Bottled magic

Happy New Year

Yes, part of the 2013 resolution guilt trip was to blog again, if only to try and match up to the prolific amount of spam being directed at this blog's comments section. I hope they're getting more out of this than I did in 2012. I did write to one of the companies being advertised and asked them if they felt good about their name being used in this way. Needless to say, the response was a profound blast of complete and utter silence. I hope they had a good boxing day sale.

First post of the year is something dear to my heart.

It's a bottle that captures any sound, remixes it, and then plays it back to you. It's kind of an aural genie thing. You open the bottle lid and it listens, you close it and it gets to work, you open it again and it plays stuff back to you.

At first I thought it was something leeching off the back of the ever excellent RJDJ, but I'm glad to say it's something very different and quite clever. 

Thumbs up to Jun Fujiwara for coming up with this.


Re: Sound Bottle from Jun Fujiwara on Vimeo.

The vinyl countdown....

Quick post, following a brilliant blog post from Shake & Vac and a great blog post on the NME site, referencing respectively the death of the music business and the growth in vinyl sales.

The bit that really jumped out for me was this beautiful quote from Roger Daltrey, fish farmer, TV presenter and....oh, he's the lead singer in The Who - still the greatest Rock and Roll band in the world.
“With a CD, you start with a nice plastic box and end with a scratched plastic box. It has no character whatsoever. But with vinyl, we threw away an art form that was so much more than the record… Sometimes the covers were more important than the music. The more fingerprints you got on it, the more it was a part of you.”

He got to the heart of the matter succintly and poignantly - in a proportionately declining market, abandoning or trying to reinvent your product isn't always the sensible thing, it's going back to the heart of what made your product so special in the first place and celebrating it's innate values.

Vinyl sales are steadily growing, with a wealth of beautifully produced releases (think Radiohead In Rainbows and most recently the gorgeous and comprehensive Warp 20 retrospective) for which people are more than willing to shell out substantial amounts for.

That's a success story in my terms.

Muxtape has snapped...

It's down courtesy of the RIAA. Full report from Mogger Mistee here. Maybe just for now - who knows?

Hope Blip isnt next. "We've only just begun..."

Can we all stop having fun please and do as we're told!