When I finished production on Unfriend, I had a bit time to just goof off and try something new. I thought I might try my hand at doing a mashup. During a particularly long run I hit on the concept of Mosby, which was just that — mashing Mos Def and Moby. I had no idea if my cheesy idea would ever work, so I just sat down and tried it out. It took a while to find the tracks that “matched”, which seems to be the key to creating a good mashup. A few hours, some timestretching and EQing, and I had banged out The Beef After. I was pretty pleased with the results, so I kept going. Before I knew it I had eight mashes of Moby and Mos, and after a month of mixing, tweaking, and mastering, I had an album.

Now, this isn’t for everyone, and likely a lot of our trip-hop fans won’t like this. Rest assured this doesn’t mark some new direction for Endless Blue. I just had a lot of fun making some music that I really enjoy listening to. And since I can never sell it, I thought I’d share.

You can download the entire album (38MB) for free at the following locations:

Mosby.zip on MediaFire
Mosby.zip on DropBox
Mosby.zip on RapidShare

And then Kickstarter came along, giving us this amazing platform to croudfund and manage such a project (and possibly get us in front of new supporters and fans to boot). About a year ago, before we had even finalized the track list on Unfriend, we knew that our next project would be Undercover via Kickstarter. After many hours of hard work and preparation, the time has come.

Help us fund Undercover and you get to help us pick the songs you want us to record. Help us at a premium level, and you get to pick a song directly. You pick, we record. What could be more fun?

Visit the Kickstarter project for Undercover here!

I spent an hour or two this weekend working up a remix pack for our rather popular song Low off the Smoke Through It album. It’s a combination of loops and full audio tracks in the OGG format (before you groan, there are 6 bazillion programs that can convert to .wav or wahtever). Provided is a REAPER and EDL project that will show the fully tracked out song. Lead vocals are dry, and most volume and panning automation has been stripped. I tried to get the “best” sound for each loop/track, so this isn’t a really spectacular mixdown. FYI.

Anyway, have at it. This remix pack is released Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 (click the CC image on this post for details). You can remix away and even sell it on your CD or on bandcamp. You only have to give us credit and share your resulting track as well. Hopefully you’ll share it with us on facebook, twitter, or SoundCloud. We would love to reshare it to all our fans as well!

Download the Low Remix Pack (26.36MB .zip file)

Incidentally, this time we really really made sure he wanted to be in our band before we announced his membership.

Show him some love on twitter (@scottfeldstein) or on his blog at scottfeldstein.net. Welcome, Scott!

2011 was a good year for Endless Blue. I feel like we’ve picked up a little momentum and that we’re getting back into the groove of writing and recording. We also started beating the internet promotion a bit more, and it’s nice to see a lot of fresh faces and names listening to our music from around the world. Here’s to 2012 being more of the same.

Along those lines, we’re going to start adding some of our B-Side, remixes, and rarities to SoundCloud. Many of these have been around for a while, but they never had a real home. The first is a Drum & Bass remix of Broken Waters:

The other is a remix we did of Nine Inch Nail’s track Only off the album With Teeth:

I think I got pushed over the edge a little this morning regarding the whole copyright topic… Allow me to explain. I’ve been borrowing an iPad lately to goof around with. I’ve been trying out a lot of music and synth apps to get the creative juices flowing. The moog app is friggin’ amazing, and it’s cool to have a mobile version of CamelAudio’s Alchemy Player. I found my way to Korg’s iELECTRIBE (being a former Electribe owner and former Korg fanboi) and started watching videos. I soon found the iELECTRIBE Gorillaz version, which got me really excited. It had this glitchy, lo-fi vibe to it which is right up my alley.

…and then I read the fine print. In the legalese on the manual for the app, it says that commercial use of the instrument requires copyright clearance. So lemme get this straight. I’m buying this instrument, a creative implement for me to use in my compositions, but I have to go to the record company, hat in hands, if I want to release any of my tracks? Seriously?

Crazy world, folks. This is why CC is so important.

First off, it’s very humbling to work with so many good musicians, folks that can just sit down with an instrument and sheet music and play songs. Just play. Sitting alone in the studio with only your own music can make you forget how important mastery of an instrument is. It also takes me back to Zen Guitar and the concept of actually being able to play a song, not just noodle around… It also blows my mind how effing hard this music is to play. Keys? Hah! 4/4 time? Puh-lease. And yet, with all craziness and weirdness in the music, it all stays highly musical. Therein lies the genius of it — pushing the limits of structure and convetion, but meticulously gluing it together so as to not lose the listener.

And at this point I feel the need to heap some criticism on an album I find extremely irritating, especially considering its “critical acclaim” — Portishead’s Third. That album totally loses me. Its amusical to the point of just being noise. Now, I recognize and respect an artist’s desire to do something different, to push boundaries and break out of ruts. Massive Attack has really done a good job of changing it up over the years — they haven’t released the same album over and over again like, say, AC/DC. And Portishead seemed to have already mastered the edgy, dissonant sound, so getting even stranger was the way forward for them. But Third never ties it together in any sort of way, the way that Webber does in Jesus Christ Superstar. It feels weak and half finished, and, quite frankly, you replace the name “Portishead” on that album with any other band name, and no one would have listened to it at all.

Ahem. Enough of that rant. My friends are all familiar with it, believe me.

As I am currently kicked out of the studio due to asbestos abatement, I wasn’t able to work up another of the Unfriend videos… Luckily I had another on hand to post. This is “Just Me” from the Fever Dreams album.

We’ve been doing this song live for years now… In fact, we did it all the way back in our STATE4 days. It’s nice to finally have it down as a real track. It’s also nice to finally post the video for this track — it has always been one of my favorites. All the clips are taken from the 1928 silent film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, and they capture the mood of this song overwhelmingly. I still get chills every time I watch it.