Buttering the musical muffin..

Album review – Enter Calico (Clear Notice Recordings)

Posted on August 9th, 2010.
Category:  tunes, video     
0 comments

I don’t usually do album reviews here, but I’m going to make an exception. Enter Calico, by new net label Clear Notice Recordings is a great compilation of unsigned electronica artists. That maybe nothing new in itself, but the label’s inception has been interesting and I’ve watched it unfold online for the last few months.

Clear Notice came about almost entirely through Twitter. Kieron James, the man behind Clear Notice, organized the whole release online. Not only are the artists discovered through Twitter, but the album mastering and artwork were done by Twitter contacts and, just for added value, Keiron organized a video for each song on the album (through Twitter again!). Check this stunning example for Tricil’s track “The Emancipation” by Burning Head.

The music itself is all important of course and it is a great album. There are some exceptional tunes here. David McSherry’s “U?+”, alka’s “sOMn ambulance”, tricil’s “The Emancipation”, rktic’s “nordic walking” and Tapage’s “Wounds” were all highlights for me and could easily be mistaken for songs by artists such as Chemical Brothers, Plaid, Orbital or Aphex Twin.

So if you want to support music and artists at grass roots, grab a copy of Enter Calico. It’s £7.99 from Bandcamp and should be available on iTunes within a few days. I recommend.

Ableton Live & Max For Live – Integrating hardware

Posted on August 2nd, 2010.
Category:  gear, max for live     
12 comments

I’ve been spending some time recently creating Max For Live controllers for all my hardware. The beauty of this is you can program a dedicated editor, with patch browsing, in whatever configuration suits you and have all parameters available for automation within Live. It means you can forget about what midi controller number does what on your synth and concentrate on making music. Read more…