Quote of the Week: Autechre’s Crack

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

From an interview with Autechre‘s Rob Brown at pitchforkmedia.com on the occasion of the new album Quaristice:

But there is a kind of yearning for a big musical movement to blow everything else away, and I guess r&b is kind of holding everything back in that regard. The only developments you get are like Timbaland might tweak something here or there more than he did last year, or people will go get the acoustic guitar samples out and Neptunes will jump on it. There’s these things, but I think we’re just in our own little world trying to have our new ideas in slightly newer contexts. I think that’s the same plan that we’ve always had since day one, slipping into the cracks in a society of music that doesn’t quite deliver the things that we need personally from it.

Warp Founder Interview MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Up at the Red Bull Music Academy, a conversation with Steve Beckett, Warp Records founder, on the rise of rave culture, the influence of hip-hop on electronic music, how British geography shapes culture, early adventures in online distribution, working with Designers Republic, and more subgenres than you can shake a glow stick at (MP3). Additional details at redbullmusicacademy.com.

There’s a funny bit at the end when it appears that Mark Pritchard (aka Reload) asks a question of Beckett, and Beckett says that when he’s done answering he has a question in return for Pritchard, who is apparently four years into a contract to deliver an album to Warp. For context, here’s a 2002 Red Bull interview with Pritchard, in which he mentions his association with Warp: redbullmusicacademy.com.

Classic Wieland Samolak MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Not all the freely downloadable music at the website of Robert (Monolake) Henke is outtakes of Henke’s past recordings. He some time back posted the complete, out-of-print album Steady State Music, released by Wieland Samolak in 1993. It was the first record ever on the Imbalance record label. Its five tracks consist of low rumbles, gestural textures, and, foremost, treated noise — noise so dramatic and rich that what is initially essentially the sound of a TV set on a dead station comes, in time, to have the depth of a large-scale choral arrangement. Get the full set at monolake.de. The files are all compressed at a generous 320kbps, all the better to drone — er, zone — out to.

Homemade Japanese Instrument MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There aren’t just second and third lives on the Internet, but countless ones, because links are rediscovered anew by successions of web-surfers — and one new link yields a new search result which yields new readership. The “self-made instruments” page at the website of Adachi Tomomi hasn’t been updated since June 2005, but a weekend post at livepa.blogspot.com was picked up by the-palm-sound.blogspot.com, which is recommended reading for its constant feed of information on mobile music-making. One highlight on Adachi’s website is a set of images and sound related to a device he created and called the Tomoring: “It has many springs, metal wire, strings and so on. It is to hit, scrub by fingers, small sticks, brushes and electric fun. The sound is amplified by 4 piezo pickups attached on the acrylic plastic body” (MP3). The resulting music sounds like a kalimba plucked by an extroverted octopus. More at adachitomomi.com.

End of a Netlabel

Brad Mitchell reflects on the decision to close his long-running netlabel, Kikapu.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A funny thing happened on the way to downloading the most recent release from the netlabel known as Kikapu. Run by musician Brad Mitchell (aka Pocka), Kikapu has been posting for free download original electronic music since 2001. The latest release popped up late last month as a headline in my RSS reader, with links to archive.org, the Internet Archive, where Mitchell and many other netlabel administrators house their media files.

But when I visited to the Kikapu website, kikapu.com, for additional information there was no mention of the release, a nine-tack set titled VXVII by Mikronesia. Given the punctuality and professionalism that have been Kikapu’s standard for nearly eight years, the lack of information at kikapu.com seemed odd.

The next day, a visit to the website explained everything: Mitchell was closing down the label, after 109 of its virtual albums and EPs, with a suddenness that defines un-ceremonial — little more than an “R.I.P.” tagline (“2001 to 2008”) and some poetry by Walt Whitman:

The Past! the dark, unfathom’d retrospect!
The teeming gulf! the sleepers and the shadows!
The past! the infinite greatness of the past!
For what is the present, after all, but a growth out of the past?

While neither the first netlabel nor the most prolific, Kikapu has been, since its debut, one of the most substantive and consistent. It was a stable entity in the vast, growing and often chaotic field of freely, legally downloadable music. Kikapu didn’t contain Whitman’s multitudes so much as it hinted at them.

I’d first interviewed Mitchell almost exactly four years ago (disquiet.com). He explained then that he’d discovered netlabels, such as Monotonik (mono211.com), while looking for music to play on his college radio show. In time, he set up his own, releasing work by Raemus, Karl Zeiss, Veem and others, including Leonard J. Paul’s soundtrack to the documentary film The Corporation — an appropriate partnership, given the inherently anti-corporate nature inherent in any netlabel venture. Many of those releases have been reviewed as part of this site’s ongoing Disquiet Downstream section.

With Kikapu now shut down, I corresponded with Mitchell via email, and he agreed to answer some questions about the end of his much-loved netlabel.

Marc Weidenbaum: How did you come to the realization that you wanted to close down the Kikapu netlabel?

Brad Mitchell: The thought had actually crossed my mind a time or two over the years, but the final decision came about six months ago. The past few years, the amount of time and energy I’ve been able to put into the label has decreased significantly. When I started it I was still at university and had a lot of free time, and I really enjoyed it. But now that I work full time I don’t have nearly as much free time to devote to it, and this caused me to lose interest in it, to be honest.

I feel that the artists involved are giving 100 percent of themselves to their releases, and when I’m not able to match their dedication I feel that I’m cheating them of something. Running a label requires a lot of work, way more than I ever expected. Once I started spending less time on the label, promotion slowed, and I think some of the releases didn’t garner nearly as much attention as they deserved. And I mainly blame myself for this. Hence, I decided to stop doing any more new releases, so hopefully the artists can find homes at new labels that are able to put in all of the necessary work to get their music heard. Continue reading “End of a Netlabel”