An interesting article on the (ever so slight) resurgence of vinyl. The digital medium insures us that CDs won’t be missed, as it’s all “1s” and “0s,” and nothing more. Vinyl, for all its faults (and I’m no purist on the subject, vinyl sucks for audio purity of things like classical and microtonal music), deserves to be made available again. I’m simply happy to see big artwork again.
The Daily Telegraph’s article on the subject can be reached here.
Michael Robertson, former CEO of MP3.com and owner of MP3Tunes, I service I happen to enjoy quite a lot, writes for TechCrunch on Amazon.com defying the major labels regarding MP3 lockers. For those who don’t know, these lockers are a source where purchasers of MP3s can store their purchases and play them back in a number of devices and locations.
Many good people are working on their own alternatives to Amazon’s proposed locker service (Michael Robertson, for example), but it’s nice to see a heavyweight take on the music industry regarding lockers, places where one can store their music and access it at any location they wish to. The music industry, record labels especially, will either have to get on board or watch their sales plummet due to continued piracy. The rip-off game is stopping, whether they like it or not.
Billboard Magazine’s Ed Christman discusses the topic further here.
In a case of absolute hypocrisy, Michael Robertson and MP3 Tunes makes the allegation that EMI, who breathe fire on upload services like Rapidshare, are using Rapidshare to to give away music themselves. Read the full article at P2P.net.
Adam Sykes was the founder of one of Great Britain’s most important experimental music labels, Iris Light. I have know of his work since I was a purchaser at a record shop in Los Angeles, and got deeper into his label when I resided in Macedonia, where a lot of my friends were interested in dark ambient and post-Industrial music. What I didn’t know what that Adam is also an accomplished musician in his own right.
His project, Generic, is anything but. Generic cover a dark, bleak, brutal corner of the genre where the Cold Meat Industry label and Esplendor Geométrico would intersect. Slow, crunchy rhythms mixed with enough air for the tracks to break, but just barely.
Adam was kind enough to provide a link to his ReverbNation site, where you can sample his work.
Of course they are. Google is about to raise the stakes in the digital downloads game and finally give Apple a run for its money.
Today seems like a perfect day to review some rather remarkable tracks by Belgium-based (though of Italian origin) singer/composer/multi-instrumentalist Elsehow. For some time after pondering the review mentioned in my previous post, I had wondered who would continue down the path songwriters from Scott Walker to the aforementioned David Sylvian traversed. Thankfully, some younger talent is beginning to mine this vein.
Elsehow lives in Brussels, but you’d never know it by the nearly perfectly-pronounced English. This is not to say that I’d favor an Angolphone sound over a Continental one. Consider, for example, Jacques Brel, who never sang in English to my knowledge, and did just fine without it. Elsehow’s English phrasing is excellent, at any rate. The melodies move at a more rapid pace than I’m used to for this genre of music, and that slight ‘speed’ adds a nice touch, a difference of feel to his songs. Think of some of the tracks on Simply Red’s hit single Fake for a comparison, though the instrumentation shows influences of mid-period David Sylvian or Mark Hollis. A worthwhile listen, and available through iTunes for download.
For more on Elsehow, check out his Myspace and Facebook pages.
