30 Nov
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General
artists

When Martin Gore (Depeche Mode) and Vince Clarke (Yazoo, Erasure) unite, it's an EP and it's called VCMG...

The "Spock" EP is on sale from today, and you can listen to it on Beatport.
http://www.beatport.com/artist/vcmg/229464/tracks

Now, is it exciting ? Do we really get the best of both worlds, the dark sides of Martin Gore, his taste and talent for melodies that will stick in your ears like glue, and the very danceable side of Vince, who was after all responsible for Depeche Mode's early hits (Vince left the band in 1981).

So, 22 years later, Martin and Vince re-unite on this neat EP. Prepare yourself for some instrumental techno not unlike the early Plastikman.

http://mute.com/vcmg/vince-clarke-and-martin-l-gore-announce-details-of-...
https://www.facebook.com/VCMGofficial

30 Nov
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General
artists, politics in music

You know at Kollector we're very much into people taking pride in their work as artists and while mainstream music rules fine in most cases, there's nothing like someone standing up from the crowd and being the voice of a generation, or a cause, or a movement, (or just for himself) but with a difference: a unique individual who never takes NO for an answer.

And Joe Strummer, who sadly passed away December 22 2002, was that: a loud, opiniated but charming man, very politically aware that stood up for the rights of the People, but also an exceptional artist : he was member of the iconic band The Clash and helped give Punk its best letters. He was also very involved in politics and took part in many Rock Against Racism concerts, AIDS campaigns, and his last records were actually pressed carbon free as Joe Strummer had trees replanted to offest the carbon foot of his releases...

Together with The Clash, they released two of the best rock albums ever: Sandinista and London Calling.

Julian Temple, an excentric and adorable english movie maker, has made a magnificent documentary on Joe Strummer http://www....

29 Nov
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politics in music

You know we love Henry here. Not only because he wrote a couple of classics, not because he has a great face we don't see enough in movies, not because he has a tatoo on his back the size of Brussels, but because he's articulate, clever, curious, addicted to his neurones showing the way up, dictatorial about where we could go if we were thinking from time to time. His stance might be directed at America first, yes, but at the same time his stance can be read globally: it comments what we are as people and how hollow we can be and his views are definitively very enlightning.

As you may know, Black Friday is the opening of the winter season in the US, and usually shops open at 04:00am, and some even at midnight... lines of people are standing on the street, waiting to get that apparatus they have been dreaming to own for months now...Incidentally, Black Friday is also a 1869 financial crisis where two gold speculators drove the USA to the brink of economic collapse. Rings a bell ?

Apple has never had a better black friday shopping day EVER: 400% above expectations...

Link to Henry Rollins' article:...

28 Nov
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politics in music

In an interesting blog entry from Tunecore, numbers show that only about 6.000 artists made more than a 100 $ in their monthly statement. Not afraid of big numbers ? Ok, Tunecore artists are...600.000: so that's only ONE percent of musicians making a decent (and sometimes very, very decent, income from their art)
(http://digitalaudioinsider.blogspot.com/2011/11/tunecore-releases-some-f...)

This is why it's not surprising the Occupy Movement started in NY a few months agois reaching more and more musicians as they are also part of the 99% of people off the Rich Grid, and they suffer directly from the effects of the big R, the recession hiting the planet. Moby, Kayne, The Kiils and many, many more artists are joining in as the peaceful movement grows and grows. What are the Occupy Wall Strert about ? Simple, yet worth the effort:

"Occupy Wall Street is leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of...

28 Nov
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General

Bill Bailey is a very funny stand-up comedian and not a bad musician altho he learned his tricks by constantely listening to The Monty Pythons and that's bad, really bad...

Musically, he's a weird and necessary person in this world: he invents wild instruments (the six neck electric guitar is a wet dream for anyone raised on Led Zeppelin...) and his raunchy reddition of Metallica songs on old cars's trumpets is exactly how Metallica should have done it in the first place !

In this long but worthy video, Bill gets into some fascinating and funny grooves with the Beeb's Orchestra (directed by the uber-talented Ann Dudley) and it's as funny and interesting: his ways of explaining how to strike different feelings with the appropriate chords is nothing short of fascinating.

Thanx Billl !

his website: http://www.billbailey.co.uk/

24 Nov
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artists, music history

Freddie Mercury was larger than life, a genuine entertainer, a great singer, an exuberant baroquian character that came up with some pure gems of songs. He passed away twenty years ago but his way of doing things still resonates in many bands today, be them Mika or Lady Gaga. We included here a documentary about him as the man deserves attention, he was far more than just a singer fronting a band.

At Kollector, we've been tracking 10 Queen's songs, and collectively they have been broadcast more than 19.000 times ! "Bohemian Rhapsody" of course is at the front with 4115 trackings since june 2011 with most of the trackings from canadia rock classic Radio K97 but Australia is the country most addicted to Queen's airplay. The song has been played 183 times these last 24 hours. Impressive, non ?

24 Nov
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advertisement, artists, music industry

We had a blog entry the other day about how the Y Generation sees very little evil at all into corporates funding artists. And maybe this is one of the ways Music can expand and grow: commercial companies seeing the benefits of being a sponsor. Just like in the Renaissance where artists were being able to survive and do their work thanx to rich benefactors...

In this case, Rolex his a sponsor for the Arts since 2002. More than 170 artists from different fildls (dance, film, literature, music, theatre and visual arts) have been assembled into doing a one year project between a mentor and his protege. People like Youssu N'Dour, Martin Scorcese or Peter Sellars have teamed up with youngs gifted artists and have interact with them for a period of at least 6 weeks, assembling new pieces or just communicating together...A bit like If Yoda a swiss watch was wearing to Jedi Padawan lessons to give :)

Brian Eno (universally known as a musical genius since Roxy Music to his work with U2 and others) has mentor Australian born artist Ben Frost (a post rock musician now living in Iceland) and together they made music, talked philosophy and arts....Here is a very interesting 5...

23 Nov
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music industry

Racism is a very sensitive issue but it needs to be tackled and chased.

Too often, pop videos portray the artists like semi-Gods living a dream, and this Florence And The Machines vidéo does just that but worst: it's drowned in horrendous pure-white-woman VS evil-black-man clichés and some of them carry very despictable racist imagery and creepy hidden meanings. The video has already attracted nearly 1 million viewers on Youtube and starts to make quite a noise because it does indeed make you travel thru white supremacy ideas and dogmas at the sound of a seemingly innocent pop song...

We leave you with this excellent article from Racialicious.com who dismantle the imagery behind what seems to be an innocent video...

http://www.racialicious.com/2011/11/22/no-light-no-light-white-supremacy...

23 Nov
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music industry

For a label, there's nothing easier to deal with than a dead rockstar. Executives don't have to mingle with the often tormented or, at best, needy artist, they immediately speak with the grieving widow or the artist's estate, all too ready to accept what the living lost wouldn't never have. And frankly, besides the fact that the artist for some reason never shows up at interviews, it's rather easy: all ils being marketed inhouse and very little can go wrong...This is why you see odd compilations, badly mixed rough demos, b-sides from old albums that never made it come out around Christmas, surely the best time to fee the fans' endless desire for more tracks from the departed Star. And we can understand the fascination for an artist, especially a young one and aren't there plenty around ? The Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, the Buckley's, the list goes on and on...

So, here comes the new Amy Winehouse: a truly great voice in a unique, strong-minded individual unfortunately out of control. Her 'new' album will hit the stores early december and no doubt will she share the charts with artists who just wish they had a tenth of the talent she had.

Kollector has been...

22 Nov
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music industry

Sometimes, it's ridiculous. When you're talking about Keith Richards (and friends) taking the stage and knowing he's about 67 years old, one can wonder where he find the energy, stamina, boldness to still go up there and perform. This said, nobody would ever blink twice if we had to tell you 'famous 67 years old bluesman takes the stage'.

There's something magical about old men still playing great songs that made them famous decades ago, but when the songs are about teenager frustration like I Can't Get No (Satisfaction) or controversial subjects like Sympathy For The Devil (the song most associated with the Hells Angels stabbing at Altamont in 1969), one cannot hide it might be time to retire...

But then again, no one says anything against an old painter having a new exhibition or a movie director finishing a hit movie at the age of seventy something so why should we even mention the fact they've been around a few decades and just concentrate on how great their latest work is....

here's Keith Richards talking about his latest project: a jam with his old friends from The Rolling Stones...

22 Nov
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music history

Brian Eno, apparently, has a great phrase about The Velvet Underground, that iconic rock band from the seventies: "The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band." And more or less the same can be said about Suicide early records: they may have sold little but their influences has been huge on electronic music and you can hear in their work traces of what will later be known as techno, synthpop, industrial and especially electroclash. Some say their music was totally avant-garde but Alan Vega said in 1980: "... I never heard anything avant-garde. To me it was just New York City Blues.".

Their live act was one of clear menace, heavy waves of analog distorted sounds with frantic, unreal vocals calling up ghosts in the hall. And sometimes, the crowd didn't want them to pursue: there's a famous bootleg from a Brussels' concert wich only lasted 20 minutes before the band was thrown off stage...

Martin Rev speaks with Network Awesome about these days, technology, the mainstream, punk music...in very eloquent ways. Respect.

the article:...

21 Nov
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music industry

In a bold move, ST Holdings, a UK company distributing more than 200 labels, has decide to take away all its music from Spotify, arguing that streamed music is cannibalizing sales.

It isn't the first time an indie label, or an indie distributor, declares Spotify is detrimental to music sales (and even Coldplay says so as they decide to not let portals stream their latest album) but this time a NPD Group study comes up with a survey clearly showing that streaming services eats up music sales as the legal streaming music users are less likely to buy music now that they have access to all the music they want for less that 10 € a month...

Spotify replied by saying they are offering a solution that works against piracy but this is clearly missing the point: streamers have to come up with a reasonable income for creators and labels, not only for huge acts or majors who are counting on massive numbers to hide for low retribution.
An example: 5.000 Spotify streams will get you about 10 € (5.000 x 0,002 € a stream) when 5.000 track downloads at iTunes generates 4.950 €...
See what we mean ?

...

21 Nov
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music instrument

Let's start with something light this week: Gwydion, from germany's Konkreet Labs, has taken an old 1950's cooking book and housed a small 139 $ Meeblip synth in it !
It looks great, sounds awesome and oozes cooliness like if it was born with it !

Now, besides being cool, this little booksynth is a great viral trick that will have Konkreet labs name being on quite a few lips these followings weeks. Well done guys!

more on Konkreet Labs: http://konkreetlabs.com/news/
more on MeeBlip: http://meeblip.noisepages.com/what-is-meeblip/

18 Nov
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General
music

Build in 1876 to host 500 classical music students, the Conservatoire de Bruxelles has today more than a 1000 students and welcome the world famous Concours Reine Elisabeth once a year.

Now,...it's a dump ! Ceilings are falling, some of the rooms are deemed dangerous of access by the Fire Brigade, and even the majestuous Hall's activities have to be tone down as the place is now becoming a risk hazard... Look at the clip directed by the students themselves, it's...embarrassing that a state funded school like that is being neglected. Try a society without culture and art and watch it crumblinb back to the Dark Ages !

But lets be positive: this will probably trigger some to open up their wallets and come with some welcome doe and resolutions so this place gets the lifting its students and teachers deserves.
They have a website dedicated to finding funds http://www.conservamus.be/cms/index.php?lang=en and a Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=139446508486&ref=ts

18 Nov
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Kollector, music industry

Let me tell you some about Kollector : it was actually started by two rights owners wanted to have a clearer picture of what their catalog was doing abroad.
Basically, for a very low price affordable to all in the music community, Kollector offers an incredible service: a worldwide realtime radiobroadcast tracking application meaning it scans the radios on the planet and detect when your songs are being played.
It can tell you, with real factual data, where (country, name of the radio) and when (date and hour) a song was played on radios.

These very valuable datas enable you to have access to:
- Realtime worldwide statistics giving you a precise and accurate view of your radio broadcasts.
- First hand transparent factual data to help you and your publisher/your collecting society to forecast airplay royalties.
- Time saving application optimizing the management of your audio works.
- Data you can share with your partners to overview in realtime and nationally/internationally your promo campaigns .
- Comparative watch to ensure new territories and markets.

One amazing plus is that Kollector opens up cultural diversity for...

17 Nov
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advertisement, fans, music industry

In a recent survey done by GMR, a few minor mindblowing ideas have been shattered. Seems like the Y generation (people born between 1980>1999) is shuffling the cards very differentely that others before them.

First: 68% of them don't mind too much the connection between music and brands. That's a radical departure from the X generation (people born 1960>1980) who dispised as much as they could the interactions between their favorite bands and commercial companies.
Secondly: 75% of the people would rather have no sex than having no music ! This data is brutally different when asked women (92% of women needs music more than sex while only 55% of men can do without sex. Hardly surprising :)
Thirdly: 48% of people think the internet is a better place to find music than asking their friends. Ouch, that hurts.
Four and last point: commercials is the right place to break a band as 69% of the people have been introduced to new music by commercials...This and movies: lots of work can be achieved thru placements.

This pictures a rather strange image of the youngsters, no ?

17 Nov
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music instrument

The Jew's Harp, or guimbarde as it's called in ze french (and in the picture), is often considered like a minor instrument, something only hobos or old bluesmen play but it is very reducing as that weird instrument is rather rich harmonically speaking, can hit low notes as much as high notes and sound uncanny like a synthesizer at times, or a digeridoo at others: that alone tells you how wide its range and richness can be...

Tran Quang hai is a world famous ethnomusicologist, 5th generation musician, and more than a virtuoso at the Dan Moi, the Vietnamese jew's harp.
But he's also a specialist of diaphonic chant, believed to be one of the oldest human chant, used by Inuits and shamans...Getting spooky, no ?

see this amazing clip for siberian chant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYqrWRiS204
Tran Quang Hai website http://tranquanghai.info/

Kollector is also about cultural diversity !

16 Nov
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music industry

The Music Industry is in a bad state as we all know...
The Majors are slowly eating up each other, Itunes is snapping a giant bit in all the songs they sell, Spotify and other streaming platforms keep on hammering great offers they can't refuse to music lovers and small/medium labels are suffering a lot: each release see them holding up their breath as no one knows these days if it will sell some, or just sell 1/3 of what the last album sold...
But we can cry about it or we can fight about it. More and more crowdfunding platforms are emerging here and there, usually there are a couple in each country, and the system does work for most.

In a general coup d'oeil, Paidcontent goes over the succes story of some of these crowdfunding site. Quite a few known bands have been going thru that business model: fans subscribe to a project, pre-pay for it. and follow its evolution as more and more fans gather. If the project doesn't get enough financial support, the money isn't used and everyone goes home. If the funding is a success, that allows the artist to go forward with his project. Some big names have used crowdfunding: Gang Of Four, Funeral For...

15 Nov
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music industry

Very interesting article in "The Music Void" about the then-newly appointed Sony CEO Andy Lack who was under a charm attack from Steve Jobs trying to get the big guys at the top of the Majors into the Itunes frenzy.

Being the man he was, it wasn't too hard for Stve Jobs to seduce Doug Morris (Universal) and Warner (Roger Ames) as they seemingly didn't see all Steve wasn't in it for the Love of Music but for selling tons of Ipods and Apple computers and devices and that the real target was to sell Apple hardware, not music.

Andy Lack saw the tactic behing Turtleneck Man and wanted a percentage on all Ipod sales...That move alone, if followed up by Morris and Ames, would have changed the situation the music industry is in these days: the labels (and therefore, hopefully, the musicians) would earn on the sales of the machinery their music is played on. Sounds logical, no ? Well, it wasn't at the time and if Universal and Warner would have join cause with Sony, Apple wouldn't be today The Mother Of All Major Labels by now and the music industry would benefit from the digital revolution and not be a victim like it is now.

Today, Andy Lack is head of new media...

14 Nov
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music industry

Well, it's time to dig up one of the worst secret of rock music: all the incredible stories you hear about bands are probably true. And if they are not, just relax and wait as they will come true some days :)

Slipknot, the very visual Nu Metal band, is gross, and in fact, they're making it part of the attraction: the worst they get, the more their audience will love it and frankly why not ?
Some bands are selling the sex appeal of their female lead singer and one can wondering why not selling horror and disgust, sickening images and dense anxiety with Silent Of The Lambs imagery ? It works !

In this rather surreal exposé, Slipknot tells 7 crazy and frankly gross stories that happened to them. Sometimes you need to read them twice such the story seems impossible or demented. But no, they are true..

oh, btw, this Slipknot video has been seen by more than 20 million people. There's a market for gross stories :)
the 7 stories: http://www.spin.com/articles/crazy-clown-time-slipknots-7-grossest-stories

14 Nov
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graphics

Ok, this isn't music related but still interesting and bearing nearly the same name as your beloved radioairplays tracking application: Lille is seeing a great CNAP (French State funded National Center for Graphic Arts) exhibition and if you're around it's a well worth visit.

3 floors of art, most of it being challenging and providing interesting points of views and reflections about ourselves, the medias and how they interact with our live, the attitudes, the economics and the evolutions (or devo-lutions) of our societies.

As part of this exhibition, the thrilling "Logorama", a 14 mins long animation build around names and logos. Incidentally, this movie is made by H5, a french company with Etienne De Crecy's brother (from Superdiscount, probably the best French Touch CD ever)

14 Nov
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graphic design, movie industry

Ever wondered where you saw that movie poster before ? Sometimes, differences between two movie posters from two different movies are very few and far between indeed. This said, it's obvious the message has to be clear and directly touch the targeted audience: there's not much room for doubts and wandering toughts. But sometimes the lack of difference is...uncanny at best !

Let us take you to http://www.ufunk.net/insolite/les-affiches-de-films-se-ressemblent-toutes/ when Christophe Courtois has assembled together movies posters that look so much like each other one wonder why they just didn't use the original poster and just changed the title....

11 Nov
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vinyl

Besides the audio loss inherent to an mp3 download, one also experiment nowadays the very sad disapperance of the record cover...Vinyl albums and twelves inches had the space to display what sometimes turned into real art...Record Covers !

UK's Andrew Heeps from Art Vinyl had a GREAT idea. As a music lover, and very good businessman, he has developped the already successful commercial venture of selling iconic albums in frames you'll put on your wall but can open to get the record out and play...Already 100.000 of these special frames have been sold. The common price for these items are about 50 UK £ and a shirtlist of iconic records and sleeves has been selected, but you can put any album sleeve, or 12" sleeve, in these astute frames...and your wall starts to be an art gallery http://www.artvinyl.com/en/gallery/index.html

Just in time for Christmas, non ? ;)

http://www.artvinyl.com/index.html

10 Nov
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Kollector, music history, radios

"Dancing Queen", a disco hit dating back from august 1976 from superstar swedish band Abba, is still rising high on the radios playlists. We introduced the song in Kollector and let a few days pass, just to see how a 35 years old back catalogue song would do. And surprise, surprise, there's still life in the old dog ;)

In the last month, "Dancing Queen" has enjoyed no less than 1200 radio airplays and it still hold on very well on radios as its been favored especially in (by order of airplays received) Germany (158 trackings), United Kingdom (154 trackings) followed closely by France, Canada and The Netherlands. To give an idea of the performance, Swedish House Mafia's "Save The World" has enjoyed"only" 4 times more airplays during the same period, which shows how resilient and still royalties wise important "Dancing Queen" is !

Kollector can help all in the music community. You betcha it can!

10 Nov
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Kollector, radios

As you may know, Kollector can track songs all over the world, in realtime, and in all transparency. And in fact, Kollector gets even more interesting when it's about to gather international datas on your airplays: realtime numbers of your airplay is very, very hard to get and very expensive (that is if you DON'T use Kollector as Kollector is very reasonably priced and available to ALL in the music community), and international numbers are night on impossible. Not with Kollector...

Diego Torres, huge argentinian star, has his latest hit-song "Color Esperanza" (his video has enjoyed more than 4 million views on Youtube...) appearing on quite a few different countries, from Spain to Mexico, Chile or Argentina on the Kollector dashboard. Kollector can even tell you that, at the time I write this report, the latest radio to play the song was Kiss Fm, in Malaga (Spain), at 21:55 local time. And the most dedicated radio to play Diego Torres's tune was Cadena Dial Andalucia Este, in Spain too. With Kollector, you know how many times the song was played, where, when and how it fares out in the weeks since it's been in the system...

How is that for gathering factual...

09 Nov
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music history, music songwriters

There is no doubt Portishead and Massive Attack are to be highlighted as some of the best bands from the Nineties, and as the most known acts from a mainly UK scene called Trip-hop.
Trip Hop was basically an experimental sounding leg of breakbeat with influences from soul, reggae/dub, ambiant, funk and jazz which occasionally made it into the charts with songs like Unfinished Sympathy (Massive Attack huge hit) or Glory Box.

In an interesting and frank interview, Geoff Barrows from Portishead answers questions about the band, the state of the trip hop scene, why Nineties bands are part of pop culture, or not, and an bold, but probably true, statement about why the music scenes don't glue together no more. Interesting, didn't we say ?

the interview http://www.spinner.com/2011/10/07/portishead-interview/
Portishead website http://www.portishead.co.uk/

09 Nov
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music instrument

Just when you thought you were on the safe side and you were übercool cos you could listen to Stress by J.U.S.T.I.C.E. and survive the exercice, another underground musical movement disrupts your zenitude...
Circuit Bending isn't new (1984 or so) and it has been around for quite a few decades but this punkish DIY philosophy of electronically altering small electronic guitars or toys or low end musical synthesizers is interesting as it relies on defaults and distortion and random events, things a classical musician (it can be a rock musician who has a classic approach of music) wouln't even think doing.

Circuit bending is very interesting cos it somehow shows disregard for the safety of well packaged/well thought about electronic tools or accessories we take for granted. But beyond the case, after you've been opening it there's a new world, a cahotic one that negates the safety of ours....A world made of randomised effects and noises aiming at challenging your views on sounds and sonic experimentations. And enjoy yourself.

Uhum, that was deep ;)

part II of the documentary: http://www.youtube...

08 Nov
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music history

(do look at this clip, it has Slash doing a most amazing solo...)

"Le Freak c'est chic" must be one of the biggest let's-go-dancing anthem ever: even tho it was written and released more than 30 years ago it always works... That's when you know you have a classic on your hands...

The story of his co-writer (Nile Rodgers wrote this song back in 1978 with the sadly departed Bernard Edwards) is one of these amazing rollercoaster stories: starting as a guitar player and session man, he played with various acts like Screaming Jay Hawkins (i puuuuuuut a spell on you), Parliament or Ben E. King, Rodgers met Edwards early seventies and some years later they would be one of disco's greatest assets with hits like 'Le Freak C'est Chic' and the absolutely gorgeous 'I Want Your Love". They also produced and penned songs for Sister Sledge. In a way, they were Disco. Later on they produced many acts, like for instance Diana Ross and her famous "Diana" album.

Nile Rodgers loves music and his history is one of love and care for artists and sounds, one that transcends music genres, races and creeds (he produced Duran Duran, Bowie and Madonna) but he's also a man who had to...

07 Nov
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music business, music industry, vinyl

These days, we hear more and more about crowd-funding for music related "products": records (but also movies) are being made possible by the injection of funds from the public, charmed and interested in a specific project.
The idea of crowd-funding isn't new but it attracks more and more people and groups who relay on this social based dynamic to get running on a documentary, an album, an art project.

Vinylmania is one of these great project: an italian vinyl lover wants to make a 75 minutes documentary about how he got entangled in music and he visits 11 different cities in the world, meets many different people, all as bitten as him by the love of music and it's paramount object: the vinyl. His film embodies so well the love for music and its physical presence, something we're losing when buying an mp3: lines of codes lost among other lines of codes can't compete with a 30cm Long Playing with a cover, an artwork sometimes as important as its musical half.

see here for more infos about Paolo Campana and his documentary project: http://www....

02 Nov
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movie soundtrack

We were talking a few weeks ago about the Majors' decision to let the CD behind, to concentrate on digital and only use the shiny plastic for limited editions - be them "pure edition" (low cost low packaging CD) or luxury editions.

This move is commandeered for several reasons but here are two obvious ones: digital sales is picking up steam against CDs and retail shops are simply disappearing from the main streets.
In an era where social recommandation is the talk of the town and allows nearly every music startup a decent first round of the table, the end of the record shops (the ultimate place for real curated, knowledgeable recomm') sounds like an ending to all hope to see a music industry rise above the last ten gloomy years. That would be true if the love for music had disappeared but many, many people across the globe still have that special relationship with music, be it on vinyl or CD. And even tho they disappear from Main Street, we can see dedicated music shops appearing here and there. There will always be a place for music lovers to gather around.

The music loving english director Jeanie Finlay has done a beautiful crowdfunded documentary on...

02 Nov
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music history

There are so many stories running on Phil Spector, how he used to scare all his artists when coming in the studio with his guns, and costumes that matched the handgrips color, how he was just totally obsessed and manic, and how, sadly, someone died in his Hollywood mansion and consequently Phil Spector ends up now in jail...

But what isn't a legend, a rumour or a bizarre story is his true incredible visionary talent. Between 1961 and 1965, Phil Spector owned Pop Music. Or let's say he owned the last leg of Pop before the newest crop of bands and songwriters (The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Stones,...) would come in and decimate the charts with a new sound, a new image, a new rebel spirit. He was probably the last tycoon of Innocent Pop, this american bred of devastatingly sad love stories sung with trademark heartbreaking naivety and innocence but in fact filled up with strong sexual tension and unassumed teen dreams. Where others would put a guitar, a bass, tiny little drums and a simple melody, Phil Spector would just add 3 basses, 3 guitars, 2 pianos and 3 drummers, all working out to extract magic out of a 3 mins long song. At most. Phil Spector didn't do little...