Alex Due

On January 5, 2018 Moby posted a link to the stems of this new song “Like A Motherless Child” on splice.com. The song immediately got me into a vibe and I could not resist creating my own remix which I also posted onto Splice including the stems.

This is my more aggressive and electronic version of Moby’s beautiful song. I kept the tempo, adapted the groovy drums and bass and reused the guitar. For the chorus I felt that my version needed more harmonies which I think fit the female vocals very well. In additional the second chorus trades E minor for G major bringing a lift and increase to the final. The outro tries to meet Moby’s wish to be “almost overly-long”.

As Moby posted his song under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license I published my remix under the same license. But right after I uploaded my remix to SoundCloud where I put all my songs so far, I received a message and an email from SoundCloud informing me that the remix had been removed from my profile. It states:

Our automatic content protection system has detected that one of your tracks might contain copyrighted content.

As a result, your track has been removed from your profile for the time being. Please have a look at the details below and get in touch with us if you believe there’s been a mistake.

As described further in this message there is a way to dispute this automated decision. I explained that the original song was put onto Splice by Moby himself under a CC-BY-NC-SA license as can be clearly seen on Splice and that my song was in line with the license’s terms. SoundCloud “resolved” my dispute only hours later saying that “Unfortunately, your dispute was rejected”.

This is classic collateral damage of overly strict copyright regulations. I assume that SoundCloud has a clause in their terms of service saying they can block content for whatever reason and therefore probably don’t have any reason to justify this. Why would they if they can arbitrarily remove content the site which is theirs. As they might be hold reliable if they kept illegal content on their site it is obvious they rather remove more content than less.

As a result I removed SoundCloud players from my label website, won’t use them anymore on my blog and am going to remove the previously used ones replacing them with players from the Internet Archive.

Nevertheless, I blame SoundCloud as their dispute process does not seem to work in this case which from my point of view could not be any clearer.

The ones who are to blame at the root of the problem are politicians making one-sided laws turning a blind eye on the rights of creative people who do not have any backup of corporations with huge budgets to sue.

As usually free downloads are available on the label website. The downloads include a 96 kHz 24 bit version for audiophiles and the stems in 44.1 kHz 16 bit.

Download MP3: Moby – Like A Motherless Child [Alex Due Remix]

Links:

• All remix downloads
• Moby’s official music video

My contribution to the Easton Ellises’ remix contest and first release for almost four years.

The contest is currently in a closed phase in which a jury including the band is reviewing the remixes. From May 15 the contest will be open to the public and everyone can put in their vote.

As usually free downloads are available on the label website. This time it includes a 88.2 kHz 24 bit version for audiophiles.

Enjoy!

Download MP3: The Easton Ellises – Falcon 69 [Alex Due’s “I Put In Some Groove” Remix]

VIMES are from Cologne. I came across their music about two years ago. Their song “UpStairs” made it onto my portable music player and stayed in the playlists for a long time.

Now they’re about their song “Celestial” on Humming Records/Rough Trade. Release date is September 30. Can’t wait.

The German House/Disco/Electro band recently posted a remix on the SoundCloud page which you can download for free. Just hit the download link in the SoundCloud widget below.

“I’m On Vacation” is a track from their last album “Our Disco Is Louder Than Yours”. There’s a 5 minute mix of all the tracks from the album on SoundCloud. It’s one of my favourite albums at the moment.

I totally love their style. On September 23 CHVRCHES are going to release their debut album The Bones of What You Believe. I can’t wait to hold it in my hands.

Until then, here’s an amazing remix they did for MS MR:

My last post is more than ten months old and I’ve been pretty busy. Unfortunately not with music primarily although I have started producing a lot of tracks.

At the end of September of last year I moved back from Canada to Braunschweig and it takes – as you can imagine – a lot of time to get settled, arrange the new flat, adapt to the new tasks at work and so on. What’s more, I’ve joined the team of C3S, the Cultural Commons Collecting Society which is currently being founded in Germany. As the name suggests it’s a collecting society whose task it will be to collect royalties for artists. It is supposed to be up-to-date with technology and society. Something you can’t really say about the currently established collecting societies in Germany. So this is going to be an alternative, a new option for artists who are living the new life, who are constantly looking for new possibilities to distribute their work and get compensation.

Pretty soon the C3S is going to start a fund raising to gain the capital needed for the foundation process. The beginning of this process was the release of the C3S Ignition Mix which is a compilation of free tracks from C3S’s supporting artists. The piece I chipped in is “LXDU – Into The Void” which is already more than six years old. Although it hasn’t gather a lot of attention on the internet so far, I thought it might fit into the mix as electronic music was far from dominating the styles.

My favourite track is “ZOE.LEELA – IAMARMX”. I mentioned Zoe.Leela’s EP “Queendome Come” about three years ago when she published it under Creative Commons licenses. Strobotone, who’s debut album “Flashback Forward” was pretty neat, also put two of his songs onto the mix.

Check it out: C3S Ignition Mix

If you like 80s synth pop you should check out Fm Attack. It’s a project by Shawn Ward from Vancouver. It seems he has been active for a few years already but I only found out about him recently. Especially his remix of Richard Marx’s “Should Have Known Better” is pretty sweet and you can download this track for free from SoundCloud.

More than one year ago I somehow found this promo video on YouTube which I liked very much. But there wasn’t much to find out about VISITOR on the internet at that time. There were ten artists with the same name on Discogs. However, none of them seemed to be involved in the track I was looking for. For the following few months I was checking several online music stores every now and then but never found the song I was looking for.

[lxdu-flash-object=https://www.youtube.com/v/QOjBzHIvoCs w=480 h=270]

A year later I had almost forgotten about “Coming Home” and the LifeLike remix, when I received an email promoting “New Music from VISITOR”. I’ve received a few emails like this before and as I was on vacation, I didn’t pay much attention and wanted to look into it later. But suddenly there was this hunch. VISITOR. This name sounded familiar. And after a moment it came back to me.

I guess that VISITOR are already on Discogs. At least the triangle on the cover of this release looks very much like the one on the Facebook and Twitter page.

This is the promo video for their forthcoming album. Check it out:

[lxdu-flash-object=https://www.youtube.com/v/9GDDgbH4YGw w=480 h=270]

This sounds very promising, guys. Keep me updated!