Auxiliary Magazine is an alternative fashion, music, and lifestyle publication based in the United States. Back in March both Ekoplex and I were interviewed by Digitalgeist (Alex Kourelis) for an article entitled “My Label is the Internet,” a feature on netlabels. You can find the finished article on page 27 of the April 2009 issue. Additionally, Auxiliary…
The activity of making and listening to music involves in something that is never merely personal. In this sense, music is like a language; when we ‘speak’ or ‘listen’ in musical language, we participate in a signifying system that is communally shared and defined, something that is larger than our own use of it and that we enter…
This set was recorded live at Darkrave vs Panic, a special one-off event held on the 2009 May long weekend in Toronto, Canada. My mission was to showcase the hard and nasty side of psychedelic trance often referred to as “darkpsy”, a style that was not often heard on Toronto dance floors. I try to ease it up near the…
In a recent article entitled Too Much Free, marketing guru Seth Godin suggests that “free by itself is no longer enough to guarantee much of anything”. Godin distinguishes between “breakthrough free”, which is interesting precisely because it hasn’t been done before, and “sample-this free”, which leads to diminishing returns for content providers as people are increasingly inundated with free…
The future of the music industry is a hotly debated subject, as just about anyone knows. Fingertips weighs in with a critical commentary of some of the more popular alternatives regularly lauded in the blogosphere, taking the time to skewer the “free music” model (not having to pay for recorded music), the “access” model (free or paid…
Andrew Dubber has an interesting new post on who to send promos to, an issue that many labels and artists struggle with these days. Dubber likens the traditional model to a lottery, whereby promos are sent out to prominent gatekeepers of taste (reviewers, radio hosts, and so on) in the hopes that someone will actually crack the cellophane and…
No culture so far discovered lacks music. Making music appears to be one of the fundamental activities of mankind; as characteristically human as drawing and painting. The survival of Paleolithic cave-paintings bears witness to the antiquity of this form of art; and some of these paintings depict people dancing. Flutes made of bone found in these caves suggest…
Recently I retrieved the metal stamper plates used to press the first and likely the only vinyl record I will ever have a hand in making: the Liquid Neon Sky EP. Until recently, these stamper plates were stored in a warehouse somewhere in Toronto, set aside after the production run in November of 2002. For whatever reason the plant held…
A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property,…
Here I have collected a list of thirteen killer tunes from the dark side of psychedelic trance. Most of these were purchased on CD from Saikosounds, my main physical media supplier these days. In alphabetical order by artist name: Atriohm – Pagan Anesthetic (Encephalopaticys Remix) [Noise Poison Records] Baal – Rite Of Passage [Underground Sound Promotions] Derango – Via [Parvati…