Category: Articles

Blue Water Drift Dive #8 Video

by darrellburgan, posted in Articles, Broadcasts

Apologies to those who attended the live concert but noticed that the video feed had no corresponding audio.  Dumb mistake on my part, of course.  Hopefully you tuned into the RadioSpiral feed while you watched the video.  Not perfect, I know …

In any event, I managed to salvage something out of the broadcast by using the video saved by the YouTube stream and pairing it with the audio that I recorded of the event.  The video quality unfortunately suffered (double encoding), but the audio quality should be very good.

Next time I will double check the audio ins on the video computer … !

Monochrome Masquerade live on RadioSpiral

by darrellburgan, posted in Articles, Broadcasts

Live right now on RadioSpiral.com is the Monochrome Masquerade electronic and ambient music festival!  This festival started just a while ago and will be going for several more hours.  It includes some of my friends and colleagues from the electronic music world, great artists, and is definitely worth your time to give it a listen.

I’ll be performing an hour long set at 9p ET / 8p CT / 7p MT / 6p PT, so stick around if you’d like to hear that.

sl

Hope to see you in the chat!

Music With Space

by darrellburgan, posted in Articles, Broadcasts, Ombient

For reasons that will probably elude me forever, I have only recently stumbled into this extraordinary radio program:

MusicWithSpace-nobkgrdhttp://www.musicwithspace.com/

Just wow.  Mike Hunter / Ombient has an impeccable ambient palate and plays for several hours on WPRB on an evening that desperately needs an ambient keep:  Friday evenings.  If you’ve never tuned in, you can listen from anywhere.

Check it out … !

The Hypnagogue Podcast

by darrellburgan, posted in Articles

hypnagogueSome more work listening for you.  Today I couldn’t decide which music to listen to while doing some head’s-down coding, so figured I should punt and let John Shanahan of the Hypnagogue Podcast decide.  So glad I did!

Folks, if you have never tuned in to John’s podcast, you simply must.  Essential ambient, electronic, and new age listening.  All extremely high quality and all super suitable for both active and passive listening.  My advice:  start with the most recent podcast and work your way backwards.  Literally weeks of glorious music.

Check it out!

New Palancar release: Yurushiiro

by darrellburgan, posted in Albums, Articles, Darrell Burgan

coverI am proud to announce the release of my latest Palancar album:  Yurushiiro.

I am a Wikipedia geek. Yes, I admit it. One of my favorite pastimes is to go to the Wikipedia home page, hit the random link, start reading a base article, and then see where I end up. Often times I pass through quite a bewildering sequence of topics, usually ending up in quite a different place than where I started. Which is, of course, half the fun.

During one of these virtual journeys, I came across this interesting page, which describes the traditional colors of Japan, including which colors were reserved for the nobility (“kinjiki”) versus those that the common person could use (“yurushiiro”):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_colors_of_Japan

To be honest, it had never occurred to me that a country might have a formal national color palette. Such an fascinating idea. And of course the colors spoke to me, very reserved, subtle, orderly, and ancient, as one might expect when describing Japan.

Which inspired a thought: what if I was to create a series of pure ambient pieces and then see which color reminded me of which track, or conversely, which tracks reminded me of which color? Sort of a weak form of synesthesia. Well, this album, called Yurushiiro, is the result of that process.

I hope you enjoy the music as much as I enjoyed making it.

The end of the audio CD?

by darrellburgan, posted in Articles

CDDAI recently bought a new car.  Nothing particularly remarkable about that, except that I noticed something while I was car shopping:  you simply can’t buy a new car today that has a stock CD player.  Not anywhere.

Think about that for a second.

For those of us roughly my age, we remember when all the pundits predicted that vinyl and magnetic tape would go the way of the dinosaur, and that this newfangled digital technology was going to take over the world.  Sure enough, the compact disc (CD) invaded popular music and culture almost overnight, followed shortly thereafter by the digital video disc (DVD).  For you youngsters who can’t remember a time before the internet, those are two different laser disc formats, one originally introduced for audio (and later extended to data), and the other originally introduced for video/audio (and later extended to data).

Except … these digital formats now seem to be themselves experiencing a mass extinction event themselves.  The rise of smart phones and other portable devices along with Bluetooth audio has driven a stake right through the heart of laser discs.  Nowadays kids play their music directly off their phones, and expect the TV and car stereo to be able to stream directly from their phones as well.  And it works great.

But what about the impact on musicians?  Is the idea of a physical disc dead and buried?  Should artists even bother to release physical albums any more?  Am I becoming the curmudgeon I always feared I would become?

clinteastwoodcurmudgeon

While I do agree that becoming a grumpy old man is likely my ultimate destiny, I’m seriously considering that my next album will have no physical component whatsoever.  Further, I’m seriously considering ignoring the 70 minute album length constraint that the audio CD spec imposed as an irrelevant anachronism.  My next album may be 80 minutes long.  Or 90.  Or 150.  Or 30.  Who knows.  Blasphemy, I know.  But is it actually a good thing?

I’m interested in your thoughts.  Is the physical disc a dead medium?  Is something lost by moving on from it?  Or is this the death of yet another artificial constraint?  Should I as an artist continue to support physical media or am I just showing myself to be the old man I really am?  Let me know what you think in the comments …