Iranian to the end…

I came across a reference to this release in an article I read today – it sounded interesting so I checked it out. It’s great when you randomly discover something special.

Saint Abdullah are a duo from Iran.  In these uncertain times, when we’re being majorly lied to on a daily basis about Iran and its culture, we need to remember that Iranians are people just like the rest of us. There is a lot of great music being made by Iranians within Iran and expatriates outside of Iran.

Ta Tash was released in June 2019 and it follows on from an earlier release, The Sounds of Evil Vol 1.   Ta Tash has two excellent tracks, coming in at about 23 minutes playing time. To me it is reminiscent of Muslimgauze but much less abrasive, more accessible – however, just as hypnotic.

“Ta Tash translates as ‘To the End’ in English. It captures the essence of a sentiment during the brutal 8-year war between Iran-Iraq. To protect Iran’s borders, to defend the Shia faith, the Persian civilization, at all costs. It is also quite a greedy aspiration. Where defense and offense and blind faith muddy the prospect for rational thinking, strategy, and humanity. But at the same time, perhaps this is the kind of shit that’s helped Iran survive for 5000 years. Who knows?.”
Saint Abdullah, in conversation with Boomarm Nation (May 2018)

The album is available on a “Name Your Price” basis, the same as our releases. We believe music has value – spend a little cash and get this album for your collection.

Persian Swords – new release from Thousand Yard Prayer

Here’s the new release from Thousand Yard Prayer. It is called Persian Swords and is seven tracks of Middle Eastern flavoured cultured electronic music. There are dubstep and Arab/Persian trap influences.

As ever, it’s available from Bandcamp to stream or download. If you like it, feel free to share it or to recommend it to your friends who also have impeccable musical taste.
We’ll let you know when it’s up on all the streaming sites and download stores.

 

The mystery of dub

Dub, in all its many sub-genre variations, is always awesome and never trendy. Genres come and go but the dub abides.  It’s a mystery.

The Dub Zone podcast has been championing underground dub for years.  Here’s the twelfth anniversary selection, two hours of bass awesomeness!

TDZ 12th Anniversary Dub Selecta

https://petecogle.co.uk/blog/2019/05/17/tdz208-12th-anniversary-dub-selecta/

Also on MixCloud 

Repetitive Beat Injury

I read a Facebook post today from someone who produces some kind of dance music, probably house related. He’d been playing his music with some children listening. Because his tunes started and ended with long sections of beats, they said:  “Your music sounds all the same”. These beats were for DJs to beat match in and out of.

Back in the 90s, when we first started making our weird hybrid forms of electronica, we didn’t go clubbing very much and, if we did, it wasn’t to house, techno or garage clubs where maintenance of a consistent unbroken beat was a functional necessity. So, we never did the long intro and outro thing.

I have always thought that if we were making music for listening to at home, even if it was within one of those styles, there was no functional need for that. That structure was to benefit DJs who beat match. I’ve always thought there must be a market for music rooted in club culture but designed to be listened to at home by people who either don’t go to clubs any more for whatever reason (age, families etc) or who never did but just like the music.  This music would not need the extended into and outro beats.

More recently, as most people now access music through streaming services, a key metric used by sites such as Spotify is how long people listen to a track before clicking “next”.  It’s 15 to 20 seconds, in case you were wondering. Spotify doesn’t pay the rights holder until 30 seconds has been played  – and how long a track is played also affects how its playlist algorithms treat the track. Tunes played all the way through have more traction. That’s two good reasons to keep people listening for as long as possible.

We must, in this modern day, get to point when writing a tune.  We need to get people’s attention early and retain it.

The most popular tunes are, apparently, also four minutes or less in length.

I think we’ll start writing a few shorter, snappier, tunes with strong hooks and see what happens.

If we can!

Wisdom Tales – Secret Archives of the Vatican Podcast 143

Yeah, it’s been a while. Too busy recording new tunes for Secret Archives of the Vatican and Thousand Yard Prayer.

But here we are with a new podcast episode!  We have a great selection of tunes, including an unreleased tune from Thousand Yard Prayer, Sharaz-de.

Please listen and share.

Tracks

1  Secret Archives of the Vatican – Cairo in the War
2  Anthy – Tiner
3  Thousand Yard Prayer – Sharaz-de
4  Goldtooth – The Destroyer of Worlds
5  Jef Stott – Quiet Royalty (Requiem for the San Francisco Underground)
6  Thousand Yard Prayer – Nasrani Minaret
7  Ethnique Punch – Nümayiş
8  Omarlizz – Arabian Pride

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Fantastic Spotify Playlists and Where to Find Them

Today, 1 May 2019, our album Barsoom finally popped up on Spotify.   As I suspected, our tune Mu’addib does not appear to have been selected by the curators for any of the official playlists (see previous post). Unless they surprise us in the next few days.

On Fridays, Spotify issues Release Radar playlists, so our paltry (but valued by us!) group of 165 followers will get notice that we’ve got some new music out.

This week the boss man of Spotify, Daniel Ek,  announced that they now receive 40,000 new tunes per day. There are 3.9 million artists.

Holy cockadoodle! How can anyone get noticed in that crowd? It seems that they now have 217 million subscribers. My thinking is that we only need to get heard by a microscopic percentage of that and we’d be more successful than we have ever dreamed of being  – but, paradoxically, as it has become easier to distribute music it has become harder to be heard.

We have tracked down the curators of some likely playlists not curated by Spotify.  Spotify shows their names but there is no way to contact them. So, some Sherlock-like sleuthing comes in to play.  People tend to use the same user name and avatar/thumbnail on their various social media sites, so although it takes some effort, it is possible to track some of them down and send them a polite message with a link to a likely song. We did this with our previous album and did get on a small number of playlists. We’ll see whether we get a similar or better response with this one.

Mu’addib on Spotify?

 

Although our new album, Barsoom, is available from Bandcamp, it isn’t on the streaming platforms or other download sites yet. This is because we’re attempting to get a track on a curated Spotify playlist which would massively increase our exposure. To do that, we have to present it to our distributor a good while before its “release date” and we picked 1 May 2019 as that arbitrary date.

Spotify asks for one track to be presented for consideration. This is tricky for artists like ourselves whose music doesn’t fit a single genre. So, we chose the track Mu’addib because Spotify seems to have many playlists that contain chilled electronica. Our drum and bass or dubstep flavoured tunes don’t quite follow the expectations of those genres enough for us to expect them to be chosen. We’re too electronic sounding for acoustic genres and too acoustic sounding for pure electronica genres. So – chilled it is.

There’s been no response from Spotify so far. I’m not sure we’re really expecting anything positive. It’s an experiment anyway. They get literally 20,000 new tracks per day. Even if only a tiny percentage of those get presented for playlist consideration, we’re still up against a vast sea of mainstream-genre drivel that is far more likely to fit their algorithms.