I’m back at home. Had a great time in Guatemala – feel free to order music to your heart’s content!

I’m going to be out of the country for a few weeks starting this Friday. Feel free to place orders, but bear in mind I won’t be able to ship anything until I get back. Download orders might be able to be filled because I’ll have sporadic access to email, but don’t plan on getting them as quickly as normal. Sorry for the downtime – that’s just how it goes with a 1-man operation.

Woke up to a very interesting article at Slate: Wall of Sound

It covers a lot of ground, but I was most interested in the discussion of the iPod’s contribution to social isolation, and how this is just the latest example (after the grammophone, boombox, and Walkman) of a new musical technology cutting people off from the world. I’m a repeat offender myself; whenever I go for a long walk somewhere I carry my iPod and plug my ears with speakers. The sad truth is, even as an ostensibly professional musician, I spend embarrassingly little time simply listening to music apart from some other activity. I hate the idea of music as background noise, but often that is what I turn it into as I listen while cooking, working on the computer, cleaning, etc.

Listening while walking, however, is a very good way of committing full attention. In the same way some people practice “walking meditation,” the act of walking in some ways intensifies my listening experience. As opposed to fidgeting in a seat, when I listen while walking my body is engaged in a nearly autonomous activity that seems to free my brain up for better concentration. Just an illusion? Maybe.

I also sometimes get the sinking feeling that I’m in a commercial. This mostly happens when I’m listening to pop, especially if I catch a glimpse of myself in a reflective window. How much has the idea of a “soundtrack” affected how we listen? The article doesn’t cover that, but I do like its mention of the absurd number of musical “styles” that now exist, each one contributing to a different “lifestyle.”

The rise of generic distinctions has lately reached a climax of absurdity, such that we can name off the top of our heads: house, witch house, dub, dubstep, hardstep, dancehall, dance-floor, punk, post-punk, noise, “Noise,” new wave, nu wave, No Wave, emo, post-emo, hip-hop, conscious hip-hop, alternative hip- hop, jazz hip-hop, hardcore hip-hop, nerd-core hip-hop, Christian hip-hop, crunk, crunkcore, metal, doom metal, black metal, speed metal, thrash metal, death metal, Christian death metal, and, of course, shoe-gazing, among others. (Meanwhile, 1,000 years of European art music is filed under “classical.”) Some people listen to some of these; others, to only one; and others still, to nearly all. And this accomplishes a lot of handy social sorting, especially among the young, whenever music is talked about or played so that more than one person can hear it.

There’s a bit of a curmudgeonly aspect to this, and I would argue against claiming that “classical” music is exempt from these tribalistic distinctions. (Especially in the 20th century – romantic, neoromantic, impressionism, expressionism, neoclassical, serialism, futurism, musique concrete, electroacoustic, aleatoric, stochastic, minimalist, post-minimalist. No one likes a good tribalist smackdown more than the practitioners of High Art, whose pompous manifestos and artistic statements, like the classic “we want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice” from the Futurist Manifesto make hip-hop beefs look pedestrian. But I digress.)

Out of curiosity, I went to a torrent tracking website and typed in my name. I had done this several years ago and found a copy of The Spiral Eyes floating around in mp3 format, but the torrent wasn’t active when I tried clicking it. At the time I didn’t know whether to be happy that you couldn’t download my music or insulted that nobody was bothering to pirate it.

This time I saw two files – “Peter Adams – I Woke With Planets in My Face (2008) [FLAC]” and “Peter Adams – The Spiral Eyes (2004) [FLAC],” and they both had active seeders. So I clicked on them and started pirating my life’s work. Unlike the older mp3 pirate version I had found, these were both in FLAC format. FLAC offers uncompressed audio that is indistinguishable from a CD. It used to be a musician could get some comfort from the fact that people pirating their work were obtaining an inferior product and hold out hope that, if they liked it, they would soon purchase a legit copy to get a higher-quality version. I also tried things like, in The Spiral Eyes, putting “Listen Harmony” as a hidden pre-track that wouldn’t show up on a computer, giving people who actually bought the CD a bonus track.

The pirate copies of Spiral Eyes and Planets I downloaded had CD-quality sound, full-size color scans of all artwork (cover, back, inside and CD) and, in the case of The Spiral Eyes, even had “Listen Harmony,” helpfully titled as “00 – Listen Harmony (Hidden Track).” Kind of ruins the fun of finding a hidden track when it’s displayed in full view with “Hidden Track” in the title. Both downloads also had little files that said, simply, “Share Freely!”

My initial feeling was a kind of resignation. I’m under no illusions that there’s any way to eliminate piracy, but I thought I had been doing a good job of offering people enough alternatives to mitigate its effect. For well over a year you could download my albums on a pay-what-you-want basis. Every track I’ve released is freely streamable on my homepage, allowing everyone to “try before you buy.” I offer FLAC to people who don’t like iTunes because of the quality of MP3s. The only reason that’s left is the big, uncomfortable truth that people are now used to getting music for free.

And here’s where my resignation quickly faded. There’s no way to have it both ways with the Internet – music is everywhere, accessible worldwide – an independent artist’s dream. I get orders from around the globe, and I know that the only way a girl in China has the chance to buy an album directly from a small-time musician in Cincinnati is because of the connectivity of the Internet. Yes, some people will get my music without paying, but even then, so what? I can’t assume every person who pirates is someone who otherwise would have bought a CD, and is therefore a “lost sale.”

In the end, these are people who want to hear my music. I know what it’s like to not be able to afford even a $10 purchase, and that’s why I admit that I pirate music myself. I have some “rules,” like I only pirate from relatively well-established artists so I can feel scrubbed of any moral responsibility. They’re probably millionaires anyway, what’s the difference to them? The accessibility of literally the world’s discography at your fingertips for no cost is simply too much for a curious music lover to pass up. While I do still purchase music, it is at far less of a pace than it was ten years ago.

That being said, to those of you who have paid for my music, be it CD or download, you have made a decision that I hope gives you a feeling of closeness and connectivity to me, because you literally keep me going.

This has taken me way too long to get to. But I’m finally posting the responses I got to the stems of my song I made available several months ago. The results were pretty fantastic and are widely varied.

First up is Sean Smith:

Bending Sky Idioteque Remix – Sean Smith

Very ambient feeling, the spaciousness reminds me of Sigur Rós. Floating, rising synth backdrops. I’m always jealous of people who have a good command of synthesizers. I can never seem to make them do what I want and rely mostly on presets. Also like the percussion Sean added, it melds nicely with the instrumentation and keeps the whole thing from sounding too cold or impersonal.

Next we have Seth Tsui:

Bent Horizons – Seth Tsui

This is the most adventurous in terms of new instrumentation. Seth definitely put a lot of work into this, and it shows. He tweaked the chord progression in a way that gives the whole song a very different character, and even autotuned my voice to an entirely new melody. The little climbing stack of voices that he created around 1:10 is simply wonderful. (I wish I had thought of doing that). The added piano creates a bit of a dramatic edge, and the horns that come in around the 2-minute mark are spectacular. Really inspiring work, Seth!

Then we have the creation of Ben Rutledge:

Bending Sky Remix – Ben Rutledge

Stark, minimalistic, and robotically funky. I went through a Kraftwerk phase, and this really does sound like Bending Sky by way of some avant-garde electornic Germans from the late 1970s. Very cool. Also at parts reminds me of some classic 8-bit videogame music.

Lastly is Charles Darling’s Skybender:

Skybender – Charles Darling

Charles went for a more abstract feel, it sounds to me like to hearing the song in a computer’s dream. Jitters, crackles, and echoes bounces around while snatches of strings and voices flow in and out of consciousness. Time is compressed in places and stretched out in others, different sections of the song overlap each other in hallucinatory layering, while the constant electronic drums glue everything together.

I want to extend a big thanks to all the participants. It’s really interesting to hear my song in such a variety of styles. It might be as close as I’ll ever come to the experience of hearing something I made as if for the first time. If anyone out there still has a mix sitting on their computer, please send it my way and I’ll get it posted.

UPDATE: Accidentally forgot to add Ben Millett’s mix:

Bending Sky – Ben Millett

Ben took a more straightforward approach, and played around with the textures of the song with filters and some heavy compression.

I’ve added my new piece I Am A Strange Loop to the store. It’s available on a CD that includes last year’s piece Dances For Heather. Here’s what David Lyman at the Cincinnati Enquirer said:

The finale, Heather Britt’s “Strange Loop,” features a memorable score by Cincinnati composer Peter Adams. It’s majestic, really, in a “Magical Mystery Tour-ish” sort of way. Adams’ music has a way of making you feel like something important is unfolding in front of you. And it infuses the dance with an equally momentous quality.

You can also download the piece in FLAC format, and an iTunes MP3 version will be out shortly. I’m also working on a little bonus for this release: a fully-notated score of the music. I don’t want to set anything in stone as it’s proving to be an incredibly time-consuming process, but when I finish it I’ll give people who ordered the CD (or bought it at the performances) first access.

In other news, those of you who have remixed Bending Sky, I haven’t forgotten about you! I’m hoping to have time to post your work in the coming weeks. If you have a version that you haven’t sent me, now would be the time to do it.

This year’s New Works program kicks off on September 9th at the Cincinnati Ballet. Performances will go until the 19th. You can get tickets here: http://www.cballet.org/performances/newworks

For those of you unable to come, the music will be on sale here shortly after the performances. I can’t wait to hear people’s responses – it has been a massive amount of work for me, not to mention Heather, who only got the final version of the music a few weeks ago!

I don’t know if there’s really a demand for it out there, but I’m making available the “stems” for my song Bending Sky. The stems include the original song broken down into its constituent parts; in this case, Drums, Organ, Synth, Vocals, and Violin. You can download the stems and use them however you want – remix the song, use snippets of it for other things, or just to get a better sense of what’s going on in a typical recording of mine. If nothing else, you can discover places where I messed up, like around 0:47 on the vocal track where you can hear a truck driving by outside my window. If the demand is there I could make other songs available down the line.

Here’s the download: http://peteradamsmusic.com/remixes/Bending%20Sky%20Stems.zip

Open up the zip, extract the 5 stems, and start a new project in whatever audio sequencer you use. Set the BPM to 180, and import all the tracks. Everything should line up perfectly. Now have at it!

Thanks to everyone who bought music after hearing me on Whad’ya Know. I hope all the downloads went smoothly. On that note, if anyone has any bright ideas about a better way to handle digital distribution, I’m all ears. Preferably something that generates a unique link for each person who buys a download, and that can automate replies so that I don’t have to manually reply to each order, which of course causes a delay between buying and downloading. Oh, and preferably one that doesn’t cost anything.

I’ll be performing on the radio show Whad’Ya Know when they broadcast live from Cincinnati on July 17th. Listeners can tune in on their local NPR/PRI affiliate station. Info and tickets for the Cincinnati show are here.