Tag Archive for 'music'

DJ Neekola, New MobBase Artist with New Music

published
on April 12, 2010
by
LG
in artist/album reviews, MobBase, and music
. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

Check out one of the newer artists on the MobBase scene, DJ Neekola from Washington, DC…. she’s hot!

Born in New York and educated in Virginia, Neekola currently resides in Washington DC where she works as a full time international DJ. Inspired by her parents musical talents, Neekola has been involved in music since childhood. The early years were spent in rock bands as a lead singer, keyboard player and songwriter. However, upon moving to Germany in 1997, Neekola was introduced to her soulmate, electronic dance music. She spent so much of her time dancing in the nightclubs within Europe. It was during this time she was inspired to pursue music production. After having a bit of trouble, she was advised by her mentors in the industry that she should first learn to DJ, and then her production skills would come naturally soon after. So she headed on out to NYC’s Scratch Academy, learned the basic skills, acquired her own turntable setup, and then her life changed forever…

Check out Neekola’s app and new song, “Don’t Live for the Moment.”

Don’t Live for the Moment – ORIGINAL by Neekola
Don’t Live for the Moment – ORIGINAL by Neekola

Neekola built her app using MixMatchMusic’s new DIY app building platform, MobBase, which makes it easy for musicians, music companies and music blogs to build a mobile app for as little as $0.50 a day. And because MobBase enables us to update the app’s content and design whenever we want, be sure to check the app often because we’ll be keeping things fresh. Ya dig?

Help Photek Make a Song and Win!

published
on October 7, 2009
by
LG
in collaboration, dance, future of music, music, music production, remix promotions, and remixing
. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .
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Calling all DJ’s, Producers and Recording Artists!!

Talenthouse is partnering with MixMatchMusic‘s online remix technology to give you the chance to remix Photek’s track and submit it to Talenthouse for a chance to be on an upcoming Photek release. For all of you Drum & Bass lovers out there, here’s your chance to help Photek finish a song! Photek, who has been producing and spinning creative drum and bass since 1992, is looking for dubstep and 4 to the floor remixes of his Drum & Bass track, “Fake ID”. He’s asking creators to produce a banging track that people would want to hear in a club. Our friends at Talenthouse say that they’re not looking for Photek clones, but for people to be original. Can you dig it?

If your remix is selected by Photek and the Talenthouse community, it will become an official Photek release and you will be credited in full as the official remixer and receive full promotion and distribution.

How to participate:
The Photek “Fake ID” remix contest can be found on the Talenthouse website as well as in a Remix Wizard that has been setup for the contest.  Stems can be downloaded from either place, but please be sure to upload your remix to both places. If you don’t have any music making software, you can use MixMatchMusic’s MixMaker to make your own remix online! For a complete list of rules and requirements, check this.

Who is Photek?
Although Photek is recognized as one of the founding pioneers of Drums and Bass, what sets him apart from the crows is his amazing ability to take the signature Photek sound to different places, outside the D&B genre.

While on Virgin Records, he managed to chart some of the most groundbreaking music into mainstream consciousness with the albums “Modus Operandi” and “Solaris”. His singles have spanned the full spectrum of electronic music, with straight up club hits like “Mine To Give” to the most legendary & abstract “Ni Ten Ichi Ryu”. It is this versatility and originality that has made Photek a favorite among artists such as Trent Reznor, Andre 3000, Bjork & David Bowie.

Originally from London, Photek is now based in Los Angeles where he finds himself evolving into an ever broader range of music through film music and artist collaborations. The UK/USA connection seems to have worked out perfectly for Photek, with the “Love & War” named Single Of The Week on BBC Radio 1 in London and his mixes of NIN’s “The Hand That Feeds” a hit on KROQ in Los Angeles.

Here’s a little taste of some of Photek’s remix, production, and score credits:
Nine Inch Nails, David Bowie, Bjork, Gwen Stefani, Goldie, Zero 7, Shy Fx/Elephant Man, Everything But The Girl, Roni Size “Reprazent”, Beth Orton, Attica Blues, London Electricity, Bumblebeez, Therapy, The Faint, Ringside, Jem, Rairbirds, Craig Armstrong, M. Night Shyamalan’s – Signs, Six Feet Under, The Matrix – Animatrix, The Italian Job, Stay, Invincible, American Wedding, Dreamland, Blade, City Of Industry, Raising The Bar.

RIP Les Paul

published
on August 13, 2009
by
ACtual
in collaboration, culture, DIY, genres, music, music business, music history, music production, and recording
. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

Les Paul

A sad day in music today as one of the older trailblazers, Lester “Les Paul” William Polfuss passed away. He was 94. Born only a few short years after the sinking of the Titanic, Paul lived through two World Wars, numerous armed skirmishes, the Depression, three “first” Supreme Court Justices as well as the first African-American president. But in a life that spanned all of those historic events, his contributions to music, the recording industry and the guitar dramatically changed the way it was created, played and recorded on a level unparalleled elsewhere.

Not only was Paul an accomplished musician, but his DIY tendencies and desire to see how things worked lead him to develop technology that shaped the future of the music industry and huge developments within genres. The standard of multitrack recording was pioneered by Paul, and the practices of overdubbing and delays were advanced by him as well. Dissatisfied with the acoustic guitars available, Paul created his own electric guitar. This would go on to be manufactured and sold by Gibson, becoming one of the iconic guitars for rock musicians from multiple generations. Certainly we may not have had the Steve Miller Band were it not for Paul being Miller’s Godfather and giving him his first guitar lesson. I’ve also read that when he broke his arm he asked the doctor to reset it in a permanent guitar playing position. I can neither confirm nor deny that.

When it comes to instrumentation and studio techniques, few people in the recording industry have had as much of an impact as Les Paul. His influence and love for music was so great that he continued playing guitar into the last year of his life, and created continued inspiration for premier guitarists worldwide. In a musical climate where “innovation” comes in the form of auto-tune and artists rarely have more than monetary attachments to the instruments they play, Paul’s truly significant leaps of technology and his subsequent engineering attachment to the instruments he created will remain singular and unique for some time to come.

Sharing Mp3s in Twitter

published
on January 29, 2009
by
ACtual
in culture, DIY, future of music, music, music business, nerd, technology, web 2.0, and website
. 4 Comments Tags: , , , .

While Evolving Music and MixMatchMusic have been Twitter devotees for several months now (check out why one of our writers thinks that musicians should jump on the Twitter bandwagon), I’ve only recently picked up the site. And I’ll be honest, if I hadn’t seen the iPhone app Gavroche has been rocking, I probably never would have. I put up an account several months ago, but the idea of just text messages coming in, or needing to look at a browser window seemed ridiculous to me. I’m not sitting at home checking my computer to see what other people are up to. But when Gavroche introduced me to Tweetie where you can post automatically, get a nice streamlined list of responses and other peoples’ status messages, I was intrigued. When he showed me how easy it was to post photos to the site from the phone, I was sold. And now, with even more features, I’m beginning to feel like Twitter culture is slowly infiltrating everything (and now to see if they can come up with a workable business model to actually stay in business.)

But up until now, the shortened URLs, the pictures, the @replies… these are fun things that have kept me busy, but haven’t yet broken into the main area of interest that I have… namely, big shocker here, music. So when I read about Songly, I was of course intrigued. The service allows you to use ANY URL that is hosting an Mp3 and post it as a Tweet. Here’s the kicker though… it doesn’t just shorten the URL and make it tweetable… it wraps it up in a flash player so anyone can listen.

To try out Songly, click here, and to read my first tweet attempt at such a thing, click here. I’ve used the new Souls of Mischief song, “Tour Stories” (click here for Souls of Mischief interview.) And for those of you rocking FireFox, Songly has an integrated tool for it. Talk about musical connectivity. A fantastic way to share music that will surely evolve with Twitter, forming the future of content sharing. Only drawback? Since the player they use is Flash, your iPhone friends won’t be able to listen until they get to a computer.

Christmas Music

published
on December 24, 2008
by
ACtual
in artist/album reviews, culture, genres, music, music business, and remixing
. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

I’m incredibly fed up. No, it’s not Bush’s pardons that are irking me… as long as he doesn’t hand one over to Scooter Libby I’m ok. I’m pretty sick of seeing red and green everywhere, but it’s Christmas time, so what can you expect, you just have to deal with it. No, what I’m sick of today is Christmas music. I’m not sure what it is (cough*money*) but every artist out there feels it’s not only their right but their absolute duty to remix the holiday classics in order to put out a Christmas album with a 93,000th rendition of “Jingle Bells.”

I’m not sure when we decided that the classic “Jingle Bells” wasn’t enough, nor for that matter when artists figured out the cash cow that is Christmas music. Every year, a different pop artist attempts to cash in on the act. Over the years, I’ve seen the travesty of Christmas albums put out by country artists and vocal crooners. I’m confused as to just how many versions of the same 11 songs these artists think is logically necessary.

Do I sound “bah humbug” here? Don’t get me wrong… I’m all for mixing and matching, and certainly in favor of a remix industry that allows artists of various genres to expand the musical universe, but there’s a difference between the creative re-working of music and the canned grab for money that the industry orchestrates in the Christmas music album rush every December.

The problem is that none of it is actually very good. I could go into a studio, put down a faux drum beat and carol for the microphone and it would probably come out in the general vicinity of skill displayed by other Christmas albums. Often the background music is just cheesy tones and chimes to provide the melody while an uninspired, already multi-millionaire artist sings the same lyrics sung by 100s of other artists because, hell, when you can clear a couple thousand dollars just by re-singing Christmas, you’d have to be stupid not to, right?

I think the worst would have to be Paul McCartney. As a former Beatle, the man has more money than several third world countries combined. There is absolutely no reason for him to be putting out a Christmas album, and yet he did. And since he did, I’ve contemplated suicide every Christmas morning when my Mom faithfully puts on his album with the song “Wonderful Christmas Time.” Now, McCartney’s transgression is worst than most… other artists settle for a CD of Christmas covers. You can’t really screw up a Christmas cover unless you try. But being the creative force that he believes himself to be, McCartney instead writes a new Christmas song that is so hideously bad that it sounds like a 4th grader in England could have written it. It not only tarnishes McCartney, but it tarnishes Christmas.

Steven Colbert jumped on the bandwagon this year, although, his foray into the Christmas album world is with a grain of salt as I believe he’s donating the proceeds, and the only real reason he did it was to create an album that could knock Kanye West’s 808 and Heartbreaks from the top spot on the charts. It worked. So on a humorous note, I don’t have a problem with this kind of album… it’s just the albums that are canned re-workings of holiday songs that I have a problem with.

But I wouldn’t rant like this if I wasn’t going to offer you a solution. The other night while watching Conan O’Brien, a longtime favorite group of mine was the musical act. Bela Fleck and the Flecktones came on at the end of the show to do a song off of their new album, a Christmas affair titled Jingle All the Way, and the track smoked. While other artists want to give you the same 4:30 version you’ve heard before, only with their voice and slightly different backings, the Flecktones bring their signature free-wheelin’ jazz style to create beautiful new takes on worn-out classics. As Gavroche stated last night after watching the segment, “It’s like acid jazz Christmas music.”

Fleck’s mastery of the banjo, Jeff Coffin’s breathless and frenetic horn playing, Vic Wooten’s blistering bass work and Futureman’s percussion work that always strays outside the boundaries make this Christmas album unlike any you’ve heard before. The instruments breathe the words into these instrumentals, and the songs never fear to bring out the creative musical flair that the group brings to all of its endeavors. Furthermore, the track selection and depth of musicianship here help eliminate any idea that the group did the album for the Christmas cash… artistically, they have always only done what they’ve wanted to do, so the organic composition of this album and its release speaks to their current desire to make Christmas music. And with all of the garbage Christmas covers floating around out there, who can blame them?

So if you’re tired of hearing the same songs every December, but the family insists on Christmas music, give Jingle All the Way a shot… it’s the musical brandy for your usually dull egg nog stereo.