Album of the Week: Zubatto Syndicate

December 12, 2011 – 12:10 am

With a stylish, fold-out image by science-fiction artist Franco Brambilla on the album cover, we are introduced to the world of Zubatto Syndicate – at once quaint, modern, post-modern, and otherworldly. Pastel-toned robots from the future have arrived in 1961, and they are ready to hang out by the lake.

The retro-futurist aesthetic of the cover reflects the music’s subject matter. The songs all feature references to other worlds, time travel, robots and alien visitors, though as a purely instrumental record, the kitsch-cool is performed rather than expressly stated.

Led by Seattle guitarist Andrew Boscardin, Zubatto Syndicate processes the last 50 years of popular music through the seemingly anachronistic medium of a brass & woodwind-heavy 12-piece jazz orchestra. Hip hop, funk, soul, metal, bossa and rock all find their way into the Zubatto palette, but the output is orchestral and electronic, cinematic and swinging.

Bass clarinet and bassoon sit alongside electric piano and rock guitar, and together they ride along over funk baselines and hip hop beats. Saxophone and trumpet solos stretch over samba rhythms and metal riffs alike. Everyone here is an improvising soloist, and each is given space to stretch out. The arrangements are intricate and ambitious, without overshadowing the strong compositions at the heart of this record.

Perhaps the most appealing aspect of Zubatto Syndicate is the way in which these seeming collisions of style are made to work – and even seem effortless and natural.

“The Green Boy from Hurrah” is a rock workout in seven with timbales and snare rolls – but rapidly morphs into an off-kilter drum and bass Pathé News travelogue soundtrack. “The Trouble With Earth Women” would not be out of place in a film noir setting at the moment of the arrival of the femme fatale, but only if the film in question was made in the 21st century. “Saturn 9” features a laid-back bossa groove with a Cosby kids bassline. In “Arrival,” Wayne Shorter appears to do battle with King Crimson.

But for all that eccentricity and diversity, Zubatto Syndicate has a consistent and coherent identity of its own throughout. Boscardin is a strong leader and overlays a singular vision, but never attempts to dominate. In fact, at times he is entirely absent, preferring instead to let the other players take centre stage. This is an ensemble piece, not a guitar player and his group of supporting musicians.

Zubatto Syndicate is an utterly contemporary jazz big band – which is happily not as much a contradiction in terms as it might first appear. In fact, they’re so modern – they might as well be from the future.

Listen to the full album and explore more from Zubatto Syndicate.

By dubber | Posted in featured music | Comments (1)

Album of the Week: The Surgery EP

December 5, 2011 – 9:44 am

Grime, a descendant of garage, dancehall and hip-hop born roughly a decade ago on the streets of the UK, is now entering maturity, with several of its stars finding themselves experiencing the trappings (and the traps) of major label success. But there’s also an increasing universality in its subject matter and themes, and a playfulness with the tropes and assumptions in the music’s culture. Grime is tackling important political and cultural material with resonance for broader society, and at the same time its artists are comfortable taking themselves less seriously — all of which point to the fact that grime is growing up.

Case in point: London-based Kwam MC (Kevin Nana Boadi), an avant-garde artist in the real sense of the word. His latest release, The Surgery EP, pushes grime into new territory by dealing with socio-political issues such as citizenship, surveillance culture and branding, while periodically breaking the fourth wall and addressing his audience with sly asides and clever banter. The result is a record that succeeds in being both important and urgent on the one hand, and entirely approachable on the other. Coupled with Sketch’E’s punchy, melodic production, it’s a slick package and invites repeat listens not only because the songs are so great, but because Kwam’s just so damn likeable and convincing.

Of course, The Surgery EP contains some of the braggadocio you might expect from urban street music. “Linen,” for example, is an unrelenting diss – a battle rap with no worthy opponent. But at times Kwam is surprisingly modest. In “Pedigree,” he makes a point of drawing our attention to his less accomplished works in part to show how far he’s come, which also has the effect of humanising him:

‘05, jumped on a bar ting
Studes in Barking
Over a beat with a dog on it barking
When I look back I can’t help laughing
Swear down I thought that tune was the hardest…

Elsewhere, the EP veers toward the revolutionary. On “What Do You Stand For?” Kwam stops the track to speak “unmediated” to his audience to point out the absurdity of a culture of conspicuous consumption and the use of social media in the service of unpaid brand promotion.

While it might be stretching the point to draw a connection between the recent riots in the UK and a grime release that only just preceded them, there’s no doubt that Kwam manages to express the collective frustration, futility and outrage of people beginning to realise the extent to which their freedom and self-determination is illusory:

This whole malarky’s nothing but effery
…and it’s upset me
So I put my anger in a tune
Before I break these chains what I can’t see
I need to work out the angle I’ma use.

As well as being a completely brilliant set of songs, Kwam has crafted something sophisticated, layered, problematic, engaging, angry, witty and nuanced. And that makes it crucial.

Listen to the full album and explore more from Kwam.

By dubber | Posted in featured music | Comments (2)

Album of the Week: Les Sessions Cubaines

November 27, 2011 – 9:26 pm

To say that Québécois singer Philémon Bergeron-Langlois comes across as vulnerable on Les Sessions Cubaines would be an incredible understatement. A good deal of the time he sounds utterly broken – heartsick, and in the throes of romantic despair. He refers to the 15 tracks on the album as chansons, a word that literally translates to “songs,” but which I suspect in French more effectively conveys the sense that the singer is holding both of your hands and staring into your eyes, begging you not to leave.

Because that’s exactly what this sounds like – only imagine the same scene on a hot, quiet evening in Havana. Les Sessions Cubaines is, as the title would suggest, a collection of recordings made in Cuba. Philémon’s account of how he came to be there is deliberately vague, but pregnant with poetic, romantic longing:

“…for various reasons, I was not in great shape. A friend told me to go away for a month. I thought about Cuba. I had long wanted to go, before it explodes – and it’s said there are excellent musicians, and of course – the sun…”

And with that, and perhaps a few belongings tied in a handkerchief on the end of a long stick, Philémon made his way to the island nation in the Caribbean.

There he assembled a group of musicians at the famous Egrem studio, where the Buena Vista Social Club recorded their now classic album, and began to arrange his songs for violin, double bass, Cuban tres guitar, piano, percussion, muted trumpet and, on backing vocals, a woman who had to learn the French lyrics phonetically, as she only spoke Spanish. A 15-minute making-of video on Philémon’s site gives you insight into the process and the characters that gave life to this rich mix of sounds and feelings. It’s a fascinating story and an inspiring adventure, but the music is what counts, and this is an astonishing collection of songs.

There’s a timeless approach to melodic form here, delivered with a sad sense of resignation and unrequited love. But there’s also a self-deprecating humor, a childlike naïveté, and a sophistication to the songs of Philémon, and the Cuban setting offers the perfect space for these elements to develop into something magic.

Whether you understand French is irrelevant, as the emotional heft of this album transcends barriers of language. Yet this is not at all a sentimental record. This is simply emotion, raw and unrefined. Experiencing it may make you yearn to be as heartbroken as Philémon, if only you too could express yourself so beautifully.

Listen to the full album and explore more from Philémon.

By dubber | Posted in featured music | Comments (2)

Album of the Week: The Other Half of Everything

November 21, 2011 – 12:00 am

At first glance, the landscape on the cover of Martin John Henry’s The Other Half of Everything is a scene of complete isolation. This is Scotland. An archetypal rugged landscape of hills and lochs, as far as the eye can see.

On closer inspection, there are some signs of habitation: buildings, roads, farms… but they are ruins, and their remnants are surrounded by such immense majesty that they almost disappear into insignificance. And yet the evidence of life is written into the hills. The landscape remembers the stories.

Scottish songwriter Henry (formerly of acclaimed band De Rosa) has teamed up with Mogwai producer Andy Miller to offer us those stories, together with a soundscape that’s as magnificent as the terrain in which they take place.

Using a mix of acoustic, electric and electronic instrumentation to craft his songs, Henry paints miniatures of a lived and imagined Scotland, performed not just through his sung accent, but deliberately evoked through the sounds he employs. Not parochial or tokenistic – you have to put some imaginative work in if you want to hear bagpipes, whisky, heather, shortbread or shipyards (though, to be fair, welding is mentioned) – but it is instead authentic: the sound of someone from a specific place in the world, expressing the unique characteristics and culture of that place as it is; through its daily ordinariness, as well as through its past, its geography and its myth.

Maps and ancient landmarks figure large within the album. The Other Half of Everything is, in a sense, a musical map. A map is something small; you can hold it in your hands. But what it signifies is something much larger than you can ordinarily see from where you stand.

The broch – an Iron Age dry stone wall circular building found only in Scotland – also recurs. For Henry, it roots him to his deep history – his contemporary experience with ancient tradition. “Breathing Space” takes you straight to that cultural memory.

You are allowed to be a tourist for no more than the first two lines:

In a land far away
There is hope on a beach
In a broch
In my thoughts
I will feed every day with itself

And similarly, “Span” evokes the place and its history, and connects us with the lives lived and battles fought in those hills:

Our hearts are cut in stone
Our lives are lived alone
My heart is cast in bronze
My skull is cracked

But to focus simply on the poetic content of Henry’s songs of national character would be to risk overlooking their universality, simple beauty, thoughtful arrangements and honest delivery. This is a very special album on all those fronts.

If I had to guess at the “half of everything” to which this album presents the “other,” it would be our focus on the here and now. Our own little worlds. What we mean when we talk about the “everything” of our lives is not really everything. It’s only part of the story.

Martin John Henry shows us the other half of everything – the context into which it all fits: the history, the landscape, the sheer scale. It’s all on the cover and it’s right throughout this remarkable album. Our stories are humble and personal, and yet they are permanently carved out in the land where we live.

Listen to the full album and explore more from Martin John Henry.

By dubber | Posted in featured music | Comments (7)

Album of the Week: Mir

November 14, 2011 – 12:16 am

This is the third in a series of weekly album reviews published by Andrew Dubber. If you haven’t already caught it, please check out his introductory post.

I remember the day I fell in love with sound. Not the date, exactly, but I remember the event. I’d heard Jean-Michel Jarre’s Oxygène on the radio and thought it was interesting and futuristic, but nothing spectacular.

“Listen to this,” said a helpful grownup.

“Yeah, I’ve heard it,” I said. “It’s on the radio all the time.”

“No,” he said, handing me the headphones. “Listen.”

And in the next few minutes, I discovered high fidelity, stereo separation, spatial movement, auditory depth of field, and my lifelong wonder at the marvel of just how good things are actually capable of sounding.

Sound is amazing. Electronic music, at its best, exploits the hell out of that fact. Jarre was really good at it. British electronic producer and musician Ott is a master at it.

Having worked with such luminaries as Brian Eno, The Orb, and Sineád O’Connor, Ott has retreated to the studio (and the occasional massive outdoor festival) to work on his particular brand of psychedelic dub, and has released fairly infrequent collections of his work in album form: 2003’s Blumenkraft and 2008’s Skylon precede this year’s offering, Mir.

The new album draws strongly from contemporary trends in electronic dance music, but doesn’t simply mimic them. Rather than adopt the palette of the latest thing, thereby running the risk of sounding dated in a matter of months, Ott references those styles but continues in a tradition of what can only really be described as timeless electronic music.

Some things will just always sound good. This can be as true of a sine wave running through an LFO as it is of a Rickenbacker. Moments of Mir will put you in mind of Vangelis, Tangerine Dream and Art of Noise as much as they will of Caspa, Rusko and Skream.

One of the drawbacks, however, of making sounds that are as beautiful and impressive as these is that there is no room for rough edges. On first listen, Mir has a kind of clinical air and a glossy sheen to it. If you like your music a little rough around the edges, that might initially put you off. But Mir redeems itself on this front by grooving hard. “Squirrel and Biscuits,” on a big system, will fill a dance floor, and prompt more than a few “what’s this tune?”s. Proven in the field, that one.

And like any good, conceptually coherent electronic album (no, I didn’t say “concept album”), Mir starts slow. This is not just a set of songs standing near each other, but a single, consistent work that builds, has light and shade, a narrative arc, conflict and resolution, thematic development.

So you’ll forgive the fact that the astonishingly intricate, glitch-riddled, dubstep-informed, deep groove doesn’t really kick in properly until midway through “Adrift in Hilbert Space,” the album’s second, 8-minute-plus tune. But when it does – and make sure you’re wearing headphones, or sitting equidistant between two very expensive speakers turned up to an almost window-rattling volume – I defy to keep your jaw at anywhere near its usual height.

Far more than the fact that Mir is a great record – it’s a great sounding record. Do a local kid a favour. Let them listen to this on a pair of decent cans. They may turn out to be a cloth-eared brat – but you could end up changing someone’s life. It’s worth a shot.

Listen to the full album and explore more from Ott.

By dubber | Posted in featured music | Comments (5)

Album of the Week: Fire on the Vine

November 6, 2011 – 10:43 pm

This is the second in a series of weekly album reviews published by Andrew Dubber. If you haven’t already caught it, please check out his introductory post.

The world appears to be littered with bearded young men with acoustic guitars and notebooks full of verse, access to old pianos, and mournful string players.

Few have the skill with words, the deftness with arrangement and the ambition with the sonic palette that Bryan John Appleby has. Even fewer are able to deliver both their words and music with a voice that simultaneously expresses innocence and optimism on the one hand, and weary experience on the other.

The cover art of Fire on the Vine presents a selection of carefully arranged items that can best be described as bric-a-brac. It’s a beautifully curated collection of miscellany that evokes a rustic past. Small and well-worn fragments, simple in appearance, but which carry with them stories and memories, personal to their owner, and from which an impression – if not the detail – of those experiences and emotions can be ascertained. The contents of a life, laid out on the table – symbolic, telling and yet inscrutable.

And that nicely sums up the contents of this album too. While Appleby is a storyteller with a guitar, he’s the kind of storyteller that doesn’t require beginnings, middles or ends, character development or – y’know – plots. Stories, like melodies or paintings, don’t have to be ‘about’ something in order to have an emotional and aesthetic impact.

It’s an album that rewards repeated listening and a little thoughtful, solitary contemplation. The opener, ‘Noah’s Nameless Wife’ could read as a reflection on loss, a treatise on sexual politics, or equally a hopeful anthem about new beginnings. ‘Boys’ has an epic quality to it, coming in at twice the length you’d expect to find on an album such as this, and rises to a crescendo that gains much of its power from the hushed tones and fragile playing that surround it. On ‘The Lake’ it’s as if the objects on the album’s sleeve have joined in with the chorus, clattering in as rustic and yet as orderly a fashion as they appear in the picture.

But while the music invites our own interpretation, that’s not to call Appleby ‘abstract’ in any sense. This is simple, approachable and comforting music. But instead of drawing us a picture, he lays out the lightest of sketches – describing small details, fragments of moods, meaningful moments and evocative glances – and lets us fill in the gaps with our own personal baggage.

What Bryan John Appleby has created is essentially an ‘Open Work’ – complete, but unfinished until internalised and interpreted by the listener. And that makes Fire on the Vine a very emotion-rich record indeed. They’re real emotions, because they’re our own. And the more you live with it, the more it becomes part of you.

When you come to lay the contents of your own life out on the table, symbolically or otherwise, you could do a lot worse than placing this record carefully, neatly and lovingly alongside the other trinkets that express who you are.

Listen to the full album and explore more from Bryan John Appleby.

By dubber | Posted in featured music | Comments (3)

How We Work, Selling Right Now

November 1, 2011 – 8:54 am

The Bandcamp team is spread out all over the world, which means we don’t have lunch together, we don’t bump into each other in the hall, and we don’t have impromptu across-the-table conversations. In short, we don’t do many of the things that are often considered crucial to any startup’s success. To make up for this, we’ve developed a fairly disciplined system of communication that includes a daily company-wide video call, a comprehensive wiki where all of our projects are documented, lots of one-on-one Skyping, and a few in-person meetups each year.

Our most important mode of communication, however, is our group chat system (we use IRC). We all have it open all day long, running side-by-side with whatever else we’re doing, and we use it to ask each other questions, share links, coordinate feature rollouts… all of the stuff that elsewhere might happen in a hallway or over a desk. But what this system lacks in eye contact, it more than makes up for by being fully participatory (nobody is ever left out of a conversation), persistent (conversations happen 24 hours a day, 7 days a week), and most critically, archived and searchable (so regardless of when you’re offline or for how long, it’s easy to read the transcript and get caught back up).

The coolest part of our chat setup, though, is that it also doubles as the heartbeat of the business. In addition to the room/channel where the team communicates, we have another channel where a script announces every signup and every music sale, in real time. It looks like this:

We originally implemented this site activity ticker for the simple reason that we wanted to celebrate every signup and sale. It’s fun, helps focus everyone’s energies on our core metric (artist sales), and acts as one of our warning systems when things go wrong (the few times the feed has stopped, we could practically hear the flatline tone from the heart monitor). But it also has had an amazing, unintended side-effect, and that’s that it’s a brilliant tool for music discovery.

For years now, we’ve all glanced over at the feed a few times a day, been intrigued by an artist or album name, clicked it, and discovered new music that we loved. At some point someone suggested that we should add album art to the feed, at which point someone else said yeah-we-should-but-this-is-ridiculous-we-should-share-this-with-everybody.

So now we do. Take a look at “Selling right now” over on the new home page. It’s a bit of a firehose at times (particularly Tuesdays around noon PST), but it turns out that “someone just paid money for this” plus “this cover looks cool” is a great filter. It’s kind of like lurking at the checkout counter at Tower on a Saturday in 1997, and the line has three switchbacks and the clerks are ringing people up as quickly as they can, but in this case the Tower is at least three times bigger, you can listen to everything that’s being bought, and the customers are from every corner of the globe. Yes, you may end up questioning some of their taste, but just as often you’ll go “Whoah, what is this!? This is awesome!”

By Ethan Diamond | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (14)

Album of the Week: Laminate Pet Animal

October 28, 2011 – 4:42 pm

This is the first in a series of weekly album reviews published by Andrew Dubber. If you haven’t already caught it, please check out his introductory post.

There’s been talk of an 80s revival of one sort or another since long before the 80s even came to an end.

Some long for the angular rhythms and haircuts of art rock bands of the David Byrne school, the bling-free street cred of early hip hop, the glamour of the New Romantic movement, or the sheer party energy and political dissidence of ska and post punk. Others warmly embrace the revival of bubble skirts, teased hair and leg warmers, perhaps mercifully young enough to not already have regrettable high school yearbook evidence of such things.

But through the clouds of real or imagined nostalgia, we tend only to see the most garish and overt characteristics of the age, and forget that there were some subtle and smart things going on in pop music at the time. Yes, there was Milli Vanilli, Wang Chung and enough Phil Collins for several lifetimes, but you also had Talk Talk, XTC, Prefab Sprout, Earth Wind & Fire, 10cc, Gary Numan, Scritti Politti and Teddy Riley creating remarkable, interesting, complex and, above all, clever pop music.

If there’s one 80s revival we could do with, it’s the one that brings symphonic, dreamlike (but never anaesthetised) pop back into the foreground. Snowmine appear to be politely offering to lead the charge, if that’s okay with everyone else. They have the craft and the talent to pull it off. Perhaps not single-handedly, but they set a very convincing standard.

Wonderful, slightly off-kilter verses lead into soaring, dreamy choruses featuring layer upon layer of jangly guitar, with arrangements reaching symphonic proportions and draped with soft, clean falsetto voices that you always suspect of wry and knowing cynicism under all that sugar coating.

In the process, they’ve also nailed that very 80s skill of crafting an album that works as a whole. One that starts strong, builds, provides light and shade along the way, and rounds off to a satisfying close. This is a band that loves pop music like it’s important, and carefully fashion it from tiny threads like it matters.

We might now live in an age of Simon Cowell, autotuned vocals, and the lyrical sledgehammer complexity of ‘My Humps’, but we once enjoyed a time when it was not unusual for unashamed, pure ‘pop’ music to be intelligently and exquisitely crafted. Anything that brings us closer to that era is to be welcomed.

Listen to the full album and explore more from Snowmine.

By dubber | Posted in featured music | Comments (8)

The Genre Spanner

October 28, 2011 – 4:40 pm

Hi, I’m Andrew Dubber and I’ve recently been asked to review albums for Bandcamp. In fact, I’ve been employed to be THE reviewer for Bandcamp. My reviews will appear both here and on the new home page, one each week. Naturally, I’m very excited (as well as honoured) to be doing this. But there’s a potential problem that I want to address, and that’s the fact that I’m not really a ‘proper’ music fan of any particular scene. I’m more of a musical tourist.

Let me explain.

Breadth not depth

I tend not to focus too heavily on one area of music, and instead, find things of interest across a range of different types of musical expression. As Howard Moon once said: ‘I span the genres. They call me the genre spanner’.

I know that I tend to be seen as ‘the jazz guy’ when it comes to DJing, and it is an area where I have specialised more than others (easily 70% of my vinyl collection is jazz), but I have also played disco, funk, indie rock, hip hop, electronic and reggae sets, as well as some sets that are an eclectic mix of them all. In short, I like music.

Let’s say I was to review an album of folk music. Or electronic music. Or contemporary classical music. Or rap. Or even jazz music. A criticism that could be levelled at me is that I don’t have the ability to speak about that music with any real authority, since I am not a member of that scene.

My experience of music is one that has focused on breadth more than it has focused on depth. I love too much music to listen to just one type. But that means that I don’t really live anywhere, and I’m not part of a particular scene.

In the wrong pub wearing the wrong clothes

For some massive fans of heavy metal, it might seem unusual (if not entirely problematic) for me to be reviewing a heavy metal album.

I don’t look the part, I don’t go to all of the gigs (some, but not many), I don’t frequent the same pubs and I couldn’t therefore possibly know the right things to say about a new entrant into that particular musical subculture. And to an extent, they’d be absolutely right.

But I like heavy metal. I don’t look like I like heavy metal, but I do.

Not all heavy metal, perhaps, but I know enough about it to tell when something’s amazing. I just happen to also like a whole lot of other stuff – from well-crafted pop to the most out, avant-garde experimental noise music. From darkwave to folk, grime to baroque, house to bluegrass, funk to minimalism. I go through periods of listening to just one type of music… but I have never become a fully-fledged member of any of the scenes associated with any of those types of music.

I may be in your town next

Rather than being resident within a particular musical scene, you could think of me as a perpetual tourist. And while a tourist couldn’t hope to (and shouldn’t attempt to) tell someone who lives in a particular place about their home, they can return from their travels with some insight and handy tips.

Because I’m not the sort of tourist that sticks to the main path. I go exploring when I visit, and when I come back, I have tales to tell of interesting things that you might otherwise miss. Wonderful things.

The sort of tourist that says ‘Oh you’re going there? Well, when you’re in town, you must check out this fantastic restaurant I discovered. It’s a bit off the beaten track, but it’s awesome.’

Like that, but with music.

I will be consulting with experts

I love reading record reviews by people who really know their stuff, but every scene has a body of knowledge that ‘real’ fans have as part of their vocabulary. So, if you’re a ‘proper’ dubstep fan (for instance), you’ll be aware of its history, its main innovators, a range of different styles and subgenres within the scene, some of the insider terminology and some of the backstories of artists, where they come from and what influences they have.

As a result, record reviews by people in the scene will often (rightly) assume a lot of that knowledge as a starting point. Generally speaking I won’t be doing that.

As a tourist, I’ll want to dive in and start exploring. I’ll pick up a few phrases and concepts, learn the basics, and use a map. I’ll consult a guide – someone who really knows what they’re on about – and then try and find things that make sense to me. Things that I can enjoy, and then maybe take home a souvenir to share with my friends and family.

That would be you, in this analogy.

Everything is always awesome all the time

My brief at Bandcamp is to ‘only write about things that are awesome’. That instruction comes directly from the boss. It’s my only guiding principle here. So my job as I understand it will be to hunt out the awesome wherever it may lie, hold it up and say ‘this is great, and here’s what’s great about it’.

The best thing about that for me, is that aside from being a musical tourist, I am also an unapologetic enthusiast.

Music is amazing. And so many people miss out on the range and the infinite variety of sonic, emotional, cerebral and visceral pleasure that comes from casting the net wide. Perhaps because they don’t know where to start.

So it’s an incredible privilege to be in the position to introduce people to stuff they may not even know they might like yet.

There will be no three-star reviews. Everything, each week, is, as far as I’m concerned the best thing ever! and absolutely deserves your attention. It might not be what you ordinarily listen to – but you can be assured of its quality.

Trust me. I’m a tourist.

How to submit your album for review

Please email me at dubber@bandcamp.com. My one rule is that your message must also include recommendations to two other artists – people who are not you – on Bandcamp that you think are incredible, and make sure those are listed in the recommendations section of your profile as well. This will help me discover new gems, and hopefully provide a bit of context and filtering. You also might want to review these tips, I’m more likely to feature albums making excellent use of Bandcamp’s features. Thank you!

Andrew Dubber runs an MA course in the Music Industries in the UK. He started an organization called New Music Strategies and once wrote a book called The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online. He’s a broadcaster, former label owner, independent music industry consultant, record collector, author and (among other things) whiskey writer. He spends a lot of his time traveling around the world researching and speaking about independent music in the digital age, and is currently working on projects about rock in Brazil, avant-garde jazz in Norway, generative music in Scotland, children’s music in India and pop music in New Zealand. He thinks the internet is the best thing to happen to music since the invention of recording.

By dubber | Posted in featured music | Comments (4)

Facebook App!

October 21, 2011 – 11:08 am

Here’s how to set it up, and here’s what people are saying:

By Ethan Diamond | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (18)
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