Twittering Machines

Little Axe Records
The exclusive distributor for Mississippi Records

Need we read more? I know I mentioned Little Axe in the New Releases post but this news deserves its own. Finally a one-stop shop for all things Mississippi Records.

My only recommendation for their site is to have a “I would buy this record if you reissued it” button along with a field for entering your email address under each of the records on the Discography page. This way anyone who doesn’t yet own Washington Phillips heavenly What Are They Doing In Heaven Today? can let Mississippi Records know they’d like another chance.

Spotted these on eBay. With two days left for the auction, bidding is at GBP 11.50 ($18.66). Get your Grinderman on!

in pure black

The “Asia Edition”. Only 100 produced. ¥854,700.

Today’s tasks (with 1 diversion).

The Peter Brötzmann Octet
Machine Gun

Free jazz lovers take note – Slowboy Records of Düsseldorf, Germany has reissued The Peter Brötzmann Octet’s legendary Machine Gun (1968) on LP in a limited run of 500. Here’s what I had to say about this record and here’s what Volcanic Tongue has to say about this reissue:

Beautiful deluxe reissue on heavy vinyl with 3 colour silkscreened tip-on sleeves of this seminal Central European free jazz blow-out from 1968, only Brotzmann’s second album as leader and still one of the founding documents of European improvisation. A parallel to John Coltrane’s epochal Ascension, Machine Gun combines ferociously aggressive ensemble playing that mimic the sounds of artillery with some incredible break-out soloing from Evan Parker, Fred Van Hove, Willem Breuker and Brotzmann. In between the walls of sheet metal there are occasional big band vamps that function as transports to earlier big band traditions as the group simultaneously honour and raze jazz tradition. The line-up is phenomenal, with the horns of Parker, Breuker and Brotzmann going up against two drummers – Han Bennink and Sven Johansson – two bassists – Peter Kowald and Buschi Niebergall – and pianist Fred Van Hove. Still one of the greatest free jazz sides ever recorded and central to any collection of free jazz. Can’t recommend this enough and this edition *sounds* better than ever. Edition of 500 copies and already sold out at source.

The original LP on FMP is hard to come by and not cheap (think $75 and up) and the CDs can run $25 and up so this looks like a sound investment. Run don’t walk…

I’m sending out a big thank you to the 0.6% of you who are clicking on “Sponsored Links” (you know who you are). Because of your diligence, TM is going to see some AdSense revenue for the first time in our history!

Audio Journalist Michael Steward wrote on his website that he heard an improvement in music playback when he swapped out the SATA cable on his Network-attached storage (NAS):

I realise that the opinion I expressed in it was contentious but the reaction from some individuals was way too extreme. I think that wishing death upon someone because they wrote how they witnessed a change in the way their hi-fi sounded when they swapped a cable in a NAS is a bit of an over-reaction.

An overreaction – you think? While receiving death threats is no laughing matter, especially if you have a family, Steward pulled the offending article which on one level is understandable but on another sets a dangerous precedent.

Here are some actual emails Steward received:

Hi, you’re a bloody stupid twat.

Christopher Anderson [dopperpod@gmail.com]

If you’re wondering why you are, it’s because of your SATA cable article. Hope you die.

————

Hi Malcom,

With reference to the article “Super SATA Cables on Sale Soon”, you are either:

1) A fraudster, or

2) A fucking idiot.

Choose one, and let me know.

Thanks,
Michael.

The Black Keys
Brothers
2011 Grammy Award winner for Best Packaging

In Friday’s New York Times, David Browne talks about how size matters in “The Incredible, Inevitable Shrinking Album Cover” subtitled, “As Record Sales Shrink, So Does Album Cover Art”:

Art directors and designers say they’ve never been given blunt directives to be more elementary. Yet they admit the transition to easily grasped images is an inevitable part of the move from 12-inch discs to MP3s. “The album cover has become just a pictographic button, some little thing on a Web site that you can click on to listen to or purchase some music,” said Frank Olinsky, a designer who has worked on covers for Smashing Pumpkins and Sonic Youth. “A thumbnail-size image can’t replace an LP or even a CD cover, but these days I’m not sure that matters to people. It’s what people are used to, and they’re getting more used to it all the time.”

Red Hot Chili Peppers
I’m With You
designed by Damien Hirst

While Browne admits that simple, visually arresting album cover designs are nothing new, he fears we may be losing something bigger:

Yet pared-down album cover art also feels of a piece with another unfortunate digital trend: the inferior sound quality produced by MP3s compared with their analog counterparts. In their respective ways each diminishes some aspect of the listening experience. And to future generations of fans who’ll be accustomed to listening to songs on something other than a home stereo while staring at its accompanying artwork, neither may eventually matter.

Designers point to a few hopeful signs for the survival of elaborate album covers. On the iTunes LP section of Apple’s online iTunes Store, fans can view album artwork in something close to CD-format size. Thanks to the revival of vinyl, many new releases are available in limited-edition LP versions, restoring covers to their former glory. According to Nielsen SoundScan, 3.6 million LPs were sold in the first half of this year. While that figure represents a 37 percent increase from the same period in 2010, it remains a niche market.

It’s worth pointing out, again, that those oft-quoted Nielsen SoundScan numbers do not represent total LP sales. First off, they are restricted to US & Canadian sales and they do not even track LP sales of everyone selling records in the US and Canada. They also do not mention which online stores they do and don’t cover but with single record pressing plants reporting pressing multiples of the yearly SoundScan numbers back before the vinyl revival really took off, we can pretty much be assured that SoundScan’s LP-sales figures are at best a trend indicator*.

Broken Bells
s/t

“I’ve definitely noticed this shift,” said Donny Phillips, an art director at Warner Brothers Records. “I’ve heard a lot of marketing people and managers say, ‘You have to make it simple because of iTunes.’ People are conscious of this.”

If we couple this bleak outlook for album cover art with the sorry state of metadata (which is what album cover art is from your music management software’s perspective), I’d say that size looks to be the smaller part of our problems.

Steve Jobs at home (a long time ago)

Like it or not, Apple and iTunes are prime-music-market-movers so the market has to move them back to a place that values old-fashioned things like sound quality and art. I hold out hope.

* United Record Pressing of Nashville, Tennessee reported pressing between 20,000 to 40,000 records a day back in 2007

From the 2011 SxSW Festival “Music & Metadata: Do Songs Remain The Same?” panel discussion (from Billboard):

The lack of focus on the financial implications behind the aggregation and availability of music metadata did indeed manage to get a representative of SoundExchange in the audience to voice his organization’s concerns. “Several millions of dollars are sitting in the bank today, waiting to be redistributed to ‘Track 6 various artist label unknown’ due to the absence of clean metadata and aggregated database,” he said. “There are 117 different spellings of INXS in our database.”

I was thinking about metadata this morning and I thought to make a joke about how I rearranged my LPs and somehow the metadata got screwed up: A Love Supreme ended up in The Velvet Underground and Nico and I have no idea where that record is...As more and more people turn to downloads as their musical source of choice, the details pertaining to exactly what they’re listening to (year recorded/released, musicians, original cover art, what other music was on the original recording, etc…) may very well become difficult or impossible to discover due to crappy or nonexistent metadata. And then I thought that’s not very funny but it is one unfortunate side-effect when you turn things into data.

Rev. Charlie Jackson
You Got to Move: Live Recordings, Vol. 1

You can pre-order your very own copy of this a-punch-in-your-soul of a record directly from 50 Miles of Elbow Room today! Read more about it at the Wall Street Journal (really).

Warning: to listen is to love:

Filson Cape Coat

It’s as if they read my post-industrial mind. Filson now offers their classics in classic black.

Mackinaw Vest

Perfect for night hunting on the Lower East Side.

Photograph: Luke Macgregor/Reuters

From The Guardian (Caspar Llewellyn Smith, Tim Jonze and Helienne Lindvall. Tuesday 9 August 2011):

Numerous independent record labels fear they have lost a catastrophic amount of stock in a fire at a distribution warehouse in north London during the riots in the capital on Monday night. A three-storey, 20,000 square-metre building in Enfield, owned by Sony DADC and holding stock to be distributed by the Pias Group, was burned to the ground.

The fire will potentially impact labels such as Domino, as well as film production companies with DVD stock. Pias is the UK’s largest independent sales, marketing and distribution company.

Other labels that may be affected include 4AD, Warp and Beggars Banquet…

Damn. Read the rest including a full list of the labels impacted.

André Breton portant la cible dessinée par Francis Picabia au festival Dada, 1920
(see here for a closer look at that piece of paper in André’s hand)

When you click on a ‘Sponsored Link’ in the right hand column Google who serves them up keeps track of all the clicks and turns them – through the miracle of modern technology – into revenue for online publishers (like Twittering Machines in this case).

Grove is a very cool company based in Portland, OR that offers plain and laser engraved bamboo cases for the iPhone 4 and iPad. The cooler part is you can upload your art and make a custom case. I think I’ll make one of these – Twittering Machines Audiophile Tree of Life iPhone 4 case. Sweet.