I've raved enough about how much I love Mixcloud. If you love Mixcloud too, make sure to check out and/or follow these cloudcasts:
Headphone Commute
This one is a no-brainer; Headphone Commute is a pretty serious weekly podcast for ambient, experimental, IDM, cinematic, etc music. They have a sizeable presence outside Mixcloud, and is one of the top 20 Mixcloud channels, with over 25,000 (!!) followers. The casts are usually guest DJs and I find they cover the experimental, ambient and cinematic end of things very well, the IDM and electronica end of things not quite so well. Still definitely worth following though, and also worth having a look through their back catalogue of mixes. The guest mix by Tympanik Audio / Ad Noiseam ambient artist Subheim is superb!
Low Light Mixes
This cast specialises in the very minimal ambient end of things, and does a really good job. Casts are usually "themed", e.g. based around the sun, air, ice, and so on, which is a bit wanky, but nice.
Led Manville
This Spanish fellow is a very solid DJ, who can beat and keymatch with ease. His regular mixes are of an exceptional level of quality, and he's also produced a whole bunch of fun industrial / synthpop mashups (though those seem to live mainly on youtube).
Neuromancer
This crazy Columbian is my favourite "hard" DJ on mixcloud. He plays a mix of club industrial and hardcore techno, and completely rocks! I wish he put out mixes more often (though I can't talk, I only put one up every few months).
End: The DJ
The most famous industrial DJ in the world. If you want to hear where industrial club music (e.g. EBM, aggrotech) is up to, listen to End: The DJ. End and Led Manville are currently the best in the world at this stuff.
Thingstocome aka The Horrorist
I don't actually love The Horrorist's music (I like a few tracks here and there but a lot of doesn't do much for me). However, he is one hell of a DJ. He plays regularly in New York and uploads his mixes pretty often, which are a weird but awesome combination of weird old acid, techno, electro and old-school EBM.
Leon Tranter aka DJ Dasein
Bit of blatant self-promotion... that's me! Go follow if you haven't already.
Showing posts with label mixcloud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mixcloud. Show all posts
Friday, April 11, 2014
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
We live in a good era: Mixcloud and Bandcamp
I'm going to go against the overall trend of cynicism and
gloom that pervades the industrial (and pretty much every other music)
community, and say that right now we are living in an extremely good era. Well,
definitely a great era for fans / listeners, maybe not such a great one for
artists, labels and producers: that's a complex discussion for another day.
There are two well-developed and extremely useful tools around now that make it easy to research, discover and listen to music (new and old, but
especially new).
The first of these is Mixcloud. I goddam love Mixcloud so much. I have my own Mixcloud account, and every few months I drag my lazy bum to the decks and record and upload a mix. But more importantly, I follow about 70 DJs / cloudcasters on Mixcloud, and every day or two I listen to a mix they have uploaded. I have discovered an amazing amount of exciting music by doing this, and cannot recommend it enough. If you don't know who to follow or where to start, just type in a genre name and see what comes up, or start clicking on mixes in the main news feed until you find something you like. The refreshing thing about Mixcloud is there is a huge amount of really good mixes and cloudcasters in the non-mainstream end of music, especially in the ambient and experimental area.
The next one is Bandcamp. Digital music distribution has been around for quite a long time, but Bandcamp is a refreshing alternative to the lazy bloated juggernauts that come to mind (Apple, Amazon, Google). There are many things to like about this channel. Firstly, Bandcamp lets you download your music DRM free, in whatever format you like, including FLAC, and we like FLAC because it's lossless, right? Right. Secondly, Bandcamp takes a very small cut: 15% of digital sales, and 10% of merchandise sales. My understanding of the big bastards is that you are lucky to see 50% of your sale price as royalties. Thirdly, and for me most importantly, I really like how Bandcamp strongly supports the concept of labels. If I want to hear some of the music that Ant-Zen put out last year, (because I love Ant-Zen and so should you), I don't have to dig around trying to find 20 websites or bandcamp sites for all these different bands, I can just go to the Ant-Zen Bandcamp site and all of their releases are right there. And not just the new ones; I can find out what that that weird Philip Munch solo album from a few years ago sounded like, or whether Nin Kuji is worth the fuss that's been made over him, or relive the fun of Morgenstern's "Cold" (ah good times). And then of course, if you like them, you can buy, for pretty damn cheap too: usually $10 or $11 per album, much less than the $19 or so that ripoff iTunes charges Australians, which is a fourth thing to like about Bandcamp.
So if you haven't already, start using these great tools! There is plenty of amazing music out there, despite the predictable cynicism of the boring naysayers and tiresome gloom merchants. In the next week or so I'm going to run through some of the best finds on those two great sites.
The first of these is Mixcloud. I goddam love Mixcloud so much. I have my own Mixcloud account, and every few months I drag my lazy bum to the decks and record and upload a mix. But more importantly, I follow about 70 DJs / cloudcasters on Mixcloud, and every day or two I listen to a mix they have uploaded. I have discovered an amazing amount of exciting music by doing this, and cannot recommend it enough. If you don't know who to follow or where to start, just type in a genre name and see what comes up, or start clicking on mixes in the main news feed until you find something you like. The refreshing thing about Mixcloud is there is a huge amount of really good mixes and cloudcasters in the non-mainstream end of music, especially in the ambient and experimental area.
The next one is Bandcamp. Digital music distribution has been around for quite a long time, but Bandcamp is a refreshing alternative to the lazy bloated juggernauts that come to mind (Apple, Amazon, Google). There are many things to like about this channel. Firstly, Bandcamp lets you download your music DRM free, in whatever format you like, including FLAC, and we like FLAC because it's lossless, right? Right. Secondly, Bandcamp takes a very small cut: 15% of digital sales, and 10% of merchandise sales. My understanding of the big bastards is that you are lucky to see 50% of your sale price as royalties. Thirdly, and for me most importantly, I really like how Bandcamp strongly supports the concept of labels. If I want to hear some of the music that Ant-Zen put out last year, (because I love Ant-Zen and so should you), I don't have to dig around trying to find 20 websites or bandcamp sites for all these different bands, I can just go to the Ant-Zen Bandcamp site and all of their releases are right there. And not just the new ones; I can find out what that that weird Philip Munch solo album from a few years ago sounded like, or whether Nin Kuji is worth the fuss that's been made over him, or relive the fun of Morgenstern's "Cold" (ah good times). And then of course, if you like them, you can buy, for pretty damn cheap too: usually $10 or $11 per album, much less than the $19 or so that ripoff iTunes charges Australians, which is a fourth thing to like about Bandcamp.
So if you haven't already, start using these great tools! There is plenty of amazing music out there, despite the predictable cynicism of the boring naysayers and tiresome gloom merchants. In the next week or so I'm going to run through some of the best finds on those two great sites.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
