As some of you may have heard, I’ve been working on a solo album this year, and I’m happy to say it is now available for enjoyment by humans. The album is called 800 Memories Per Second and it’s a collection of mostly live improvisations recorded over a period of two years or so.

The album should appeal to fans of the more ambient side of Älymystö.

Here’s where it resides. It’s available as a free download and under a Creative Commons license, so feel free to spread the word and/or the files. Do it now.

(Also feel free to follow me on Twitter or on Facebook.)

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ITEM! 19:38:00 by ATYD/Älymystö will be coming out on vinyl in May. The graphics look damn nice.

The split release with And Then You Die is finally up on Spotify. Took three months, but hopefully it was worth the wait.

Click here to listen. Spread the word far and wide.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are happy to have you join us live @ Kuudes Linja. Here we go!

EDIT: The gig is now available as a recording. Click to make go. Yes, next time we’ll be using something other than the built-in mic on the laptop.

EDIT2: We cleaned up the clips a bit, so there’s no dead air there.

Enjoy!

Hey, gang.

The split release with And Then You Die and it is now available at least on iTunes Music Store. Spotify should follow soonish. There will be a collectors’ edition 12″ vinyl picture disc of this available on April 1st, at which time we’ll also put up a free download of our half of this split vinyl.

Meanwhile you can listen to our half of the whole thing on our website by clicking on the Sounds of Waking Dreams in the banner.

Here’s a press release on the proceedings as well as the mini tour we’ve got going.

Onwards toward 2010!

So, we have good news for all of you Spotify fans out there. As of today, our full length album Atomgrad is available in Spotify, so just click here and tune in.

Right now our latest publication, a split vinyl EP, is still in the production line, but things are certainly moving forward. Also, we have a new tour coming up, so stay tuned!

Time for a quick update and showcase of the remixes in thus far!

We’ve received four mixes so far, and it’s been nice to see the song go into so many decidedly different directions. Here we go.

The first remix (download) came to us from Lacuna Origin, and boy, it’s a slow and heavy one. The melancholy twang of the original takes wonderful a pummeling from the rhythm section.

Number two (download) was quite the departure from the first one. The huge jump from Sweden to Australia seems pretty appropriate, as Very Sharp Knives came to us with a very abstract and glitchy reworking. The guitar is drenched in delays and reverbs, and as for the vocals:

The vocals are still there, and I think they’re audible at high volume, but they have a denoiser set to remove the entire voice part, leaving the weird random beep artifacts, and only mixed in for the choruses.

The third remix (download) was done by Invisible Waves, who make the whole affair sound like your neighbours are really up to no good. Nice ambience from the reversed samples here, and a surprisingly eastern shift in the tonality there, too. I picked up a bit of CMI vibe as well, although I’ve no idea if that’s just me.

The last one so far download) comes from Zha and I guess it was about time we got our dubstep on. I’ve personally been on a huge dubstep kick lately, so this one put a big old smile on my face and a nod in my neck.

Lovely work, you guys. Keep them coming!

Oh, and happy mother’s day, people! We luvs the mums.

Right, we mentioned this on the Band Camp report, but now we can actually go ahead with this. We’re putting the unmixed tracks for an upcoming tune called Revitty online for remixing.

We hesitate to call this a competition, since music is never one, but we’d love to send some swag to the remixes we dig the most. Say, a copy of Atomgrad and a lovely Älymystö t-shirt? Unfortunately we only have XL sizes left, but they make a lovely tent or a stylish nightie! If you’re located in Finland, we’ll throw in a free pass to a gig and will even buy you a beer! We’ll keep this deal open until the end of May.

All this is now within reach!

Click here for the tracks in WAV format (240.6 MB).

or

Click here for the tracks in 200 kbps VBR MP3 format (50.3 MB).

These are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license, which means you can freely distribute these files and remix them, as long as you attribute the original material to us, aren’t making any money off them, and share the remix under these same conditions.

Drop us a note in the comments, we’d be happy to host your remixes here as well. (With the proper attributions and links of course.)

EDIT: The tempo of the original is 94 BPM.

The Finnish writer, RPG designer, poet, screenwriter, spy and renowned adventurer Mike Pohjola made a short film last summer and used our music as a soundtrack. The film is a post-apocalyptic story called Taivas ja Helsinki 2018 (Heaven and Helsinki 2018) and it’s now on YouTube in all its 7 minute glory.

The songs used here are Antithesis and Lodges; a couple of the new ones, in their earlier incarnations. Oh, and that’s me gunning down a graffiti artist in cold blood.

The film is in Finnish, but I think the gist should come across pretty well.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz794z0263U

Exhibit B, your honour.

Last year Trent Reznor pulled a coup and released five CD’s worth of material for free under a CC license. The first batch of these was a four CD collection of instrumental material – not radio friendly pop to say the least.

So how’d that gambit work out?

In case you missed the it, Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I-IV became Amazon’s best selling mp3 album of 2008. It outsold the new Coldplay. (Radiohead, who also put their latest album up for free download for a limited time, came in at #11.)

I’d say the key to that success boils down to two things: visibility and a dedicated fanbase (or community). In the traditional model visibility is exactly what record companies provide — and fair enough, it’s what they’re good at and what their resources are geared to do. Whether this is actually necessary these days is another matter entirely.

In the field of fanbase or community building, NiN is again a prime example of the way it should be done. This live video project is a brilliant case. 400 GB of HD video footage shot and edited by fans, released for free with the consent of the band.

Point being: don’t bury that Long Tail enthusiasm just yet, it’s early days and we’ve work to do.

In 2004, a man named Chris Anderson came up with a theory he was calling The Long Tail. It was an idea of the future of shopping in the environment where shelf space is unlimited – that is, of course, online.

Mr. Anderson’s theory dictated that in the future people will start buying a much wider spectrum of products online, now that they are easilly available, and they don’t have to stick with blockbusters – suggesting that in the future the blockbusters would die, and the future of business would be “selling less of more”.

Anderson called this Long Tail, because, instead of the traditional way where people buy what’s popular, so you need to sell popular stuff in order to make money, consuming habits scatter through a much wider range of products along the long tail of the marketing curve (as shown on the graph on the left, stolen from New Scientist.)

Now, the latest results of the Internet shops claim that mr. Anderson was wrong: it is still the blockbusters that rule. For example, Internet music business, that was one of the great examples of the long tail in effect, shows that out of 13 million tracks only 52,000 (0,4%) cover over 80% of the sales made online, and rest remain virtually untouched. And the same phenomenon keeps on repeating through most of the products on the Internet.

As an example, let’s take HIM and Älymystö, and a music store owner who wants to sell great ambient industrial noise. According to the traditional way, he’d have to sell HIM instead of Älymystö, because that’s what people were buying and that’s what kept him paying the bills. Now, according to Long Tail theory, he takes his shop off the street and moves it to the Internet, and starts selling Älymystö and hundreds of other noise musicians in addition of HIM and The Rasmus, and he would’ve believed he’d make the same income by more people buying only few units of different noise musicians that are wonderfully available through his webstore.

But what happens, he still finds out it’s the HIM the people buy, and nobody buys any units of Älymystö or other great stuff he’d loved to sell. So no matter the fact that now there’s a much wider range of stuff available, people still stick to the big sellers instead of exploring the tail.

This is also shown with Levyvirasto’s recent statement of the inexistent Long Tail effect there: half of the small bands at Levyvirasto don’t sell any units.

According to New Scientist, who wrote an interesting article on this topic, it’s because buying blockbusters is, in addition of being easy way to get entertainment, a way to belong to a bigger group, and that’s what people are all about: belonging to a group. Sort of depressing, but not very surprising.

But I still believe that Long Tail effect does exist, it just takes a much, much longer time for it to actually work. The evolution of consuming is, in the Internet era, always thought of taking maximum of 5 years and after that everything is changed. I’m much more skeptic, and even most of the small changes will take at least 6-10 years to actualize. Also, I think there’s a problem in the marketing – people are still fed with this blockbuster mentality, and the idea of “start exploring” still means “oh, HIM has done other albums, too!”, instead of really getting people excited of digging deeper into the long tail.