Spotify - Free Music Streaming

One of the most promising music services today comes from Sweden and it is called Spotify. I have been using it for about two weeks since I received an invitation from Antti at Monoliitti. Spotify is a music streaming service and at the moment the music selection is quite large. Spotify uses its own client application (available for Windows and OS X, Windows version should work in Linux with Wine), which is easy to use, fast and solid as rock. The best thing is that the service is free as it is funded by advertisements.

Bad thing is that because Spotify is in beta testing phase the free accounts are limited: You need an invitation to create one.

Luckily, I found the service so nice that I wanted to support it and subscribed to a premium account, which costs 9,99€ a month (less than 14 USD). As a premium subscriber I have received some invitations and I have some spare ones left. As a Christmas/Hanukkah/whatever present to my readers, I will send invitations to the first two people commenting to this post (don't forget to write your real email address in the message part in form like your(dot)name(at)gmail(dot)com).

Info About Next Trailing Space Album + Project Status Updates

I have started to work on a new Trailing Space album. The project name is "Like Burning Cities Painting a Crimson Sky". My target is to make the ugliest and the most beautiful album I have created so far. There will be a shift of course in style compared to previous Trailing Space albums: The electronic post-rock stays, but there will be more real guitars, more improvisation and more progressive rock, krautrock and even heavy metal.

I already have a couple of songs ready (Kill Your Darlings, And The Rockets Dead Glare and Every Heart Will Be Attacked) . Some of them were originally produced for theater plays, but they all need a little bit better mixing, new content or overall finishing. I have also been recording a heavily King Crimson influenced prog rock track (Lateral Surface of Discord). It will be interesting!

Recycle, Remaster and Remaster project will also continue shortly. I have been a little bit busy with everything to remix anything. My Christmas holiday starts today so I probably have a little more time to contribute to my projects.

Next year I will also start to work on another theater project, but I don't know about it very much yet. The style will be something davidlynchian...

At The Gates of Addi(c)tive Synthesis

I've been in need for a high quality additive VSTi synth, but I have skipped Image-Line's Morphine just because their demo songs on their web page sound so poor reminding me of cheap General MIDI sounds on many products. Now when Image-Line started an X-Mas Sales offering Morphine for 99€ I decided to try the demo... Bam! I was immediately in love! The sound quality is very good, the synth is light weight and the usability is rather good for an additive synth, which are usually quite hard to operate. After tweaking a while I was sold on it and I purchased the plugin. It's nice there is soon lot of free time to make music and play with my new toy.

I haven't tested Gross Beat (the plugin included with my purchase) yet, but I will write about it later. If you are interested to purchase Morphine or IL's excellent multi-band compressor Maximus, I recommend buying it from here.

Jean Nine - Stars Are Neurons Of The Sky

During the Resurrect, Recycle & Remaster project my interests in IDM, broken beats, glitched rhythms and esoteric electronic sounds have risen again. I have also rediscovered how good the tracker interface is to slice, cut and rearrange sounds. Nowadays I use mostly VSTi synths/romplers intead of pure samples and I am used to a piano rolls as my sequencers.

During the last weekend I tried to make more sample oriented music and I managed to compose my first IDM track for a while. I cut some drum samples from a dubstep loop, loaded each sample as an individual Sampler channel in FL Studio and made a typical glitchy beat out of them. When the beat was ready I added some layers of melody (I used AquesTone to make that synthetic voice sound) and a bassline (a fat upright bass; I like to add some acoustic elements into midst of synthetic sounds). I also tried first time in my life Glitch to variate the beat here and there. I also used it to f*ck up the melody sequence at the end of the song.

The results were quite nice. Nothing revolutionary, but not bad either, I think. What do you think? Download the song and decide by yourself!

Resurrect, Recycle and Remaster Part 6: I Know I Leak

Ahh... It's Saturday and there is lots and lots of time to work with music. I decided to skip the last track from Flackworks EP and to resurrect next a track named I Know I Leak. It was originally released under my old mod label Kyoto Republik. Mod labels existed before modern mp3 labels and they did practically the same thing, only the format in which the music was released was different. Later Kyoto Republik turned into almost same named mp3 label Kyoto Republic. I Know I Leak is from year 2000 and it is quite typical IDM track with progressive song structure. It starts with quite simple ring modulated sounds, grows a little by little and finally just before the song ends really kicks in.

You can download the song from here and/or download the original module from here.

Resurrect, Recycle and Remaster Part 5: Herb Song

It's fifth track already! I continue to remaster/remix the Flackworks EP and this is the opening track, Herb Song. The delayed pad hit sound and family show melodies are back! The beat is quite gross and a little over distorted, but I let it be like it was, because of the contrast to otherwise soft and happy-happy-joy-joy atmosphere.

I started this project by using XMPlay + FL Studio combo and I have find it to be good. One problem is the lack of power in my few years old laptop when processing almost 20 stereo tracks same time. I need more memory and faster hard drive! Another problem is that XMPlay does not replay all my modules 100% correctly. Usually it is a minor thing, but sometimes the amount of misplaying is so overwhelming, that e.g. We Slay You With Our Orders, which uses a lot of Impulse Tracker's tricks, filters and bugs, does not work (yes, your read right: bugs - trackers used to have many programming errors and many musicians put to use those bugs to create interesting sounds).

I think I will try to run Impulse Tracker in Dosbox or something and exporting the song there. Someday when I have too much time.

Back to today's track: You can download it from here (or the original module from here).

Resurrect, Recycle and Remaster Part 4: Deaf & Blind

The fourth recycled track is Deaf & Blind from the same album as the previous song in RRR series: Flackworks EP. This is a sibling to my maybe most known track Bubblemaster 19100 (download mp3 version from here). A slower and less chaotic, but the same modulated drum sounds and NES-esque leads are present. I like the tremolos, vibratos and arpeggios heavily used on those lead sounds.

You can download the new version from here and the original Impulse Tracker module from here.

Resurrect, Recycle and Remaster Part 3: Flixotide (Epifenol Mix)

Today's RRR modernisation is track number three from Flack Works EP. The name of the song is Flixotide (Epifenol Mix) and it is more darker track than the previous tracks I have remastered. Cold clanging sounds, electro drums and simple bassline at the end of the song. I added some reverb and delay to the atmospheric sounds and filtered the bassline to make it a little more interesting. I believe I will remaster the whole EP, because in my opinion it does not have a single bad track.

You can download the new version from here and the original EP from here.

PS. I finally joined Facebook (am I a little slow to grab these modern things like blogging and social networks or what?).

Interesting New Netlabel: Fant00m Netlabel

I was listening to last.fm today and a nice interesting piece of music came by: Toasted Crispy by Fant00m. Some abstract cinematic triphop with Amon Tobin influences. A little bit of research and I found Fant00m is not only a band/collective, but also a netlabel releasing music for free. And their music is great! It is mostly dark and glooming but full of soul. It is quite a new netlabel but there are lots of releases already out. Worth of checking out.

Finnish ESC 2009 Candidates

This morning, Finnish broadcaster YLE published the songs which will will fight for the so called honour to represent Finland in the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest in Moscow. As every previous year the songs are that typical ESC stuff you hear every single year: Mediocre and clichéd melodies and lyrics, constrained ethno influences, unsurprising song structures and de rigueur modulos. I wonder how even good acts always seem to make so embarassing material for this competition. The most of the songs were monotonous to listen to, but there were two highlights:

Signmark feat. Osmo Ikonen - Speakerbox

Hiphop, soul and r&b. Obviously the best song Finland can offer this year - and the Signmark's concept is unique: He combines visual sign language and the strong message of the deaf and express it through hip hop music.

Janita - Martian

This piece is also good. Beautiful voice combined with above-the-mediocre singer-songwriter type of song and fresh arrangement make a good deal here.

You can listen to all the other songs at http://euroviisut.yle.fi/euroviisut/2008-11-20/karsintakappaleet-2009

Rest In Peace, Pekka Pohjola

One of the greatest and most known Finnish composer-basists, Pekka Pohjola has died. He has been one of my inspiring musicians. He got known in the 70s as a bass player in Finnish progressive rock band called Wigwam and he has also released numerous solo albums. Best known of those are Harakka Bialoipokku, Keesojen lehto and Pihkasilmä kaarnakorva. Material from his solo career can be categorized as fusion jazz. Pohjola might have been gone, but his legend lives ever after.

Resurrect, Recycle and Remaster Part 2: Mellon Moon

Another track resurrected! This one is from year 1999 and it is another Assembly music competition participant; Pop electro with mellow TV show jingle kind of theme. This track needed a little more work, because the original mix was so muffled and everything sounded so booming and muddy. Now it is a little better I think so!

Download: New version and/or original version.

Resurrect, Recycle and Remaster Part 1: Melonapplet Beautiful / Bottleneckmelon

When I started making music over a decade ago, I used so called trackers. For those unfamiliar with concept, trackers are a piece of software, which can be thought as a combined sampler and sequencer. Effects were limited to most basic ones like bending the pitch. I started with Scream Tracker 3, followed by FastTracker 2 and then Impulse Tracker. I stopped using trackers as my main tool somewhere in year 2001. A big pile of songs from that era is lost forever or buried in various places in Internet and BBS boxes.

Some of my tracker songs are available in scene.org. Some of them are a little embarassing, some of them are quite good even today. If you want to listen to them, I recommend to try a player like XMPlay to play those songs, because they are not MP3s but native tracker project files (also known as modules)!

I've been thinking of going through these songs, exporting the best songs and remastering/remixing them. I call this project "Resurrect, Recycle and Remaster". As a proof of concept I exported tonight a melodic IDM song with two names: Melonapplet Beautiful / Bottleneckmelon. It is from 2000 and participated in Assembly music competition. I used XMPlay to export each instrument separately to a wav file, imported each track to FL Studio, added some reverb and compression and exported a MP3 file.

It was easy and fun! I will continue tomorrow with some other tracks.

You can download the song from here and the original module from here.

I Hate MySpace

For years MySpace has been the de facto music social network. I wonder why, because it sucks like a super massive black hole. That statement may not surprise you, but for me it is a surprise that MySpace still gathers more and more bands to promote their music.

To be honest I had a MySpace profile. I don't really remember why did I register. Maybe I was doing it because everybody else was doing it and people usually search for music samples from MySpace. But I know well why I don't want to use it anymore:

It is slow

The pages download creepingly slowly. Of course one page can be a bandwidth nightmare when it is full of videos, photos and a background image size of a football stadium - and it is the profile administrator's fault that the page is like that. But it is interesting how much rope MySpace gives to its users to allow them hang themselves.

Of course I shouldn't care - I kept my own profile clean and simple - but all the other pages generating a massive load for the whole service caused that the single most important thing on my profile was slow as well: The music player.

Bad music streams

MySpace renewed their player few months ago and the player is quite ok now, but the streams are still sluggish. Sometimes it takes so long time before the song starts that I have left the page already. Not good for me, not good for the artist which could have been The Next Big Thing. Not only that but also the sound quality is weak. And you can't put very many songs to your profile, let alone organize them as albums.

Awful user interface

The profile layout is not very appealing, but the whole mess to upkeep your profile is something that even MySpace Tom can't be its friend.

Inflation of friendship

Friends, friends, friends... and almost all of them people I have never heard before. Do I need to say more?

Lack of plays

MySpace by itself does not very much improve your promotion. You have to advertise your music actively everywhere to gain attention. Social networking via so called friends does not generate very much good traffic. And by good I don't mean only quantity but also quality.

Last.fm does it better

I simply like last.fm. You have unlimited space for your songs, bitrate is not limited, it has numerous way to promote your music, there are radio channels, tags, groups and recommendations derived from its users' listening habits. I am not very known, still my songs get played once in a while. And what is more interesting: They also pay royalties also for the independent artists. I have earned only pennies and cents, but the principle is right.

Because last.fm does the job so well and I don't want to double my workload by keeping two profiles in separate services the choice was easy: I left MySpace.

The Ground Quits... Oh It Does Not!

The Ground was announced last summer with a buzz in Finnish IT and music media as it was the first Finnish net shop selling DRM free music also by the big records companies. The Ground had its roots in Levyvirasto, which was selling music by small record companies and independent artists as CDs and later also as MP3s. At same time Equal Dreams announced a MP3 shop with some interesting concepts to independent artists and bands. It felt like something was finally happening in the music business!

Few months later, 14th of November, The Ground announced that they are quitting the competition and shutting down their service at the end of the year. This caused a flood of feedback from artists and The Ground reconsidered: A little more than a week later they announced that they will continue their service at least until the next summer, but they will only sell music MP3s - no CDs anymore.

The reasons for these shifts of direction are clear: There are already big CD retailers in the market and they are not easy to challenge. Also the continuously dropping numbers of CD selling made the business concept based on not very firm soil. By dropping the CD selling they streamlined their concept to the point which actually made The Ground known in the first place, but it also cut the most laborous tasks: Receiving CD's, storage upkeep and sending packets all over the world.

The Ground is still unsure about its future. The selection of music by big record companies was a disappointment for many customers as the only big player there was EMI and the problem with independent artists is the cruel fact that over the half of releases never sell a single copy or only a few ones. This is not only The Ground's problem: For example TDC’s Play offering has had 60 million downloads, but three million out of the catalogue of 4.5 million songs have never been played. Not even once. I have also found it to be hard to be part of the so called long tail: I released my album All of a Sudden I Am Full of Scars for free just few days ago, because so little number of people actually bought it (it was sold in The Ground and Equal Dreams).

The Ground is developing now their service in peace without commercial pressure and I hope they find a durable concept for their business model. We don't need more DRM to a world like this.

For more information I recommend to read thoughts at http://www.monoliitti.com/2008/11/17/levyvirasto-kuilun-partaalla/ (in Finnish).

Violetear

This is an incoming Jean Nine release for Kahvi Collective named Violetear. It is a five track release containing some sort of dubstep: Dark but mellow mood, sparse rhythms mixed with strings and things. You can already download and listen to these beats now at last.fm if you can't wait for the official release, which will happen some time next year (Kahvi has a new policy of releasing only one album/ep a month to gain more attention for individual releases thus delaying the release of this EP).

You can listen to this at http://last.fm/music/jean+nine/violetear

All of a Sudden I Am Full of Scars

I have released my new album All of a Sudden I Am Full of Scars under my netlabel Kyoto Republic. It is a trip into dark downtempo, triphop and dubstep which beautifully sparks glimmer of hope here and there - only to collapse into the depths... Music for the armchair travellers of the darkening nights.

Here is a brief description of each track:

1. Landfills and Eternal Fall - The oldest track on this album. A triphop track from the pile of song ideas for an independent movie called Tiina. The name of the song refers to Leea Klemola's quote about my home town: Landfills, eternal fall and rebelling of teenagers.

2. Asphalt Ocean Lights - One of my first dubstep tracks. Does not try to push the boundaries too much and therefore succeeds well.

3. Sudden Disappearance - Melodic, melancholic dubstep downtempo whatever. Rhodes and violins forever!

4. Haunting Shadows - Slow, slow dive into despair. Beautiful, beautiful despair.

5. Premiere of The Night - Slowly progressing looming triphop. Tremolo violins and synths for the win!

6. Dedicated Thunder - This song was so much inspired by Portishead's Machine Gun, but comparing these two songs is so unfair.

7. Empathy Locks - There is always hope. And there is always scars. Locks for the open minded, locks for the empathy!

8. Sailor and The Star Burst - Periodically growing cinematic triphop. This song got the first place in Stream 2007 listening music competition.

Download album
Stream album online (at last.fm)

Prolog

It is a long time since I had a blog/net diary and now I'm back. I am 25 years old mobile software designer from Finland. I like music... No, I love it! I listen to it, I collect it and I produce it - and I release it for free in the Internet. I have been releasing stuff for free since the 90's when I uploaded my music created with trackers to old good BBSes. Nowadays I continue making mostly electronic music from side to side. I don't make (much) money with my creativity, but I have composed music to numerous theater plays, indie movies and multimedia presentations.

So it may not be a surprise the focus of this blog is music (especially free music): I want to share my thoughts about music culture and business, tell about my projects and promote the netlabels and music gems I find.

May the future be tomorrow!