Dear folks,
for those who wanted to come to the shows today in wroclaw and tomorrow in katowice:

I am really sorry, cause due to last night’s big storm over germany, trains are not leaving from berlin this weekend.

I hope to come over in spring.

Francesco Caccamo (an ATM magazine editor) did an interesting interview with German duo Phace, who are about to release their Psycho album (which is already out on promo, while the full release is set to hit stores worldwide in february).

They’ve talked about Phace‘s history and making-of their album, but also more broadly about German scene and drum and bass current state and possible evolutions.

You can check out the interview on Phace‘s MySpace blog.

Taken from anamorphosis. Thanks!

After the positive feedback related to our previous free 320″ giveaway, Nostromo, we decided to hand over to the community another smasher by us, titled Columbia. This tune has had a similar history as Nostromo, as it was signed to U3R, but never released. What a shame! But seems that’s part of the DnB biz, too.Anyway, go ahead, play out whereever you like. One restriction: Make rewind, not profit ;)

Download

Technorati Tags: free, audio, download, drum, bass, dnb, track, n.phect, dizplay

I’m still thinking about tags. The idea of reader Cygn in a previous comment to establish a taxonomy or even an ontology to maintain tags and by that tagging DnB tunes, is compelling to music as a whole, but has some limitations when it comes to differentiating DnB tracks. Take, for example, Phace’s “Reservoir” and Misanthrop’s “Viperfish”. Of course, these two are similar, and to a random non-Head they would both sound like an incarnation of hell, still for an insider it’s possible to quickly distinguish the two.

The problem therefore is to build an ontology of entities which allow for handling very fine-grained differences. I’m currently not convinced that it is possible to do that. After all, as Miles Davis (?) put it, “talking about music is like dancing to architecture”. My fear is that at least 50% of all Neurofunk tunes will end up being tagged identically.

My question therefore is: Could you provide convincing tags to distinguish Reservoir and Viperfish? I’m talking about musical properties, not artist or label info. (Feel free to choose others for convenience)

Update:

After some fruitful comments by Cygn, I came to think that the only way to provide a specification for describing tracks as similar as many Neurofunk tunes, is by extracting their intrinsic properties, however hard that may prove to be. The more I think of it, the more I feel we need a highly focused ontology which provides the following descriptions, maybe on top of more generally appliable properties like “Neurofunk, heavy, minimal, sub-bass-focused”:

• DnB-specific patterns, i.e. drum patterns (i.e. the “Phace shuffle” = shifting the initial kick of each 2nd measure by one 8th)
• Contained elements, i.e. “Apache break” or “foghorn”
• Arrangement elements, i.e. delayed drop

The problem is that an author would be required to have both very analytical skills and DnB background knowledge. I really doubt that there enough people to get this going.

Consequently, most DnB tracks will be put into a relatively small amount of different boxes. Maybe that’s not even too bad…

Technorati Tags: dnb, drum, bass, distinguish, tracks, tagging, tags

A couple of weeks ago me and some commentators wrote about visualizing relationships between artists. Although I don’t find the following link too helpful in terms of completeness or correctness, it’s still a beautiful site to visite:

TuneGlue

(via ProgrammableWeb)

Technorati Tags: visualizing, relationships, artists

We have modified Neurocode and now support Microformats, thereby helping to leverage semantics on the web. To read more about the Microformats standards and understand why it may change the way we experience the web, check the microformats website and this introduction.
More precisely, you can now find our booking contact as an hCard, as well as all the 2007 events in hCalendar format. To use these embedded microformatted data, we recommend Operator, a Firefox Extension which allows for viewing and using this structured data bits. How do you do that? In The Operator toolbar, select i.e. the appropriate calendar entry,  choose export to Google Calendar, and the gig will be added to your Google Calendar entries.

Technorati Tags: Microformats