I’ve been listening to all the low quality mp3s I could find for a while now but the debut album from N.A.S.A (aka Squeak E. Clean and DJ Zegon) was finally released yesterday. It’s full of crazy collaborations such as ‘Gifted’ with Lykke Li, Santogold and Kanye West. Both the debut single ‘Spacious Thought’ and the video for Money has been all over the internet for a while now, but in case you’ve missed them here they are again.
This is a remix of Fat Freddy Drops – Del Fuego from 2006 by an old friend of mine, Carl Borg. He just uploaded it to SoundCloud and I hadn’t actually heard it until today. It’s a very calm and fluffy little piece with some soft late night-ish vocals Exactly what I needed to hear at the end of a long work day. You can buy both the original and Carl’s remix on Sonar Kollektiv’s website.
It’s here! It feels like I’ve been waiting for this track for years and it finally got released on beatport two days ago. It’s something about those pitched 909 crashes that keeps me listening to this over and over again. Chris Liebing’s mix adds a choir synth and some effects to shake things up a bit, but since all you really need are the cymbals you might as well stick with the original.
This is a beatport exclusive for now, so you have to head on over to their new and improved website to grab it. A search for an artist and a track name still doesn’t come up with any results, but at least they’ve added a button so you can link straight to the page you’re on.
It sounds like something from a sci-fi movie: mathematicians, having discovered a secret formula behind all good music, are able to produce powerful dancefloor destroyers using only mathematical calculations.
According to beatport.com Mat Cooper is using some clever mathematical formula to create the all the melodies on his EP called ‘Harmonisch Serie’, named after the mathematical modelling research projet he is involved in.
Usually I love this kind of stuff and I don’t think there’s any doubt that there’s a mathematical formula behind the music, I just don’t understand why he decided to use the melodies his math project came up with to create techno? Why not “fluffy piano trance”? Or just a midi “piano”? When it comes to electronic music it is all about the sound and not the melodies, and if I understand this correctly, his math formula doesn’t choose drum samples for him. I doubt it picks compressors, effects or the EQ settings either. What I mean is, once you’ve come up with a melody for your track, you still have the other 90% left until it’s finished.
I’m not sure Mat Cooper is completely to blame though, he might just want to make electronic music and thought it would be fun doing it using the research he’s involved with. It could just be the first paragraph in the article on beatport which pisses me off.
Being of the 8-bit generation I really love the retro chip music sound. I used to make chip tunes when I was still making music on trackers, but my tracks were nothing like the craziness they’re coming up with today. A few years ago I went to a club in Stockholm where they had a guy playing live on gameboys and some other retro 8-bit looking systems. Had a blast just sitting down and watching computer nerds dance next to trendy pop chicks, finding some common ground in the low-fi 8-bit music coming from the speakers. I have to go back next time I’m over there..
Bubblyfish creates her music mainly using gameboys with the nanoloop software, although in some of her tracks she’s adding effects and using a “real” sampler. I have no idea what the track at 08:30 in the video is called but I like it. And check out her sweet dreams remix at 05:15, or on her myspace.
The only problem with trying to find chip music online without really knowing what to look for is that there’s so much of it! But this is some quality 8-bit madness from Atari-ST music collective dropdabomb. These two are from stu and you really should listen to more of his stuff on his site, his myspace or on the buy page for his Atari Solo album on retinascan. I especially love the those low bitrate samples and the small glitchy bits in chiprape.