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.

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!

Jan 06 2010 Tampere, Vastavirta (FB, Last.fm)
Jan 07 2010 Helsinki, Kuudes Linja (FB, Last.fm)
Jan 08 2010 Tallinn, Rockstar’s (FB, Last.fm)
Jan 09 2010 Riga, Elektra (Älymystö single act + support) (FB, Last.fm)

So, after a bit of a pause Älymystö will take on the road again, this time to celebrate the release of our new split vinyl album with ATYD! This time we’ll making a road trip of traditional proportions – we’ll start off from Tampere, get down to Helsinki, then hop over the Baltic Sea to Estonia and Latvia.

Check your calendars people and see you on the road!

Now it’s finally official: Älymystö / And Then You Die split album titled 19:38:00 will be released in 24th of December as a digital download. The album will be available in iTunes Music Store, Nokia Music Store, Spotify and selected other on-line services right in time to offer you some easy listening for the Christmas Eve. If you are more into large discs and diamond needles than download services, you’ll have to wait a bit longer: the collectors edition picture disc will be released in 1st of April 2010.

We will also be on tour in the beginning of the year and you’ll be seeing and hearing us in both Finland and Baltic countries. More information incoming as soon as we nail down the exact dates and venues.

Meanwhile check out this ad / mood piece of the oncoming record, made by Skithund Records:

Every three years the Library of Congress in the States goes through a review, where they grant the right to circumvent DRM in some cases, which is usually forbidden by DMCA. Not surprisingly, at this time you get the silliest and most infuriating spin from the copyright lobby.

The winner this time is Steve Metalitz, who is a lawyer representing MPAA, RIAA and other similar outfits. According to him consumers should not be able to strip DRM from material that is bought from stores that shut down their DRM-servers – thus rendering all the material bought from them useless. So, if you have bought your music from, say, Wal-Mart download service, you are out of luck – better go and buy all your albums again from somewhere else. Ka-ching.

According to Ars Technica Metalitz responded to several questions from the Copyright Office as follows:

“We reject the view that copyright owners and their licensees are required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works. No other product or service providers are held to such lofty standards. No one expects computers or other electronics devices to work properly in perpetuity, and there is no reason that any particular mode of distributing copyrighted works should be required to do so.”

On the surface this looks kosher. Of course you can’t expect things to last forever or hold any industry to that kind of standards. Things break down, get lost and so on. But comparing downloaded DRM protected music to, say, electronics is a false analogy. Why?

Because DRM protected music is DESIGNED to fail whenever the seller feels like it. If someone’s music collection is lost due to a hard drive breakdown, accidental deletion or something similar (and there’s no backup), then the situation is pretty clear – he has to replace it with his own money. All kinds of devices wear down and break up sooner or later and there isn’t really much you can do about it. But a DRM kill switch is a different thing altogether. It’s not in any way an inherent property of music files, it’s a tacked on suicide pill which the consumer is not really paying for.

So, Mr. Metalitz and the organizations you represent: if we follow your logic, you would not mind if the car manufacturers fitted your cars with devices which they can use to trash the engine when they feel like it, or the furniture stores you use retained the right to just barge in and take out your sofas, beds and so on any given day? I mean, we can’t expect people to be able to drive their cars or sit in their living rooms in perpetuity?

If you follow the news about music industry, by now you must already KNOW that the pirates are killing music. Surprise surprise, while the industry is suing single moms for millions, they are also making more money out of paying customers.

You don’t have to believe us, you can ask Will Page, who claims that the revenues of the music industry in UK went up by 4,7% in 2007-2008 in spite of the recession and increase in p2p downloads. Who is this guy? Another copyright activist who tries to justify his piracy by babbling about online distribution, long tail and such crap? Not quite. Will Page is the Chief Economist of PRS for Music, which is a royalty collecting group for music writers, composers and publishers in UK. His study titled “Adding up the Music Industry for 2008” reveals that the music industry is diversifying and the consumers use a variety of different platforms to enjoy their music.

All in all the retail sales of music fell by six percent, which the report states is “actually quite an achievement, given the harsh economic conditions and turbulent events on the high street towards the year end”. The sales of physical records fell by 10%, but at the same time digital distribution was up by 50% and the sale of concert tickets by 13%. The net gain for the music industry over this was three percent. Additionally the industry saw dramatic growth in licensing, advertising and sponsorship deals.

The news article in Zeropaid made a nice summary of a key trend revealed by the report:

This report highlights the importance of diversification, or finding new places and new ways to generate revenues. By understanding the ecosystem, it enables more cooperation to grow the market going forward.

According to Zeropaid in the US investors have started to shy away from new innovations in digital distribution of music, because the biggest obstacle is getting the record labels to cooperate. At the same time the labels are whining about the declining sales, they seem to make it as difficult as possible to develop and adopt new revenue models. They seem to be either completely out of touch with what the modern consumers want, or somehow wilfully opposed to renewing their model just on principle. A good example of the former is Finnish Johanna Kustannus, which is a label for many well known major Finnish artists. In the beginning of the year they pulled most of their catalog out of Spotify, and what was the reason:

“We are a bit unsure about what Spotify is, so we wanted to pull our artists out of there.” -CEO Sini Perho (Kaleva)

Yes, because that information is so incredibly difficult to dig out…

So, what is the bottom line of this (and many other) surveys? It’s what us filthy pirates who want the artists to starve have been saying for some time: P2P is the new radio. People use to get to know new artists, then go to their gigs and buy both merchandise and their albums – the latter not necessarily as traditional CDs, but as downloads or song packs for music games, and so on. The same applies to YouTube with its numerous fan videos, which is in excellent way to get free publicity.

Make no mistake; the live music industry grew in 2008. More events, more bands, more tickets and importantly, higher ticket prices. Breaking it down to basic supply and demand economics, and given the scarcity embedded in its model, the live music industry is somewhere you really want to be right now. However, the distribution of wealth in live music represents a trend that economists at PRS for Music have also established in digital music – a perverse and paradoxical effect of the ‘long tail’. – Adding up the music industry for 2008

Music is doing just fine and so is the music industry – as long as the latter has the common goddamn sense to adapt to the times.

And how might that table look by the end of 2009? Factors outside the industry’s control will have a major say, especially as the effects of a ‘deleveraging’ economic downturn work through the system. Jeremy Fabinyi, Acting CEO of PRS for Music, has talked about ‘tough times ahead’, and advertising revenues are reportedly down double digits in many B2B sectors such as commercial television. That said, the intrinsic value of music itself may be playing a role in helping the industry weather the storm, as all major summer festivals have sold out and recorded music sales have shown some impressive resilience given the conditions. In terms of putting your money where your mouth (or mouse) is, two trends are worth a punt for 2009 though: firstly, B2B’s share of the overall pie will grow, and secondly that the wealth gap between hits (often heritage acts) and niches will widen. Ultimately what this all means is that portfolio theory matters more now than ever before or as Jeremy Fabinyi would argue, finding new places and new ways to collect royalties has never been so important. – Adding up the music industry for 2008

So, tomorrow (that’s Thursday the 28th of May) we’ll finally be hitting the stage at Kuudes Linja and we’re happy to tell you the other performers of the evening will be the lovely Burlesque Polaire.

Guys in gasmasks and girls in corsets sounds very appropriate to me. Hope to see you there!

In case you’ve been missing seeing us play live lately, you’re in luck: we’ll be playing at Torture Torstai on 28th of May at Kuudes Linja. We’ll be playing a lot of material from the upcoming vinyl, and we’ll have an expanded lineup with Lin on cello.

The resident DJ’s are Proteus, aQi and ErilaZ, and there might be other fun stuff going on as well, but more on that as things develop.

Tickets are 8 euros. Bring friends. We like friends.

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.

Right, that’s another Band Camp done. Tired reporting follows.

First order of business: The master for the split vinyl has now — finally — been handed off to the boys at Skithund Records, and hence we once again broke out the bubbly.

Cheers.

We’ll keep you posted on possible release dates and what have you.

More on this front: We’ll put the raw tracks for a couple of the new songs online sometime next week, so if you feel like cooking up a remix, feel free! We’d seriously love to hear what you come up with, and we’ll be giving out some free swag for the ones that really strike our fancy. More on this as the tracks go live, but heads up!

Second order of business: New material! This was a surprisingly productive session and we were able to get a cover song into shape in pretty much the first sitting, and it should be a blast at shows in the future.

We also sunk our teeth into an entirely new Älymystö tune. Herra Haapanen presented us with some new (or is the word “fresh”?) beats, 30 minutes later we’d written and cut the first tracks on bass and guitar, another 10 minutes later Herra Honkonen was done with the lyrics, another hour and we had the chorus written and arranged, and at the end of the evening, the vocals were laid down. This may not sound exceptional, but rest assured, this is not how we usually do this stuff.

Not only that, but the song is really nice FUCKING AWESOME. I know having an attack of fanboyitis on your own material is sort of incestuous, but HOLY HELL YOU GUYS.

That’s it from us for tonight. This shit is hard work, and so I’ll be following the example of Herra Eskola. See you all next week with the new developments!

SLEEP. IS. WRONG.