A couple of weeks ago Digital featured Danger Mouse and Danielle Luppi’s impressive WebGL video which was made to promote their new album Rome. As was noted then, artists have to do something fresh, new and different these days to get their music noticed amongst the hail of noise that dominates entertainment.
Step forward Gwilym Gold. The former frontman of London’s promising band Golden Silvers has gone solo and to mark the occasion has released his first single Flesh Freeze as a downloadable app using a new musical format called Bronze (bronzeformat.com). Far away from his former band’s sprightly indie-pop music, the new track is downbeat ambient song with Gold’s vocals pushing things along. Flesh Freeze does not have a conventional arrangement. A perfect song for some experimentation then.
The Bronze format is described as “a non-interactive music format, that transforms every aspect of a song, to create a unique version on each listen.” The result is that no two listens of the song are exactly the same. Vocals will not always follow the same order, the drum pattern may change, synth lines will appear and disappear:the arrangement and playback is always unique.
Gold himself conceived the idea and implemented Bronze along with the help of his producer Lexxx and, not your normal credit for a pop song, a team of scientists from Goldsmiths University in London. The non-static song is available for Mac only at the moment with iPhone, Android and PC coming very soon at gwilymgold.com. More music in the Bronze format is also forthcoming.
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While all the talk about cloud music in the last year or so was centered on when Apple would launch their service, it was Amazon, the leading online retailer who made the first move into the cloud last week with the announcement of their Cloud Drive & Cloud Player.
I’m sure a few of you are wondering what kind of hippy dippy nonsense I’m on about. Cloud music? It all sounds suspiciously like an ill-advised experimental ambient concept album, but fear not, this is THE FUTURE (probably). The cloud concept in computing is one that is becoming much more ubiquitous (ironically after the last big computing system concept was called “ubiquitous computing”).
Cloud computing allows you to harness the power and resources of multiple computers rather than rely on one computer or server to host your website, email or files. So, as we all become increasingly more connected, the theory is that everything we own on our hard drives could exist on the virtual cloud, so we could access it anywhere we needed it and our data will persist across our digital life. Continue Reading..»
It’s hard to believe that there exists a tribe on the Amazon border of Brazil and Peru who have yet to make contact with the modern world but aerial footage of such a tribe was shown in a recent BBC series. Fascinating and then some. More photos.
With a new Sufjan Stevens album called The Age of Adz on the way this month, his U.S record label Asthmatic Kitty issued a plea asking fans not to buy the new record through Amazon as the online shopping giant will purportedly be selling the album for a very low price.
In a lengthy email discussing the positive and negative aspects of discount pricing, the label takes a stance by saying they feel “the work that our artists produce is worth more than a cost of a latte.” They have a point – music should be worth more than that. Music is sadly losing its value. You can blame illegal downloads or a slow moving industry or supermarket chains who buy up chart CDs at a discount and sell them at a loss (shutting down independent record shops in the process) or you can attribute it to the ever-changing media-devouring landscape. Some people will blame bloggers like myself.
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The biggest story in digital music last week concerned the advent of the MP3 price wars. Apple announced a new pricing system for iTunes worldwide which would change the standard €0.99 per song to a new three-tiered system. Under the change which came about under the pressure of major record labels, the Irish iTunes Store (and the country’s most popular digital music service) now sells songs at €0.69, €0.99 and €1.29, the latter now applied to popular acts like Lady Gaga, The Script and Beyoncé. It has been indicated that the €0.69 price tier will apply to the majority of older back catalogue music in the store.
While it currently makes little sense to charge more for music in times of recession and in a time when a LOT of people get their music illegally, Apple has also said that more tracks will be available at the €0.69 than €1.29 in the long-term and tracks are now sensibly DRM-free, meaning you can play them on any computer or device without restriction.
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