I’ve been sampling a lot of electronic items, they have especially great sounds when turned on and off, planning on using then extensively as drum based samples in the upcoming album.  More soon…

Thursday Afternoons (Swaying Smoke Remix) by madebyrobot

I was deeply honored when James Lowery (Swaying Smoke) contacted me to let me know he’d been working on a remix of Thursday Afternoon the opening track on Penguins (link to iTunes). I was even happier when I heard his mix, which I think paints a nice spin on the original. Many thanks James.

And don’t forget if you’re interested in working on a mix or a totally new track using the raw stems, they are all available on my Band Camp site, just let me know what you do with them.

I have released the 8 stems from Thursday Afternoons the first track on Penguins.

They are up on my bandcamp site. I’m releasing them as I did the entire album under CC-NC-A license, and I’m hoping some will take on the challenge and remix them to oblivion. If you have any questions whilst remixing don’t hesitate to ask. If I get enough volume of remixes I’ll put together a little compilation and and maybe see if I can get a netlabel to release it free.

If you make a remix, please let me know how it comes out, I’d love to hear what people do with the stems and if I get enough feedback I’ll be sure to put them together and make them available as a free download on my bankcamp site.

If you need an easy way to send the tracks to me, just use my soundcloud drop box:

Send me your track

Number Stations if you are unfamiliar are shortwave radio stations that broadcast strange and cryptic content, often ordered or seemingly random series of numbers repeated over and over again. Other stations played weird music, and other still just repeated tones over an over. They were all the rage back in the Coldwar era and are often thought to have been spying agencies means of communication.

Probably the most famous Number Station sample is from the Wilco album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, partly due to the album being named after it but maybe more so because it lead to complex legal wrangles over who “owned” the recording, eventually settled out of court.

The most authoritative collection of Numbers Stations recordings is the Conet Project by Irdial Records, who make available the entire collection under their Free Music Philosophy. There are also plenty of other places online to find other samples that can be used in recordings as samples (my so called 3 note oddity used in my track comes from this very informative site).

So now you have the background, here’s my idea. I’d like to get 10-15 tracks together, and release them through an established netlabel free. My current netlabel of choice is the Barcelona based Public Spaces Lab (I’ve contacted them and they seem very interested).

If you are an electronic musician, of any flavor and would like to make a piece that heavily uses samples taken from Number Stations recordings and then make it publically available for nothing, either drop me an email mail at madebyrobot dot com, or leave a comment below and drop me a message on twitter @madebyrobot.

I’ll keep a running list here of people who have expressed interest in contributing:

- Made By Robot
- Kieron James
- Ambienteer (James Fahy)
- FixateMusic
- Svanbommel
- Mrbitterness
- I Am Genko
- Battery Collection
- % (aka Owner Operator)
- Martin Backes
- Weather Balloons (Dave Barber)
- Oicho

For anyone interested in submitting and those who already have listed above, I will need the following for Public Spaces Lab at some point:

What we need from you is the following:
Every artist involved in the release, including yourself should provide us with:
1. Small Bio (300 words max)
2. High Resolution Photo

All artists have to agree to being released under a Creative Commons License 3.0 Unported by-nc-nd.

I have setup my soundcloud drop box for submissions, if you have a soundcloud account you can just keep the track private and share it with me that would be great.

http://soundcloud.com/madebyrobot/dropbox/

Something from the new album which is tentatively being called Penguin. There are some interesting ideas being thrown about for this release, including the possibility of limited run vinyl, but I need to see how the final thing works out. Hope you enjoy this sneak peek, this is one of the tracks that might not make it onto the album, but you never know.

Something from the new album which I’ve been working on for the last few months, should be ready in the next month. We have 18 tracks currently ready for master and mix, will probably trim those down to 12-14. This is a rough cut, pretty much a live recording with no mastering, but I hope you enjoy it.

Very excited to be part of the first open invites from Muxtape.com, I just setup the initial page, with the whole of the Binary album ready for streaming, I’ll be adding almost all of my freely available content to there as I move forward. I’m very excited about muxtape and what they could lead to as a simple music focused platform for musicians. I’m really loving the page constraints, I think it will help keep the site focused, and I’m sure people will find imaginative things to do with the pages. Swing by Made By Robot on muxtape and don’t forget to checkout the other great artists on there.

Very different to my usual stuff, almost IDM meets Gabba, consider this one very experimental.

Some new work in progress, this is a very rough live recorded track. More coming soon. The excerpt and inspiration for this is from Japanese Lullaby by Eugene Field.

Sleep, little pigeon, and fold your wings,–
Little blue pigeon with velvet eyes;
Sleep to the singing of mother-bird swinging–
Swinging the nest where her little one lies.