two fish

Why did the band Harvy Danger decide to release their entire September, 2005 album, Little By Little, for free P2P distribution and download, on the net? Read the full statement here. The precis begins:

Why we’re releasing our latest album for free on the Internet

In preparing to self-release our new album, we thought long and hard about how best to use the internet. Given our unusual history, and a long-held sense that the practice now being demonized by the music biz as “illegal” file sharing can be a friend to the independent musician, we have decided to embrace the indisputable fact of music in the 21st century, put our money where our mouth is, and make our record, Little By Little…, available for download via Bittorrent, and at our website. We’re not streaming, or offering 30-second song samples, or annoying you with digital rights management software; we’re putting up the whole record, for free, forever. Full stop. Please help yourself; if you like it, please share with friends.

Of course, the CD will also be for sale on the site, as well as in fine independent record stores across the country, in a deluxe package that includes a 30-minute bonus disc that serves as a companion piece to the record proper (retail price for the package is $11.99).

We embark on this experiment with both enthusiasm and curiosity—and, ok, maybe a twinge of anxiety. Why are we doing this? The short answer is simply that we want a lot of people to hear the record. However, it’s important that people understand the free download concept isn’t a frivolous act. It’s a key part of our promotional campaign . . .

Also of note,

Tanya Andersen, a 41 year old disabled single mother living in Oregon, has countersued the RIAA for Oregon RICO violations, fraud, invasion of privacy, abuse of process, electronic trespass, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, negligent misrepresentation, the tort of “outrage", and deceptive business practices, Ms. Andersen’s counterclaims demand a trial by jury. (List of 65 allegations against the RIAA follows, in original article)

(As reported by isohunt:) This follows another recent US court ruling that mum can’t be held responsible for 13-year old daughter’s file sharing. While the RIAA’s lawsuits to protect its copyright is not “illegal” and are within their right (under laws they lobbied for), perhaps this case will shed some light on their extortionist behaviour.

           Moog Modular

Thank you Robert Moog!

Moog died today, age 71. In rememberance, the beginning of a piece on Moog (rhymes with ‘vogue’) published April, 2000 in salon.com.

Robert Moog
His invention had an extraordinary impact on how musicians create, and radically changed the way music is made.

By Frank Houston

In the 1920s a Russian inventor named Leon Theremin unveiled the first purely electronic instrument. You played the theremin by waving your hands in the vicinity of two metal rods, controlling pitch and volume, that were attached to a nondescript wooden cabinet. Between the strange arm motions and the instrument’s invisible machinations, the theremin’s overall effect in performance was theatrical and mysterious.

But like the 200-ton telharmonium, the world’s first mechanical music synthesizer (invented by Thaddeus Cahill around 1900), the theremin was difficult to play. In 1955, four years after the theremin’s eerily weepy sound was employed in “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” RCA introduced the first modern synthesizer. The machine made sounds by manipulating electrical waves to denote timbre, pitch and volume. Like early computers, it filled a room and was tended by men in lab coats.

Moog Sonic 6

A few years later Robert Moog, a graduate student in physics at Cornell University, published a magazine article explaining how to build a theremin, offering do-it-yourself kits for $49.95. Orders poured in, and Moog sold 1,000 that year. “We had $13,000 in the bank,” he recalled recently, “a humongous cache of wealth for a graduate student back then!” The windfall enabled a career that helped bring electronic music out of the realm of novelty acts and university labs. A decade after the first RCA machine, Moog introduced the first widely adopted electronic instrument – the synthesizer that bears his name.

When Moog (rhymes with “vogue") unveiled the Moog music synthesizer in 1965, his engineering skills combined with a bit of business luck to radically change the way music was made. Synthesizers went from being computers to instruments that could be found in any music store. The flowering of rock music may have come via Leo Fender, Les Paul and the Gibson Guitar Co., but the innovative music of the early 21st century owes far more to Moog and his imitators and successors.

Mini Moog

After getting some exposure to the liberal arts at Columbia University’s Engineering School, Moog began graduate education in the engineering physics department of Cornell University. He took eight years to get his Ph.D., largely because of his part-time hobby: building theremins and other electronic instruments. The degree came in 1965, a year after Moog launched his synthesizer business. Moog built his synthesizer in 1964 after a composer told him about the need for user-friendly electronic instruments utilizing new solid-state technology. The Moog was modular: You used patch cords to select your waveform (the sound’s timbre) and frequency (pitch), and plugged in the interface – a keyboard, instead of the binary code on paper that had defined the first RCAs. Moog’s engineering wizardry did the rest.

Significantly, Moog’s was the first synthesizer to use attack-decay-sustain-release (ADSR) envelopes, set with four different knobs, which control the qualities of a sound’s onset, intensity and fade. Like many of his designs, Moog’s envelope generators became a basic component of later synthesizers. . . RCA synthesizers, intended for an elite market of labs financed by universities and record companies, had cost $100,000 and up. In 1967 the new Moog sold for $11,000. It wasn’t the only synthesizer around; many experts also commend Donald Buchla’s modular synthesizer, built around the same time. But the Moog became prized for its utility and elegance, making Moog the name that brought synthesized music to the masses.

The Moog’s biggest break came in 1969, when musician Walter (now Wendy) Carlos had a huge, Grammy-winning hit with “Switched-on Bach,” . . . The Beatles introduced a new Moog in the majestic “Because,” on “Abbey Road,” . . . In 1971, Carlos brought the Moog to cinema, scoring Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” with electronic Beethoven [she also scored The Shining, and played Moog synths for TRON] . . .

The synthesizer also boasted the voltage-controlled lowpass filter that came to be known as the Moog filter, capable of making a variety of full horn, string and vocal timbres. The filter was patented in 1968, much to the envy of the competition, who “ate their hearts out,” Moog says. They “all came up with voltage-controlled lowpass filters, but most of them sounded like shit, if I do say so myself.” . . .

         
Wendy Carlos & her circa 1971 Moog studio

Robert Moog

Here’s a song I wrote last week
(with thanks to Kate).
Feel free to do something with it,
as licensed under this
Creative Commons Artist License.

North of Hollywood

tomorrow
lights up in the city garage
cindy sings a refrain
her slicker caught in rain
to find a life in orange
by the carousel of music
found against another star
sequins of las vegas
heartthrob songs
cruisin as a demimonde
among the carnage

CHORUS:
who’s that lady
it’s an LA bar
the chandelier sways
against the guitars
uncertain limits
from a man with a rose
bourbon on the rocks
tastes better cold
. . .

only
a vandal dreams forever
with a crease and a gun
3 am in the morning blood
drains against the sun
it don’t take much
to memorize the lines
tickets are easy
posing silhouettes breezy
drinks down Chandler novels
dressing an Egyptian idol
got her own brains
writing on dirty trains
this day and age

CHORUS

fifteen
sixteen hours a day
working up and back the highway
a knife and a match and a quarter moon
deep blue sky at a quarter past noon
with the tv playing old cartoons
black stagedoor lighting the dunes
spilling quarters on the floor
diamonds from a penny jar
in a montage

CHORUS

bones
crossing sunset and avenue E
sightlines painted against the sea
flames the bomber doesn’t see
fallen in a single victory
torn mulholland missives
the book of love and kisses
slicker caught in rain
fingerprints on windowframes
among the footage

TAG
end

One very cool .wav file lasting 5 seconds. The following article claims the universe started with a low moan. Untrue! It’s a bit less definable (even 50 octaves up). Note, sound waves could propogate through the early universe. Amazing stuff:

The Universe began not with a bang but with a low moan, building into a roar that gave way to a deafening hiss. And those sounds gave birth to the first stars… The variations in the cosmic background radiation expose the relative clumpiness of the early cosmos at a variety of different scales. These density variations began as quantum fluctuations in the moments after the big bang, and then propagated out as sonic waves… Translating the observed frequency spectrum directly to sound yields tones far too low for ears to hear - some 50 octaves below middle A - but transpose the score up all those octaves and you can listen to it… You can listen to the sound from the first million years after the big bang here (500Kb .wav file).

Whittle played the soundtrack at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Denver last week. Contrary to its name, the big bang began in absolute silence. But the sound soon built up into a roar whose broad-peaked notes corresponded, in musical terms, to a “majestic” major third chord, evolving slowly into a “sadder” minor third, Whittle explained. For those worried that you cannot have sounds in space, that is true today, but it was not so in the Universe’s infancy. For perhaps its first million years, the Universe was small and dense enough that sound waves could indeed travel through it - so efficiently, in fact, that they moved at about half the speed of light.

New Scientist June 12.

Hot off the presses: John March has just released some killer mp3’s (downloadable) from The Circuitbreakers, for your musical listening pleasure. Crank these up on your best speakers for a real treat.

John’s also written some thought-provoking articles on the music business. Most recently: Going against the grain of Pop culture; Making music for the sake of music! which begins:

The music business is in shambles. everyone is concerned, or outright panicking. Work is slow and Pop music and technology are killing music. In fact intellectual property and artistry has all been reduced to binary consciousness, zeroes and ones are the beginning and end of the universe and nothing else is sacred. These, and many other sentiments, are the prevailing dialog in our industry at this moment…

Two more excerpts:

To me the music of The Blues is like a Zen art form. Its roots are steeped in tradition, in a history of form and performance, but it is also an evolving form that is both familiar and potentially new at the same time. It requires, at its most fundamental level, absolute attention and presence and a certain moment to moment awareness that requires an emotional honesty and connection to detail that only comes with time and experience…

For the last 15 years I have had a unique and inspiring working relationship with Westlake Audio In Los Angeles. Steve Burdick, the studio manager there, has been a great supporter over the years, of my vision of craft and community. 15 years ago I had a Synclavier room there, and Steve and I became friends. Recently we have been working together with his fantastic idea for helping and supporting new artists and singer/songwriters. Westlake Audio’s Artist Development Program, in conjunction with the fantastic resources that Westlake Audio has to offer as a recording facility. We worked together to create a community effort that joined his vision of artist development with my idea to create a resource for singer songwriters that connected them to great players, called sectionforhire.com. This lead to talks with my fellow musicians and studio players, which in turn has lead us to this project of The Circuitbreakers.

Been dying for that free mp3 download of I’m So Glad by Skip James? (composer, 1931 recording, lyrics here.) Plenty more where that came from. A couple of sources for free and legal downloadable mp3 archives: Internet Archive: Open Source Audio. Also, Webjay, which has for instance, video of John Cage.