Fjord Festival Locks Its 2027 Lineup — and It's All Unsigned Acts
All 42 acts on next June's bill are unsigned or self-released, and the festival says the rule is now permanent.
Frequencies
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Minidisc Sales Just Outpaced CDs for the First Time Since 1998
Independent retailers moved more minidiscs than CDs in the second quarter, and three quarters of them were blanks.
Tbilisi's Substation Club Reopens After Two-Year Silence
The Tbilisi club returns on 19 September at a reduced 380 capacity, with Barometric and DJ Provenance on the opening bill.
Velvet Static's 'Half Light' Is Shoegaze for the Server Room
Recorded over eleven days in a decommissioned data hall with the cooling still running, 'Half Light' is the most detailed headphone record of the year and completely useless on a motorway. Both facts come from the same decision.
The Interview: DJ Provenance on Digging, Data, and Dying Formats
Since March 2004, DJ Provenance has logged every record he owns in a single spreadsheet: 32,140 rows, including who he was with when he bought it. We met him in a storage unit off an A-road.
What We Lose When the Venue Becomes a Condo
A 300-capacity room is not a small arena. It is the only place a band learns to hold a room, and the arithmetic keeping it open is thinner than anyone building flats next door has ever been told.
The Sound Design of Silence in This Year's Best Films
Three of this year's best films spend most of their running time near silence. That is not restraint, it is a mix decision, and it comes straight out of forty years of ambient records.
'Field Notes From a Dying Mall' Finds Ambient Gold in Dead Retail
Nineteen months, six shopping centres in their last weeks of trading, and a 62 Hz escalator motor doing the job of a bass player. Field recording usually gets away with pointing a microphone at somewhere interesting. This record actually composes.
The Algorithm Doesn't Dance: Notes on Discovery After Playlists
Recommendation systems are extremely good at telling you what you already like. They have no way to model forty people in a back room deciding, together and in public, that a record is worth caring about.
Club Flyers Were the Internet Before the Internet
Before a link could travel, a rectangle of paper had to. The club flyer was a routing protocol with a typeface, and it encoded who was invited far more precisely than anything that replaced it.
Game Audio Is Eating the Avant-Garde (and That's Fine)
Indeterminacy, generative form, scores that never play the same way twice. Concert programmers largely stopped paying for that. A twelve-person studio making a diving game is paying for it now.
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