Hi folks. I’ve recently started work on a film soundtrack for Dolls, and currently have three pieces written to date, posted below. Feels nice to take off my Ochre hat from time to time, writing music tailored to the requirements of a specific project.

Dolls by Ochre

I’ll be posting more news as and when it trickles through, but if you’d like to actively stay in the loop with Dolls, we have a Facebook group to join, as well as a dedicated film blog for your bookmarks. If you’re on Twitter, you can also follow the Dolls team on there, too.

Meanwhile, I’m feverishly trying to complete my uni work over the summer, as well as sorting out the next Ochre project.

Last year San Diego-based games developer Psyonix got in touch about licensing a couple of tracks in a tech demo/game called Whizzle, showcasing the Unreal Development Kit. Being a demo, it’s just a single level (for now, at least), but I’m glad it came to fruition nonetheless. Here’s a short vid of Whizzle in action:

If you’re interested in learning more about the UDK and fancy dipping your toes into the world of game development, then this video of Dave at Psyonix gives you a quick intro to the platform. The UDK is free to download too, so given a little free time there’s nothing stopping you from crafting your own titles.

And it needs you! Yes, I know you may have already done this (and I do apologise for the inconvenience), but it’d be awfully nice of you to click on it again.

Following my traditional of sporadic and occasionally regrettable social media suicides, I had removed my Facebook profile after inadvertently hosing the Ochre page (I thought it would be ‘hibernating’ along with my personal profile, but I guess not!). Now while I’m not missing MySpace, Facebook was a much handier means of getting snippets of news updates out there, and although Twitter has become increasingly useful for this, there’s no denying Facebook’s convenience and popularity.

I think it’d probably be a good idea for me to install some admin other than myself though, just in case I get trigger happy while aiming at my feet again.

Oh, and I am working on some new music by the way too, if I may self-consciously steer this post towards something a little more newsworthy. More details to come soon (demo track deleted from post).

If you’ve been following Bandcamp’s Twitter/blog updates you’ll have probably noticed a rather major update: the ability to sell physical products alongside your downloads. Needless to say, I sorted out a bundle for my remaining Midsummer Nice Dream vinyl, pairing up the double vinyl and an instant download for the current sale price of £5. I’ll keep it at that price until next week, so if you were thinking about either purchasing it on FLAC or picking up the vinyl, now’s the time to act. Consequently, I’ll probably retire the Ochre shop in its current state, and divert traffic to Bandcamp for sales.

I’ve also sent some vinyl to CD Baby, enabling stateside fans to get a better deal on shipping than ordering from me, although at the current sale price it’s probably still cheaper to buy direct.

Minor rant ahead. Last week I pulled the plug on my MySpace page, though admittedly not without a certain amount of hesitation and deliberation—it took a long time to amass those hard-earned 120k plays after all, that’s for sure. But, once I thought about the ridiculous valuations MySpace has bewilderingly managed to achieve on the back of advertising potential (not to mention the many millions of penniless and uncompensated musicians bolstering its value), as well as its corporate bedfellows, I felt a little better about ditching it.

It seems I’m not the only one who’s gotten fed up with numerous bugs and annoyances that litter the site, as various stats from the Guardian seems to portray a pretty sharp, but consistent, downturn of MySpace users and visitors over the past year. Personally, I got fed up with tracks inexplicably skipping part-way through, as well as the many error messages that used to plague the site, plus the tortuously inefficient attempt at page customisation, innumerable adverts and insufferable amounts of desperate spamming.

Of course, it’s still a free service though, so perhaps I shouldn’t grumble too much about its numerous shortcomings (though once its Google trust fund runs out next year, it’ll be interesting to see how it pays for itself). It does provide a familiar interface for those wishing to pop by and hear an artist’s music, without too much fuss. But unfortunately for MySpace, it’s no longer 2006, and there are much better alternatives for showcasing your music on the net. There’s Bandcamp and SoundCloud, for starters, both of which provide many more options and forward-thinking features, music widget-sharing facilities and greater general flexibility than MySpace ever could. They’re independently run, have no shareholders to appease, and appear to be run by genuine enthusiasts rather than advertisers and marketers. I don’t know how long that will last, or how both site’s growth will affect their continued operations, but for now things seem good.

But, as we’ve seen with countless other music showcase sites over the past decade, the online environment progresses swiftly, and if they don’t adapt and progress to meet the expectations of their users, these sites will quickly fall by the wayside. As soon as MySpace proves to be more of an unprofitable millstone around the necks of its parent companies, it’ll be discarded just like the rest before it. If there’s one thing we’ve learnt about the online economy, huge page views and users don’t equate with profitability, and as soon as one free service bites the dust, another will pop up, until it too realises it can’t squeeze money from users expecting a free service, and so on.

I’m getting fed up with hopping from site to site, keeping up with the latest ‘social’ trends, so I figure it’s perhaps best for me, at the end of the day, to concentrate on my own site, rather than spread myself thinly across various social outposts. I’m not earning a living from this (not by a long shot), and have never drawn much of a crowd regardless of how much I plaster myself over the net, so I don’t feel the need to advertise my ‘brand’ the way as a more… radio-friendly act might.

I do find it ironic given the continued fanfare we read weekly about the net’s ‘empowering’ or ‘democratising’ effects on indie musicians, only for us to end up having to connect through the mediation of a huge site like MySpace or Facebook in order to stand a chance of being heard, even if that chance pales against, say, winning the lottery. As for networking and communication—what’s wrong with email? At least we can control our communications that way, rather than relying on infrastructure set up for us by MySpace and Facebook, according to their own whims and advertising needs. Twitter has shown us that our networking online selves can essentially be boiled down to efficient sound bites, necessarily so in order to keep on top of the endless communications torrent (insofar as we ever can), and for that it does do a very good job. It goes to show though, just how far we can quite happily pare down our online selves to the bare minimum required, when needed.

Anyway, I’ll stop there. Hopefully, somewhere within that ranting, there’s some insight as to why I pulled the plug. Thanks for hanging in there.

Just a final reminder that I’ll be closing the mastering service and shop before the end of the week, until August, as I’ll be off to concentrate on my thesis work over the summer. I’ve got 7 Midsummer Nice Dream CDs left in stock, which would be nice to clear; considerably more vinyl is available, so don’t worry about that — plenty left. If you need any odd tracks mastered, please arrange to get them to me by Wednesday at the latest, just so I’ve got a couple of days to work on them and get them back to you.

I’ll still be online around here though and obviously contactable via email—not going to leave the face of the planet while I’ve got an impending album release.

Regular visitors to the site may have noticed a few changes to the music page, with the notable addition of ‘Fictional Soundtrack,’ eight tracks freely available for download in mp3 and FLAC formats.

These were demo pieces written in 2005 for a fairly well-known Half Life 2 mod called Minerva. It’s a very well crafted mod, with a definite style of its own, and a cool, mysterious (i.e. rather cryptic) plot. I originally contacted the author, Adam Foster, and offered these tunes for subsequent episodes, but alas Adam had his music-needs already met. Ah well.

If you have HL2 on your PC, then go and grab Minerva—it’s a very worthy free download, and a very challenging extension to the HL2 world. And would you believe it, on the back of the attention garnered by Minerva among the mod community, Adam now works for Valve, developing HL2: Episode 3. Very well-deserved in my opinion—congrats, Adam! That has to be the ultimate fairy tale ending to every mod developer’s dream. Hopefully Adam will still have time to add further episodes to Minerva.

Anyway, back to the music—this is freely available under a Creative Commons licence, for you to use in your own not-for-profit games, mods, videos etc. If you want anything reworked or tweaked for a particular project, let me know.

I haven’t really come across much talk about Amie Street across the net, in blogs or on forums, which seems unusual given its apparently novel approach to music sales (I guess it could use a few more artists on there).

Rather than assume a fixed price for album and single track sales, the pricing structure varies according to the track’s popularity. At first, the music is available for free download, then as the tracks rack up download counts the price goes up by a few cents, until it settles on a price deemed fair by the listeners, i.e. what they’re prepared to pay for it. The tracks are eventually capped at the heady heights of ninety-eight cents each.

As a new member, all my tracks currently on there are free—just put a check next to all the tracks you want, select download in the actions drop-down (or alternatively click on the whole albums you want), sign-in, and you’ll be presented with a zip of your selected tracks.

I’ve uploaded the same 320kbps mp3s that I’m currently selling here (a little artistic licence with the term selling—’for sale’ would be more accurate! ) so the quality is as good as you can get with an mp3; the only difference being you support me directly via my own store and have a chance to download the FLACs too. But as the tracks on Amie Street are currently free, you may as well grab them there, and leave a ‘REC’ (that’s recommendation to you and I) for your favourite tracks, and help me gain a little more exposure on the site.

The REC system works by remunerating those who have REC’d tracks, giving them money back as the tracks gain in popularity, incentivising feedback and helping listeners find other similar tracks they might enjoy by other artists.

It’ll be interesting to see if and how this takes off, but what do you think? Have you used Amie Street or anything similar?

Anyway, get downloading, tagging and REC’ing!

A couple of you were asking about the surround version of Reception (see here for more info), so here it is:

Reception.ac3

Working in surround is still somewhat of a novelty for me, and I’m sure I’ve yet to get to grips fully with it, so let me know if you hear anything that sounds like it shouldn’t be there and I’ll make appropriate adjustments.

You might have noticed a few changes to the site of late, as I’ve just updated WordPress to the new 2.5 version, which includes a whole host of updates on the admin side of things to make my life a little easier. Cosmetically though, there are few changes, although you’ll have noticed the addition of Gravatars to the comments section.

For the uninitiated, Gravatars are ‘Globally Recognised Avatars’, and exist to make it easier for us to have a uniform identity across the net (the avatar equivalent of OpenID, if you will). It will become quickly apparent, by the dearth of avatars in my comments section, that this is very much A New Thing, and has yet to catch on within the online world (although I have noticed one or two commenters have caught on already).

So, if you fancy procuring a Gravatar, all you need is an email address to sign up and associate an avatar with and you’re all set (you can assign multiple emails with different avatars).

Continuing the theme of updates, I’ve tweaked and tinkered with the download store, mainly to a) reduce the number of tracks I have to tend to, and b) by popular request, arrange the downloads into more manageable album-sized chunks, with the option of buying individual albums separately.

The previously ‘orphaned’ tracks are now separated into three volumes, imaginatively titled I, II and III (yes, I did take a pinch of inspiration from the recent NIN release), and are now approximately grouped chronologically (by completion date, rather than upload date). Each album is about 45 mins long, and will cost you just £2 (~$4—yep, I’ve switched currencies, allowing me to accept Google Checkout now too!).

Finally, I’ve also provided each release in 320kbps and FLAC formats, as a single purchase, to save you having to pick which format when buying. You’ll get links to separate zips of each format emailed to you—just choose which you’d like to download.

Just a quickie: a couple of my recent mastering projects might interest those who enjoy a bit of Boards of Canada-esque electronica (both of which are free to download, I might add).

First up is the new compilation on Twoism Records (borne out of the Twoism BoC community) called One on Twoism (Volume 2)—yes, there’s a One on Twoism Volume One too! Try saying that quickly.

Second up is the Inspired by… Boards of Canada: A Few New Tunes release, on the budding Myuzyk netlabel. It’s a bit more eclectic than the Twoism release, but still very much worth a listen.

Both releases are available in lossless FLAC too, as well as mp3!

Here‘s an interesting (and at times chucklesome) essay by ex-Depeche Mode member Alan Wilder, concerning the music industry and its ongoing existential crisis. Topics covered include an increasingly fickle and attention-starved attitude towards listening, the loudness war’s attempt to catch the consumer’s ear for a moment—along with the ensuing ear fatigue that sets in when you try to listen intently, and musings on alternative modes of operation and distribution. Bang-on the nail and well worth a read.

Coincidentally, making use of the boutique-approach discussed by Wilder, Trent Reznor just released some new NIN, entitled Ghosts I-IV, directly available through his site (or at least, it will be available once the server-crushing traffic wanes—I ended up getting the free release through a NIN-authorised torrent). There’s an almost bewildering variety of products and prices available in addition to the free version, right up to the $300 Ultra-Mega-3000 Edition.

It’s interesting to see these special editions increasingly being offered alongside standard releases, to subsidise the mp3 and basic CD releases. Giving away part of the release for free also makes a lot of sense, especially when there are so many tracks on offer anyway; Ghosts I clocks in at almost half an hour of music, free for familiarisation, to become lodged in the mind of listeners, who’ll then hopefully be back for more. Assuming I get enough material written, I can see myself utilising a similar method. After all, why limit a release to a single CD or 74 minutes of music if you’ve written the equivalent of two CDs? Package it all together as a single release, and give away 30–40% of it as mp3s to get people listening straight away before you’re eclipsed by next week’s news. Little use saving it for a separate release if no-one will give either release a chance.

It’s that time of year again when the North-East of England sees the biennial AV Festival descend upon its streets for a week. Working feverishly over the preceding fortnight, I managed to get involved by writing a piece of music for the festivities being held in Newcastle’s Culture Lab, as part of the Music & Machines VIII conference. My resulting contribution was a 4.1 9-minute piece called Reception.

This year the symposium shared the AV Festival’s theme of Broadcast, featuring a variety of lectures, presentations and interventions by various key writers, artists and musicians. In between the scheduled presentations, artists from Newcastle University presented a series of installations and performance pieces taking inspiration from Jeffrey Sconce’s notion of Haunted Media, using sample material sourced from Antonin Artaud‘s Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu, a recording originally commissioned by Radio France sixty years ago for a broadcast that never was (unsurprising, given the blasphemous and and somewhat scatological subject matter).

Other highlights of the weekend for me were Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec’s Reality Soundtrack and Tetsuo Kogawa’s Deconstructing Broadcasting.