In one of the records we’ve been most anticipating this year, Mouse on Mars today release Parastrophics, a densely-layered Magnum Opus of a full-length album. If you want to audition the release before buying, there are two places where you can do so:

SoundCloud has a set that will give you a taste
XLR8R has the full stream

But the overwhelming sense I’ve gotten talking to the duo (Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma) is that you should resist the temptation to stream this is the background whilst you respond to emails or sort your socks. If you want to hear it in the sort of environment the artists intend, in other words, you should find yourself a comfy couch, your favorite listening device, and listen to the higher-quality, lossless version. (“Mastered for iTunes” be damned. Come to think of it… anyone want to sell me a couch?)

Care and attention to detail is a real watch cry for the record, so another way to understand it – once you’ve done that proper listening – is to take in the superb behind-the-scenes video shot by Berlin’s Electronic Beats, top. (That’s the print and online magazine also known to locals as the best thing Deutsche Telekom has ever done with their spare change.) As part of the beloved Slices series, Holger Wick interviews the two in their studio at Funkhaus Berlin, the former-GDR broadcasting center whose recording facilities have been converted to new, more democratic use in the reunited city. There, it’s clear that the two apply craft and philosophy in equal, mixed measure, that the process of making is itself a kind of process of listening.

Perhaps the word that’s better than “quality” is “depth”: the reason the album demands close listening is the sense that you need to devote those neurons to a beyond-superficial experience of what’s happening, like donning 3D goggles and listening to the musical activity on more than just one level or plane. There are rhythmic and timbral lines to follow on multiple levels, a kind of digitally-constructed polyphony of both melody and sound, some of which unfold after repeated listens.

That said, it was equally a joy hearing the first live performance of the material at Berghain, as a featured act of the CTM Festival. There, the two improvised their way through the raw ingredients of the record almost as if a dance, their creative energy and enthusiasm unleashed in frenetic fashion. There were even some cameos of squealing and vocoded gestures on iPhones, powered by Pure Data patches, as a handheld instrument.

We should have more from this duo and a look at the record soon, following their lead and taking our time. In the meantime, sit back for some good listening and (thanks to Electronic Beats) watching – highly recommended.

http://www.mouseonmars.com/

Official notes, well worth reading in this case, I think:

Over the course of ten albums – not to mention an avalanche of side projects, remixes and collaborations – Jan St Werner and Andi Toma of Mouse On Mars established themselves as two of the most inventive and unpredictable artists in electronic music.

In 2012 Mouse On Mars’s triumphant return comes in the shape of Parastrophics, a life-affirming and constantly surprising album which is crammed with ideas, exuberance and sheer kinetic energy. It’s like listening to the entire history of pop music – distilled, refined and crystallized into a string of compulsive new shapes, full of glitter, intrigue and addictive detail. Atomised fragments from two lifetimes of listening flare and fade, tiny scraps of memory shrapnel hover, tantalizing and insubstantial, before being whisked away by the next impatient idea.

But despite all that restless curiosity, Parastrophics also demonstrates a peerless command of pace. Whereas some previous Mouse On Mars releases have bordered on the frenetic, their latest displays a subtle but persuasive sense of control. Even when tempos climb, 303s squirm and kick / snare patterns snap to brisk attention, there’s an elegance to the way that each element slips in and out of the mix which speaks, whisper it, of maturity. Parastrophics is as a playful as ever, but it’s never throwaway. The closing “Seaqz” is the perfect illustration, a frenetic romp which is perfectly held in check by gracefully undulating melodies; it brings into focus the beguiling sense of confidence that suffuses the whole record. All of which is a roundabout way of saying that – after six years away – Mouse On Mars have come back with their best record yet.

Chris Sharp

In two ambient works, musicians Cory Allen (Austin, Texas) and Marcus Fischer (Portland, Oregon) chart connected sound worlds mined from shared samples, in a sweeping opus of a musical environent. Released yesterday on February 22, coinciding with birthdays of the artist and Chopin, it generously has the you’ve-just-got-to-buy-this price of US$2.22, well worth adding to your downloaded collection.

The first track is nothing if not womb-like. It begins with a warm, pulsing hum, delicate tones peeking above the blur. Then it gradually succumbs to binaural fuzz, producing a whitened atmosphere of timbral architecture, an eneveloping mist punctuated by soft, insistent ticks. The second track feels more expansive, a trip on an alien sea that begins with creaking, ship-like wooden planks and sails into waves of sound and ringing timbre. With the arrival of the piano and strings in the second track, there is a renewed sense of musical groundedness: this is not just an endless drone, but a set of extended gestures.

There is a regular sense in the sound design of tonal centers, of lines and connections and progression behind the spray of sound. Accordingly, our friend Marc Weidenbaum, whose blog disquiet has been a compass for online releases of ambient and experimental music, has contributed some thoughts on just that topic of congruity in notes for the album. He fits those, of course, into 222 words:

The Internet is a congruity engine. The ceaseless churn of online databases aligns any two or more things found to have in common any one thing.

Cities with similar names require clarification from mapping systems. Faces of people with similar names appear together in image searches, forcibly conflated into one extended family.

Congruity is especially powerful regarding individuals with the same birthday. Factors such as seasonal attributes and development relative to classmates are widely accepted to explain perceived similarities between individuals otherwise born years, even centuries, apart.

Two / Twenty Two by Cory Allen and Marcus Fischer occurred because the two musicians acted on their shared February 22 birthday. Both live in cities considered artistic outposts in otherwise rustic states (Allen: Austin, Texas; Fischer: Portland, Oregon), both have professional experience in visual design, and both explore gentle sonic psychedelics that bring texture to what might otherwise be termed ambient. All coincidence, certainly.

Allen and Fischer stacked the deck in congruity’s favor by providing each other with a set of samples from which to devise new music. The result is two rough fragile recordings. They have the burnish of delicate objects that survived significant tumult. As for the tremulous piano in track two, perhaps it’s a nod to Chopin, who was, according to various databases tracking such things, also born on February 22.

Marc Weidenbaum
disquiet.com
credits
released 22 February 2012
. . .

all sounds were created or captured
by CORY ALLEN + MARCUS FISCHER.
in Austin, TX + Portland, OR.
Winter 2012
Mastered by CORY ALLEN
Photo + Design by MARCUS FISCHER

More:
cory-allen.com
mapmap.ch
disquiet.com

By the way, one of the many things I love about Bandcamp is that it is supported by the superb Chrome extension, ex.fm, which is ideal for listening to streamed music. I tend to like to survey music via ex.fm and purchase and download the stuff I really love. If you want to follow me, my profile is:

http://ex.fm/peterkirn

Get the extension: http://ex.fm/

And I’d love to know what you’re listening is like, if you wish to send playlists. Perhaps we can talk more about that soon. We’ve just enabled the ex.fm plugin here on CDM, so that may make finding music here easier, too.

Texas-born, Detroit-raised, New York-based artist Matthew Dear has a new EP, to be followed by a full-length in 2012. It’s worth mentioning now for two reasons: one, the driving, “chugging” rhythms of the single, “Headcage,” will pop into your head and stay there, led by Dear’s vocal ability to croon and groove simultaneously. Second, the opening of this video may well make your mind go squish. The work of London-based director Morgan Beringer, seen previously milking monochrome textures out of another Matthew Dear collab, the film makes it look like some very colorful part of the Earth’s crust turned a film into magma. It settles down, but the opening frames are to me transcendent, especially when set to a similarly-morphing sonic backdrop.

You can stream and download the single via SoundCloud:

Matthew Dear – Headcage by ghostly

More on the upcoming release from Ghostly:
Matthew Dear: Headcage

The music writing echoes a bit for me Eno and Byrne on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts; perhaps channeling that, the album art by Michael Cina for Dear has washes of indistinct color, like a kaleidoscope set into motion, then blurred. Ghostly reports Dear co-produced the single with Van Rivers and The Subliminal Kid, vets of the acclaimed self-titled Fever Ray. The rest of the album is full of other vocal and producer collaborations. More on this when it arrives.

We hear plenty of hype about the Web’s power for artists, but what happens in the real world? That question is doubly interesting now that Topspin, already influential in its early test run, is available to everyone. Atlanta-based artist Tricil joins us for a special guest post to answer just that. It’s a chance to peer in the head of a Topspin power user. (If anyone wants to rebut this with the Bandcamp perspective, go for it.)

Tricil, aka Johnny Jacobus, answers all this for us. His answers are glowing; he even worried that this might seem a little too Topspin “fanboyish” to post. But no worries here: if people are loving a tool, I want to hear about it. Johnny, take it away. (And readers, have a listen to his music, too – another reason to involve him in this question!)

To compare Topspin to Bandcamp seems a little unfair to me, for the former has a multitude of tools that go beyond streaming and commerce. Both are used by musicians like you and I to “get our stuff out there.” Tim O’Reilly said that “Piracy is not the enemy [of the artist], obscurity is” and I think that’s true. Ed.: Actually, it seems that Seth Godin said that, and Tim O’Reilly didn’t. But Tricil just said it, and someone else might, too. -PK

Be it Topspin, Bandcamp, or even SoundCloud, there are a plethora of ways to get your music out to your fans ears in much more intelligent ways than having a myspace with some tracks or hosting downloads on your own site.

Bandcamp’s charm when they came out in the post myspace-era was an embeddable, music-centric streaming site that had built in social-sharing, almost like SoundCloud with a commerce function. With Bandcamp, you can set up “In Rainbows”-style pricing of pay what you want and even do a free in exchange for an email much like Topspin. The downsides to Bandcamp are a sandboxed site with little to no css customization, so it’s harder to create a more “branded” presence going the all Bandcamp route.

Topspin is different. They seem to be the pioneers of the “email for download” thing, which to me is your first price point. You could host them on SoundCloud, Last.fm or your own site and get 1000s of downloads, but wouldn’t it be nice to tell those 1000 people about your new album with an exclusive offer to download another new track? Anonymous hot-linking downloading is great, but having permission to go Direct to Fan is even better. This is the strength of Topspin’s email platform. Additionally, you can segment your fans so I can holler at my three fans in Peoria, IL about my next show there (TBA). Geo-tagging is done by clicking on a link in a confirmation email, COPPA-compliant. No spam here.

Bandcamp’s real appeal came from the universally embeddable streaming players that work via HTML5 and within Facebook as well. As you can see from a recent Topspin blog post that bizarrely features me, these are coming to the Topspin world as well.

Bandcamp has added email for download functionality as well, but I don’t think its email backend is as robust as Topspin’s. I believe it’s through FanBridge and that’s on a separate site, whereas in Topspin, it’s all self-contained in the same app, along with stats on plays, emails, geodata, and NextBigSound integration. (NBS is amazing, it’s like Google Analytics for musicians). Ed.: Finding the exact answer to this question on the Bandcamp side is difficult, and I think best left to a story that covers Bandcamp specifically. Bandcamp added this functionality in 2008, according to a site blog post, and continues to evolve, too.

Real case scenario: I put up One Day Soon for free download as part of an upcoming Atlanta show promotion on my site. [Ed.: See link above.] I emailed the Atlanta people on my list (about 15%) a link to download the sampler from all three bands and told them where to buy tickets and asked them to share the show info with their friends. I didn’t want to tell the other 85% about a show in Atlanta they can’t go to, so for them I gave them a link to my new song and made up a contest to make the cover art for One Day Soon (right now, the cover art is the flyer for the aforementioned show, and from May 15th on, that’s a little silly). The contest is cool, I think: you post your art on my Facebook wall, and whichever one has the most “Likes” and “TRICIL-ness” wins. One email campaign for one new song, split across the country in two presentable formats.

Speaking of Facebook, Topspin has an upcoming Facebook store that’s going to look a lot like their “spinshops” (which is something they offer for every artist, self-serve or not that works like a splash page for downloaded media, a sort of “while you’re here, maybe buy a T-Shirt?”). Commerce on Facebook, without leaving Facebook. Additionally, you have the option of sharing media for a Facebook Like or a Tweet. You can connect with your fans and grow your networks too, not just via email.

Speaking of T-Shirts, one thing that Topspin does in spades is physical media and merchandise. I know Bandcamp has that BCWax thing, which seems cool. [Ed.: It's a vinyl label, though with only two releases so far, it looks pretty tightly curated!]

Topspin lets you bundle, say, a T-Shirt with an artist’s entire discography in any format from MP3 to 24-bit wav and lifetime VIP access and iPhone ringtones, if you wanted to. This is exactly what I have setup, and it’s my highest selling item, outselling $2-$4 digital downloads. People still like tangibility and the music experience really is being re-bundled. VIP access is cool, you connect with a network like Google, OpenID, FB, Twitter, AOL, and you’re given access to download specific packages. A way to cater to superfans.

Finally, one last thing that Topspin has in the tangible realm is Ticketing. You print (or save the PDF on your iPhone) and bring out your ticket to a show, and you can use the Topspin iPhone scanner (no love for the Droid or BB folk, sorry) to check in your fans. Sell a bundle with a CD, an instant download, and some tickets and you just bypassed both Ticketmaster and a record label.

So, there you have it. Here’s a bit more reading on the latest from Topspin, and a nice live release to grab. I expect this will cause us to hear from Bandcamp (and others), and hopefully even better, real-world users of those services.

I’d like to hear what you think of the alternatives out there, what’s available and what’s missing, and even if you’ve found ways of working across sites. And I hope in the process, we get to discover some new music, too. Let us know. -PK

Topspin blog:
Major Updates to Streaming Player Coming Soon, Embeddable Store Offers

The Unbundling (and Re-Bundling) of Music – interesting business analysis, including some discussion of SONOIO, the artist who recently won recognition from Topspin and whose DIY synthesizer presents a very different vision of the technology of music distribution! (More on SONOIO soon!)

http://tricil.net/ – Tricil’s own Topspin-powered site

Tired of top 40 hits? Pooped on podcasts? Sapped on streams?

What if your radio could generative music that was never-before — and never-again — heard, all from dynamic, algorithmic software?

PatchWork Radio does that with Pd patches. It’s not a new idea, but the radio station here, at least, is modular – not just one patch but any number of patches can be transformed into radio, thanks to some Python scripting. Creator David Guy John notes:

I’ve recently just started up an internet radio station using PureData to stream generative music. The system will load and unload randomly chosen PD patches, synthesize all the audio in real time and then stream the results out.

You can listen to the stream at http://radio.rumblesan.com and more info is available at http://www.rumblesan.com/?p=265

I’m hoping to try and recruit some help to build patches for it as it’s a bit of a daunting task to do just on my own so if you could let people know about it I’d be really grateful.

So, who’s in – does this generate (ahem) some interest or ideas, and might you want to contribute?

It seems fitting that the kind of musical worlds imagined by artists like Brian Eno now can be deployed anywhere in the world, not just generated in one iteration, but in endlessly-transformable versions.

(But can you dance to it?)

Tim Exile, laptop virtuoso, vocalist, and Reaktor software creator, has apparently taken a liking to the recording features SoundCloud is touting. He’s got a novel idea: you record samples into SoundCloud, he takes your samples and incorporates them into his set. It takes someone like Tim to pull that off; it should be a good set. If you have a day job, this one will be a bit tricky – the interactive online show is at 7pm today, Thursday, GMT (aka CUT) time; that’s evening for all of Europe but 2pm New York and 11am in Los Angeles, etc.

Do let us know how it goes (thanks for the tip, “wantless”!):

I’ll be taking sounds that you record and share with me in realtime using Soundcloud’s new capture & share feature. Just capture your sound, whatever it is, and share it with exile@timexile.com and I’ll weave it into the track live. Watch the preview vid above to get a peak…

http://www.timexile.com/interactive/

I’m curious to hear thoughts about how this recording feature could work. Keep in mind, what SoundCloud is doing is just taking a recording from a browser (in Flash) or mobile app (currently iOS) and uploading the file; it’s not really a cloud-specific recording. That means the idea could be ported to other service, or other clients for use with SoundCloud. Could this be useful for your music? What else would you want to see such features do?

Previously: Social Recording: SoundCloud Adds iOS, Web Record Buttons, More Social Integration

I’ll have some news from Avid following the event.

Updated: It’s over, and now you can find out what happened. I’m saving this article to save our comment thread below about good Avid press conference drinking game terms. (Not recommended if you, for instance, do PR for Avid.)

Anyone really serious about following Avid, you can read the notes from their Q3 earnings conference call.

You can hear the full album on Grooveshark. Update: The Grooveshark available was apparently premature, pending an exclusive release deal. It should become available again, but in the meantime, Warp has put several tracks up on Soundcloud:

A name like Eno’s tends to precede itself, but I quite honestly think, his fame aside, it’s a masterpiece. The collaboration of the three artists seems utterly clear and harmonious. Some of Eno’s own best ambient and experimental tendencies, from the artist who helped define those categories, float back to the surface here. But they’re partly reflected anew in these other artists. The ease with which the trio fuse their sounds is little wonder: these two gentlemen have been ongoing collaborators with Eno, working extensively on fine details of various productions and playing live with him onstage. They seem to achieved a creative mind meld.

The result is something that returns to that tradition, but finds continuity between the old and new, a common voice that can begin to escape the burden of time and trend. It is often unabashedly simple and, in the words of The Great Pumpkin, full of sincerity. It’s the original soundtrack score to something you haven’t imagined yet. And it’s just sonically wonderful, even in the lower-fidelity stream, warm and clear, evoking deep colors. It’s something you might like to bring along with you for the winter of 2010-11.

But, anyway, through the magic of the Internet, you don’t have to take anyone’s hollow words; you can give it a listen and disagree violently, immediately, if you like.

For myself, I’m off to purchase it as a physical album, to listen repeatedly in its entirety, in defiance of what supposedly happens these days in music listening trends.

Release news via Flavorwire, who point to still more reading.

Same as it ever was:

With talk of the cloud, streams, special proprietary devices that pipe vendor-specific sounds to particular home stereos, intelligent, always-on access to entire music collections, tablets and set-top boxes and … all of that … it can be tough to look into the future of music and audio. I spent the last weekend at Project Bar-B-Q, a mind-bending retreat of audio tech industry sages and engineers, on a team that looked at the issue. It’s not time yet to share those discussions, but as we face the dizzying array of possibilities ahead, this one quote stands out, pointed to me by someone in my BBQ group.

The article is from June, but as “cloud music” talk heats up, it’s worth pasting to your wall. The ever-insightful Sasha Frere-Jones writes for The New Yorker

…the near future of listening to music looks a lot like 1960. People will listen, for free, to music that comes out of a stationary box that sits indoors. They’ll listen to music that comes from an object that fits in the hand, and they’ll listen to music in the car.

Full story: You, the D.J.: Online music moves to the cloud.

I think a corollary is that, even with the big box playing music for free, people will want to own a collection of music and own things they take around with them, alongside the free things. Exactly where that line falls and in what way remains the sticking point.

But why stop at music listening, or even music creation? The idea above could lend perspective to any conversation about design and technology. The dimensions of the virtual, digital universe and its possibilities are indeterminate and difficult to conceive. But the dimensions of human beings are not.

I look at my Android phone and iPod touch and see something that rests comfortably in the palm of my hand. Keyboards and pianos sit before me at waist height and stretch within reach of my arms. The netbook to which I’ve just taken a strong liking I notice is the near exact size and weight of one of my favorite paper sketchbooks from a few years ago. It folds under my arm. (The dimensions of an airline coach row are applicable here, too, but one could think of those as the economic extensions of how closely you can pack humans and still get them to buy tickets.) The iPad, embraced recently by musicians, is sized to a music stand and could easily replicate manuscript paper, which in turn could be the net of multiplying staves sized to human hands and handwritten dexterity. The ubiquitous knob may be just an endcap on the electrically-convenient potentiometer, but it’s also a physical manifestation of the fact that human beings have opposable thumbs. The grip of your hand is, literally, the reason we talk about “tweaking.”

It’s not just a matter of ergonomics, though if design causes discomfort or you can’t see a user interface, that obviously matters. Human scale is part of what allows us to grow emotionally attached to certain things.

And it should also be apparent that while the tech headlines and reporting focus on platforms or vendors — Apple! iPhone! Cable TV box! BMW car stereo! — humans, quietly, keep using objects that are fundamentally more or less the same. The rest is just a bit of icing. It makes you wonder why we don’t ask the fundamental questions first and worry about the details later, instead of the other way around. That would bring some humanity, sanity, and a longer view to technological discussions. (A shock, I know.)

Think in human terms, and sometimes design answers or the future of music are within arm’s reach. Just ask an accordion.

Autechre are back, following up a set of live dates and March full length release with yet another full-length on Warp and more dates, this time beginning at the end of August in Perth, Australia and heading off to Slovakia, Poland, Japan, and Greece.

Best to let you hear the new full-length track, available for streaming via SoundCloud. (Not embeddable; only on their site, though note that there’s actually a little SoundCloud security hole when you expose a private link in that way – a topic for another day.)

http://autechre.ws/move-of-ten/

I think I may be more eager to hear this one than the March release. Stay tuned.

Does anyone else notice the graphic similarity between Warp’s cover for “Move of Ten” and Flying Lotus’ Fieldlines? You could almost see the one image fitting inside the other. Indeed, let’s try that:

Mystical secret coded message from the folks at Warp?

For more free music, Bleep.com is starting a SONAR free MP3 promo series.