Year In Review 2012: Uruguayan Artists & Videos

Well, this is the last post of 2012. I want to wish you all a happy New Year, and thank you for your support. Keeping this blog alive takes me a huge amount of time, but it’s always something I do with a lot of conviction, a lot of determination and (most of all) a lot of illusion.

Always will.

Emilio

Free & Legal Music From Ibero-America At CancioneroAzul.org

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Emilio Pérez Miguel

Cancionero Azul [Blue Songbook] is a website that gives you free and 100% legal music downloads from all over Ibero-America. And that includes Uruguay. Artists that I hope to review in 2012 such as Ismael Collazo and Martin Barea Matos have all made their albums publicly available on CancioneroAzul.org. You can download Ismael’s “Rincones” [Corners] and Martín’s “Odisea En El Parking Planetario” [Odyssey In The Planetary Parking] at absolutely no cost on this well-designed site.

For its part, those of you who want to have your own music featured on CancioneroAzul.org should read this page.

As one of the few sites with this scope and depth, Cancionero Azul comes highly recommended. It’s not every day that you get to sample music from Spanish-speaking countries this accurately and legally.

StoryAmp – The Place Where Musicians And Journalists Meet

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Emilio Pérez Miguel

Name: StoryAmp
URL: http://www.storyamp.com

This new site brings together musicians and PR agencies in a grand way. If you’re an artist, you can turn to StoryAmp.com to create dispatches by uploading your music, bio, photos, videos and concert links. These dispatches can then be shared using any of StoryAmp’s press lists, and brought into the hands of journalists. That doesn’t mean they’ll write about you and your wondrous ensemble, but at least you’ll make your presence known to them. It’s a start.

And any way you look at it, using a site like this one is infinitely cheaper than trying to hire the services of a PR agency. StoryAmp can actually be used for free, and if you need to flex some additional muscle then you can sign up for a premium account. This will give you unlimited audio streaming, unlimited password-protected downloads and the chance to upload an unlimited number of photos and videos to be used in your dispatches. Continue reading →

SpotMeUp – Upload Your Music To Spotify

Posted on December 18, 2011 by Emilio Pérez Miguel

Name: SpotMeUp
URL: http://www.spotmeup.com

The war between Spotify and Google Music rages on, and (by the looks of it) the European startup is the one that holds the upper hand. It’s not that Spotify has become a household name, but the last year’s been pretty spiffy for the music streaming service, what with a brilliant American launch and a partnership with Facebook. And web tools like SpotMeUp do nothing but keep the momentum going.

This new website has come along to answer the question of “How do I get my music on Spotify?” in the most direct way of all. SpotMeUp is an easy-to-use service that lets you upload your music to Spotify in the blink of an eye. Singles, EPs and full albums can all be uploaded equally fast. Upon creating a (free) account, you’ll be able to upload the files from your computer, one by one. Continue reading →

Turning Your Gameboy Into A Musical Instrument

Posted on December 14, 2011 by Emilio Pérez Miguel

And here I was, thinking that making music with a Gameboy could only be taken this far:

It turns out someone did try and improve the Gameboy’s audio capabilities quite recently. Just look at this Kickstarter project. It added a resonant low pass analog filter into the classic Nintendo Gameboy that became all the rage in the 90s for extra audio supremacy.

Well, for a couple of new effects at least.

It was all done by placing the filter inside the battery’s compartment, with external controls being used for cutoff, resonance, bypass and envelope follower. The filter could operate both in mono and in stereo mode. Continue reading →

PumpYouUp – Free Indie Electronic Music

Posted on November 27, 2011 by Emilio Pérez Miguel

Name: PumpYouUp
URL: http://www.pumpyouup.com

Visit PumpYouUp.com when you’re in the mood for some music to rock your body to. This new site’s devoted to free electronica, trance, dubstep and techno. In all cases, we’re talking about quality selections, handpicked by the site’s creators. The idea is to include songs that aren’t too long for their own good, and which aren’t that weird either.

So, songs can be searched used a dead-simple interface. This lets you have songs found without having to sign up for an account or anything like that. It’s all done on the fly. Continue reading →

GarageBand Comes To The iPhone And iPod Touch

Posted on November 24, 2011 by Emilio Pérez Miguel

iPhone and iPod Touch Users Can Now Run GarageBand On Their iDevices

After having been introduced on the iPad earlier this year, Apple’s GarageBand has become available on the screens of iPhone and iPod Touch users everywhere. It costs $4.99 (iTunes link), and much like its iPad counterpart it lets you plug in your electric guitar and mic to record yourself playing. Plus, the app comes with touch instruments like keyboards, drums and basses. And tons of sound effects are also included, along with a sampler and more than 250 professional loops you can use as backing for any song of yours.

These are the full features of GarageBand, as listed by Apple itself.

• Create custom chords for Smart Instruments
• Support for 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures
• Reset song key without transposing original recordings
• Transpose songs in semitones or full octaves
• Additional quantization options for recordings including, straight, triplet and swing
• New audio export quality settings for AAC and AIFF (Uncompressed)
• Arpeggiator available in Smart Keyboard
• Adjustable velocity settings for Touch Instruments
• Numerous enhancements, including automatic fade out and improved audio import options

Veenue – Collaborate With Musicians From All Over The World

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Emilio Pérez Miguel

Name: Veenue
URL: http://www.veenue.com

Do you remember the video I posted earlier this year that brought together 100 different musicians playing Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog”? If you watched it back in the day, then I’m sure you do. That video was certainly impressive. The effort made by the folks who put it together was nothing short of titanic. I’m sure that many of you felt like being involved in something like that. And who could have guessed that you would be able to do it this soon?

Veenue is a music collaboration platform. It lets you connect with artists from every corner of the world, and create songs together. You do that by shooting and uploading videos of you performing. These are then used to create a “full” clip.

And just to add a little spice to how the site works, on Veenue you can become part of competitions which are sponsored by world-renowned brands. The first contest will start on the 3rd of October, and it will close on the 31st of March. Sponsored by Volkswagen, its winners are going to be invited to a studio in Berlin to record the song they have made together. And they’ll also get to produce a music video for the song.

Obviously, it’s still to soon to know how far this platform can go. We can’t know just yet if it will become the kind of social service people such as David Fincher end up making movies about. But the site is surely original, and you can use it without having to read a manual that would take half the Amazonia to make. And that’s just about the rightest way to kick things off, really.

Vincent Vega – Uruguayan Independent Artist

Posted on November 13, 2011 by Emilio Pérez Miguel

Vincent Vega's Debut Album

The matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. Because the truth is inexplicable, puzzling, mystifying. Well, it must be for this fellow who keeps on emailing me, asking why there’s never any guest posts on MusicKO, why it’s always me and the belly of the beast running the show.

OK, look. I did try hiring some folks to write stuff for this blog. I asked those who were interested to submit some capsule reviews, to see what they could do. And someone named Elbo Ludo sent three in. Two were a cut and paste affair, straight from the All Music Guide. The third and final one, now, was a short piece on a Uruguayan artist I’d never heard of in my life. That artist was named Vincent Vega. And that’s what this gentleman came up with:

Vincent Vega (pronunciation:[bjœːɳ ɵlˈveːɵs]): Named after actor Vincent D’Onofrio and Vega (the Spanish cage fighter from the “Street Fighter” franchise) Vincent Vega is a Uruguayan duo that had a chance to rise to prominence when they were commissioned by director Rob Marshall to write a song for the film “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides”. The resulting track (“Huevo Maraca”) could be heard as the end credits were rolling. But since the vast majority of the people in the theaters always left by then, the duo’s pyrotechnical contribution to the film went largely unheeded by audiences, unaware of the credibility of what they would have heard had they stayed around.

So much for having guests authors on MusicKO, then.

But the silver lining (because there’s always one) was that I became really curious on this duo that went by the name of Vincent Vega. Hey, I’m always up for anything that could send people tripping as much as to write a review like the one I just shared with you. And you know what? After having been to a couple of their gigs and getting to know the guys personally, I must say their compositions are not only tasteful but truly resonant.

At its core, Vincent Vega is a duo made up of Matías González and Mauricio Sepúlveda (Dr. Gonzo & Mr. Vega to friends and foes). They’ve been around since 2008, and in November 2009 they released an eponymous album, which you can download for free.

Vincent Vega (Mauricio Sepúlveda & Matías González) At A Recent Gig

Their influences include artists as celebrated as The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Big Star and Wilco. And their main Uruguayan touchstone seems to be Eduardo Mateo, one of the seminal artists in the development of popular music in this country. Continue reading →

Napster Is Back Again

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Emilio Pérez Miguel

You Read It Here First - Napster Is Coming Back From The Dead

I announced the return of MySpace just last week, and now I find that an even more emblematic service is trying to slip back into the public eye. I’m talking about Napster, one of the most widely-discussed P2P filesharing platforms ever.

“What do you mean ‘slip back into the public eye’? Wasn’t the service dead and gone for good?”, I hear you retort. To which I have to reply, “no, it wasn’t”.

You see, although Napster’s days as a filesharing service were over by July 2001 (when the service was forced to close down after a much-publicized legal dispute with the RIAA), the name “Napster” has changed owners a good couple of times. One of these was Roxio, which relaunched Napster as a 100% legal music service shortly after it was originally closed. It was all to no avail, and most people never noticed. To them, Napster sank from sight when it stopped being a place to get music for free. Period.

But Napster’s latest owners are intent on reclaiming some of the fire the service had on its P2P glory days.

Napster has just been acquired by Rhapsody for an undisclosed sum, and it is to be relaunched as an on-demand service letting users listen to all the music they want in exchange for a monthly subscription. Continue reading →

MusicKO

We Built This City On Rock & Roll

Tag Archives: Music