I’m late for my 8am marketing class. I’m running out the door of my tiny apartment, scrambling along the the sidewalk to campus. I’m 10 minutes away. Can I grab a coffee before class? Surely I can make it. I pull out my shiny new iPhone 5. Pull up YouTube. The wired headphones slowly untangle as I saunter into the student union building. I search for “majestic casual”. I hit play. Full send, volume up. Every step seems softer with music flowing out of the headphones.
Majestic was my daily driver for so long. This was a lo-fi, trip-hop, chillwave firehose of music for so long that my entire catalog of playlists came directly from Majestic for years. That is until there was a brief hiatus because of copyright drama.
My electronic roots demanded reflection today. Lo and behold, after digging up old playlists, I discovered that Majestic is a listed Curator on Apple Music!
It doesn’t look like there’s much activity, but maybe that will change? Check out some of the playlists here:
Kwon is best known for capturing the burgeoning New York hip-hop scene from the late 1980s to the late 2000s, featuring iconic figures such as Notorious B.I.G., Method Man, and De La Soul.
Back in 2017, Resident Advisor visited Paul Nicholson. He shares his creative design process for Aphex Twin’s (Richard D. James) Selected Ambient Works Volume II (sometimes abbreviated as SAW II) album artwork. Novel and fun to hear him talk about some of the design choices he made. You can tell he’s giddy to expand on some of the deliberate artwork choices (like the chart symbols corresponding to different tracks on SAW II).
I came across this really cool project on Hacker News a while back and it’s just been sitting in my bookmarks. It’s an excellent little toy to fiddle with and explore chiptune music from the past. Chiptune.app was created by Matt Montag, and it just the neatest little thing I’ve seen in a long time. I’m going to enjoy spending my downtime browsing through these archives. I may even sample a few tracks with my used OP-1 I picked up earlier this year.
Screenshot of the Chiptune.app UI. I was smitten to discover the tracks from the Alien 3 SNES game ????
Truly devastating. Ryuichi Sakamoto dies at 71. Cancer claims another great. One of the greatest pioneers of electronic music. An early adopter, a vanguard of just so much. His influence alone was revolutionary and profound. He was deeply beloved, and considered to be the father of J-pop and other synth-pop influences.
From Pitchfork:
“While undergoing treatment for cancer discovered in June 2020, Sakamoto continued to create works in his home studio whenever his health would allow,” Sakamoto’s management, Commmons, wrote in its statement. “He lived with music until the very end. We would like to express our deepest gratitude to his fans and all those who have supported his activities, as well as the medical professionals in Japan and the U.S. who did everything in their power to cure him. In accordance with Sakamoto’s strong wishes, the funeral service was held among his close family members.”
The man knew how to create magic out of thin air. I mean just listen to this stuff:
But, enough about all that preface. Previously, when I’m away from my home computer or iPhone, and want to listen to my Apple Music library on my work computer I only had one option. I had to sign-in to Apple Music on my work MacBook.
Apple Music for Web (with dark mode enabled no less)
I’ve only played around a little bit with the player, some of my radio stations and my music library for a couple of hours now. I have to say, it’s a pretty great beta! Not too many bugs, it’s a decent start.
I had read a long time ago when Apple Music originally launched, that the Apple Music application on MacOS was Ember-powered. I’ll admit I was pretty skeptical at the time. But lo and behold 4 years ago, the evidence:
So, that got me thinking, I wonder if the Apple Music web app itself is still an EmberJS web app? Welp, let’s just inspect this bad boy!
Well, well, well. Hello old friend.
Confirmed! Apple Music is indeed still leveraging Ember for the front-end. Makes sense. Ember is very mature and stable (it also lacks some of the baggage that other open-source frameworks comes with). Looks like Ember needs to update their “Ember Users” page! This was a pretty cool find!
The timing is conspicuous here. Apple is just now getting skin in the web music player game, as iTunes prepares to deconstruct itself in MacOS Catalina this fall. It means that this was likely their game-plan all along. Very impressive coordination. Apple wants to beef up their music services marketshare, and for good reason too — Chaim Gartenberg for The Verge writes:
As for the logic of adding a web interface, the move allows Apple to bring Apple Music to other platforms — like Chrome OS or Linux — without having to develop and support a custom app for each platform. Web support also puts Apple on par with its biggest competitor in the music sphere: Spotify. The Swedish streaming service, which became the first platform to hit 100 million paid subscribers earlier this year, has offered a web player for years that allows subscribers to access music without having to install a full-fledged app.
Also, if you’re interested in learning how to make a web app, or for that matter how to create an Ember app, start here. Ember maintains an excellent library of documentation, guides and tutorials.
Update: I discovered to my chagrin, that AirPods continue to work as expected with the Beta. That is to say, if you have your AirPods configured to pause music with a double-tap and you’re listening with a paired Mac over the web Beta, double-tapping will pause your music. Nicely done Apple. It’s the little things that matter most.
His newest EP, is pretty fantastic. It’s not a wild departure or anything, but I can tell that his taste and composition is certainly maturing. His tracks have had (for some time now), great rhythm exploration, thrilling bips, kits and sequence layers that are really just simply delicious to listen to. But this EP in particular has a heavy synthesizer, simple samples and overall has a decent homogeny that I just dig.
His previous releases are also worth a listen, click here to visit his Bandcamp. Otherwise, checkout Be On Fire below via Apple Music.
I really liked this interview. It’s also a shame to see this website go (thank you Internet Archive). I use to love surfing these music and band interview blogs.
I was introduced to Page France at around the same time I began questioning my future, myself and my religious beliefs. You know, those formative teenage years. I remember everyone loving to dissect the (existent or non-existent) sentimental Christian symbols from their lyrics. Hell, even David Bazan is a victim of that.
But, I thought this was such a great quote from Michael Nau (@naumichael) of Page France, I just had to share:
“The ‘Christian band’ inquiry wears me out, to be honest,” Nau said in response to numerous articles which have painted Page France as just that. “As for the Christian symbols in my writing – sometimes I don’t even realize that they exist until someone points them out to me. There’s really no reason; it just rolled out that way.”
While Page France is no longer producing music together, he continues to perform under his own name.
“The next Steven Spielberg is Anthony Scott Burns.”
Well, that’s what this Vimeo commenter said. This guy has an impressive resumé. Burns is a Canadian-bred filmmaker, visual effects artists, musician and producer — you know, like the rest of them. Is there something in the water up there?
Anyways, I came across this trailer over at kottke.org and guess who scored this project? PILOTPRIEST a.k.a. Anthony Scott Burns:
I freaking LOVED Akira. I thought it was mind-blowing. I mean, it still is actually. It’s a landmark animation piece. It influenced everybody from Steven Spielberg to Rian Johnson. So much so that, the destruction of Neo-Tokyo in Akira is literally a tirelessly repurposed knock-off trope reused over-and-over again in live-action Marvel movies.
But at any rate, it’s really cool to see such talented people working on such incredible admiration project like this. You can read more about Awaken Akira, here.
Here’s PILOTPRIEST’s latest release on Bandcamp.
Very chill stuff. Ethereal. If I close my eyes, I’m transported to a Weyland-Yutani Marscape in the year 2089… or something like that. Good jams. Reminds me of my buddy Justin’s work, BOUT.
