Links: Roland founder dies, workplace entrance themes, BitTorrent repivot.

April 2, 2017, 2:56 pm

≫ Next: Links: A dumped Steinway, Kim Dotcom’s terrible album, early TR-808 hits, the history of disco.

≪ Previous: Links: Spotify hackers, voiceover woes, Cabaret Voltaire in 2017.

Ikutaro Kakehashi, founder of Roland, has died age 87.
“This blog post details how I hacked the office WiFi to play entrance theme music for my colleagues when they entered the building each morning.”
BitTorrent, Inc. gets out of ridiculous spinoff projects nobody wants and goes back to maintaining the uTorrent client, which still makes their money. The reason is that CEO, founder and inventor of the BitTorrent protocol, Bram Cohen … has the Bitcoin bug.
… which leads nicely into the damned book. Finishing it is like Zeno’s paradox of writing. Expect Rocknerd to continue to be slow while I try to finish something actually intended to make money. (And not Bitcoins.) Discopedia has helped.

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Links: A dumped Steinway, Kim Dotcom’s terrible album, early TR-808 hits, the history of disco.

April 6, 2017, 1:57 pm

≫ Next: Musical user interfaces, copyright companies being themselves, the worst of Rolling Stone.

≪ Previous: Links: Roland founder dies, workplace entrance themes, BitTorrent repivot.

A Steinway baby grand piano found by a teenager at a rubbish dump in tropical north-western Australia. No, he didn’t get to keep it.
The saga of how Kim Dotcom’s one-star album Good Times was recorded. “One of the most expensive albums in New Zealand music history” (NZ$1m), and Neil Finn was not happy to find out what sort of bozos he’d hired his studio out to. A Mixerman-level event.
Eight early TR-808 hits. I hadn’t realised “Sexual Healing” used an 808.
From 2010, an oral history of disco. “Disco music is funk with a bow tie.”

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Musical user interfaces, copyright companies being themselves, the worst of Rolling Stone.

April 16, 2017, 2:55 pm

≫ Next: There’s drum machines, then there’s a machine drummer.

≪ Previous: Links: A dumped Steinway, Kim Dotcom’s terrible album, early TR-808 hits, the history of disco.

A project to come up with better music creation interfaces. “Which one of these is hardware, and which is software?” What would music software look like if you weren’t starting from an imitation mixing desk? The subpages include examples with video. (Hacker News discussion.)
The Copyright Society of the USA’s lesson for World IP Day: give us your copyright for nothing. Presumably an informative insight into how the organisations that promote copyright actually think.
Rolling Stone‘s 500 Worst Record Reviews, as rated by a sufferer.

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There’s drum machines, then there’s a machine drummer.

April 30, 2017, 2:51 pm

≫ Next: Links: How to rig the charts, musicians’ vending machine, a malware music player, Internet Archive.

≪ Previous: Musical user interfaces, copyright companies being themselves, the worst of Rolling Stone.

For his 2014 EP Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2, Aphex Twin wanted the dream of musicians for decades: a drummer you only had to punch the information into once. So he got the Logos Foundation to make him a mechanised snare drum: Snar 2.

Here’s what it sounds like.

Aphex Twin got them for the job because of their 2012 robot drummer Snar.

Of course, others have done this trick. Polyend sell the Perc Pro MIDI-controlled drumkit, a snip at £999 (you supply the drumkit):

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Links: How to rig the charts, musicians’ vending machine, a malware music player, Internet Archive.

May 7, 2017, 12:46 pm

≫ Next: Video: Go-Betweens, techno in six steps, a pop hit in four minutes.

≪ Previous: There’s drum machines, then there’s a machine drummer.

How to rig the charts in 2017: stream lots via VPNs. “As a result, some fans banded together to start a blog called the Harry Styles Promo Team”. I suppose his label and management count as “fans” in some technical sense. Probably cheaper than buying your own CD singles by the car bootload.
A 24-hour vending machine for musicians, outside Clingan Guitar Tone in Collingwood. They take suggestions. Surprised not to see gaffer in there.
Super Free Music Player in Google Play is malware. I remain delighted with VLC.
How the Internet Archive preserves 78s and how it preserves old hard disks. You should give the Internet Archive money.

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Video: Go-Betweens, techno in six steps, a pop hit in four minutes.

May 13, 2017, 3:40 pm

≫ Next: Lester Bangs on Brian Eno.

≪ Previous: Links: How to rig the charts, musicians’ vending machine, a malware music player, Internet Archive.

There’s a Go-Betweens movie coming out: the trailer for Right Here:

How to make techno in six steps:

And Brett Domino: How to Write a Hit Pop Song in Four Minutes. “Press any of the black and white buttons on a piano.” The result sounds like it’d fit right into the Spotify Viral Chart. You also need the rest of his channel and the worked examples on his Bandcamp. Now I want a Moog Theremini.

The rest of the day’s been the blockchain book. Here’s how come the Bitcoin price hit $1900: because you can’t get ActualMoney out of Bitfinex and several other exchanges, so there’s nothing to spend it on but more bitcoins. And of course seeing the 100% predictable and predicted effects of a proprietary software monoculture that people like me have only been warning about for a couple of decades. But with Bitcoin.

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Lester Bangs on Brian Eno.

May 16, 2017, 3:56 pm

≫ Next: Links: AIR Studios Montserrat, Carl Bernstein the pop critic, net neutrality for musicians.

≪ Previous: Video: Go-Betweens, techno in six steps, a pop hit in four minutes.

Yesterday was Brian Eno’s 69th birthday. Lester Bangs interviews Brian Eno, apparently an unpublished interview. Mr Eno is a thoroughly delightful fellow.

I found this from looking at the Dangerous Minds article for Eno’s birthday and trying to track down the record sleeve at the top. A Google Image search on it and going to All Sizes turned up this blog post linking to it. The page has long since come down. A find, lurking in the Internet Archive, unindexed, waiting for a determined reader. Tracking down useful stuff lurking in the IA will be the future of humanities scholarship.

Here’s the documentary Dangerous Minds posted. It says 1994, they think it’s 1992. There’s a bit of German at the beginning and the rest is in English.

Bonus: how Brian Eno managed to pee in Marcel Duchamp’s urinal “Fountain”. Allegedly.

It appears to be a bootleg of a Peel Session of “Baby’s On Fire”. But surely a sleeve this obviously good must have been used elsewhere.

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Links: AIR Studios Montserrat, Carl Bernstein the pop critic, net neutrality for musicians.

June 7, 2017, 3:02 pm

≫ Next: Links: Declining guitar sales, I Feel Love, tinnitus.

≪ Previous: Lester Bangs on Brian Eno.

AIR Studios, Montserrat, the source of many a classic album, is rotting away on the volcano-blighted island.
Before he took down Nixon, Carl Bernstein was an acerbic ’60s pop critic.
No Internet, No Music: Why Musicians Need To Care About Net Neutrality. Musicians, keep in mind: the record industry’s interests are not yours. The major labels have wanted to kill off the Internet and turn it back into three channels of boring television since they knew it existed. We realised this last time this came around, in 2007-2008 (1) (2) (3).

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Links: Declining guitar sales, I Feel Love, tinnitus.

June 25, 2017, 4:26 pm

≫ Next: Well chaps, SoundCloud may be buggered. Save what you can.

≪ Previous: Links: AIR Studios Montserrat, Carl Bernstein the pop critic, net neutrality for musicians.

Electric guitar sales are through the floor, down from 1.5 million annually a decade ago to 1 million now. The charts need more guitar heroes.
Another retrospective on the writing and production of “I Feel Love”, including what synthesis was like in 1977. I didn’t know the kickdrum beat was Keith Forsey going thump-thump-thump for seven minutes, ‘cos they couldn’t synthesize a good kick sound. “It is safe to say it was the blueprint for all electronic dance music today.”
Oh look, that’s topical: Tinnitus!
Finishing off the damn blockchain book. Now doing final text revisions, trying to write the intro and conclusion, and awaiting some artwork.

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Well chaps, SoundCloud may be buggered. Save what you can.

July 14, 2017, 12:58 pm

≫ Next: Synth links: Detroit techno, old gadgets, TR-08, Alan Vega, making your synthesizer fart.

≪ Previous: Links: Declining guitar sales, I Feel Love, tinnitus.

It turns out that SoundCloud can’t just continue stumbling forth with no clear direction or business plan and losing twice as much money in a year as they take in revenue. After firing a pile of people with no warning last week, it came out yesterday that they have money “until Q4”, which is 80 days away. (SoundCloud denies the TechCrunch report, but TechCrunch calls BS and stands by their story.)

Everything about SoundCloud seems to have been a mess. The Hacker News thread after the layoffs has a pile of stories like this one:

Frankly none of this should be surprising: nobody there could figure out a product definition nor a monetization plan. What is more: the engineering organization at SoundCloud at large was completely fractured and suffered from in-fighting. Nobody trusted anyone across organizations. There was no shortage of bullying even. Taking that in mind, SoundCloud’s downfall was to be expected. Because of caustic environment even before the financial crunch, they couldn’t execute.

The Internet Archive is the obvious new home for the content, but that won’t come for free. Jason Scott from IA asked his boss Brewster Kahle about it, and tweeted:

Had a quick chat with @brewster_kahle about the Soundcloud thing. To host a Petabyte of data for forseable future would be ~ $1.5/2mil.

The Archive Team estimates SoundCloud as about 2.5 petabytes, and is working out how to selectively save what it reasonably can without accusations of copyright infringement.

Chance The Rapper, who credits his SoundCloud with starting his career, tweeted yesterday “I’m working on the SoundCloud thing” and posted on his Facebook today “Just had a very fruitful call with Alex Ljung. SoundCloud is here to stay.” Ljung has posted positively as well. We’ll see if they’ve pulled a rabbit out of the hat … but in the meantime, it’s worth remembering that the other term for “the cloud” is “other people’s computers,” and get downloading and preserving. As you should be anyway.

Oh, and play all ours while you can!

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Synth links: Detroit techno, old gadgets, TR-08, Alan Vega, making your synthesizer fart.

August 12, 2017, 4:22 am

≫ Next: Producers: Max Martin literally farts a top ten hit; Butch Vig; Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies.

≪ Previous: Well chaps, SoundCloud may be buggered. Save what you can.

The pioneers of original Detroit techno. All four of them.
How to make your synthesizer fart.
Another paean to old synths and their potential for fortuitous mistakes.
Roland has released the TR-08, which recreates the TR-808 by digitally simulating the analogue circuitry and defective transistors.
The final Alan Vega album, and it’s a delight. Long interview with his wife Liz Lamere. Here’s the album on Spotify.

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Producers: Max Martin literally farts a top ten hit; Butch Vig; Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies.

August 14, 2017, 3:37 pm

≫ Next: Pop links: The missing V chord, why pop comes from Los Angeles, how earworms work.

≪ Previous: Synth links: Detroit techno, old gadgets, TR-08, Alan Vega, making your synthesizer fart.

Brian Eno’s original handwritten “Oblique Strategies” cards. Below: Eno explains the cards to Jarvis Cocker. And Alan Moore interviews Eno.

Butch Vig on producing everyone that mattered in the late ’80s and early ’90s — not just Nirvana and later Garbage, but a huge swathe of the post-hardcore pre-grunge before them.
How good a pop producer is Max Martin? He can literally fart a top ten pop hit — the bass sound on “The Call” by the Backstreet Boys.

parp parp parp

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Pop links: The missing V chord, why pop comes from Los Angeles, how earworms work.

August 19, 2017, 3:32 pm

≫ Next: Links: Devo “Satisfaction”, failed electronic instruments, subgenres of electronic music.

≪ Previous: Producers: Max Martin literally farts a top ten hit; Butch Vig; Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies.

Where Have All the V Chords Gone? The musicology of current pop.
The Internet Doesn’t Matter, You’re Making Music in L.A. “Recall that the purpose of pop music is to reach people with no active interest in music.”
Anatomy of an Earworm: how tunes get stuck in your head.

“She converses”

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Links: Devo “Satisfaction”, failed electronic instruments, subgenres of electronic music.

September 26, 2017, 12:20 pm

≫ Next: Links: TR-808 in Wikipedia, the Nick Cave graphic novel, punk podcast, Big Muff.

≪ Previous: Pop links: The missing V chord, why pop comes from Los Angeles, how earworms work.

Devo got their start with their cover of “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones. Warner Music required them to get approval from the writers … and Mick Jagger liked it. Their performance on Saturday Night Live pretty much started their career:

The first electronic musical instrument is usually credited as being Thaddeus Cahill’s Telharmonium, 1897. A new piece from Daniel R. Wilson tells some failed histories of electronic music.

Subgenres of Electronic Music by Maxie:

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Links: TR-808 in Wikipedia, the Nick Cave graphic novel, punk podcast, Big Muff.

October 25, 2017, 3:54 pm

≫ Next: Links: Reviews and auteurs in the streaming age, Grant Hart’s last interview.

≪ Previous: Links: Devo “Satisfaction”, failed electronic instruments, subgenres of electronic music.

Roland TR-808 is now a Wikipedia Featured Article.

There’s a graphic novel, by Reinhard Kleist, about the life of Nick Cave.

BBC 6 Music’s A to Z of Punk podcast, presented by Marc Riley and Rob Hughes, is available for download.

A paean to the Big Muff guitar pedal.

Laura Cortese and the Dance Cards: “California Calling”

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Links: Reviews and auteurs in the streaming age, Grant Hart’s last interview.

November 13, 2017, 1:38 pm

≫ Next: Links: Sgt. Pepper, Raincoats, Severed Heads on DAWs, Tommy Keene RIP.

≪ Previous: Links: TR-808 in Wikipedia, the Nick Cave graphic novel, punk podcast, Big Muff.

Adam Clair at Real Life holds that written reviews are now superfluous, because music is readily streamable — so why read words when you can just click play! This misses an important point: listening is slow, but reading is quick, and anyone who was going to read to get tips on new stuff will still be doing so — nobody who uses Alexa as a radio was reading in the first place. I would be delighted if I could just link a pile of stuff and say “here, this is great!” because trying to write about music is arse. But the precious commodity these days is attention, and a well-turned sentence is the hook to get people to even click on the thing you feel the need to tell them about. And that’s quite apart from music being about everything else and not just the sounds at all.

What streaming is doing is reducing the viability of auteurs as a songwriting marketing strategy.

Probably the last interview with Grant Hart, about his life leading up to Hüsker Dü, conducted for the sleeve notes of Savage Young Dü.

Could not have predicted 20 years ago that browsing in a bookstore in 2017, I’d see a vinyl LP soundtrack to a TV show about cassette tapes you can only watch using the internet. pic.twitter.com/jWiidLuOHe

— Michael Newman (@mznewman) November 11, 2017

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Links: Sgt. Pepper, Raincoats, Severed Heads on DAWs, Tommy Keene RIP.

November 25, 2017, 9:58 am

≫ Next: Links: Chapter Music, Damned Industrial top 20, ZynAddSubFx terms, iTunes shutdown, vinyl clog.

≪ Previous: Links: Reviews and auteurs in the streaming age, Grant Hart’s last interview.

Some 1987 interviews with George Martin and the other engineers on the recording of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

A career rundown on The Raincoats, the not-entirely-expected post-punk wellsprings of grunge.

Tom Ellard, Severed Heads: A completely biased guide to Digital Audio Workstations. “Ableton Live. Notably not called Ableton Compose, because trying to write actual music with this tool is like keyhole surgery, one little box at a time.”

Well, damn. Tommy Keene died.

A week between Rocknerd posts! My apologies, I’ve been horribly busy. I started a Patreon, which is mostly marketed to the blockchain news blog, but I’ll note Rocknerd posts there as well so as to help generalise it to the rest of my writing. So if you want to encourage this here thing, give me money. Or attention, I’ll take attention. Also writing reviews. Look at that tottering review pile …

Become a Patron!

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Links: Chapter Music, Damned Industrial top 20, ZynAddSubFx terms, iTunes shutdown, vinyl clog.

December 24, 2017, 8:35 am

≫ Next: Links: Dick O’Dell/Y Records, DX-7 presets, Mony Mony, going algorithm-free, Hypebot.

≪ Previous: Links: Sgt. Pepper, Raincoats, Severed Heads on DAWs, Tommy Keene RIP.

The history of Chapter Music. I remember when it started, you know.

Damned Industrial’s top 20 albums of the year. And some are better than middling!

The famous ZynAddSubFx soft synthesizer used to have rather different terms and conditions:

#OnThisDayInNTK:2002 https://t.co/FxCXq7IgEZ
Edinburgh AI dept on fire@iamclintmansell (née Poppie) scores Lord Of The Rings 2 trailer
unusual https://t.co/MEgQf84IXy T&Cs pic.twitter.com/AJsQdZYHO2

— Modern Day NTK (@ModernDayNTK) December 15, 2017

Apple may be killing the iTunes music store by 2019. Imagine a world where there are only streams, stream rips and Bandcamp.

Meanwhile, vinyl is trendy enough that indie bands can’t get past the dad rock. It’s just like making a record in the ’80s was!

God it’s been hectic. I did BBC News at Ten, which, you’ll be pleased to hear, sold a ton of books. I just spent a week ill in bed. This thing I quickly dashed off last Sunday has somehow become the second most popular thing I have ever written anywhere (first is this, third is this). Friday’s 25% off Bitcoin sale was, I assure you, hilarious.

Picked up the Rocky soundtrack on vinyl for a buck. I believe the record sleeve is worth more than that pic.twitter.com/NDDuIvmggF

— Shawnlicious (@shawnaldridge) December 15, 2017

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Links: Dick O’Dell/Y Records, DX-7 presets, Mony Mony, going algorithm-free, Hypebot.

January 7, 2018, 8:22 am

≫ Next: Links: Dragon Ball Super mass piracy, origin of the gated reverb snare, the return of illegal raves.

≪ Previous: Links: Chapter Music, Damned Industrial top 20, ZynAddSubFx terms, iTunes shutdown, vinyl clog.

Dick O’Dell of Y Records did a fantastic podcast of early ’80s post-punk, largely Y-related. Reminding you that post-punk was considerably black and female.

The story of writing the first Yamaha DX-7 presets. You know these sounds — they were all over every pop record in the early ’80s. The video doesn’t have the sounds, but Dave Bristow tells the story.

The origins of the audience participation lyrics for Billy Idol’s version of “Mony Mony,” and how they spread before the Internet: an ongoing series. In case you were wondering.

In 2018, Kaitlyn Tiffany wants to find music without algorithms. I applaud, but must confess that Spotify’s Discover Weekly has totally been delivering for me, both new and old. Also my inbox is often outdone by my favourite method of musical discovery: going through “New Arrivals” on a tag in Bandcamp — maybe a 1 in 30 hit rate, which is actually pretty awesome for literally going through the slush pile. How do you think I find so many things nobody’s ever heard of to review? I go looking. So if you’re after an algorithm-free discovery experience, you should just read Rocknerd.

Of course, this requires me to find time for reviews any time soon — it’s still all go here, my word. The bl*ckch**n book got reviewed in the New York Review of Books, holy shit! “A sober riposte to all the upbeat forecasts about cryptocurrency.” I have a review quote with authority! So media’s been taking off too. (I did BBC Tech Tent on Friday. The segment from 9:20–16:15.) I also wrote a series for the blog called “Why you can’t cash out”, which has been as popular as you’d expect with that name.

And my piece Why You Can’t Put The Music Industry On A Blockchain, a reprint of chunks of chapter 12 of the book, is the seventh most-read piece on Hypebot for 2017. Must spend more time over here telling the music industry why they’re full of it.

My ten hour white noise video now has five copyright claims! :) pic.twitter.com/dX9PCM1qGx

— Sebastian Tomczak (@littlescale) January 4, 2018

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Links: Dragon Ball Super mass piracy, origin of the gated reverb snare, the return of illegal raves.

March 25, 2018, 2:34 pm

≫ Next: Links: Spotify metadata, VU meters, songwriting camps, Disney defends fair use, the history of Smash Hits.

≪ Previous: Links: Dick O’Dell/Y Records, DX-7 presets, Mony Mony, going algorithm-free, Hypebot.

Toei Animation and the Japanese government: “Please do not pirate Dragon Ball Super.” Local governments across Latin America: “lol GFY.”

How Hugh Padgham tripped over the gated reverb snare, first recorded on “Intruder”, a song Peter Gabriel wrote around the effect.

Thirty years later, illegal raves are all the go again in Sheffield and London. For some reason that first article was deleted from the actual nme.com site.

I’ve recently learned Salman Rushdie wrote a 70s disco song about the joy of saving money with the Burnley Building Society. And I still can’t believe that sentence is factually correct. https://t.co/YsJBnkrBFx

— Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) March 24, 2018

ACE OF SPADES on an ACTUAL FUCKING SPADE!!!! ?? pic.twitter.com/JaXyyBsnAD

— Vintage Heavy Metal (@HeavyFknMetal) March 22, 2018

When Suicide started playing gigs again in the late 90s, a bit of the old magic had departed. pic.twitter.com/hOTM5qKLP3

— frozen reeds (@frozenreeds) March 20, 2018

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