It’s hard to describe how much I enjoy this music.

Escape Philoosphy is Matthew Davidson, otherwise known as Stretta on his blogsite.

A few things that I have run across or picked up lately that I think are well worth checking out.

Braunschweig Upright Piano from imperfectsamples.com – Ohmigod I love this piano. It is not without its “flaws”, but these flaws introduce character and help to make the instrument inspirational for me. (I’ll provide more detail in a follow up.)

apulSoft apEQ

apulSoft’s apEQ – This has been around for a while, but it is very versatile and allows extreme almost surgical sound shaping via EQ. A great interface. Demos available at the website.

NI Acoustic Refractions

NI Kore2 Acoustic Refractions – If you are into Absynth, this gives you some very cool sounds. The strength of the programming really comes through when morphing between the sound variations.

SampleLogic’s WaterHarp – This is one helluva deal at $49.95. 300 instruments, 1.8GB of samples for some “film ready” waterharp sounds, ambiences, stings, transitions. If anything, it’s a bit TOO film ready IMHO. Seems like an entire episode of CSI in a box. Still, there’s a lot here that can be worked with. And did I mention it’s only 50 bucks?

Tonehammer’s WaterPhone – Not as many instruments as SampleLogic’s and more expensive at $99.

A worthy cause indeed...

Please consider supporting the Bob Moog foundation:

“Our mission of documenting, teaching and celebrating innovative thinking in electronic music has been our beacon as we narrowed our focus over the past year and began the momentous task of preserving Bob’s extensive archives.”

(Oh, and beware the opening salvo of rather “enthusiastic” Moog only music that starts playing when you load up the site…)

Happy Thanksgiving to all of our readers in the US!

Cheers.

Luftrum is an artist who produces ambient musics, minimalistic soundscapes, field recordings, and (thankfully) amazing Reason4 refills. He makes some of his field recordings available from his website and freesound.org under a Creative Commons license. He also has a project (”Music for Films”) underway wherein he posts tracks for listening as they are done.

Luftrum Website

In any case, his refills are fantastic. As he describes Luftrum 3 on his site “For ambient composers into deep listening and no-beat drone music in the likes of Biosphere, Klaus Schulze, The Orb, Tangerine Dream, early Brian Eno, Steve Roach and Robert Rich.” (Since you will find many of these same artists in my “Artist Quilt” to the right, I am understandably stoked.)

A description of the content is provided below.

LUFTRUM 3
95 Dr.Rex loops  (318 Mb) + 45 Ambient Pads for Thor

52 Old Movie Conversation
45 Ambient Pads for Thor
15 Soundscapes & Drones
12 Spoken Dialogue
10 Atmospheric Pad Loops
6 Field Recordings

Luftrum 1, 2 & 3 are available together for $39! By all means check it out.

MOTU DP keyboard by Logickeyboard (no less) - Logickeyboard’s custom keyboard for Motu Digital Performer is available though only using the Ultra Thin Aluminum Apple Pro keyboard at the moment. It features all the regular letter, number, and symbol labelling found on a conventional keyboard, so it can be used as your regular keyboard. It’s a bit pricey, but Logickeyboard tells me that they are also developing a set of replacement keycaps for older style Apple keyboards. (This will be much less expensive obviously.)

Bandcamp – I’m probably a little late to announcing this party, but Bandcamp is another free music distribution/viral marketing/sell-your-music-directly-to-the-public site that looks the business. It provides “drop-dead easy tools to share your music with their friends, and most importantly we do it in a way that drives traffic back to you. We also give you complete transparency into how your music is spreading…” The last point refers to their extensive online stats which are pretty impressive. Check out the screencast.   

SoundCloud goes live – I know for sure that I’m late announcing this party, but SoundCloud officially opened to the public recently. SoundCloud is a music distribution/viral marketing/’net 2.0 kind of application with a focus a bit different from Bandcamp. SoundCloud is not really set-up for the general public to find music for downloading.

I was just cruising around on Loscil’s MySpace page recently. (You can find the link to that and a few others under “Check these out” in the right most column.) Under their “Blog” section is a link to the Relay Project. The project is described as “A dialogue between sound artists curated by Chequerboard“.

Relay website (so far)

More specifically:

“Commissioned by the Model Arts and Niland Gallery as part of model::offsite, Relay is an online music project devised and curated by musician John Lambert (aka Chequerboard). Lambert will invite a selection of irish and international sound artists and musicians to contribute to Relay over the duration of the project. He will record an initial sound work and then relay this piece to the first contributor. Each work will be published online as it is completed, and this page will map the path of this dialogue of ideas between artists.”

I love efforts like this. We have open to us so many new avenues for collaboration and exploration … and the costs for doing so approach zero.

The possibilities are legion.