Mint.com, the online financial management tool, has put its numbers together with market researchers NPD Group to analyze music spending. The results: when it comes to consuming recorded music, digital music continues to rise. At the same time, so does Apple’s grip on the music consumption market, a combination that includes proprietary control of a music store, a music player, and the leading mobile device.
Sure, novel controllers are fun to watch, like our friend Gustavo Bravetti, driving a Brazilian crowd wild by waving his Wii remote live. But what if you can’t see the performance gimmick, if you’re just listening to the track?
The pitch behind the track “Raw,” celebrating the fifth anniversary of Fresco Records, is just that. It’s a studio-produced track, but the artists wanted to maintain some of the improvised feel of the live music. The track pairs the hit DJ/producer duo of David Amo and Juli Navas with Gustavo Bravetti of Uruguay – the Ableton and alternative controller wizard who regularly feeds tutorials to CDM.
Of course, this trio aren’t the only folks thinking this way. The first sequencers gave us the power to arrange everything in advance, meaning people immediately began to seek ways to restore live feel, turning off the metronome and doing everything in one take. But it’s nice to see these high-profile artists – and our friend Gustavo – taking it on specifically with something as off-the-wall as a Wii remote.
My own President Obama is this week off making his pitch for why Chicago should host the Olympic Games. Correction. Oops. I need to read the news. Chicago was eliminated first. But look out – our friends at Antipop (slogan: “antipop music for a pop music”) are using a different tool in their arsenal: music.
Watch the video for some fun gear spotting, plus one vintage arcade cabinet. I could point out stuff I see, but that’d spoil the fun. Shout out in comments.
There’s definitely a commercial gloss on this, but it’s nicely executed, and felt so absurdly Olympic to me that I actually couldn’t help but smile listening. (In fairness, either Chicago or Madrid ought to be able to do better than New York did with 2012; I recall dignitaries in traffic while rowers paced the polluter waters of Flushing Meadows. Yipes.)
Here you go, probably the most commercial music we’ll ever run on CDM:
Makes me want to, like, train or something.
Updated: From comments, I like these alternative suggestions by safd in place of “anti” pop:
Au Revoir Simone have released the debut music video, “Shadows,” from their forthcoming album, “Still Night, Still Light.” Yet again, the music is warm and wonderful, with clever, deceptively-simple ostinatos and earnest melodies delivered in wispy vocals. But the release also suggests the new album is going to be more of what we got in the last albums – pleasant and dreamy, but absent, ironically, any hint of “shadows.” The music video comes again from Vikram Gandhi and Brendan Colthurst of Disposable, a firm with expertise in indie-tilted but finely-crafted and always-safe music videos. Their previous outing on “Sad Song”, featuring un-ironic, sweet footage of the trio baking cookies, seemed to capture the blissfully good intentions of the talented Brooklyn outfit. Here, though, the video seems to fixate on its crushes, alternately on the ladies, their vintage synths (just one more effects shot over the top of the JUNO-60), or both. It’s product placement for hardware that isn’t made any more.
I begin to wonder if all of this is moving us, the music fans and critics, into dangerous territory, tangled in indie cred and inescapable nostalgia. I expect some of you wonder why, years into an avalanche of releases with whisper-thin vocals of [boy/girl] atop vintage [square wave synth] and [lo-fi beat box] it would take me until now to come to this conclusion. I love Ms. John Soda and Lali Puna and the many other bands whose stripped-down style is close to Au Revoir Simone’s, but it seems by definition the sort of music that doesn’t need description or explanation or analysis. Yet, oddly, we have even more publicity for a band that seems not to need it.
Plastikman in Second Life. Now, could Plastikman get a second life? Survey says yes. Photo: (CC) Torley.
Richie Hawtin has been the subject of adulation and sometimes seemingly-random scorn by readers of this site — blame the passions of the Internet. But amidst that noise has been a clear signal: bring back Plastikman.
Richie is a terrifically talented DJ, but for many of us it’s his work as a producer that we love. And for all m-nus has done over the years, the handful of work that comes from Richie’s Plastikman persona remains significant. He’s announced he’s bringing Plastikman back, and has a survey to match. Don’t worry – this isn’t something like “What’s your favorite bpm,” or “specify preferred filter cutoff frequencies.” It’s more along the lines of whether you’d see a show in Santiago or Perth. But there are indications of a new live show and re-releases. (I’m not clear whether the “new project” includes a new release, but I do hope so, and it does talk about “creative process.”)
When considering the various aspects of Richie Hawtin’s persona, it seems fans reserve a special place in their hearts for Plastikman. So it’s only right that as we prepare for a new Plastikman project next year, you should have some input and control over exactly what you see and hear.
Richie Hawtin and the also-excellent Ambivalent reflected on music making with technology at DubSpot here in New York over the summer. I think they had some really good things to say, even if your own music tends in other directions or genres, so now is the ideal time to share that. Both Richie and Kevin spoke about the need to incorporate physical gestures into digital music making, whether it was drawing on the performance (for Ambivalent) or locking oneself into the studio and getting physical with the gear (for Hawtin). That made something like Maschine important to Richie’s newer work, he said. DubSpot has video of this conversation (led by an audience Q&A of Ableton users), as well as a private conversation with Richie about his work.
It was around that time that Richie Hawtin was scanned into the computer by a rogue software application, met another program named Tron, and had to defeat the evil Sark. Photo (CC) Luiz Roberto Galetto.
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