• Album on Last.fm
• Album on iLike

• On Last.fm
• On Ilike
• On iTunes

Anyway. Here’s a nice podcast I found lately, Chillout Bar Podcast by DJ Koopakoop (subscribe on iTunes). The mix combines a bunch of styles I enjoy, downtempo music with a slight ethnic flavour, easy listening or what I like to call cocktail music, a bit of jazz from the approachable end of the spectrum… all in all a diverse and enjoyable listen.

Check out DJ Koobakoop’s journal on last.fm for more links to good music.

The podcast is quite hard to classify, but if I absolutely did have to pick one genre, I would say glitch. With ambient, rock, folk, and noise poured in. It’s not a combination I would expect myself to like, but somehow I do. Take a listen, you might like it too.

Dave is passionate about downtempo music and the promise of internet distribution for independent artists. There’s only agreeing to that. Of course you can rarely find anyone whose musical tastes are 100% compatible with your own, but Dave’s Lounge features a lot of music that seems to have some elements I really like. Soul or folk influences, stronger beats than the balearic Ibiza chillout tracks usually have, broken sounds, but not in the IDM/glitch way, which while interesting, usually gets really irritating quickly.

Long time no blogging. It has a lot to do with having spent the last weeks programming Flash at a client’s office, on an audio-crippled computer, without music. Terrible.

After such silence, it’s easy to appreciate music even more than usually. Especially good music. Something like, well, everything by Ulrich Schnauss. Actually I can’t figure out how I have not blogged about him earlier.

Anyway. Schnauss’ instrumental music combines certain key elements that I seem to be drawn to despite of genre:

• Melody: something you can (at least theoretically) sing along to.
• Harmony: probably the element that allows me to like the best, most sugar-coated, pop country tracks ever created, no matter how un-cool that is.
• The combination of major chords and melancholy. It’s like going through happy memories that are long gone.
• The driving, pulsing 1/8 rhythm.
• Walls of sound.
• Sounds that drift out of tune and back into it. Strange as it might sound, I believe this even reinforces the strength of the harmonies.

Ulrich does all of these, on nearly every track, giving me instant goose bumps whenever I listen to it. It makes you want to chill out and turn up the volume at the same time. Simply brilliant.

Listen to selected music by Ulrich Schnauss on Last.fm or his MySpace page.

Like Dani Siciliano whom I mentioned in passing, Suzanne Vega is a singstress-songwriter produced by her husband, Mitchell Froom. Or was, actually. After their divorce, she has released one album (Songs in Red and Gray Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk) which marks her return to her roots of acoustic guitar folk-pop.

Folk-pop? That’s even worse than that nu-folk of Emiliana Torrini you blogged about earlier. Where’s the chillout beef?, I hear you asking.

There’s of course the classic Tom’s Diner, but it’s the two albums produced by her ex-husband Mitchell Froom, 99.9F° (Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk) and Nine Objects of Desire (Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk), that I like most. I admit these discs might still take a little stretching of the chillout definition, but these are some of my all-time favorites — actually, 99.9F° was the first CD I ever owned, semi-randomly picked from the store when I got my first CD player. Didn’t know I hit on something I would listen through times and times again.

The iTunes Music Store reviewer thought Froom’s extensive sound processing worked against Suzanne Vega’s intimate material. I find the results completely opposite: I think the interesting sonic soundscape decorates the music and creates a special and even mystical world her singing starts to live in. Sometimes the world is disturbingly cold, sometimes very intensive, sometimes overly laid back, but almost always slightly twisted. I like it much better than the yet-another-folk-guitar-track approach.

And for those who respect lyrics, Suzanne Vega’s style is deep in metaphors while still making her message come through scaringly clear. All in all, the music works both when you play it in the background or if you sit down and immerse yourself in her (and Froom’s) world.

And by the way, she’s very geek-friendly: she was the first major artist to perform live in Second Life…

Meanwhile in Finland, I heard the night of the arts went well in LISN, with audiovisual art from the Japanese rewall as well as my Softys productions. If you’re into incences (or great interior design!), be sure to check out the LISN shop on Tarkk’ampujankatu.

Meanwhile if you’re in Helsinki, check out LISN on the Night of Arts this Thursday. My animations should be on display there among a high class suite of Japanese scent products.

For the last days, I haven’t been listening to much music, and even less to chillout. During a lengthy car trip I did listen to the matchless Motown compilation though, Hitsville USA: Motown singles 1952-1971 Amazon UK. I have also ably bought but not listened several albums from iTunes Music Store: Feels Closer by Layo & Bushwacka, Takk… by Sigur Rós (although I hate them for being too trendy), Likes… by Dani Siciliano (lot’s of ellipsis going here), In My Mind by Pharrell, The World is Gone by Various and finally, the single track Ain’t No Other Man by Christina Aguilera (don’t ask…).

Meanwhile, I have basically been hitting my head on the wall with the next Softys release. The situation is this: I got an idea of an extensible animation, one that allows switching in alternate graphics without altering the actual Flash code running the animation. The code was done in two afternoons, one laying and planning on the beach, the other sitting and coding at the office. Easy.

The difficult parts turned out to be the actual graphics and the music.

As you might know, I do have a stack of ready-made tracks for these animations. For this video though I wanted a specific kind of track, because the whole point is to have the visual and the music beat sync together in surprising and random ways. I finally got the music done today (we’ll see tomorrow if I still think that way…) and I’m quite satisfied with it. But the visuals are still bugging me. The idea is to have a “big thing” appear in the beginning of each bar, and a number of “small things” on each beat of the music. What I have now is so ugly it can’t stand daylight, let alone site visitors.

It’s probably a mix of self-criticism, fear of failure, and laziness that keep me from finishing this release. But whatever it is, it’s annoying me to death.

Global Communication, a collaboration between Tom Middleton and Mark Pritchard, released their debut album in 1994. I don’t know where to start describing the excellence of 76 14, it’s simply enchanting. It has lasted the test of time and numerous repeat plays. 76 14 comprises of ten tracks of repetitive and slowly evolving music, a style I’ve always been fond of. After each loop cycle you can’t wait to hear the next cycle – a cycle exactly the same and at the same time subtly different. I can say from experience, this effect is very difficult to achieve. Tom Middleton is a trained cellist and pianist and this shows on the intricate melodic structures used on the album. Maybe the melodies are not that complex compared to classical, but way more so than your average electronic music.

The album is named after the total duration of the music and every single track has an equal name comprising of two numbers. A clever idea at the time, I wonder though if they had come to a different conclusion had they known the main way to search for music in ten years would be Google. This album was near impossible to find among all the telco websites offering “global communications”!

Not sure if it was the played-to-death hits or what, but it took me a few years before really getting into Groove Armada. But even more than Groove Armada, I’ve come to like Magic Dragon by Caia, an album produced by Andy Cato, aka the other half of Groove Armada. Apparently the artist of the album isn’t Cato himself, but a Japanese musician Maiku Takahashi. Not sure what he does on the album though, as the album has been produced, recorded, arranged and engineered by Andy Cato…

The music is an excellent combination of intimate beats and wide, atmospheric sounds. The songs are basically loops that go on and on, but manage to never get boring. Very much an influence on the sound I’ve tried to achieve on many of my own tracks.

Buy Magic Dragon from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

Sunshine Reggae was a hit in the 80s, and as proved on Saturday, the song still works as a nice anthem for chilling under the sun.

But do you remember the band who made Sunshine Reggae? What’s most interesting about Laid Back is that they’re still here and putting out music (rarely, as you can see on the Discog’s release list, but anyway).

A remix of Laid Back’s Beautiful Day is one of the best tracks on the Lüftkastellet 2 compilation and their track People has appeared on other chillout compilations, probably in remixed form as well.

Laid Back is also especially interesting because of the B-side of the original Sunshine Reggae. The song was called White Horse, and while Sunshine Reggae didn’t go down well in the States, the electric funk sound of White Horse was a club hit, landing a re-release on the B-side of Prince’s When Doves Cry (which by the way is one of my all time favourite tracks). You can read the full story on VH1’s artist profile for Laid Back.

Last weekend was the only Club Unity party of this summer and I had the DJ booth for myself for an hour during the warm afternoon. The last track I played was a remix of Sunny Road by Emiliana Torrini. I found it on a Lüftkastellet compilation (Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk) while wondering over my track selection for the day. Since then, I haven’t been able to get the song out of my mind. I had completely forgot about Torrini’s excellent low-key album Fisherman’s Woman, categorized as folk, I believe. What a perfect soundtrack for a sunny Sunday morning.

If guitar and soft female vocals are your thing, check her out. And while you’re at it, don’t forget her country-mates mentioned earlier, Múm.

I had feedback on the old site (and frankly I could do with a lot more feedback!) and made some changes besides simply reviving the design. Notably I tried to address these issues:

• Too much text: nothing has been taken off really, the content is just less on your face.
• Animation/MP3/remix kit links (ie. the most important content of the site) are too hard to find. Well, if you can’t spot them now, I don’t know what to do! (But seriously, if you can’t, please please let me know.)
• Animations are now called videos. Not sure if this works, or if there is not enough emphasis on the generative nature of these works. At least that’s what most people (YouTube and Google Video users) seem to call moving things on the web.
• Less scrolling. Trying to keep the most important stuff at the top.

What I did not really address (consciously at least), is the complaint suggestion that the “reason” for this site’s existence is not easy to grasp. What’s the story. As much of a story as there is, you can find on the about page.

As said, check it out, and please do email me with suggestions on how to improve the site. I’ve heard “I don’t know about these things, but…” so many times already, there’s no reason to be ashamed of your ideas. I’m doing this site for you, not myself. You are the expert. Enough emphasis? Good.

Are you english speaking, want to talk to and be understood by jazz musicians, hipsters, beatniks, juvenile delinquents, and the criminal French? Dimitri From Paris is your teacher.

Dimitri From Paris’ first album, Sacrebleu, was probably my first proper introduction to the world of lounge and easy listening. It literally got me stuck on the Easy Listening channel of my digital subscriber radio for two months (internet radio stations were not widespread yet at that point). The radio opened up a wide world of “original” music, that from which Dimitri had drawn his influences.

But Sacrebleu is not just a cheap copy of what’s been done. It stands on its own as an artistic blend of samples from the times when men were gentlemen and women were ladies. And most importantly, it’s so joyous and frisky and at the same time innocent and playful. It makes you smile, want it or not (after the introduction to this album, you usually do).

If you’re still not sure, check out the video for Sacré Français for the full audio-visual Dimitri experience.

Henkka points to a very impressive music+animation piece in the comments, Giant Steps by Michal Levy. (click on Giant Steps and then Watch Movie) Colorful three-dimensional architecture built to the rhythm and flow of John Coltrane’s music.

Somehow I feel the need to cover my back and explain the technical differences between his approach and mine. ;) Michal has animated and pre-rendered the video in Maya, while the Softys animations are built semi-randomly in real-time. These real-time calculations create limitations in the form of the processing power of the viewer’s computer, and not least the mathematics prowess of myself.