Tag: music

Trance Tuesday: not every Tuesday

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

 

I really want to figure out how to make the right production mix to craft classic female leads for vocal trance music. Anyway I’m convinced there’s a formula that has to do with creating a husky, sensual echo sound that must involve multiple vocal tracks in layers.

Well one of the world’s foremost practitioners of trance at the moment, Gareth Emery, mixes a song that he used in a previous mix but lets the whole vocal track play through, unlike in the previous mix. The effect is a totally new understanding of the song’s meaning. Trance, at its best, is like that–equivocal but always intriguing.

Gareth Emery has a podcast that has become my favorite source of new trance music. Too much time is occasionally used for unenthused reading of listener emails, but most of it is good music.

Not that there’s much competition. It’s too bad Trance Tuesday, a more techie style trance podcast from San Francisco, only comes out every few months now. Certainly 2007 is not a high point for trance music, but it is a high point for Gareth Emery, whose podcast #40 exceeded expectations with an excellent hour-long mix set.

Other trance acts worth checking out right now include quirky Danish psy-trance outfit Flowjob and the always-brilliant work of Sander Kleinenberg, Paul van Dyk and Deadmau5 and Fine Taste.

How Last.fm creates business for Beatport

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

DJs__Love-Fest_2006_SF_CIMG1931
I think Last.fm is one of the most important sites of the web 2.0 era. It’s an Internet radio station, you’ve probably heard of it but if you haven’t tried it you should. Probably my favorite background listening when I’m relaxing is the trance tag radio station.

Many people use Last.fm’s soical networking features, and why not–for music fans it’s a great way to meet people online. But I use enough social networking stuff and the reason I go to Last.fm is for the music–because recently it’s become my favorite place to discover new music.

When I put on trance tag radio, it plays songs that others have tagged trance. Some of them don’t belong, but most of the selections do at least somewhat and it’s easy to skip to the next song anyway. And once in a while, I find a new song that I really like.

But this is where Last.fm needs an upgrade. Instead of sending me on a search on Amazon.com for the whole album, I should be able to buy the mp3 right away. They should partner with Apple iTunes or Beatport.com or build their own music store, and sell individual tracks. As of now I just head over to one of those places for the song, sometimes after finding it on Last.fm. (Tabs pose an underrated threat to e-commerce sites, because they put so much information–crucially, from different sources–on the same browser at the same time).

It’s true that other sites like di.fm have something close to that, in terms of Internet radio and a music store. But that site lacks the web 2.0 features and buzz that Last.fm has.

Now, Last.fm has a lot of good music but since so many of their listeners like rock and roll they don’t exactly specialize in electronic music the way a more focused site could–and because of the tagging and things the more listeners in a certain genre the more interesting the radio station for that genre so that means something.

Come to think of it, maybe this calls for all these ideas being thrown together into a new electronic music radio/record store site. Of course, maybe not–the market seems to be flooded already with half-baked Internet startups.

The most underrated bands of the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

1960s: The Velvet Underground

Now this is a famous band, to some extent–but even allowing for all that it is the most underrated 60s band. Do you really know how good they were? To hear it all put out there in terms that those of you who fear the esoteric New York art band’s noisy early days (when the sound was heavily influenced by the legendary early members John Cale and Nico) can deal with skip forward to the late days of the group and the song “Stephanie Says.” No song has ever made a more convincing argument about how cold Alaska is, and few songwriters have captured the pop genius of the Lou Reed.

1970s: Television

Tom Verlaine invented the angular guitar hook sound of U2 all while forging a fascinating and complex punk sound that was still every bit as street as The Sex Pistols or the Ramones. Listen to “Prove It” from 1977 for a great example of the sound, or “Guiding Light” if you need a pop edge to it. (Attention Irish megastar fans: Television actually sounds nothing like U2, though what I said above about the guitar stylings is true.)

1980s: Pet Shop Boys

Nothing really comes to mind. Perhaps the early work of the Pet Shop Boys, while popular then, doesn’t get the attention alongside other dance classics the way it should. 1987’s “Actually” is a phenomenal album, and songs like “Shopping” would mix well into trance sets. (Well, I guess they probably roll like that in London, but here in San Francisco you’re just lucky if you don’t hear songs with lectures about “WHAT REAL HOUSE MUSIC IS” and “THESE DAYS EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE A DJ!” when you’re out. Actually, continuing on this tangent, I’ve been think of trying to compile a collection of such songs and release it as the “House Lecture Series” LP.)

1990s: Underworld

Underworld came out with a few long, melodic electronic tracks like “Born Slippy,” “Push Upstairs” and “Dirty Epic” that even got occasional airplay. But the 1996 album “Second Toughest in the Infants” is easily the greatest electronic album I’ve ever heard. Though it features none of the above-mentioned songs, it has an amazing opening triad (“Juanita/Kiteless/To Dream of Love”) and continues through a series of tracks that are both wide-ranging and highly consistent. “Pearl’s Girl” was the album single, where occasional shattered beats almost recall the drum-n-bass madness at the time, but then roll into the huge techno track with a star vocal turn by Karl Hyde.