After I’ve read that Flickr now supports geotagging via Yahoo Maps, I geotagged all of our photos in Flickr. Check out here. That’s a great way to make more out of your pictures.

On entering the label name, this service returns a list of MP3 shops where you can purchase the labels’ tunes. Nice.
http://www.beatmatcher.net/

Wow, this will probably introduce a new way of online performance, turning what used to be a classic DJ into some kind of real-time remixer. We all knew this would come some day, but this new software/hardware solution is gonna heat things up for sure. Check out the video from the SNAMM2006 show.

(via Multiple Extase)

01: N.phect – Crysis (-)
02: Misanthrop – Viperfish (Subtitles Dub)
03: X-plorer – Unnatural (Sudden Def)
04: Phace – Cataphiles (Subtitles Dub)
05: N.phect & Dizplay – Nostromo 2006 (-)
06: Teebee & Noisia – Time stops (Subtitles Dub)
07: N.phect & Dizplay – Campaign (Syndrome)
08: Dizplay & lost sequence – Freak Wave [Citrus]
09: Noisia – Endgame (Virus)
10: State of Mind – Back to the jungle (Shogun Dub)

There’s a pretty interesting Wired interview with Daniel Levitin, who used to be a rock producer and is now and an assoc. prof for neuroscience. In the article he talks about links between brain functions and music perception. Insightful.

Though still in beta, this site looks pretty promising. Covers Juno, Chemical, Track It Down, and more.
http://simfydj.com/

After a certain while, the human nervous system adapts to constant stimulus, no matter whether it’s massive or low. This is what we call boredom.

Having that in mind, today I’ve read two interesting posts on what dubstep can learn from DnB and what DnB can learn from Techno, which contains some insightful thoughts.

Imagine yourself at a show of your favourite band. Images of people yelling, singing along the lyrics. Now switch, wonder why watch the clock shows 8 in the morning, and realize you’re located at some decent techno event. Pondering beats accompanied by minimal floating sound bits which seem to continunously change. Move on, and experience the very moment the drop hits you hard in the face at a DnB night.

Obviously, these impressions are quite different, though they all are bits of music, experienced by your sensual apparatus. How come these genres work in such a different manner?

Of course, they’re based on different BPMs and have a different sound sources and audio esthetics; but there’s one thing that work really different for Rock/Pop, DnB, and Techno, which is part of the two articles mentioned above. Arrangement dynamics. The way a piece of music (aka track) changes over time.

In Rock, we hear the old verse/chorus pattern again and again, which makes us calm down in the verses and scream in the chorus, often supported by a more minimal instrumental approach and a different style of vocals. Seems to me, the moment the chorus happens is quite similar to the drop in DnB, with the difference that this happens just once in a typical DnB track. We’ve had good response to recurring chorus-like elements like certain vocal samples, and if people know these tracks, they seem to enjoy anticipating those moments. For the rest of the track, there’s not much change in DnB tunes, apart from some copy’n'paste action. Remember the initial words above?

A typical Techno set on the other extreme doesn’t contain any climaxes at all. It just floats on, changing all the time. Not like some Jazz piece. More subtle. Dynamically. Yeah, it takes some time to get into it, but once you let it happen, you’re lost. Literally.

DnB in contrast seems to be focused on the drop. For the rest, it’s pretty static. In the course of a DJs set, I often find myself waiting for the next drop, like a junkie urging for a fix. Yeah, that’s fun, but it really can get boring over time. Many modern tracks are just streamlined (no matter from which sub-genre), and once the drop’s over, you still have that high energy sound, but it’s constant. Of course there are various tunes which do quite the opposite, constantly changing patterns, thereby breaking the boring predictability of most DnB tracks. Well, to be honest, most of them overdo that. They’re just stressful. In fact, it seems to be a pretty hard task for the producer to find the right balance.

This is where many people think DnB producers from the past have made a better job. They were focused on both production level *and* composition, whereas today it’s fairly easy to get boring, but well-produced tunes signed. Many big labels also seem to support that drop-and-you’re-done-style.

Apart from the global arrangement view, there also is the topic of variation. The whole classic music is based upon the idea of repeating certain central themes, but each time with a different approach and/or a changed notation set. A couple of (post-Rock) bands have managed to adapt that scheme, like on the newer Radiohead albums, for example. By that, in a style not too far from the Techno arrangement approach, a track keeps changing, and thereby surprises the listener again and again. To some degree, this is a very cool feature, but bare in mind that we’re ultimately speaking about DnB=dancefloor music, so Free Jazz anarchy is not an option.

Maybe it’s time to adapt some of those principles:

• On the global level: Chorus-like elements, thereby increasing the arrangement dynamics of a track and in parallel multiplying the effect of DnB’s drop mechanism.
• On the detail level: Permanent variations of themes, avoiding the perception of underlying copy&paste operations by introducing subtle percussion and hihat pattern changes, keeping the tune alive instead of static.

Interestingly, in information theory, the degree of information in a data flow is measured by its variance, which is a value computed from the data, which expresses the “difference” from the expected value.

So let’s increase the variance of our track arrangements, leaving the listener barely nothing to expect except for the change to come. And the drop. And another.

Wow, this must have been one of the heaviest, hottest parties I’ve ever been at! We had so much fun spinning, presenting our album “Beautiful Bytes” on a Basswerk session. Thank you everyone for coming out and celebrating that night with us! Awesome…

Check my flickr page for pictures… (thanks, ducktank, for some of them! – originally posted on drumandbass.de)