Phew! It’s already been 6 months since my last appereance on Pr0gramma with my Bimstein EP and obviously I went back into the ethernet shadows after that. Not really – I rather went into the shadows of my studio racks, taking a recent mixture of changes and chances as an inducement to rebuild my studio setup. And as a result of some quite drastic setup changes there also went quite some time into learning new machines and software and teach them to communicate with each other.
So let’s take a few steps back and remember where we took off, shall we?! Back in April I had my last appearence on Austin Cassels radio show. And while it’s rather unlikely…maybe some of you missed that one. If that’s you…or if you just wanna listen back to some Octobird stuff, here is the set I played on Austin’s show:
TRACKLIST:
Andreas Grosser – Rhythmic Desert
UFOCUS – Fun With Fractals
Octobird – Desert Hall (unreleased track)
Dona – Vrs 2
D’Marc Cantu – Another Number
DJ Spider & Franklin De Costa – F Planet
Simon Haydo – The Territories Marked
S Olbricht – Asterid
oxvac – 7
Octobird – Monowai
DJ Spider – Inner Earth Existance
Israel Vines – Rage Appropriate
Container – Peppered
Don’t DJ – Hexentrix (Jordan GCZ Remix)
So much for the warmup and hopefully I’ll be back soon with some actual “news” 😉
Back home at Pr0gramma, back to some rough and raw structures. I’ve always been bad with timing and so I present theses rough and earthy tunes just as the brighter days are coming. And while I may be a bit better with words I stick to the valued opinion of Pr0gramma’s Ismael:
Back in the key of Octobird, we return to the pristine dynamics of Bimstein. From the onset, Palm Slap leans in with sluggish tape edit styles, tight electro rhythms, and playful earworms. Evolving into what feels like a moody 5th gen platformer, things take a more metallic heavy-rhythm turn. Controlling the color palette is a clear Octobird skillset. Passing halfway, melodic tension emerges once again from the rhythmic detour making for a very narratively guided trio of closing tracks. From the heavy side-pumping of saturated echoes to the crazy well-crafted perc throughout, PR16 feels like the inevitable polished gem of a closer. There is no lag here, just pure diamond quality.
There we have him, the newborn. That happy little companion who will cheer you up about the first hardships of the approaching winter. A handful of tracks that are rather creamy, soft and warm, but won’t refuse a little dance or two.
The links to the streaming services could still take a few days before they actually lead to the release, but Bandcamp is up and running. Everything else is fake anyway! 😉
Well, I guess that’s called a sellout without income. In a better future, we would all be busy squandering our pocket money on Bandcamp and in record stores. But streaming platforms like Spotify have probably changed our listening habits permanently. And no matter how you understand the statements of a generation of poor bedroom producers, it may not be so much about paying for music, but rather about giving it a value.
No matter! Octobird is on Spotify and all these other Major Players now. Because, well … everyone else is there too … and admittedly I also use Spotify. So go along, click all these links, push all these subscription buttons and give your thumbs up at the checkout.
SPOTIFY | APPLE MUSIC | TIDAL | YOUTUBE | GOOGLE
I love you all!
Hey there Earth Persons…I am very happy to announce that Octobird’s current release “AM Sessions” is available in the form of manifested electrical vibrations now. So go grab your (free) digital copy from Bandcamp.
Inspired by the recording workflow from the sessions with his like minded fella Vodor L. Zeck, Octobird got himself an 8-track digital recorder and startet jamming.
Similar to the recordings from the recent Tram Komputer Release, these jams reveal themselves more or less as a raw distillate from spontaneous sessions, driven by repetitive patterns, exuberant modulations and a midi clock. Recorded in a single run and shrunk down to a bearable size later on.
Like Dessert Sessions… but on Midi Clock.
I started to make my releases available on the alternative streaming platform Resonate.is starting with my latest Pr0gramma Release Organelle. The others will follow.
I’m really hoping for a bright future for Resonate as it is right now still in Beta. For those of you who don’t know, Resonate is a streaming service aiming to even out the quite unfair outcome for artists from streaming revenues by offering a stream-to-own model. This means you don’t pay a monthly subscription fee but rather pay for every stream but with a very low price tag for the first streams, up to the point where you finally own that song with all the benefits of downloading and so on.
It’s already a good sign to see some “bigger” underground labels such as Hyperdub, Ostgut Ton and Opal Tapes there but as any of these fresh ideas they still have to prove their concept in the big jungle of major players. But I’m in good hope that they could fill a gap away from the major players to more independent artist such as Bandcamp did back in the day and still does.
And yet another EP (or what ever you call 6 tracks in a row these days) out on Pr0gramma! It feels just great to be in such good creative company. This time even with some visual gems. Pr0gramma Number one Ismael Stein made a fantastic little collage with memories of a forgotten future.
“Organelle drives in and out of a polar spectrum: the shadowed, looping post-industrial grit of Treevolt and the more luminous, organic left field of Woodrough. The area between these aesthetic pillars makes each juncture that much more unique. The ebbs and flows somehow follow a natural trajectory despite being far from predictable making for 34 dense minutes that never overstay their welcome. The staple dissonant riffs, busy perc, and tasteful bridges all remain intact, but in evolution from Octobird’s last, Baikonur, Organelle seems to retain and build with a more concretely directed pace driving each listen through a more diverse myriad of textures and seemingly very real places yet all with an oddly particular fidelity that suggests some weird sense of omnipotent control.”