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