. Danger Mouse just isn’t as ground-breaking as The Residents, who tried Internet distribution with accompanying blank CDRs way back in 2006 on “The River of Crime! Episodes 1-5.” (And I imagine there may be other cases of this, too.) Of course, The Residents were just being creative – they didn’t have an unspecified legal battle with EMI. From Discogs:

This 2-CDR set was released as blank media, to be burned as eventual hard copies and packaging for the River Of Crime tracks, that were distributed via the internet, in a subscription series, each “CrimeCast” episode being released every two weeks, over a 10-week period. These subscription downloads also included exclusive material, including scripts, icons and CRT wallpaper, as well as unrelated bonus tracks. The track marked * was not released on the “standard” release (CDL38).

Thanks to B.C. Thunderthud for the tip (and I see a Boing Boing reader caught the same thing).

The news came over our Twitter feed via Jaymis, which also prompted a discussion of how to get and decompress the tracks.

Enough of the empty cheerleading. Web-only networking can have a dark side, too — and the music community can do better. Playing devil’s advocate this week to one-dimensional Web 2.0 optimism, we welcome Dave Dri, musician, producer, and founder of Segue. -PK

I write a column for a weekly street press magazine in Australia. The vast majority of the universe won’t have picked up that magazine, of course. But my topic this week has been bouncing around Interwebs, cafes, and clubs like an alarm clock, waking the electronic music community from a happy slumber. The cause for alarm: the dire state of expectations amongst electronic music producers, digital labels and online stores.