1 | Thoreau.
Put Walden down, now. You haven’t ‘just discovered’ how Thoreau was, like, totally ahead of R. Murray Schafer.  That pond is teeming with hydrophones at this stage.

Unimpressed: Thoreau

2 | Contact microphones and melting ice, or the go-to first timer experiment the moment the kit is unboxed.

3 | The pensive, looking-in-the-distance-while-monitoring biog shot. This one’s fairly unavoidable. We’ve all been there.

4 | Soundmaps. As apps and GPS make the collection of a ginormous amount of mediocre-to-atrocious quality sounds possible from all conceivable sources including your granny’s Nokia, this really isn’t worth pursuing any further. Moving on.

5 | Tweeting exclusively about your ‘Upcoming Releases’ on that label (what was it again…oh, right. The one set up by you.)  Zero likes.

6 | Bells. In the wise words of professional recording Gandalf Mikael Fernstrom: ‘Every sound student has his Quasimodo moment’. Let it…

Many of you will be familiar with John Cage’s famous 10 Rules for Students and Teachers from 1968, which are a constant source of inspiration.  Recently I have come across a similar set of good advice through a different discipline (painting). This blog post recirculated the advice of Irwin Greenberg, a teacher at the High School of Art & Design and the Art Students League of New York who passed away in 2009 age 87.  Although we work with audio and not visual arts, I believe some of the best tips and advice can come from cross-pollination with other disciplines, and as such I dived into the long list (100!) to find a lot of advice easily applicable to any creative pursuit. Some I don’t necessarily agree with, but others are great.  The 10 I have picked and listed below are the ones that in my opinion are wonderful advice and encouragement for us sound artists…

Happy New Year!  We’ve finally finished our year-end lists, reflections, and vacations, and are about to turn our ears to the new.  With nearly 75 new releases on the horizon for January and February alone, 2015 is already shaping up to be a winner.  We’ve had the privilege of hearing many of these albums in full, and samples of many more.  If you just want to hear the sounds, head over to our News page, which is a constantly updated scroll of upcoming music.  But for initial observations and picks, stay right here!

A huge congratulations to all those artists and labels who sent their press releases out early.  Advance notice is definitely the way to go.  A happy and healthy new year to all!

Our gorgeous cover image comes from journalist, photographer and educator Tara Haelle at Tara Incognita.  Tara writes about family, art, and social and health…

As has become my habit, I’m sitting down to reflect on the last year on New Years Day. I can’t reflect properly on the year until its actually over, and so I resist writing my End of Year list until then. (And didn’t Black Messiah prove that!?)  It was a big year in a lot of ways, not least in the music world.  I listen to a lot of new music since I’m always reviewing music, but as usual I tend to dig old records and revisiting old favorites, this year especially early Industrial/Noise music, musique conrete and hip hop.  Many of my favorite releases of this year, including records by Kate Carr, Kyle Bobby Dunn, and Valerio Tricoli, have already been featured on our end of the year list so below I’m just going to spotlight some of my favorite records that we haven’t covered. I did a lot…