Today Bandcamp is once more waiving their share of sales to benefit artists during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, many artists are donating 100% of their sales to Black Lives Matter causes, making today a great day to put your money to good use.
To aid in directly supporting black musicians, artist Stephanie O'Byrne has compiled a list of black musicians who have music for sale on Bandcamp. The spreadsheet is being updated continuously throughout the day.
I’m overjoyed to write that Mansions have announced a new full-length record. That record is called “Big Bad” and it’s coming on June 26, 2020.
This marks the band’s first album since Doom Loop in 2013. It’s available for preorder now at Bad Timing Records or Bandcamp.
Jason Tate at Chorus.fm has undertaken a fun preservation project involving the “best of” lists published on his former website, Absolutepunk.net.
The story of what happened to ap.net is too long to get into here, but the gist is that after several years of trying, Jason managed to get the site back from the corporate reapers that he had previously sold it to. During its time under Buzznet Buzzmedia SpinMedia LLC SpinMedia Group, the site grew to a size that Jason couldn’t host independently. And so he made the difficult decision to let AbsolutePunk die, and with it over a decade’s worth of news articles, reviews, and forum threads.
For a while at least, a decent amount of material for the old forum and news feed was available on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. It appears that is no longer the case as any searches on the tool result in the response, "This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine."
Still he’s managed to scrape together these lists from 2005-2015. It’s great to revisit these lists again.
From Jason:
When I re-designed the new website and put together the new “End of the Year” feature page, I added a bunch of old lists from the AbsolutePunk days as well. They’re a lot of fun to read back through and remember the albums, remember the arguments, and see which ones have held up and which ones are hilariously all over the place.
In a rather unique promotional campaign, The 1975 have opened up a website called Mindshower.ai for fans to interact with assets from the band’s latest release, Notes On A Conditional Form.
The website simulates a waiting room for a “digital detox” center, as seen previously in the music video for “The Birthday Party.” Scattered around the room are a number of interactive elements that allow fans to explore behind-the-scenes photos or gather digital assets for posters. Most interesting, however, is the inclusion of complete audio stems for 3 of the band’s songs.
By accessing the computer sitting on the lobby counter, you can pull entirely mixed stems for “People Like People,” “The Birthday Party,” and “If You’re Too Shy Let Me Know.”
Using these, I took a wack at an acoustic take on “The Birthday Party,” pulling back the electric, percussive, and electronic elements of the song. I'd love to replace the "do you wanna come and get fucked up?" lines with some house-party gangs at some point.
Explaining all of these wonderful assets is a contest put on by The1975 and Amazon Music. Creators can upload their creations for a chance of featuring in a future marketing campaign.
Contest aside, this is a really clever project that gives fans like me exactly what they want—rare digital clutter!
Those who are savvy enough to go beyond what is given by the simulated file system will have access to instrumental versions of “Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America” and “The Birthday Party” by fiddling around with the water fountain feature to the right.