Abbey Road Studios announces online mixing service

 
The phrase “Mixed at Abbey Road Studios, London” is no longer the exclusive domain of the Beatles, Pink Floyd, U2, Radiohead, Lady Gaga and other superstar acts that have worked at the famed facility.

The studio has now launched an online service where anyone willing to pay a fee can upload tracks and Abbey Road engineers will start mixing away, with a promised delivery of finished mixes via download within 10 days. Prices start at about $800 U.S. for recordings with one to 24 tracks, and about $1,200 for 25 to 48 tracks. A similar online mastering service also is being offered, with prices starting around $140 per song.

“The online mixing service offers a more accessible alternative to working personally at Abbey Road Studios, providing musicians and producers all over the world with the engineering excellence that makes us the perfect venue for mixing your song,” according to the studio’s website description of the service that launched in August.

Potential clients are also told they’ll have their input in the mixing process, even though they won’t be working in real time with the engineers.

“As our engineers won’t be working with you in person, it’s important for us to gather as much information as possible about how you’d like your song to sound. So please send us your ideas, i.e. ‘I’d really like this to sound like a Pixies song,’ or ‘I’d really like this to sound like a Pixie Lott song,’ ‘give it a long fadeout,’ ‘the vocal needs a slap back echo’ etc.,” the website states.

Customers also get one revision included in the mixing price if they aren’t completely happy with the engineer’s first attempt. Full details on the process are available at the Abbey Road Studios website.

In all likelihood, the move stems from financial problems the studio has been facing from competitors and the rise of home recording technology in recent years, despite its vaunted history and famous clientele. Last year, there was considerable specualtion that the EMI Group, which owns Abbey Road, was considering putting the studio operation up for sale to help ease its own financial troubles. But public outcry at the prospect prompted EMI to back away and issue a statement assuring the public that the historic site was not going on the auction block.

As for aspiring musicians looking for a prestigious studio imprint on their own recordings, Memphis, Tenn.’s fabled Sun Studio, which gave Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins and many others their starts, also is available to anyone who wants to make a record there. It costs $100 an hour.

Think of it: You could have a record stamped with "Recorded at Sun Studio, Memphis; mixed at Abbey Road Studios, London.” At that point, who’d care whether it was a hit?

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-- Randy Lewis

Photo of the Beatles' "Abbey Road" album cover. Credit: EMI / Capitol Records.

Radiohead releases free stream of 'King of Limbs' remixes

 
Nearly a decade ago, James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem smirked about "selling his guitars to buy turntables." At the time, the shift from the much ballyhooed garage rock revival to dance-punk was in full swing, and his caustic sentiment belied actual fact.

The trend has only increased over the last several years, as many indie bands have ditched meat and potatoes guitar rock for the fusion of synthesizers, gauzy textures and electronic sheen. Of course, there will always be plenty of popular bands dedicated to the Gibson, but between "chillwave,"  the ascent of DJ culture and the popularity of pop-electro like Passion Pit, Foster the People and MGMT, it's clear that dance music heavily informs the zeitgeist. All you really need to do is look at someone like Skrillex, who ditched his post-hardcore band to become one of the most popular dubstep DJs in the world.

Radiohead's "Kid A" had something to do with it. The British band has long been in the avant-garde vanguard, merging left-field sounds to dulcet melodies and Thom Yorke's beautiful banshee wail. But even more so than its peers, the band has shown a far deeper dedication to contemporary bass music. Many critics rightfully pointed out the influence of Flying Lotus and the Low End Theory beat scene on the group's latest gem, "King of Limbs."

Coachella 2011: Prayers for the party kids with Scala & Kolacny Brothers

In the days leading up to Friday's kickoff of the Coachella Music and Arts Festival in Indio, Pop & Hiss offers a preview of some of this year's less established or underappreciated artists.

Who: Scala & Kolacny Brothers

When: Friday

From: Belgium

The dirty secret about Coachella is that at some point in the three-day blitzkrieg even the most voracious listener will get tired of guitar, drums, synthesizers and other racket-making instruments, no matter how divinely combined.

It’s true that Scala and Kolacny Brothers, the all-female Belgian choir led by pianist-composer Steven Kolacny and his conductor-brother Stijn, are playing early in the festival, but hopefully, their soft vocal harmonies will sustain you into the late night when the Sahara tent resembles a violent alien spacecraft about to lift off.

The Scala choir, going strong since 1996, first got its name in the States with its cover of “Creep,” used in the trailer for “The Social Network” and somehow more haunting than the Radiohead angst classic. On its Rhino debut, the 200-member ensemble specializes in covering rock songs that wouldn’t be pegged for ethereal treatment. Who knew, for instance, that “Champagne Supernova” from Oasis could sound like the last transmission from a collective of angels falling through space, instead of the pained nasal wail from one-half of bickering British brothers?

The rest of Coachella can be summed up as a party in the desert, but for Scala & Kolacny Brothers, it’ll be more like church in the desert, the altar devoted to sweet rock and roll.

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-- Margaret Wappler



If Radiohead releases studio-quality 'King of Limbs' downloads, will anyone listen?

Ah, the good old days, when sonic philistines debated the merits of vinyl over compacts discs.

This week, Radiohead may well spark a debate over FLAC versus AAC that could bring a misty eye to audio historians. Radiohead's new release on Tuesday isn't about alphabet soup. Rather, the band is offering fans, via a London company called 7Digital, their first chance to download is latest album, “The King of Limbs,” in higher-quality digital formats.

FLAC stands for free lossless audio codec and, at 24 bits, is said to feature the same audio fidelity in which bands record their songs. In the mastering process, when recordings are made ready for copying on to CDs, the accuracy is taken down a notch, to 16 bits, a process that has annoyed recording engineers and bands because some of the nuances of their music can sometimes be lost.

But the losses are minimal when compared to what happens to music files when they are compressed into downloadable formats such as MP3 and AAC, which stands for advanced audio coding. These formats were spawned in the 1990s to allow listeners to squeeze more songs onto devices such as the iPod, which debuted in 2001 with a whopping 5 gigabytes of memory. That was enough to hold "1,000 songs in your pocket," according to Apple honcho Steve Jobs, but only if they were aggresssively compressed.

Extra! Extra! Radiohead to give out a newspaper next week

On Monday and Tuesday, Radiohead will be giving out a newspaper in commemoration of "The King of Limbs" being available in record stores. Why are they giving out a newspaper? Because Thom Yorke is William Randolph Hearst now? Because they got jealous when McSweeney's did it? Because the New York Times is going behind a paywall soon and we gotta read something? Any or all of those reasons could be true, but the truest reason is because they are Radiohead, the band that was once a band but is now something like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Oh, and also, it probably ties in with the elaborately packaged "newspaper edition" of the album that will be released on May 9.

Radiohead's periodical has a lovely title: The Universal Sigh. (Hey, is that a newspaper or a meditation tape I never returned to the local Buddhist center?) It will be given away at select spots all over the world. In Los Angeles, you can get it Tuesday at 6400 Sunset Blvd. (Amoeba Records) and 3700 Sunset Blvd. (perhaps where the Silver Lake Farmers Market sets up). The website for the newspaper doesn't say who will be giving away the papers -- but let it please be little street urchins in newsboy caps shouting "Extra! Extra!"

Related: Radiohead's 'The King of Limbs' reviewed

The Universal Sigh has already leaked, it seems; a copy of it sold on EBay for $60. The rest of us in North America will have to wait until Tuesday (Europe gets it a day earlier).

Remember when trudging to the record store on Tuesdays made you a super-fan? Not so anymore. In the age of sussing out ticket-purchase locations via ZIP codes, fandom is not for the faint of heart. Well, at least they aren't making us geo-cache anything.

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--Margaret Wappler

Photo: An EBay photo of a copy of Radiohead's newspaper. Credit: EBay.com.

 

Radiohead weekend: Best of the dancing Thom Yorke mash-ups -- so far [Video] [Updated]

Since Friday, when Radiohead's new album, "The King of Limbs," was unleashed worldwide with an accompanying video of lead singer Thom Yorke dancing to the song "Lotus Flower," a few things have become apparent: First, the band has cemented itself as one of the most visionary and inspired music-business entities on the planet. Second, the band continues to explore and expand on all the nooks and crannies of its music to create new sounds and structures.

And finally: The man can dance and has, over the course of a single weekend, managed to single-handedly make bowler hats hip again (there were, no doubt, many Yorke moves on dance floors all over the world last night). Want evidence that Yorke can dance to anything? See below the video mash-ups concocted to show the versatility and all-around joyousness of a music and a moment.

Thom Yorke dances to Beyonce, and the single ladies go wild.

Snap Judgment: Radiohead's 'The King of Limbs' [Updated]

Thom Yorke jerks around in the video for "Lotus Flower," the first single from Radiohead's just-released eighth studio album, "The King of Limbs," like someone only just discovering that the body's job is to move. In the clip, choreographed by the British kinesthesis expert Wayne McGregor, Yorke shakes, wobbles and nearly drools to the song's needling dance beat, sometimes elegantly loosening up, only to shake back into awkwardness.

The singer's moves and his bowler hat recall the physical comedians of the silent film era, when onscreen human motion still seemed artificial, almost surreal. It's a typical Radiohead moment in some ways, a visceral expression of the struggle to stay fully human in a world that's been both enhanced and corrupted by technology. Yet it's new, too, mostly because of the music behind Yorke, and specifically the sound coming out of him: his falsetto has never sounded this relaxed before as he sings about the release of dancing, the joy of releasing energy, "just to see what gives." In some dark imagined disco, this song is getting people on the floor. Radiohead, it seems, has become a dance band.

Well, not entirely. "The King of Limbs," which was abruptly made available for download via the band's website Friday, can be heard from several different angles. Fans and critics have already been registering wildly divergent reactions: Some think it's one of the band's best efforts; others find it too low-key or similar to previous work; a few consider it awfully doomy, and a few others wish it were less abstract. The stature and skill of this band allows for so many interpretations that even a decisively unpretentious work like this one sends listeners wide to find its headwaters.

Radiohead releases 'King of Limbs' earlier than expected, unveils new video

On Monday, Radiohead did music writers the world over a favor, announcing that a new album would be released in days, and therefore bringing to an abrupt halt numerous day-after-Grammys so-called "think-pieces," as the globe rushed Radiohead stories/items to the Web.

"The King of Limbs," the band announced, would be released on Saturday, available in digital formats and what the band dubbed a "newspaper format," which included vinyl pressings, a compact disc and 625 "tiny pieces" of artwork, to be shipped in May. 

Yet those who had planned to spend Saturday morning with "The King of Limbs" can now devote the final business day of the week to the album instead. "With everything ready on their website, the band decided to bring forward the release rather than wait until the previously announced date of Saturday, Feb. 19  to deliver the music," read a statement from the act's publicity firm, Nasty Little Man.

It's not uncommon for an act to rush an album out once it has leaked, but simply posting it because everything is "ready" is still something of a rarity. The band, of course, had a slightly more cryptic reasoning: "It's Friday... It's almost the weekend... It's a full moon...."

It took this writer three tries to load the Radiohead site without a Web timeout message, but "The King of Limbs" was downloaded safely and quickly within five minutes of first visiting the site this A.M. While you wait for the download, Radiohead also posted a video for the glitchy-rhythmic track "Lotus Flower," which had been a regular in the band's sets for some time now. It is embedded above.

Pop & Hiss will, of course, be reviewing "The King of Limbs," in the near future.

-- Todd Martens

Radiohead to release new 'newspaper album,' 'The King of Limbs,' on Saturday [Updated]

And then, out of the blue, a new Radiohead album arrives. It's called "The King of Limbs," and the band has launched a website of the same name to feed its hungry fans the music and the information. Details, according to the site:

Newspaper Album - PRESALE
Radiohead's new record, The King Of Limbs, is presented here as the world's first* Newspaper Album, comprising:

* Two clear 10" vinyl records in a purpose-built record sleeve.
* A compact disc.
* Many large sheets of artwork, 625 tiny pieces of artwork and a full-colour piece of oxo-degradeable plastic to hold it all together.
* The Newspaper Album comes with a digital download that is compatible with all good digital media players.
* The Newspaper Album will be shipped on Monday 9th May 2011 you can, however, enjoy the download on Saturday 19th February 2011.
* Shipping is included in the prices shown.
* One lucky owner of the digital version of The King Of Limbs, purchased from this website, will receive a signed 2 track 12" vinyl.

*perhaps

The price? $48 for the newspaper album and MP3 files; and $53 for the album and .wav files. Brace yourself for a new round of "Radiohead continues to transform the music business" stories.

[Updated: As a few commenters so kindly pointed out, we neglected to mention that a $9 MP3 version and a $14 .wav file of "The King of Limbs" will be available for download on Saturday for those who preorder.]

-- Randall Roberts

Video: View the full Radiohead for Haiti benefit concert online, compiled from fan footage

On Jan. 24, Radiohead did a surprise benefit gig at the Music Box @ Fonda in Hollywood to raise funds for relief efforts in Haiti following a  devastating earthquake. The band, which was in town recording, performed to a sold-out house, and in true Radiohead fashion, allowed concertgoers free reign to video the gig. Inevitably, much of that footage ended up on YouTube, where it's drawn hundreds of thousands of views.

A trio of fans compiled the best of the footage to re-create the entire concert, and posted it. They explain the project on formengr's YouTube page:

this was a benefit for Oxfam America's Haiti Earthquake Response Fund. we who assembled this multicam video received approval and support from both Radiohead and Oxfam. on our combined behalf, we kindly request a donation to the beneficiary fund for which Oxfam graciously created the following dedicated link: www.oxfamamerica.org/radiohead