One of the ironies of netlabels is the prevelance of full-length recordings. The mainstream record industry (MRI? — maybe “mainstream music business,” MMB?) is slowly adjusting to an iTunes business model, in which songs are purchased individually. But so many aspiring netlabels — which are forward-looking enough to post their music online for free — persist in pushing multi-song releases.
There are occasional outliers, like the excellent, if less than prolific, Yo.yo pang (ambulatore.com/yoyo), which I wrote about back in October (disquiet.com) and which only releases individual songs. More often, an ongoing concern, like the ironically named netlabel top-40.org — a Moscow-based netlabel that likes its tunes dank and glitchy — takes a break from weighty albums for the occasional single, such as Abstrakt Machine‘s Motor (MP3), a through-composed survey of surface noise, distant voices and microsonics that suggests we’re evesdropping on a terrarium.