Never delete a dead RSS feed, because you never know when the feed will suddenly show signs of life. Late last year, for example, the great if far-from-prolific netlabel called “yoyo pang” released a single song after an absence longer than a year. And then this past Friday, March 20, the Kikapu netlabel, which called it quits in early 2008 after 109 releases and almost a decade of activity, added release number 110 to its catalog. The Kikapu wesite, at kikapu.com, has long since come into the possession of a domain squatter, but a peek at the Wayback Machine at archive.org displays the final update to the page, which was simply a list of the label’s releases and a reflective quote from Walt Whitman: four lines from “Passage to India,” including the now somewhat clairvoyant “For what is the present, after all, but a growth out of the past?”
The release is Glades Fall, five tracks by Kikapu founder Brad S. Mitchell, who recorded it under the name Pocka. He reports on his own website, bradsmitchell.com, that he had entirely forgotten about it: “I discovered an entire album I recorded a couple of years ago. It was originally a demo for an overseas label, but it never came to fruition beyond this stage in the recording process.” It’s available at his soundcloud.com/pocka and at archive.org. It’s a great collection, especially the elegant backward-masking of “Patient Lines” and the hints of sublimated horn on “Brew Compound Create,” which make one wonder if the sampled material includes Miles Davis.
For future reference, this is the URL of the Kikapu feed: RSS. And here’s a brief interview I did with Mitchell back when he closed down Kikapu in 2008: “End of a Netlabel.”
The title of Tony Mahoney‘s recent Dusted Wax free netlabel download, the 11-track Product of a Dying Breed, is a conscious nod to the willfully backdated sound that he pursues. With the exception of a few vocal appearances on the recording, it’s purely instrumental hip-hop, and it’s made from the mix of steady beats and a minimal selection of samples that feels almost primordial in its sparseness. The aged quality is reinforced by how the tracks revel in the light sprinkling of vinyl surface noise that largely disappeared with the rise of digital production. Several pieces stand out, in particular a violin/piano/beats entry that lifts a smidgen of what appears to be Beethoven’s “Für Elise.” The reworking is titled “Broken Wingz,” and it’s to Mahoney’s credit that he manages to slowly erase the listener’s memory of the source material as his rendition proceeds — an especially tricky situation, given how deeply those notes are etched into our musical memories. 
One of the strong suits of Otomata, the browser-based web app of generative-sound ingenuity, is its social component. The app employs a Conway’s Game of Life grid as the basis for collision-based music making, and then lets users easily share with each other those select patterns of which they find themselves suitably proud — like