[Ellen Allien + Apparat] album

[rayray]

[quote=rayray]seems as if sasha should look into this methodology, do you think it would work for an artist of his scale or is it only after their continued success that UW can pull this off so flawlessly?

totally agree eikman - the scale issue is what makes the river run project interesting from a distribution / control standpoint, my guess is that it would not work for apparat. it just seems so perfect a system for artistic control in concept that it should work, in my utopian mind.

anyway - is berlinette worth checking out, what's the sound/ vibe of the disc?

[rayray]

btw - eikman, you qouted me on #666, i'm staying quiet for the rest of the day!

[patrick]

scott, that all makes sense, but why don't they just bumb back the promos (or rather bumb forward the albumn release) so that the hype is a lot closer to the release date? there must be a pre-net reason to get it out, but i couldn't imagine needing 3 months now to get reviews and whatnot...

[Eikman]

Originally Posted by rayray

.
anyway - is berlinette worth checking out, what's the sound/ vibe of the disc?

definitely worth checking out. allien's stuff is more techno-based than apparat, but it's a very diverse record with lots of influences, ranging from IDMish sounds like apparat to more 4/4 dancefloor patterns. the vibe is rather mechanical ('urban' in some sense), lots of cut-ups and distortion, but it flows perfectly.

[rayray]

thanks, great description - will def'n. check it out.

[Scott Warner]

hmm...how can you tour the globe when you can't afford it? like i said, being well known on the internet doesn't pay for flights/insurance etc.(although mrs allien and mr apparat certainly don't have this problem, because they are already fairly well known acts)

Yeah but that was true before the Internet too. Obviously it's not as easy as "just tour" but I'd argue it's far easier than it was ten years ago for artists with little to no resources to establish a world wide audience. Unless the artist is also a business and management savant they're still going to have to work with middlemen in order to get the ball rolling but at least they're not at the complete mercy of the whims of the corporate music industry. And, after that first tour, they should have a much better understanding of How Everything Works.

As for holding up promos - you still have to rely on music portals and publications to achieve the largest possible penetration for your work. A good review in Pitchfork == instant career traction. You can't rely on someone listing the band as a favorite in a MySpace profile alone, but you can rely on a review within a few key online music publications as near instanteous worldwide tastemaker awareness for you and your work. To generate that buzz, you need to market, and under the traditional model you can't market on the day of release because then there is no pre-awareness for you work, your album ends up sitting on the shelf not getting sold during that period and the retailers end up saying "No thanks, have your album back because shelf space is valuable by the second - and don't send anything else." Now, things are changing with the non-traditional retailers like Apple but it takes a long time switch an entire industry to a new way of doing things.