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The Mannheim-based label will release a vinyl compilation later this month.

We've got a winner! Back in December, Strictly Rhythm celebrated 20 years of label history by offering fans a chance to remix Armand Van Helden's 'Witch Doktor', a classic slab of darkside house music. Now, the votes have been tallied and Strictly Rhythm have chosen their favorite from the 20 finalists.

Read more on Beatportal

We've got a winner! Back in December, Strictly Rhythm celebrated 20 years of label history by offering fans a chance to remix Armand Van Helden's 'Witch Doktor', a classic slab of darkside house music. Now, the votes have been tallied and Strictly Rhythm have chosen their favorite from the 20 finalists.

Read more on Beatportal

bonobo eyesdown youtube
From: ninja000 Views: 236 24 ratings Time: 03:35 More in Music

They are the robots: Flight of the Conchords. Now, you are the robots, too, as Rock Band Network opens the indie floodgates to the music-distribution-as-game model. (And yes, you’ll get to sing along with the Conchords, too.) Photo (CC-BY-SA) kris krüg.

Music games Rock Band and Guitar Hero are simple enough in terms of gameplay, but testifying to the power of people’s passion for music, their impact has been staggering. At a time when purchasing recorded music has waned from a 90s peak, downloads for games are proving surprising growth, despite pundits predicting the segment would cool off. The talents of the Harmonix team attracted the collaboration of the download-averse surviving Beatles and family members. But most importantly, the popularity of these games has translated into renewed interest in learning to play real instruments. It’s no accident popular music chart sales are surging, or that you will now find a new selection of digital and acoustic (but serious) instruments at your local Best Buy, often located right next to the games section. (Even as a witness to this trend, I was surprised recently to pick up an extra KORG nanoKONTROL in the aisle next to Rock Band.) Heck, even sales of music notation software are growing.

I’m uncertain of the extent to which a game like Rock Band can be identified as the cause of these trends, but there’s no question that popular music making is on the rise, and games are part of the shift. Perhaps it’s a matter of games changing the way people feel about making music. After all, a lot of early music training is very much like a game: to learn a new instrument, you simplify the playing of that instrument into more basic exercises. Obviously, that helps develop chops, but it also boosts confidence, giving a music student a feel for what it’s like to play successfully. (And, let’s face it, even experienced pro players sometimes need to defeat anxiety.)

The dark side of all of this has been that the music itself has been limited to a narrow selection of top-of-the-charts hits and popular classic tracks. Rock Band Network doesn’t yet address the limited instrumentation (guitar, bass, drums, voice), but it does open production to a new range of artists – and that, in turn, could be the beginning of much more to come. By allowing anyone to author and distribute tracks for a nominal subscription fee on Microsoft’s Xbox creation community, Rock Band Network is all about opening floodgates.

Having followed the story here on CDM since last year, I’m thrilled that the Rock Band Network store itself is now live. The results run the gamut from relatively big-name artists to more obscure contributions. (Phone giant T-Mobile will pony up some cash to highlight an “Artist of the Month” from the community, in the interest of shining a spotlight on lesser-known acts.) The only bad news is, while the store is international, the Rock Band Network isn’t immune from the music industry’s trouble crossing national borders; as our own Jaymis discovered to his dismay, countries like Australia are left out. I hope to talk to Harmonix and Microsoft about how they plan to make these kinds of efforts more global with time.

For those countries covered, though, you can now enjoy the store as both an artist and listener (or make that “player”). Starting on launch day last week, of Montreal, The Shins, The Hold Steady, Steven Vai, and geek God Jonathan Coulton were onboard. (“The Future Soon,” anyone?) I’m pleased that among other artists, we have Flight of the Conchords to look forward to.

But I will say, whether you appreciate these games or not, there are promising signs for the music business here, without question. Harmonix’s founders began work with experimental musical interface research, as with many of the readers of this site. Oddly enough, though, what they found was by some measure an entirely new industry.

The idea: make the Xbox 360 game Rock Band an open mic night. Photo (CC-BY) Justin Moore.

By the numbers:

• Rock Band Network launches with over 100 songs, out of a private beta; expect far more.
• Artists choose pricing tiers and get a 30% royalty (high for this kind of royalty, at least for a typical indie artist).
• 1,100 tracks are currently available on Rock Band, prior to the many, many more expected on RBN.
• Some 4,300 users have registered on RBN to contribute tracks and/or perform peer review. That’s significant growth for Microsoft’s XNA community, and it’s prior to a wider launch that will be an order of magnitude bigger.

Harmonix info:
How to Submit a Song; scroll down to “Adding a song to the pipeline.”

How to Become a Peer Reviewer (aka playtester)

I’ll see the Harmonix team this week at GDC; I’m looking forward to it. Let me know if you have questions for them. It is a reminder, though, of why I’m glad to spend my travel time in March at the Game Developer Conference even in place of South by Southwest. I think a lot of our future may be at the former as much as the latter. (Well, and if not, I still get to geek out with discussions of adaptive music engines.)

If this stuff does interest you, don’t miss our previous, exhaustive Q&A’s with Harmonix (thanks to the folks there for being so forthcoming):
Inside the Rock Band Network, as Harmonix Gives Interactive Music its Game-Changer
Your Band in Rock Band: Rock Band Network Beta Opens, Q&A with Harmonix

It is February in Dublin. Danilo Plessow, a skinny white 24-year-old DJ from Stuttgart, spins vinyl to a tightly packed dancefloor in the Crawdaddy section of the Pod nightclub in Harcourt Street. Now known as Motor City Drum Ensemble, Plessow has worked under several aliases including Hypster Wonkaz, Aphro Pzyko, and Inverse Cinematics (previously his most successful project and a joint creation with Joachim Tobias), before he launched MCDE last year. Through a number of high profile remixes and a standout series of EPs called 'Raw Cuts', Motor City Drum Ensemble hit all the right notes in 2009. Both deep house master Moodymann, and Detroit pioneer Kenny Larkin, publicly praised Plessow for taking the classic Detroit sound and turning it into something new.

Read more on Beatportal

What can you do with this? Game designers and artists find out this week at GDC. (Pictured: my own submission, up close.)

Why should Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion (and, well, their editor) go to a game conference? This year, in particular, the annual gathering of game developers in San Francisco means a real convergence of gaming culture and digital music and motion, of ideas about how interactivity can work (and the challenges of making interaction design creative), of generative and adaptive music and new cultures of digital media. Aside from that, of course, there’s no particular reason.

A quick look at some event highlights with which I’m involved:
Tonight (Wednesday) is the debut gala for Gamma IV, the creative game design challenge by the Kokoromi Collective. You can check out the winning games on the show floor, as well.
http://www.kokoromi.org/gamma4/

The games themselves offer plenty of inspiration for live visualists and people exploring new interfaces for music. But there’s also a music lineup alongside, with Starpause, Phil Fish, Moldover, Baiyon, Class Prez, and Future Boy. A big thanks to my mate Starpause for putting that lineup together; I’ll also be doing a short live set.

Unrelated to GDC (but working out nicely since I’m in town), Thursday night is a meeting of the illustrious Bay Area Computer Music Technology Group (BArCMuT), with a big, all-female lineup of creative artists finding expressive new interfaces for musical performance. I’ll be giving a lightning talk before the full program, so say hi if you’re around.
http://www.meetup.com/barcmut/calendar/12702241/

Friday night is the free evening of One Button Objects, a set of interactive art pieces that explore what can be done with a single button. I’ll be talking more about that later this week; it really wound up being a great exercise, and even if you believe in rich, expressive control for music, forcing yourself to work with a single button is nothing if not enlightening. I co-curated the show with Heather Kelley of Kokoromi.
Event details: One Button Objects: Kokoromi + Gray Area Foundation for the Arts

We should warn you at the outset that this video is totally NSFM—not safe for mealtime, that is. The Dutch heavyweights of drum'n'bass and electro, Noisia, test your gag reflex with their video for 'Machine Gun', which begins as a clever collage of abstract imagery and commences in a bloody orgy of mangled flesh and raw meat.

Watch this video on Beatportal

The Liebe*Detail co-founder has started his own house imprint.

The brooding French artist will release her second album next month on Kill The DJ.

The latest model in Pioneer's ever popular mixer series will bring the range in line with their new CDJ models.

Robert Hood, DJ Koze, and Anthony 'Shake' Shakir will also play the annual Detroit festival.

The Oakland producer releases his entry into the imprint's limited edition series of cassettes today.

A BBC website article, Music stars ’still need labels’ , reports on comments made by global music industry body the IFPI.

IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) chief executive John Kennedy said attempting to forge a career online, competing with millions of other acts on MySpace, was like ’screaming in space’.

‘There’s not really any evidence of anybody succeeding having gone direct,’he said.

Utter nonsense! It all depends on what you call success. If you mean being a household name but all your rights being owned by a record label, all your creative decisions ebing made by marketing people, and being vulnerable to being ‘dropped’ by the label at the whim of an accountant, then maybe you have a point, Mr Kennedy. Some of us define success very differently.

The industry dons quoted in the article also fail to mention that in a standard industry record contract all the money they claim to spend nurturing talent is recoupable from the artist’s share of any royalties earned. In other words, although a label can help with cash flow and marketing, the artist pays for their own fame. The labels end up owning all the copyrights and publishing with a traditional deal and can effectively decide whether an artist works or not. How often has an artist you liked suddenly disappeared from public view? It’s probable that a label withdrew support in order to redirect cash to to fund ‘the latest thing’ but refused to allow the artist to sign to someone else or release their own music independently.

That’s why more and more muscians do not deal with record companies but do it all themselves. And, yes, they are successful but not according to 1950s standards. Bands are selling downloads and CDS, gigging, earning money, selling merchandise and building strong reputations for themselves and the old dinosaur labels hate that they’re not the ones raking in the cash. That’s what this whinging is all about.

Is there any producer with a keener eye for detail than Wolfgang Gartner? The meticulousness of the electro house producer from Austin, Texas, has made him a huge star within the genre, and helped him net eight Beatport No.1 records. Whilst most electro house producers opt for simplicity - a big bassline and a simple house loop will do, won't it? - Wolfgang Gartner throws layers of synths and FX into the mix, resulting in tracks that offer a multitude of build ups, bass holes, and hand-raising moments. His latest single 'Undertaker' sees Wolfgang return to what he does best - microscopically precise heavy house grooves mixed with an instantly recognisable epic melody. No doubt, it will be one of the hits of Miami's WMC 2010 in a little over two weeks. But what don't we know about Wolfgang Gartner? We decided to fire a series of personal questions at the producer and DJ to find out more about the man behind those killer electro house grooves (and yes, that is Wolfgang Gartner when he was a kid).

Read more on Beatportal

Download this now!

More info: http://destroyallconcepts.com/dubgabriel

DESTROY ALL CONCEPTS

Jeff Mills' theatrical DJ routine will debut in Europe next month at Tresor.

The German electronic pop group will release their third album this May on Italic.

The Berlin-based label will release a two-disc collection this May.

Episode 24 of our podcast is available from HERE or from iTunes. 74 minutes of transglobal breakbeat dub science and more….

Tracks

Salam Alaikoum
Darga
http://www.myspace.com/dargafusion

No/w Peace
Nomad Soundsystem
http://www.myspace.com/nomadsoundsystem

Crushed Mooncrators
Iron Braydz
http://www.myspace.com/ironbraydz

Get Crunk Wit Jesus
Mix n Blend
http://soundcloud.com/mixnblend/
http://skankypankyrecords.com/

Muqaddim
Celt Islam
http://www.myspace.com/celtislam
http://www.soundcloud.com/celt-islam

Gham Dub
Echo Wanderer
http://www.myspace.com/echowanderer
http://www.addictech.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=45609&atech_id=b3a931d5d8f1fcfa4d3c05c68ad5c99f

Tutankamun
Ges-E
http://soundcloud.com/nasha-records/tutankamun-by-ges-e-07958-204-188-ges-e-nasha-co-uk

Desert Escape
Jef Stott
http://soundcloud.com/jef-stott-embarka
http://www.www.embarkarecords.com/

Stepping Lion
The Talking Dog
http://www.brokendrumrecords.com
http://www.myspace.com/talkingdoguk

Faqir (David Starfire remix)
Jef Stott

Mureed
Celt Islam

Junjura
Jef Stott

Tigris Riddim
Monkey Steak
http://www.soundcloud.com/steak…/steak-002-b1-monkey-steak-tigris-riddim

Arabian Nights
The Wobblist
http://soundcloud.com/djbenk/sunrider-arabian-pleasure-electro-mix

Arabian Pleasure (Electro Mix)
Sunrider
http://soundcloud.com/djbenk/sunrider-arabian-pleasure-electro-mix