Monday the 21st of May 2012 the Norwegian dj Rune Lindbæk and GramArt, the artist organisation that is representing him, filed a complaint to the district court of Bergen, Norway. The complaint states that Lindbæk wants to be credited as a co-writer of two songs from Röyksopp's debut album "Melody A.M." The two songs are "A Higher Place" and "40 Years Back/Come".
This conflict has been going on over 6 years most of the time behind the scenes, but made public in March 2011 when the Norwegian paper Dagens Næringsliv featured the case/situation over 10 pages (short summary in Norwegian can be found here). The peice was written mostly from Linbæk's point of view, to great irritation for Torbjørn Brundtland and and Svein Berge. 8 months later (even it is dated 20.04.12) Röksopp answers the article by publishing a 45 pages letter (written in Norwegian) on royksoppsvarer.com. Few days later Lindbæk answer this letter by writing a blog post on runelindbaek.com.
The picture above is taken from a time when things probably seemed to be better (photo taken from runelindbaek.com). So what did this conversation through the media and web really tell us (especially for people that dont master the Norwegian language that well)? Well, there are these two songs that was made in the Drum Island (Lindbæk, Brundtland and Ole Mjøs) period, and then developed by Röyksopp and released on their hugely successful debut album. To cut it short (if I should mention all the twist and turns in this case this post would be 10 times as long), the quarrel its about if Rune Lindbæk was part of the creative process and of course - money!!
MToK do not want to take any side in this conflict, but was it really necessary to do your dirty laundry in public? On the other hand a court case might be for the best, since everything else seems to have failed, so the record (or rather tunes) finally can be set straight...
One of the songs that has caused this controversy is Röyksopp's "A Higher Place"...
...which has some similarities to Drum Island's "Lift"...
...which again has a resemblance to the beginning of Jean-Michel Jarre's "Wooloomooloo"...
I've marked 25th of June in my calendar. That is the day Frijsfo Beats will release Gaute Hjartåker's, aka Clueless, new EP "Griswald House". Normally I'm not so into 2step or garage (or "step" music in general), but I have a feeling that "Build" might be the tune that lower my threshold for checking out these genres more thoroughly...
The EP has got early dj support, among others, by Submerse, that played a set in Helsinki a few days ago.
Shit Robot is back! After two years touring the globe with his live show, Marcus Lambkin is releasing a new 12" today through DFA Records. "Teenage Bass / Space Race" is the first a series of releases called ‘The Green Machine’, which will culminate in an album early next year.
If you like Irish shitronica, the vinyl can be ordered from the here (if DFA is done with their inventory...).
Disclaimer: Before any one sues this blog for voicing a different opinion than the masses, please remember this: "What goes up, has to come down..."
"Oh by the way, which one's Pink?" is a line from Pink Floyd's song "Have a Cigar". Already back in 1975 (and probably much earlier) artists expressed their frustration about the big record companies arrogance...
They wern't happy about the C-cassettes, and tried to protect their sales of records by launching the "Home Taping is Killing Music" campaign. Then they got help! Technology had managed to developed the Compact Disc and that was the start for the nastiest (and probably the cleverest) sales trick in the book - lets force all that have LP's to buy their records one more time, but now on CD's...
After a period where people had CD's in the freezer and antistatic rubber around their CD players, to try to get the same warm sound as they were used to - the LP's were gone. All music was now available only on CD's.
Ok, CD's are handier than LP's, they take less space and you could play them in a car! But they in fact opened a whole new market - compilations! This is the start of the period where the inflated sales of CD's started. And how the music industry have milked that! How easy isn't it just to buy an artists back-catlouge and then start to pump out new compilations from this? A quick search on Discogs for Elvis Presley show us that he is represented on a handsome 400 compilations!!! And that is money - simply pure gold!
Update: Started to write this blog post 2 weeks ago (yes, Im slow...), and in that time there has been released 6 new compilations of Elvis!!
Common sense tells us that this cant last, the sales of CD's has to go down after over a decade by pumping out old music to the people. Do the music industry think this way? NO, of course it's someone else fault that their cash cow is in decline. How handy wasn't it that technology once again had leapt forward so they could blame the mp3/downloading/piracy (or whatever they call it)...
But that we will look into in the next instalment!
Rounding off this post with how I started it, with a Cigar (lyrics after the jump)...
Yesterday James Ford and Jas Shaw released their long awaited 3rd studio album, "Unpatterns". Its been 3 years since their last album, but they have been pretty busy during this time. Not only have they travelled around the globe with their live act and hugely popular DJ-sets, they have also found time to produce artist like Florence + the Machine and Arctic Monkeys.
"Upatterns" are released by Witchita Recordings and can be bought from here. After the jump you can stream the whole album (and also download the stand out song "Seraphim" for free!).
Simian Mobile Disco has always had a love for a bit different videos, and nothing has change for this album. Here is a ball's (or is it better described as a dot?) fascinating travel...
All tracks shared on this site are copyrighted by the artists and are only meant as samples. If you like what you hear, please buy their music, go to their shows, support them!
If you want some of the content removed, please contact me and Ill gladly do that!