Have You Heard It

Mixtape Monday: Vakula

09.05.11 Posted in Blog by Robbert van Ooijen

During the last months the name on the lips of many techno enthusiasts has been Vakula. With high quality releases on labels like Uzuri, Quintessential and the Shevchenko imprint, the Ukranian producer came on the radar of many music critics. And with great remixes done for Steve Reich and Moodymann you can be sure that Vakula is a name that you will hear more often in the coming months.

Until recently, Eastern Europe and Russia have been a rather blind spot on the musical map. Artists like Nina Kraviz and the earlier featured Anton Zap change this and the latest talent to emerge from the East is Vakula. He was born in the Ukranian city Konotop and became famous for holding a residency at Moscow’s Propaganda Club. His high quality releases on respected labels helped to establish his name and during the last months the name Vakula has been emerging more and more often.

Vakula got his name from a character in a classic novel by the Ukranian writer Nikolay Vasilievich Gogol. Just like the writer, Vakula gets his inspiration from the Ukrainian history and nature, he remarked in an interview with MLAT. Next to influences by the tranquility and the diversity of the Ukranian nature, one can recognize influences of jazz, deephouse and dub rhythms in his music.

Vakula’s music stays away from bold statements and subtly lays out patterns, textures and beats that result in a diverse pallet of sounds. To discover this versatility, head over to his packed SoundCloud page. Here you’ll discover jazzy pieces like ‘Sleepily’ but also the track ‘Remix part 2 (love minimal version)’ that could easily be released on Detroit finest Axis imprint.

The mixtape below was done for the Juno Plus Podcast series and consists entirely of his own productions, “Music which is simple and melodious as Taras Shevchenko poetry and fat as Ukrainian lard”

Juno Plus Podcast 11 – Vakula by Juno Plus on Mixcloud

Mixtape Monday: Africa Hitech

06.27.11 Posted in Blog by Robbert van Ooijen

One of the best electronic albums of 2011 so far is Africa Hitech’s ’93 Million Miles’. This edgy full-length was released back in May on Warp Records and contains a spacey blend of dubstep, hip-hop and dancehall. With reviews of this album and of the project in general being unanimously positive, it’s time to check out one of Africa Hitech’s mixtapes.

Africa Hitech is a project by the Englishmen Mark Pritchard and Steve Spacek. Both of them aren’t newcomers. On the contrary: Pritchard released on labels like Hyperdub and Sonar Kollektiv before, while Spacek has been active for more than a decade, most notably in the band Spacek.

The two began bonding over their shared passion for the seemingly disparate spheres of bubbling Detroit techno, soul and fierce Jamaican digital dancehall. They decided to combine their experiences and skills which lead to the exciting Africa Hitech project. A project that has managed to fetch one of the best electronic albums of this year.

While acknowledging that the roots of much of today’s electronic music can be traced back to Africa (mind the name), the music sounds innovative and futuristic. The mixtape below contains most of the genres that influenced the music of Africa Hitech ranging from African music to hip-hop and from UK bass to Drum ‘n Bass. If you enjoy it, make sure to check out their album 93 Million Miles too!

[Can't see the embedded SoundCloud player above? Tap here!]

Found My New Colleagues At ZEO

06.17.11 Posted in Blog by Robbert van Ooijen

About four weeks ago I published a post titled ‘In Need For A New Colleague?’. In this post I announced to be on the lookout for a permanent job and asked for your help to spread the message. With your RTs, your network and tips, the message reached a lot of people and – more importantly – reached the right people. And today, I’m happy to announce that next July I’ll be starting a new adventure at the young and eager online marketing company ZEO!

During the last weeks, I had talks with various interesting companies and got a lot of emails and phonecalls from recruitment agencies. After these appointments and talks, the company that will be my new home is ZEO Webmarketing.

For the last years the company, based in a beautiful monumental building in Utrecht, has been rapidly growing. Thus far, their activities have been mainly centered around search engine marketing and webdevelopment, but just as the team and their customer base is growing, so are their activities. This is where I come in!

Research & Development

New media are constantly evolving, which is why the company always tries to make the most out of new technologies by implementing them in an effective way. In line with this vision, I’ll be researching and developing new products for them, focused both on social media and usability / conversion optimization. I look forward to start on these new projects on the first of July!

To you all: Thanks again for your help and thanks for reading!

Mixtape Monday: Axel Boman

06.06.11 Posted in Blog by Robbert van Ooijen

I am a big big fan of eclectic mixtapes made by artists that I respect for their taste of music. It’s the reason why I started this Mixtape Monday series with the genius ‘Börneboll Mikks’ by Robag Wruhme. Because good eclectic mixtapes do not appear very often, I was happy to find Axel Boman’s mixtape last week. It’s titled ‘If you ever feel down, put this mix on!’ and does what it promises!

In comparison to earlier featured artists like the house-veterans Larry Heard and Rick Wade, Axel Boman is quite a newcomer to the scene. He has been an important player in the Swedish club scene for the last years and has been releasing music since 2008, but it was in the year 2010 that his international breakthrough took place. With the brilliant Holy Love EP released on Pampa Records, Boman managed to permanently establish his name.

As said in the introduction, I’m a big fan of eclectic mixtapes that introduce you to new music and new genres. That being said, the witty and optimistic mixtape below is such an exceptional mix. With music included from Matthew Dear, J Dilla and Bullion I’m sure this mix will accompany me in the coming months when working, enjoying the sun or traveling, just as the mixtape of Robag Wruhme did last year.

The mix is titled ‘If You Ever Feel Down, Put This Mix On!’. To make sure the mix achieves this goal, Boman added a track by Michael Jackson without whom a good eclectic mix wouldn’t be complete. So go ahead, and cheer yourself up with Axel Boman!

[Can't see the embedded SoundCloud player above? Tap here!]

New Project Asks: Why Do You Pirate?

06.02.11 Posted in Blog by Robbert van Ooijen

Earlier this year the Don’t Make Me Steal Manifesto got a lot of attention in the worldwide tech-press. Websites such as TorrentFreak and Hypebot wrote about it and even EU commissioner Neelie Kroes, responsible for the Digital Agenda, decided to spend a tweet on it. This week, four months later, a comparable French initiative launched: Pourquoi Je Pirate (Why I Pirate). The website asks you to share the reason why you pirate content from the Internet. What can the initiative teach us?

Pourquoi Je Pirate launches a week after the controversial French “three strikes” policy was put on hold due to its insecurity and only days after the news that two alleged operators of France’s most popular file-sharing links forums have been arrested. Just as the Don’t Make Me Steal Manifesto, the project seems to gain traction very quickly. At the moment of publishing, the website’s simple question has already managed to gather about one thousand “confessions”.

It’s interesting to see that at a time when the French anti-piracy policy is tightened up, the project gives France’s Internet users a platform to respond. Will their voices be heard? Will initiatives like this have enough impact to influence the public opinion and reverse the harsh decision-making of the French politics?

Although the goal of the project is not explicitly stated on the website, it seems clear that the project aims to reveal the many reasons behind online file-sharing. This, in order to show that file-sharing is not solely about wanting to get content for free, and to make clear that a solution to file-sharing should primarily lie in increasing accessibility and usability.

As stated in previous posts, the history of music piracy shows that at times when piracy is regarded as a structural problem, there are often various legitimate reasons that underlie the waves of piracy. The ideology of increasing the accessibility of music lead to more piracy in the 1900s, the 1910s saw an increase due to the technical difficulties of producing gramophones and in the 1950 the switch from gramophones to vinyl lead to another wave of music piracy.

What are today’s reasons to pirate music, movies, or software from the web? Check hundreds of reasons at Pourquoi Je Pirate.

Music Haekelday Revives Your Cassettes

06.01.11 Posted in Blog by Robbert van Ooijen

Finally there’s a cool solution for your collection of dusty old cassette tapes. Those tapes that you don’t want to throw away but can’t listen to anyway, because you don’t own a cassette deck anymore. What if these tapes could be a part of a cool art project and be playable on SoundCloud again? Meet the Music Haekelday project.

One of the tech-events that never fails to inspire, is the Music Hackday event. During a weekend, developers and creatives gather to create cool, innovative and funny music related hacks. Last weekend the event took place in Berlin. One of the projects that was developed at this specific Hackday is the Music Haekelday art project. On the project’s website, the following is stated about the project:

“We decided your old tapes should find a new home in the cloud and in our cities. We digitize audio from the tape and upload it to Soundcloud, create a piece of artwork made from the actual physical tape, place it somewhere in the city and connect the two together with a QR code. The object can be discovered either by chance or by the map on this page, and when found, can immediately be listened to with every html5-capable smartphone.”

By combining creativity with new technology, the art project brings your carefully preserved cassettes back to life. Check out some examples of urban crocheted tape and listen to the music the tape once contained on Music Haekelday‘s website. Coming to a city near you soon?

Every Pirate Wants To Be An Admiral

05.31.11 Posted in Blog by Robbert van Ooijen

The Copyright Wars aren’t something new. For centuries long book publishers, composers, recording artists, and broadcasters have been accusing others of pirating their products. However, as Cory Doctorow argues in the video below, all of these institutions and companies accusing others, have once been considered pirates themselves too when their activities were new and disruptive. Are today’s accusations more legitimate? Should we be concerned about the future of the Internet?

I largely agree with Doctorow here. As I also argued in my master’s thesis, it’s often a matter of perspective whether a disruptive and innovative technology is considered as piracy or as innovation. I would even go as far as stating that piracy is one of the thriving forces behind innovation, as I argued earlier in the essay Why Piracy Is Good For Innovation.

Mixtape Monday: Rick Wade

05.30.11 Posted in Blog by Robbert van Ooijen

“All that crazy dubstep and all this other wild stuff out here is bad for you, it’s real wrong. This is what’s real right”. These are the words of house-legend Rick Wade who played a special educational set of classic house in Tokyo’s Dommune. After listening to these two hours of Rick Wade, everyone will agree with these words. Join the classroom too, and “Get some of this funk in your soul”.

Many of today’s house productions feature warm, lo-fi, and dubby sounds. The producer and DJ that is often regarded as one of the originators of this sound is the Detroit-based Rick Wade. He’s the owner of the well respected label Harmonie Park that has been releasing music from among others Mike Huckaby and Theo Parrish since 1994. Next to this, Wade has been steadily releasing high-quality house releases himself on labels like Rush Hour, Third Ear and Laid Records. A man with a big influence on the sound of today’s house music.

On the third of May of this year, Rick Wade played a special live-set in Tokyo’s interactive club Dommune. Instead of delivering a regular DJ-set, Wade decided to try out something different and gave everyone an education on the tracks he played. I was able to record this special lesson in the history of house music and am glad I can share it with you today!

Expect some great stories and of course a special selection of disco and house music from Delano Smith, Soundhack, Theo Parrish, Norm Talley, Moodymann and the likes. Now back to the regularly scheduled program, this is Rick Wade!

[Can't see the embedded SoundCloud player above? Tap here!]