Music technology and music industry Cherie Hu goes deeper into NFT. Her high-points:
Danish singer Kira Skov has released 14 albums in her career, but the new one, 'Spirit Tree' coming out in May is special. It is a duet album featuring Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Mark Lanegan, John Parish, Jenny Wilson, Bill Callahan and others. Skov explains the idea to TNC: "Uniting forces with artist that has specialized in something, that I could not master myself and vice versa, merging and creating something more than we could have done by our selves. I wanted to distill this experience on this album. It's a homage to the duet".
An amazing, albeit not the newest, Twitter thread by YourWullie, about famous album covers, and the photographs that inspired them. One of them is the original photograph used for Sonic Youth's 1990 album 'Goo'. Pictured are Maureen Hindley and David Smith, key witnesses in the Moors Murders trial. Maureen was serial killer Myra Hindley's sister.
"I’m at peace with my life, with my stories. That peace is a dignity. Which means I guess I’m kinda proud of my life. In fact, my life is extraordinary! I truly feel joyful and I think the book has helped provide some joy" - singer-songwriter Rickie Lee Jones says in The New Cue interview about her new autobiography 'Last Chance Texaco'. The Washington Post describes the book as a "raw and roving life story", whereas Arts Fuse writer declares it "the most transparent about the vagaries of fame... of all the biographies of female musicians I’ve read in the past year".
Logic and Madlib have formed a new duo project, MadGic, and have already represented it with a new joint single 'Mars Only pt. 3', Pitchfork reports. The song's lyrics allude the pair have made an entire MadGic album in lockdown. Logic announced his retirement from music last year to spend more time with his family.
Ticket touts and resale sites such as Viagogo and StubHub impede the tracing of fans in the event of coronavirus outbreaks, leading music industry figures have warned, Guardian reports. Their investigation found that dozens of professional touts have snapped up tickets for eagerly awaited festivals and are demanding massively inflated prices from fans. Festival firms are required to retain attendees’ details for 21 days as part of government efforts to prevent coronavirus outbreaks but industry figures warned the greed of resale firms and touts would make it much harder to comply.
The first trailer for Questlove’s documentary 'Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)', premiered at the Oscars last night (watch it below). 'Summer of Soul' focuses on the little-known history of the Harlem Cultural Festival, dubbed “the Black Woodstock,” which took place the same summer as Woodstock in 1969 over the course of six weeks in New York's Harlem. The lineup included Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, B.B. King, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and more. The clip juxtaposes many of these performances with the cultural and sociopolitical upheaval happening at the time. 'Summer of Soul' is Questlove’s directorial debut, and it was already awarded both the U.S. Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award in the U.S. Documentary category at the Sundance Film Festival.
Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, and Jon Batiste win best Original score award at the Oscars last night for their work on the beautiful animated feature film 'Soul'. In the Best original song category, H.E.R. took home the trophy for 'Fight for You' from the feature film 'Judas and the Black Messiah'. 'Sound of Metal' won Film editing, and Sound. Check out all the winners and nominees here.
Young Thug's star-studded 'Slime Language 2' debuts at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, earning 113,000 equivalent album units last week. The 23-track features Young Stoner Life’s artists Gunna, Yak Gotti, Lil Duke, T-Shyne and Lil Keed, as well as acts from outside the camp, including Drake, Lil Uzi Vert, Big Sean, NAV and Future. Young Thug himself performs on more than half of the album (13 of the 23 tracks), and, in turn, the set is billed on the chart to Young Thug & Various Artists, Billboard reports.
Lil Nas X has released a new version of his controversial hit single 'Montero (Call Me By Your Name)' in which he recreates every sound on the song with his mouth. The new rendition of hit single arrives with a very innocent Brady Bunch-style music video.
Universal Music Group’s total revenues hit $2.20 billion in Q1, up 9.4% year-on-year. MBW does a breakdown of that number - $2.20bn quarterly turnover was equivalent to $24.5m a day, or $1m an hour. The star of the period, expectedly, was streaming - it generated $1.23bn, up 19.6% year-on-year.
Italian chanson and pop music singer and actress Milva, very popular in the 1960s and 1970s, passed away Friday at her home in Milan, Italy, aged 81, Deutsche Welle reports. With an active career spanning decades, Milva sold some 80 million records, and recorded 173 albums. Her penchant for singing in foreign languages led to her success around the world - she released songs in English, French, Spanish, Greek, Portuguese and Japanese. She had an especially large fan base in Germany, where she gained fame with sophisticated easy listening tracks.
"I’m anxious to be accepted and for people to know what I’m about. More than is necessary I hang on other peoples’ thoughts of me. That hurts or slows me sometimes" - Shock G said in a great Alice Price-Styles interview back in 2014. The interview went deep into Shock G's relationship with another late hip-hop great, Tupac Shakur, and his mother who at first didn't like her son hanging out with the prospective rapper. "I was fed up and like 'Ma, he had a rough time'. She said 'I know Gregory. You know how I know? He has those eyes that little kids give you in the grocery store when they’re not getting love at home and they’re like "will you save me? Will you take me home? Will you feed me?” But they’re not allowed to say anything, and they look at you a little too long'. She said Pac had those eyes when she first was around him". The visionary hip-hop bandleader died last week.
Remember Sports have hidden a laid-back indie-gem 'Out Loud' on their new album; Dope Purple go beautifully psychedelic on 'Evilness'; Arcade Fire's violinist Sarah Neufeld announces her new album with hypnotic 'The Top'; Royal Blood share straight-rock 'Boilermaker', made with the help of QOTSa's Josh Homme; Girl In Red endures consequences of love on 'You Stupid Bitch'; Brooklyn rappers AKAI SOLO and Navy Blue announced a joint album with 'Incursio Fur', indie-rap New York style.
'Vulture Prince' is the third album by Pakistan-rased and Brooklyn-based Arooj Aftab, dedicated to her younger brother who died while she was making it. The album was written as an instrument of swimming out of feelings of loss and grief. Arooj Aftab's mesmerizing voice is supported here by a team of renowned musicians. It's a subtle amalgamation of classical, South Asian music, jazz, even some trance and reggae. Full of class and a class of its own...
“A lot of people are making music intending to break it on TikTok. Your average person on TikTok is going to have 15 seconds to make the video, right? So you want to have as much of the song in that 15 seconds as possible. I think things naturally have gotten shrunk down from there” - Jasmine Star, 17-year-old musical prodigy and a guitarist who has found a large audience through TikTok, tells Guitar World in their piece about how TikTok is changing guitar music. Star says music is - "shrinking down into two minute songs that are written hook one/hook two/hook three, back to hook one with a variation hook, to hook three. So it's all about how the guitar fits into the hooks... And I think that that will change how riffs are being written. I think that riffs are probably going to become more melodic because of how songs are being written right now”.
Video game sounds, abrasive distortion and emotional rap lyrics are a typical digicore cacophony, but that's not all - digicore artists also pull from genres as wide-reaching as midwestern emo, trance, and even Chicago drill, Vice writes in a profile. Everything about this scene of teen musicians - the kids of digicore are mostly between the ages of 15 and 18 years old - centres around the modern Internet landscape; from its origins, to its diversity, right down to how community-oriented it is, including everybody working from their bedroom.
Lisa Rovner’s archival documentary celebrates the women whose breakthroughs in early electronic music laid the foundations of modern electronic styles. The focus falls on about nine or 10 women in the field, including experimental music pioneer Clara Rockmore, British composer and mathematician Delia Derbyshire who co-created the 'Doctor Who' theme, and Suzanne Ciani, the first woman to score a major Hollywood movie - 'The Incredible Shrinking Woman' in 1981. Guardian gave it five stars, describing it as "superb" and "electrifying". The Wall Street Journal starts with a provocative premise: "that the frontiers of electronic music were blazed by women".
Pitchfork looks back at 40 years of albums by "pop stars to metal urchins to avant experimentalists" covering the issue of climate danger. The list goes back to The Clash and Dead Kennedys, and also covers today's pop stars such as Grimes and Billie Eilish, as well as metal heroes Cattle Decapitation, avant-guard artist Babe, Terror, and indie-rock heroine The Weather Station.
TV needs new content in order to grow, while music, on the contrary, thrives on catalog music, MBW points out the examples of Netflix and music consumption in the US in lockdown. In Q1 2020, Netflix added nearly 16 million global paid subscribers quarter-on-quarter, whereas in Q1 2021, the platform gained just 4 million – 2 million lower than its own forecast. Music, on the other hand, was thriving on catalog music (records released 18 months or more prior to the time of listening) - it claimed more than two thirds (68%) of the US recorded music market (in sales-equivalent terms) in the first three months of this year. Catalog’s total share of US sales-equivalent music consumption in 2020 stood at 63.3%, up from 62.8% in 2019.
Little Simz announces her new album 'Sometimes I Might Be Introvert' with a great single 'Introvert', a symphonic hip-hop banger with a pounding drumline. The lyrics are top-notch too, with the finishing line accentuating the message - "I’m a black woman and I’m proud one / We walk in blind faith not knowing the outcome / But as long as we unified then we’ve already won".
Stereogum made a list of 45 never-released albums they would want to hear "a collection of projects that at least supposedly existed in something approaching completion, that are formed enough that artists or other personnel have discussed their existence or their plausible release somewhere down the line". The list starts with the 1970 Jimi Hendrix' acoustic concept album 'Black Gold' that got forgotten in a suitcase. The list also includes unreleased works by U2, Paul McCartney, Neil Young, Deftones, Beck, Soundgarden, Purple Mountains, and many more.
"As increased loneliness and stress have contributed to declining mental health, people have turned to online communities to seek reassurance and companionship" - and some have found Oddly Specific Playlist, a Facebook group with bizarre playlists, such as songs i listen to when the gang of 15 year olds at the train station are intimidating me or looking for songs that make you feel like a misunderstood villain who is just struggling with past trauma. Slate insists it's not just about the music, but also the community - "people wrestling with heartbreak, trauma, nihilism, low self-esteem, and other personal issues find not just song recommendations but also people who empathize with their struggle".
4,000 people will be allowed to the Brit awards in London next month to enjoy the show and - take part in a government-led research programme into how crowds can safely return to mass-participation events, Sky News reports. Audience members will not have to wear masks or socially distance, but they will, however, have to have proof of a negative Covid test. After the performances by Dua Lipa, Headie One, and Arlo Parks, the audience will have to take a Covid test.
Classical music has always been a natural fit for podcasting. And podcasting, it turns out, might be just as fitting for the concert hall - the New York Times argues in a recent article about classical music's bigger steps into podcasting. Next to the older ones like 'Aria Code' by Rhiannon Giddens (trained in opera, better known for her banjo playing), 'Sticky Notes' by the conductor Joshua Weilerstein, and 'On a Personal Note' about the last gathering on an ensemble before the pandemic, there are new ones breaking ground. 'Mission: Commission' follows three composers over the course of six weeks as they create short pieces. 'Trilloquy' goes outside music and into social issues. 'Beginner’s Mind' is idealistic in its premise - making a better world through music.
Rockfield is known as the world’s first residential studio - a former farm remade to a studio, where Black Sabbath, Queen, Robert Plant, Oasis, Coldplay, Simple Minds, and more made their albums. Directed by Hannah Berryman, documentary 'Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm', is out next month featuring interviews with Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Liam Gallagher, Robert Plant, Chris Martin, and the Ward family (made the studio and still, after 50 years, own both the farm and the studio, in their 80s).
“We were the ones most negatively affected by the war on drugs, and America has turned around and created a business from it that’s worth billions” - Jay-Z said explaining his decision to launch Social Equity Ventures Fund worth $10 million, to support minority-owned cannabis start-ups. America’s legal marijuana market is estimated to be worth $61 billion at the moment and heading all the way up. Rapper-turned-cannabis mogul B-Real of Cypress Hill explains - “everybody and their mama is gonna come and stake a claim. The only thing you can do is to stay ahead”. "I’ve got a built-in marketing mechanism" - late Nipsey Hussle said of his cannabis business, now being overseen by his brother. XXL Magazine insists that hip-hop artists getting paid from the cannabis boom is more than just a side hustle - it's a matter of social justice.
"Music has always acted as a pillar on which teenagers hang visions of their ideal life, with each generation forging a sound representative of their era. This time, the urge to escape is magnified and, in the face of a global pandemic, increasingly unrealistic" - Clash Music looks into slowed + reverb, re-worked songs in a way that features the angst and longing for post-COVID freedom, mirroring the moodiness of its teen creators. Slowed + reverb edits have catapulted into popularity over lockdown, because, as one of its producers, Slowerbed believes - “people might be very bored or sad during lockdown because their freedom is limited. They find their escape in slowed songs which make you relax and get your mind off bad things”.
Flying Lotus shares jazzy/soul songs 'Black Gold' featuring Thundercat and 'Between Memories' featuring Niki Randa, both from anime series 'Yasuke'; Tirzah shares 'Send Me', a sparse song with plenty of tension; Ethel Cain goes from calmness to noise on 'Unpunishable'; Wu-Lu goes for a fresh take on rap-rock on 'Times'; Wolf Alice share an indie-rock smash 'Smile'.
Boomtown festival got cancelled Tuesday morning, days after the arts festival Shambala and the indie rock festival Barn on the Farm announced last week that they would not go ahead. All three cited the financial risk of staging events that could be shut down at a moment’s notice by a reimposition of Covid restrictions. Guardian reports that more than nine in 10 independent events are privately indicating they may not go ahead.
"The scars in Ka’s music come with lessons he feels duty-bound to pass on. For the first time, he steps fully into the role of teacher, claiming the title of griot for his era of wounded street soldiers"- Pitchfork writes in a review of Ka's 'Languish Arts' and 'Woeful Studies'. "The Brooklyn rapper’s two new albums set hard-earned wisdom to the lushest music of his career" - The P points out.
Music rights company Concord has bought the publishing and recorded music catalogs of Tony Banks, Phil Collins and Mike Rutherford, as well as the publishing and recorded music catalog from their years in the band Genesis. The Wall Street Journal reports that the ‘megadeal’ is ‘valued at over $300 million’. These catalogs contain songs such as 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway', 'Sussudio', 'Against All Odds', 'All I Need is a Miracle', 'In the Air Tonight', 'I Can’t Dance', 'That’s All', 'Land of Confusion', 'The Living Years', 'Invisible Touch' and other hits.
Pitchfork is looking back 30 years - they selected "150 albums that... shaped the way music would sound in the decades to come", and "250 songs that would make up Pitchfork’s ultimate ’90s mixtape". Here are the 10 best albums:
Nirvana: Nevermind
A Tribe Called Quest: 'The Low End Theory'
Hole: 'Live Through This'
Janet Jackson: 'The Velvet Rope'
Björk: 'Homogenic'
Wu-Tang Clan: 'Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)'
Liz Phair: 'Exile in Guyville'
Radiohead: 'OK Computer'
Lauryn Hill: 'The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill'
My Bloody Valentine: 'Loveless'
"Why did the sound of an inflatable clown toy falling down the stairs so capture the musical zeitgeist of September 2022?" - that's the question the music theorist Adam Neely explains in his latest video. The "sound" is the song 'Cbat' by experimental hip-hop producer Hudson Mohawke, supposedly the perfect "sound" to have sex to.
"Music is now so abundant as to be completely overwhelming in its availability, and that listeners, faced with everything at once, are increasingly playing it safe and sticking with the tried-and-tested" - Guardian's Alexis Petridis writes exploring the supposed disappearance of music discovery. He believes getting music placed on a TV show, film, advertisement or TikTok video can help. However "music discovery and consumption in 2022 is a weird, confounding, counterintuitive and strangely fascinating place, where the traditional ways of doing things have been completely overturned, but it isn’t entirely clear what’s replaced them".
Producer Aphex Twin and the engineer Dave Griffiths have launched an app called Samplebrain, which translates inputted sounds into similar samples. The “sample mashing” design software has been in the works for some 20 years. Aphex Twin describes the app: “What if you could reconstruct source audio from a selection of other mp3's/audio on your computer? What if you could build a 303 riff from only acapellas or bubbling mud sounds? What if you could sing a silly tune and rebuild it from classical music files? You can do this with Samplebrain.”
Pitchfork shared a lovely read about jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders who died at 81 this weekend - "a guy who saw music as a means to keep food on the table, as well as a route toward holiness... For Sanders, transcendence didn’t exist only in some rarefied other realm; it was something you worked at here on Earth, with your lungs, and your lips, and a good reed if you could find one". Sanders belonged, the P points out, "to a cohort of musicians who, in the middle 20th Century, threw open the doors of jazz to allow for fierce dissonances, extended instrumental techniques, and a new style of improvisation oriented toward freeform collective expression rather than individual solos". Vulture also shares a beautiful read about the saxophonist: "Sanders not only represented the heart and hustle of New York City, he embodied its communal spirit as well. Be it the volcanic peaks or meditative valleys of his work, Sanders always spoke a very clear message: Love is everywhere, and it always finds a way".
London-based singer/rapper Alewya is back with a new video 'Let Go', the first new music since her debut EP, 'Panther In Mode', from November last year. Alewya shared a thought about the new track: "The feeling of being on the precipice of something new but not there yet - it’s uncomfortable". It is to be a mark of a new shift into a "wild" new phase for her: "I'm freeing myself up, getting more confident in how lost I feel. With 'Panther In Mode', I was coming from a more poised space. The next phase is more wild. I won't hold back anymore."
To celebrate their first 15 years, Consequence is releasing a list of their 75 favorite albums of the last decade and a half. Plenty of various albums between Lorde's 'Melodrama' and Kendrick Lamar' 'To Pimp a Butterfly'. Check out the full list.
YouTube music theorist Adam Neely wonders what we expect from AI and how might it replace human musicians. He thinks "it's clear that something going to change somehow and something might get lost... but a great deal of other stuff [will get] added".
