Freedom from copyright will really deliver feudalism

Helienne-LindvallI’ve written about the need and benefits of copyright before – in fact a couple of times. It’s still on ongoing debate with three broad groupings, or sides if you will – those who support copyright as it currently stands (with some minor changes to reflect new technologies), those who want some fundamental changes to loosen copyright (led by the big tech companies such as Google and Facebook who want to make money from advertising stuff whilst they give away other people’s work) and those who want to rid the world of it completely (such as Pirate Bay and their associated political groups).

As you can probably guess I support the first of those groups but it’s always good when other people make your arguments for you – particularly if they make it more eloquently! So instead of another rant from me have a read of this article in The Guardian written by Helienne Lindvall, a Swedish songwriter and a big supporter of copyright. She makes some excellent points and shows that copyright isn’t about making big companies money but helping creative people make a living from their work.

Freedom from copyright will really deliver feudalism…

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Some Things You May Have Missed – May 2012

You know the drill by now – a bunch of tunes from the last few months that I like and think that you should too…

Sleigh Bells – Comeback Kid

First up is a track from US band Sleigh Bells and their second album Reign of Terror. I’ve liked them for a while now and this is very much a piece of their trademark noisy dance-punk which sits somewhere between LCD Soundsystem, metal and La Roux. Only better than that sounds.

‘Comeback Kid’ is probably the standout track from the album with the best chorus and slightly tighter production than the rest but it’s all worth a listen as is their first album Treats which was released a couple of years back. A real solid new band with lots of potential.

Neon Indian – Fallout

Neon Indian has been labelled as one of the chillwave scene’s leaders and even a brief listen to either of his first two albums tells you why. They are made up of that kind of very modern, slightly leftfield downtempo tracks that define the sub-genre. To me it can all be a little too “try hard” and cool for it’s own good.

This track however is from his third album Era Extrana and he finally seems to have dodged the usual pitfalls of being too noisy, too industrial or too slight. This is classic chilled electronic music – epic, sweeping, some distorted vocals and elements of noise but all on the right side of tuneful. Whether nuclear annihilation is a good topic for a tune or not we’ll leave for another day….

Jacques Lu Cont – Church

Jacques Lu Cont aka Les Rythmes Digitales aka Thin White Duke aka Stuart Price is one of the more talented producers of his generation. His work sits somewhere between electro, house, techno, pop and rock being none but appealing to all. His remix of The Killers ‘Mr Brightside’ is genius and one of the best remixes of all time. However he’s been away from dance music for the last few years working with pop aristocracy including Madonnna, Kylie and Take That. Now he’s back in the clubs both as Les Rythmes Digitales and on this track as Jacques Lu Cont.

‘Church’ was given away free on his website which was nice – I assume he’s not short a bob or two with his recent production credits so good of him to share his better work with us. The track itself is a slab of big room electro house given a slightly apocalyptic edge by the epic choral vocals. A great tune that is likely to work on any number of dancefloors.

Lana Del Ray – Video Games (White Lies Remix)

I’ve briefly written about Lana Del Ray before when I suggested she was something of a record label creation with little talent and less staying power. I stand by those comments but want to highlight this tune anyway – I thought the original was perfectly average but this remix is really solid. One note of caution this version didn’t get widely released but you should be able to track down a promo MP3 without too much difficulty.

As with the Ms Del Ray I’m not really a fan of the remixers, White lies, either.  They are a poor man’s New Order and delivered a hugely dull first album a couple of years back – with the only standout moment being ‘Death’ which was an awesome album opener. And it seems they’ve rediscovered some of the magic of that track in this remix. It starts very chilled and it’s those first couple of minutes which are the best with awesome soaring synths and some subtle production. The section which starts at 1 minute 50 mark is genius and never fails to send chills down my spine. After about 3 minutes the vocals are dropped and the beats get heavier. A little of the magic is lost but still a good tune throughout.

And finally one from the classic pile….

Dreadzone – Captain Dread

Dreadzone are one of those dance bands that have been around for years never really breaking through but regularly putting out good tunes. I’ve always been a bit of a fan at least when they’re not being too reggae.  I’ve got a few favourites from their catalogue including ‘Little Britain’, ‘Earth Angel’ and ‘Shining Path’ but this is the best. It’s about pirates and you can’t beat that!

It really hams up the concept too with pirate-based samples, a jaunty sea shanty lead line and even some nautical poetry from Derek Walcott. All in all a excellent, if slightly silly tune that always makes me smile.

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So you want to DJ with your iPad do ya?

You’re a digital DJ and you want to get controllerist on your iPad? And why not- hardly a week goes by without a new “DJ” app being released for pennies and at 6am that flight case you have to drag home can feel very, very heavy. Type ‘DJ’ into the app store you get 570 hits and this is indicative of your choices here but is dumping your controller for your iPad a realistic aspiration yet?

With The DJ have researched this issue and it’s surprisingly complicated. Did you want to use your iPad as a controller in place of your aging Vestax or were you looking for it to replace your laptop and work with your shiny new S4? Or maybe you want to do away with laptop and controller completely in favour of the ultimate portable DJ solution- your iPad on its own? Maybe you’ve even heard tell of a new controller you put your iPad inside to act as screen and software, allowing you to access the cloud and play that hot girl’s request, even if you didn’t bring it with you…

As it stands, we have worked out four configurations for DJing. We’ve ignored the more producer-end applications because, at least for now, that is a whole other ball game. We hope this gives you a head start and we’ve even given you some software recommendations or, failing that, some other blog’s software recommendations. No point reinventing the platter…

1 – The Software All-In-One

ipad1First up, your ultimate portable solution; just using your iPad and nothing else but a pair of headphones and your mojo. The top end of this market is probably DJ Player which is £30.99 from the app store. For that you get two decks and nice XY effects pads, night and day modes and some neat options like killing the bass on the appropriate deck when you load up the next tune and a see-through button which uses the iPads camera to give you, essentially, a heads-up display. As with all the all-in-ones you will either need to split the stereo output from the jack into two monos to have a cue channel, which will lose you some audio quality or, as a couple of apps are now doing, you can wirelessly runs a full stereo cue channel into your iPhone or Touch, leaving the 3.5 jack a full stereo stream to the master. You’ve still only go the iPad’s sound card though and WTDJ found serious latency issues with the wi-fi cueing solution DJ Player flog you for £5.99 so you will probably want to use a camera adapter and plug a proper sound card into the 16-pin iDevice port. A really nice app to use though and it runs on your iPhone perfectly well too, in case you need to check your playing order on the train without looking like a complete poser.

ipad2If that’s a little rich for your blood then try Touch DJ Evo, which is £2.99.

ipad3-4It looks like a 80’s electronic children’s game with the majority of the screen showing two massive electric blue and purple waveforms. A narrow band at each edge shows the entire track and shares space with nudge and high- and low-pass filter buttons. The neat thing about this app is that, unless you are actually loading a track, everything is on the one screen. Press the vol button and a transparent window pops up with gain, level and master. Press FX and you get and XY pad and buttons to change to next or previous effect, again, transparent and superimposed. Press EQ, and your eq pops up. And so on. At no point do you lose sight of your two tracks, everything is just superimposed and it’s just so much fun! Perfectly usable for parties and you will feel like Tron using it, but they really need to give you a better search option than scrolling through your entire library!

2 – The Remote Controller

ipad5This next option replaces your controller. However much you love your DX or S4, eventually you are going to want new buttons and that’s where a software solution might be what you are looking for. With the loss of your controller’s sound card you will still probably want an external one for audio quality and cueing but as you are using a laptop you can get one for under £90 from Numark or Traktor to sort that out (the Traktor unit even comes packed with Traktor Pro 2.0 included in the cost- insanity!).

App-wise, Virtual DJ Remote is £6.99 and is essentially a mirror of what you see on your laptop but with that all-important touchability. As with other VDJ products there is an ever-expanding choice of free skins so you can use your iPad for the mixing and your iPod touch as an FX box, for instance.

ipad6-7If Traktor is your software of choice, you’ve got an even greater choice than with VirtualDJ. My two faves are TrakProDJ and Touch OSC Jog-on. TrakProDJ looks like a controller and you could probably use it within about five minutes of installation but really, the future is with Hexler and the ultra-configurable Touch OSC. This looks and feels like it’s been designed for a touch screen rather than being a software copy of a controller, with finger-width control surfaces and more sliders than knobs. You can have any number of screens and any number of iDevices wirelessly connected at once and here’s the clincher- you can download free editing software to design your own buttons! You could just stick with the Jog-On layout and use it out-of-the-box perfectly happily but the how-to guide on the website is very well written for a blog selling software at £2.99 a pop so you’d be tempted to have a go at making custom layouts yourself and ironing-out those creases that only you can see.

Serato DJs are more limited, as you still need hardware connected to use Itch or Scratch Live, you can only supplement your rig with your iPad. Serato are still happy following the herd, it seems.

Finally, if you are desperate to lose your turntables and feel that using two iPads as you would 1210s, is something you want to get involved in, Inklen’s Tonetable has been around a couple of years. The scuttlebutt on the blogs scream “latency issues” so this could be the reason we’ve still not seen this out and about yet. (Or maybe it’s just a silly idea.)

3 – The Laptop Replacement

Controllers and mixers incorporating iPods are ten-a-penny and there are too many to seriously get to grips with there, plus we doubt any club DJ would be seen dead using one. iPads, on the other hand have a big, touchable screen and for £79 you can pick up the Numark iDJ live. It looks a bit rubbish but if you want to have a go at this DJ lark without serious outlay (and you don’t want to venture out of your bedroom- it does look like a toy!) you could do worse. We’re not going to linger on this configuration because the trade-offs between the inherent restrictions of an iPad and the slightness of its greater portability over a laptop make it, to us, a dead-end.

4 – The Hardware All-In-One

ipad9Finally, the holy grail. The idea of having a controller with a built-in screen and memory so you can do away with your laptop altogether in favour of a single piece of kit must have occurred to every digital DJ who ever spilt his beer over his laptop or forgot he was watching porn prior to the gig. Nobody has gone all the way with this yet, presumably due to price of combining the two pieces of kit without serious quality compromises, although honourable mention must go to the CDJ-2000 and Stanton’s gorgeous controller-porn SCS.4DJ.

Numark have done the next best thing and there’s no way the Numark iDJ Pro is not going to be a roaring success. Essentially, you slip your iPad into the controller so they become the single unit you always wanted, the iPad becoming soundcard, processor, memory and screen all for £349 plus the cost of the iPad. Numark may have a reputation for being the budget end of the market but increasingly their gear feels nice and they have a canny knack of making useful gadgets and novel configurations that the hopeful amateur can afford and at the end of the day, it’s about soundcard, sound rig and tunes, really, isn’t it? So hats off to Numark and expect a slew of copycats any day now.

ipad10Our friends at DigitalDJTips will tell you if you are looking to buy your first controller, the first thing you should be doing is deciding what software you prefer. Now it seems, you have other choices to make even before thinking about software but I hope we have given you some idea of what your options are. This is the tip of a rather large and boring iceberg so if you do have any questions about this or anything else we’ve talked about on the blog, get in touch. I’m sure we can sound like we know the answer.

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Glue – This Saturday!

Glue_Front_Apr12BlogGlue @ The Cornershop, Shoreditch, 28th April with Mini da Minx & Stylus Rex!

After last month’s stellar comeback Glue is once again part of your life. However we are now no longer tied to one venue and like medieval minstrels we will spread our tunes of joy far and wide! For April you will find us in Shoreditch’s Cornershop – a lovely little venue that also has the advantage of being FREE all night so you don’t even have to pay to get your next dose of Glue.

Headlining are Stylus Rex and Mini da Minx. The former has recently launched an album to great acclaim with positive write ups in the specialist press and broadsheets alike. Mini da Minx has been a big part of the London scene for a last few years – both as a promoter and a DJ. Expect both our guests to play Glue’s trademark mix of breaks, electro, house & techno.

Supporting our guests will be our usual trio of home cooked heroes – James Furness, Hell Yeah & bump. Hell Yeah will kick the night off with some funkier party beats before bump takes us on one of his patented techno journeys. James Furness will then finish the night off in his normal classy style with some proggier sounds.

If you want more details and regular updates head over to our facebook page -
www.facebook.com/gluelondon  (remember to hit like!).

And to get a taster of Glue, check out mixes from our nights on Soundcloud – soundcloud.com/having-a-laugh

The night runs 8pm to 2am, at the Cornershop, London and it’s FREE all night!

Full Lineup:

Mini da Minx (Soundcloud)
Stylus Rex (Soundcloud)
James Furness
Hell Yeah
bump

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Orbital @ the Royal Albert Hall – 10th April

Orbital-Royal-Albert-Hall-TopThe greatest dance act of all time, Orbital, played the Royal Albert Hall on 10th April and as promised With the DJ was there in force with myself, bump, Beeca and a cohort of friends in tow. The gig was part of a tour to support their new album which came out a couple of weeks back. It’s a pretty good return from the Hartnoll brothers and you can check out my review.

Before we get to the music I want to say a few words about the venue. As you’d expect it was a lot more impressive than most of the beer-soaked dives you see bands in. We got there relatively early and as we wandered around the empty but terribly smart halls I half expected to be turfed out as the uncouth oiks we are. Things didn’t improve much as the crowd got bigger. It was a little incongruous to say the least to see Orbital’s aging and uniformly scruffy fanbase fill the classy bars and corridors although perhaps it was appropriate – grey hair suits the RAH better than Brixton Academy. Some of the crowd probably didn’t even need to hire babysitters anymore!

Still it did give the whole thing a very epic feel with tiers of people in boxes seemingly vanishing into infinite recesses of the building’s dome. We were in the ground floor, standing area which was surprisingly small, a fraction of the size of similar capacity venues but no complaints there as it made it very easy to pop out for beer or a piss and find your friends after!

The Japanese Popstars were the support act for the whole tour and started the night off at a rather early 7.45. As with all support acts they suffered a little with a half full venue and a slightly sleepy crowd who were really waiting for the main event. I’m quite a fan of the band so that was a little disappointing but they did well with a set crammed with hits from their first and second albums. There was one minor problem with a sound issue during their last tune, the epic ‘B.C.T.T.,’ when it went very quiet for a few minutes.  Some fiddling with the wires seemed to sort it out and suddenly it all went much louder for the last couple of minutes! Still I think they were a perfect warm up for Orbital – they’ve been touted as the “new Orbital” enough times after all and it worked well.

Orbital-Royal-Albert-Hall1After a quick dash to the bar the Hartnolls came on about 9 and then played for well over 90 minutes, not as long as I’ve sometimes seen them do but a solid set none the less. And as always they were really great. It was a new set list with lots of tunes from the new album, as you’d expect, along with a big lump of classic thrown in too.

Whilst I do mostly like the new Wonky tunes (the dubstep lite of ‘Beelzedub’ aside) they didn’t seem to work quite as well as the older tunes and were definitely the least exciting bits of the show – the crowd just didn’t seem to get as excited or have quite the same response to them. Obviously with a crowd of what seemed to be exclusively long-term fans the classics had much more emotional resonance and so got a better reaction.

Exceptions to this were the opening and closing tunes of the set which were the ones from the same positions on the album – ‘One Big Moment’ and ‘Where Is It Going?’. They’re probably the best tunes on the album and both worked really well, setting the scene and giving an big ending respectively. I can see them becoming long term parts of the set, though perhaps not in such exalted positions.

The light show was also excellent. They’ve always gone for impressive visuals but they really seemed to have improved things a lot since last time I saw them with Death Star levels of lasers and flashing lights. The photos you see here can only give a vague idea of how good it looked – probably worth seeing even if you hated the music!

Orbital-Royal-Albert-Hall3One slightly weird moment was the encore. After winding up the whole place with a great new version of ‘Impact’ they went into ‘Are We Here’ from Snivilisation. We joked it was to let the older crowd get their breath back but then, amazingly, they ended the set!  Inevitably, they came back for a finale with three big tunes, including a reworked ‘Chime’ but while many would agree that the whole encore thing is silly at best, at least most of the time acts try to do the fake finish with a big tune. This time it felt more forced than usual as if it had to be done to finish things properly rather than being a genuine response to an awesome performance. Still – a minor complaint!

Big highlights from the night were when the old classics like ‘Lush’ and ‘Chime’. The latter in particular is utterly amazing every single time I see it. Truly a classic for the ages. The venue really helped with those epic moment too – it was great to be able to look back from the floor at tiers and tiers of people dancing all the way up into the black above. A very special view!

So to sum it up I’d say it was a great gig to support a good album – but perhaps not the best I’ve seen Orbital do. Still they are touring Wonky again towards the end of the year and if you didn’t catch them this time I would strongly recommend doing so then!

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