First thing, now that I am back. I won't bore anyone with the relations of my tech-problems, but before I get on to pseudo-ranting about stuff I have been musing on, I will get right back to doling out free music.
Today's song of the day (feels good to say that again) is Lawn Wake IV (Black) by The Flashbulb (which I have a tendency to type as 'Flashblub'). I was teetering on the edge as to reccomending anything by this artist, as normally I won't push music without having a whole album, or discog, or something like that. Today, however, singles were in abundance, and after having heard some of the fellows music, I've decided that this is worth sharing. Good luck getting any more songs of his though... I only have 4 as it is. >> Anyway, about the song. I remember when I first discovered Goa-Trance - that's trance music fused with psychedellic guitars, for those who don't know. I was delighted to find that electronic music could have the same sweet riffy, catchy-ness that popular music could. And, then, I discovered just the other day that IDM and Breakcore could use guitars too. Genius! The Flashbulb makes music in a variety of styles, as is usually the case with prolific electronic musicians (who are actually worth listening to). Squarepusher and Venetian Snares, anyone? Right. Well, this song is pretty downright awesome. A very noisy, glitchy start, not nearly as abrasive as that Dev/Null track I reccomended a while back though, and then a sweet breakcore guitar-fest of mind-melting proportions. This song, as well as the other that accompanied it on the limited promotional EP Lawn Funeral, are available for download here. Enjoy.
Now, what do I have to say about categorizing music? Really just a wonderment, actually. As I'm a big advocate of music being freely distributed in the first place, it's easy to see that knowing what I'm getting would be a point of interest for me. What I have more to gripe about, however, is how proper music categorization is almost non-existent today, and indeed, most modern-day technologies and utilities seem to stifle the idea, rather than help it. Let me give you an example...
Say I purchased a CD from my local music retailer. Let's use Nirvana's breakthrough album Nevermind for the example. I take the CD home, unwrap it from its shiny plastic packaging, and after listening to a while, decide I want to copy the files from the CD onto my computer. A lot of programs allow me to do this - Winamp, Windows Media Player - I think Windows even has a built in utility. But, what do I find when I check the directory I extracted the files to? I can't tell which is which anymore! And so, I have to listen by ear and manually recategorize everything with my CD in hand as I scroll through a proprietary file tagger.
You'd think with all the time in the world to organize, format, and press CDs, a music company would take the needs of the consumer into place, and embed file information into the files on a CD. You'd think that, on the off chance that they do, that the music ripping program would make an effort to read that data.
I know this is an out of place gripe. Most CDs now a days are properly formatted, and with iTunes, there's no limit to the instant categorization! But to extrapolate further on this idea... go on to any random P2P music sharing program. Download a popular song... something by The Beatles. Play it in your music player of choice. No doubt, you will find things such as genre, album, and year are completely blank - and that the title is something like "the beetles_(song name)". No artist, or the artist will be the song name... blah blah blah, it goes on. When someone has the time to group and upload a torrent file of an artists entire discography - or, more to the point, even just that one album, you'd think they could also take the time to properly label it. Not so!
It ends up so that I'm one of the only people I know who has a near even close to properly organized music collection - at 50 gigs and rising, that's no small feat, but even I'm not close to done - and it's taken me literally days of work to get where I am. Even when I transferred over all my old music files, I had to retag them, because WMP tags weren't compatible with Winamp, and Winamp wasn't compatible with iTunes, or some stupid shit like that... it's just ridiculous. This is like a gripe people used to have on KaZaA back in the day - dialup users not sharing files. I disagreed with that one, but I think I'd like to take it to the extreme in a different way...
If you don't have properly categorized and labelled music files, do not share them.
I'm just kidding, really, but it is a huge pet peeve of mine. The fact that there's no 'auto-tagging' system for music these days makes me wonder what the internet is for... For people who actually want to tag their music properly though, look into getting Tag & Rename - it covers all different formats of tags, and all different audio formats as well. Really useful.
And that is all I have to say about that. Until tomorrow.
Showing posts with label breakcore. Show all posts
Showing posts with label breakcore. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Saturday, January 20, 2007
It's Glitching In A Good Way
I wanted to put off another post until I felt I had something relevant to say. Thusly, herein lies great contemplation on the nature of sound... and stuff.
As if I haven't already been spouting off about the site enough, I have to mention BrEaKcOrE-AdDiCts today, if only because it was through said site that I acquired today's song of the day, as well as more free music than I know what to do with. Before I get right to the track though, I have to cover something.
For those of you reading this who don't play video games, you might not understand the soundtrack/remix culture associated with the medium of entertainment. For every big game, there is a soundtrack, and for every soundtrack, there are more remixes than you can shake a... Japanese Doujin Band at (S.S.H., Mint Jam). OC ReMixes is a good example of this. This kind of phenomenon exists for the same reason that people eagerly purchase rereleases of their favorite games - they are eager to play their favorite content over again, but in a new and exciting way. Thusly, the remixed soundtracks are analogous to this kind of thing - listening to a soundtrack is like playing your favorite game moments over again in your mind, and remixes are a different way to do that. Also, many games have amazing scores, and composers just seem to be getting better and better.
All that said, today's track may be a remix - if it's not, it's an amazingly done piece of original work - and even if it is, it certainly sounds good enough to warrant listening to anyway. As I earlier mentioned my oft visited breakcore site, I was lead through it to an artist called MegAAngelo (not unlike the dog from Final Fantasy VIII). He has quite literally, his entire catalogue for download, which consists of no fewer than 10 albums. He also has several partner artists hosted as well. People who offer their music for free download amaze me, and I hold to this day that if I secure a record contract in some soon to be famous band (the upcoming Battle o' the Bands in march may determine the reality of my future fame) I will offer my band's entire compendium of music for free download. In any case, after extensive re-labeling and organization of the (what seemed like hundreds of) zip files, I was ready to listen to this artist.
I wasn't really very impressed.
Let me interject something here though. I pride myself on my ability to have at least enough knowledge of a given 'music' scene to hold my own in any medium of discussion about said scene. Possible exceptions are Country and any amalgamation of 'street-cultured' music such as Rap and Hip-Hop. One of the scenes that is small enough whereupon it's not overly hard to know most everything about it is the 'Intelligent Dance Music' scene. Abbreviated to IDM, this is computer music for 'intelligent' people. It can also be called 'braindance'. It's very cerebral, clicky, mellow, and meticulously programmed. I know a lot about it, but I'm not a huge fan. When this supposed 'breakcore' artist came off as IDM, I was a little disappointed. After a while, though, I warmed up to it... incidentally, the fellow seems to be a fan of the anime FLCL (pronounced "Furi-Kuri"), which gave him points. I remembered noting what sounded like a remix of the Super Mario Bros. theme (entitled Super Musical Brothers), so I checked that album out. I'm glad I did.
A high contender for album of the week, this delightful EP is an amalgamation of IDM style mods and clicks, as well as some home-brewed video-game instrumentation and sound effects, with a healthy dose of pre-established samples and remix work as well. I can't say why, but the second I heard the opening track I was hook - the entire album, without even listening to all of it at first, made a place on my 'Music worth noticing' playlist. The song of the day today, is the first track, Battle Sequence, from awesome free-download music artist MegAAngelo's EP album, Vidiot.
MA seems to make music in a more ambient, quieter, glitch associated thing than I'm accustomed - there's a decent breakcore influence though. His site offers all his music for free download, so rather than upload (even though maybe I should be), I'll just offer a link - you can download invidual MP3s, or the whole album - even though I would reccomend this whole album, you don't have to get it. Here is MegAAngelo's site. The link to the album is on the right, along with tons of other musical deliciousness. Even if you don't like breakcore, this stuff is worth checking out - it's far less abrasive, more melodic, dare I say creative - and free. Can't go wrong with that.
Album and artist of the week approaches, and my recent music listening habits my skew my decision a bit. Hopefully someone awaits eagerly.
As if I haven't already been spouting off about the site enough, I have to mention BrEaKcOrE-AdDiCts today, if only because it was through said site that I acquired today's song of the day, as well as more free music than I know what to do with. Before I get right to the track though, I have to cover something.
For those of you reading this who don't play video games, you might not understand the soundtrack/remix culture associated with the medium of entertainment. For every big game, there is a soundtrack, and for every soundtrack, there are more remixes than you can shake a... Japanese Doujin Band at (S.S.H., Mint Jam). OC ReMixes is a good example of this. This kind of phenomenon exists for the same reason that people eagerly purchase rereleases of their favorite games - they are eager to play their favorite content over again, but in a new and exciting way. Thusly, the remixed soundtracks are analogous to this kind of thing - listening to a soundtrack is like playing your favorite game moments over again in your mind, and remixes are a different way to do that. Also, many games have amazing scores, and composers just seem to be getting better and better.
All that said, today's track may be a remix - if it's not, it's an amazingly done piece of original work - and even if it is, it certainly sounds good enough to warrant listening to anyway. As I earlier mentioned my oft visited breakcore site, I was lead through it to an artist called MegAAngelo (not unlike the dog from Final Fantasy VIII). He has quite literally, his entire catalogue for download, which consists of no fewer than 10 albums. He also has several partner artists hosted as well. People who offer their music for free download amaze me, and I hold to this day that if I secure a record contract in some soon to be famous band (the upcoming Battle o' the Bands in march may determine the reality of my future fame) I will offer my band's entire compendium of music for free download. In any case, after extensive re-labeling and organization of the (what seemed like hundreds of) zip files, I was ready to listen to this artist.
I wasn't really very impressed.
Let me interject something here though. I pride myself on my ability to have at least enough knowledge of a given 'music' scene to hold my own in any medium of discussion about said scene. Possible exceptions are Country and any amalgamation of 'street-cultured' music such as Rap and Hip-Hop. One of the scenes that is small enough whereupon it's not overly hard to know most everything about it is the 'Intelligent Dance Music' scene. Abbreviated to IDM, this is computer music for 'intelligent' people. It can also be called 'braindance'. It's very cerebral, clicky, mellow, and meticulously programmed. I know a lot about it, but I'm not a huge fan. When this supposed 'breakcore' artist came off as IDM, I was a little disappointed. After a while, though, I warmed up to it... incidentally, the fellow seems to be a fan of the anime FLCL (pronounced "Furi-Kuri"), which gave him points. I remembered noting what sounded like a remix of the Super Mario Bros. theme (entitled Super Musical Brothers), so I checked that album out. I'm glad I did.
A high contender for album of the week, this delightful EP is an amalgamation of IDM style mods and clicks, as well as some home-brewed video-game instrumentation and sound effects, with a healthy dose of pre-established samples and remix work as well. I can't say why, but the second I heard the opening track I was hook - the entire album, without even listening to all of it at first, made a place on my 'Music worth noticing' playlist. The song of the day today, is the first track, Battle Sequence, from awesome free-download music artist MegAAngelo's EP album, Vidiot.
MA seems to make music in a more ambient, quieter, glitch associated thing than I'm accustomed - there's a decent breakcore influence though. His site offers all his music for free download, so rather than upload (even though maybe I should be), I'll just offer a link - you can download invidual MP3s, or the whole album - even though I would reccomend this whole album, you don't have to get it. Here is MegAAngelo's site. The link to the album is on the right, along with tons of other musical deliciousness. Even if you don't like breakcore, this stuff is worth checking out - it's far less abrasive, more melodic, dare I say creative - and free. Can't go wrong with that.
Album and artist of the week approaches, and my recent music listening habits my skew my decision a bit. Hopefully someone awaits eagerly.
Monday, January 15, 2007
That's really all it takes
I hate to rant on in a sort of 'freaky electronic music' binge, but it's all that's on my mind lately, excepting progressive time signature crap - and that's not for everyone.
Neither is breakcore, really, and I can see why. A synopsis couldn't hurt. Basically, as I understand it, Breakcore is a fusion of the genres of gabber, glitch, noise, and IDM. Just as speedcore was a response to the childishness of nu-style gabber and happy hardcore, breakcore is the response to IDM being too ambient... or something like that. I see Aphex Twin and Squarepusher listed as Breakcore a lot, and I'm not sure if it's true. I doubt that AFX (that's Aphex Twin, don't ask me why, it was his idea - him being Richard D. James, fyi) really qualifies, unless some of his more obscure and harder to find stuff fits the label. As for Squarepusher - he's really all over the place. As long as no one calls him jazz, it's all good. Anyway.
Breakcore, in my experience, is typified by harsh breakbeats, and a maximum output of sonic density. Artists will try to cram a lot of sound into one piece of music... resulting in what can sometimes seem an imposing wall of noise. Noise music, however, is an altogether different thing - it's made with lots of static, tape-looping, and vicious feed-back. I do enjoy some noise music, but it takes a very specific taste to like it. If someone you know doesn't like Venetian Snares and calls it 'not music', do not show them noise music. Heck, even the most hardcore VSnares fans don't like the searing feedback... I do, but again, I'm not everyone.
Breakcore is primarily made with sampled drum noises, synths, and crazy smooshing off sounds together to create sound effects that can't be replicated acoustically - a good example is the 'snare rush' VSnares does in a lot of his songs, that blurs the sound together into one continuous grating stream. If you're a fan of gabber, IDM, glitch or noise music, breakcore is probably a good idea to check out. There's some melodic type stuff out there: notably, a lot of Dev/Null's tracks, and a huge amount of VSnares, cosnidering his vast discography - especially the much toted album Rossz Csillag Alatt Szuletett by Venetian Snares - the title is Hungarian, and means 'born under a bad star'. Everyone who like VSnares usually loves this album, and it's reccomended by people getting other people into breakcore, which bothers me immensely. It's like reccomending Metallica to people looking for Progressive metal... perhaps not that bad. But the album doesn't really epitomize the genre - it is an amazing album, don't get me wrong. Hungarian feeling string orchestras mixed with vicious VSnares-esque breakbeats is awesome, but... it's not the best example. VSnares goes melodic on a lot of his other albums too, so people should check those out. I'd reccomend Rossz, as well as The Choclate Wheelchair Album and Higgins Ultra Low Track Glue Funk Hitsn 1972-2006 - yes, they all have long and weird titles, but those are some good albums.
In any case, I'm going to link BrEaKcOrE-AdDiCts, and say that anyone who's intersted in checking out this totally diverse, unreal, out of the way and awesome genre gives it a look. I reccomend Dev/Null and Speedranch - they have the most stuff for free download. Dev/Null is a lot more melodic, and Speedranch is a lot more noise influenced, but their both good.
As a sample of this delicious genre, I'm providing todays song of the day - Bolt Thrower In A Chinese Resteraunt by Dev/Null. This might not be the best song he offers, but it's my favorite. It starts off a bit frighteningly, so for those who want something more accessable, check out Symphonies of Suckness. Instead of wasting my bandwidth, and dealing with Megaupload (though I love them), I'm just going to link to the page for downloads on Dev's site. Here is the link - the MP3 section isn't hard to find. If you like it, please check out more, and if not... well, you're silly.
Neither is breakcore, really, and I can see why. A synopsis couldn't hurt. Basically, as I understand it, Breakcore is a fusion of the genres of gabber, glitch, noise, and IDM. Just as speedcore was a response to the childishness of nu-style gabber and happy hardcore, breakcore is the response to IDM being too ambient... or something like that. I see Aphex Twin and Squarepusher listed as Breakcore a lot, and I'm not sure if it's true. I doubt that AFX (that's Aphex Twin, don't ask me why, it was his idea - him being Richard D. James, fyi) really qualifies, unless some of his more obscure and harder to find stuff fits the label. As for Squarepusher - he's really all over the place. As long as no one calls him jazz, it's all good. Anyway.
Breakcore, in my experience, is typified by harsh breakbeats, and a maximum output of sonic density. Artists will try to cram a lot of sound into one piece of music... resulting in what can sometimes seem an imposing wall of noise. Noise music, however, is an altogether different thing - it's made with lots of static, tape-looping, and vicious feed-back. I do enjoy some noise music, but it takes a very specific taste to like it. If someone you know doesn't like Venetian Snares and calls it 'not music', do not show them noise music. Heck, even the most hardcore VSnares fans don't like the searing feedback... I do, but again, I'm not everyone.
Breakcore is primarily made with sampled drum noises, synths, and crazy smooshing off sounds together to create sound effects that can't be replicated acoustically - a good example is the 'snare rush' VSnares does in a lot of his songs, that blurs the sound together into one continuous grating stream. If you're a fan of gabber, IDM, glitch or noise music, breakcore is probably a good idea to check out. There's some melodic type stuff out there: notably, a lot of Dev/Null's tracks, and a huge amount of VSnares, cosnidering his vast discography - especially the much toted album Rossz Csillag Alatt Szuletett by Venetian Snares - the title is Hungarian, and means 'born under a bad star'. Everyone who like VSnares usually loves this album, and it's reccomended by people getting other people into breakcore, which bothers me immensely. It's like reccomending Metallica to people looking for Progressive metal... perhaps not that bad. But the album doesn't really epitomize the genre - it is an amazing album, don't get me wrong. Hungarian feeling string orchestras mixed with vicious VSnares-esque breakbeats is awesome, but... it's not the best example. VSnares goes melodic on a lot of his other albums too, so people should check those out. I'd reccomend Rossz, as well as The Choclate Wheelchair Album and Higgins Ultra Low Track Glue Funk Hitsn 1972-2006 - yes, they all have long and weird titles, but those are some good albums.
In any case, I'm going to link BrEaKcOrE-AdDiCts, and say that anyone who's intersted in checking out this totally diverse, unreal, out of the way and awesome genre gives it a look. I reccomend Dev/Null and Speedranch - they have the most stuff for free download. Dev/Null is a lot more melodic, and Speedranch is a lot more noise influenced, but their both good.
As a sample of this delicious genre, I'm providing todays song of the day - Bolt Thrower In A Chinese Resteraunt by Dev/Null. This might not be the best song he offers, but it's my favorite. It starts off a bit frighteningly, so for those who want something more accessable, check out Symphonies of Suckness. Instead of wasting my bandwidth, and dealing with Megaupload (though I love them), I'm just going to link to the page for downloads on Dev's site. Here is the link - the MP3 section isn't hard to find. If you like it, please check out more, and if not... well, you're silly.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
As Promised
Like I said - second post.
I have some things to cover in this one that are actually important. First, an update on my jam session with emotional yet not so technically proficient guitar player, Django!
Things went quite well this time, I think a lot better than they did last time. I'm not even sure if it could be called a jam session - basically we tried to get down parts to a song for all the time he was over. We actually succeeded to a degree as well. I was convinced I didn't want to do something in normal time, and I had been working on this crazy 5/4 / 6/4 intro thing that I wanted to work with. We started on that, and didn't really get very far with it - so then we started working on an intro hook in that pattern - alternating between 5/4 and 6/4 every bar, essentially amounting to 11/8. Then we took a chorus pattern in 6/4, and then started working on a bridge in 5/4. Basically, we had to go back over some stuff, and we don't have anything solidly finished, but we have a lot of components for what promises to be a sweet song that's a hybrid of prog-metal, mathcore, and some form of death something. I'm loving the math-core influence.
I also have a jam to go with Julien, the 'Metallica' kid. I dunno how that will go - I wrote lyrics to a song of his, would like to see how that goes - and maybe we'll get something accomplished.
As for the other things I wanted to rant about - I wanted to say some things about my posting of a VSnares album. I know that I have held that I will not post albums by my essential artists - and yet in two days, I've posted two of them. I think the MSI album speaks for itself - it was an accompaniement to the review - but why the Snares? Mostly because I realize that there's not enough exposure to Aaron and his wonderful music - I fell into the world of breakcore purely by mistake, but Venetian Snares makes tracks so innovative and wonderful I can't help but want to share them. I was originally just going to post one track from that album, because I found it amazing, but then I wanted to post another, and another, and now, I have uploaded my favorite Venetian Snares album for everyone to enjoy. I've also stumbled upon something amazing... BrEaKcOrE-AdDiCts. Holy crap. This site is astounding - almost every artist there has an MP3 download section, and over the course of just today I've exposed myself to tons of new artists. Expect to see some breakcore tracks posted in the next little while.
That's all for now, I suppose. For those of you who haven't immersed yourselves in the world of odd time signatures, I suggest you check out Dream Theater, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Venetian Snares... and that's all I can think of for now. Rush is pretty good for it too. Just do a Google for "Mathcore", and you'll do fine.
I have some things to cover in this one that are actually important. First, an update on my jam session with emotional yet not so technically proficient guitar player, Django!
Things went quite well this time, I think a lot better than they did last time. I'm not even sure if it could be called a jam session - basically we tried to get down parts to a song for all the time he was over. We actually succeeded to a degree as well. I was convinced I didn't want to do something in normal time, and I had been working on this crazy 5/4 / 6/4 intro thing that I wanted to work with. We started on that, and didn't really get very far with it - so then we started working on an intro hook in that pattern - alternating between 5/4 and 6/4 every bar, essentially amounting to 11/8. Then we took a chorus pattern in 6/4, and then started working on a bridge in 5/4. Basically, we had to go back over some stuff, and we don't have anything solidly finished, but we have a lot of components for what promises to be a sweet song that's a hybrid of prog-metal, mathcore, and some form of death something. I'm loving the math-core influence.
I also have a jam to go with Julien, the 'Metallica' kid. I dunno how that will go - I wrote lyrics to a song of his, would like to see how that goes - and maybe we'll get something accomplished.
As for the other things I wanted to rant about - I wanted to say some things about my posting of a VSnares album. I know that I have held that I will not post albums by my essential artists - and yet in two days, I've posted two of them. I think the MSI album speaks for itself - it was an accompaniement to the review - but why the Snares? Mostly because I realize that there's not enough exposure to Aaron and his wonderful music - I fell into the world of breakcore purely by mistake, but Venetian Snares makes tracks so innovative and wonderful I can't help but want to share them. I was originally just going to post one track from that album, because I found it amazing, but then I wanted to post another, and another, and now, I have uploaded my favorite Venetian Snares album for everyone to enjoy. I've also stumbled upon something amazing... BrEaKcOrE-AdDiCts. Holy crap. This site is astounding - almost every artist there has an MP3 download section, and over the course of just today I've exposed myself to tons of new artists. Expect to see some breakcore tracks posted in the next little while.
That's all for now, I suppose. For those of you who haven't immersed yourselves in the world of odd time signatures, I suggest you check out Dream Theater, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Venetian Snares... and that's all I can think of for now. Rush is pretty good for it too. Just do a Google for "Mathcore", and you'll do fine.
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