The moon light shining through the tree branches, the hiss of the wind chilling your bones as you slowly walk into the dark forest. There’s a ritual tonight, somewhere deep in the obscure fog, would you be able to find it? The air fills with the scent of unknown things lurking in the darkness, you can feel it in your soul, something ancient, something beyond light and dark, is being resurrected. You hear the distant chants getting louder and louder. And suddenly, everything stops. The forest fills with a heavy eerie silence, they have found you, it’s too late to run.
German artist Klaus Schulze passed away at the age of 74 on April 26th. Schulze was a major figure in the "Berlin School" of music in the 60's and 70's (aka "Krautrock"), starting out with brief stints in such legendary groups as Ash Ra Tempel and Tangerine Dream. He quickly shifted to releasing his own solo work and pretty much never stopped making music until his death. Very much of what you're familiar with in ambient and electronic music can be traced back to Schulze. He was one of the first people to release work based almost exclusively on experimenting with synthesizers and is considered a progenitor of ambient and techno music. We made some music in memory of him.
On the Magpie Pirates discord, we do a lot of elaborate, well-thought-out album projects. Sometimes encouraging working within specific musical genres or traditions, using only the samples supplied, or focusing on experimenting and pushing one's own boundaries. Other times, we just make a channel called, let's say "Pet Sounds", post a deadline, and hope for the best.
As is our usual practice, the community has decided to explore a genre of music. This time we chose dungeon synth. Some artists on this album have already released material in this genre and some had never even heard of it before starting to make a track for this project. Enjoy!
Lou Ottens, inventor of the standard audio cassette tape as we know it, passed away earlier this year (March 6, 2021). We wanted to make a compilation of tracks dedicated to his memory with a focus on the cassette tape. Sound art that uses and/or is about cassette tapes, or blatant use of cassette tapes was strongly encouraged.
We wanted to devise a genre of music randomly, so we put a whole bunch of words in a bag, made a script to put them together randomly, then had a tournament with the resulting random phrases. The winner was "Swamp Ritual VHS". After that was sorted, everyone made some music that they thought would fit this imagined genre.
Most everyone has a voice. Most of us don't use it as much as everyone else would like. For this album, we wished for The Magpie Pirates to put their voices in the spotlight. The human voice adds a personal connection that is felt by the listener. Anything goes, as long as you use your voice.
The guidelines for this collab were: Create a song, preferably within the loose confines of the genre "pop", using only toy instruments. The definition of toy is up to you, but for some kind of framework/reference I'd say that any piece of equipment over 100$ isn't a toy. Old Yamaha/Casio keyboards are most def toys. Apart from toys it's encouraged to use things like rubber bands, finger snapping, glasses of water etc. Stylistically it'd be cool to have an album with a somewhat acoustic and multitracked feel to it, with a lot of working with whatever you got and less of using the best equipment to get that perfect sound. Using VST's and/or samples is absolutely fine (since everyone doesn't have access to a microphone/instruments), but try to keep them within the concept, i.e. probably leave your most realistic sounding kaoss-paddy motorized synths out of this one and pick up your slide whistle instead. Oh, and don't forget to check out the kids section at your nearest thrift shop.
Andreij Rublev and Næringssorg met in the Magpie Pirates community and decided to make a concert on a live stream during the Quarantine Sessions, a two months long marathon of daily live streams on Andreij Rublev youtube channel. Then they mixed and mastered it to create "De Rerum Natura". The improvised music is evolving slowly through all the length of the album as a seed grows with its own inner time into a full plant. The artwork, inspired by ancient herbariums, is made by Garden of Myxini. You can find the full footage of the live stream here: https://youtu.be/Au39MJxs75E Næringssorg: https://naeringssorg.bandcamp.com Andreij Rublev: https://youtube.com/c/AndreijRublev Garden of Myxini: https://www.artstation.com/hagfishgarden
This collaboration is to take a second and capture those sweet moments in the morning. The sun just peeking out, maybe your children sleepily waking up, or your partner humming in the kitchen, your new exciting synth idea you can’t wait to bang out before work. A freshness to it all, and a new start.
Where will the winds blow them this day? What will be found in the forbidden sounds of the distant city on the hill? This is no quest for the meek, there is no rest for the weak and weary, through rain and wind, wet and dreary. Make haste. The Sea calls out to you. 5 sample swap sessions spawned a sonic Monolith that will shine brightly as a beacon for all to see that anything is possible, thru MUTINY.
A very conceptual and quirky idea that formed after someone just tagged the ‘collab’ role in the server with the word ‘yo’. So naturally we collaborated to create a song called yo. Everyone submitted 1 yo and were allowed to process them however. Warning: some people have clipped their submission, so volume inconsistencies are a thing.
Simon Magpie started a surprise stream and challenged everyone to make a full song from start to finish in 1 hour. The neat thing about this collab is not just that the tracks were created in an hour, but that *all* of the tracks were created in the *same* hour. The entire album was literally done in 1 hour. Cover art by Lu (Also done within the hour).
16th of June, 1969, exactly 50 years ago that day Don Van Vilet who's more famous under Captain Beefheart and his magic band published their magnum opus of an album, trout mask replica. After months of Don tourmenting his band having them practice every hour of the day, everyday resulting in the band only needing about 4 hours of studio time upon recording the entire album, to fellow producer Frank Zappa's shock upon the quick finish. The album have reached an undeniable legendary status amongst listeners and critics alike. And with this very big anniversary for the album we really only saw it fit to pay homage, trying to put our own twist to the sound of trout mask replica. This album is more of an interpretation of the sound. Musicians trying to pull elements from the album into an own sound. No beefheart covers, sadly.
All participants were asked to record for 1 minute outside the space where they live, in 1 take. The album cover is a collage (made by the artist Andreij Rublev who is also on the album) of pictures taken of the places where the field recordings were recorded. From left to right: track 11, track 1, track 2, track 5, track 8, track 4 and track 10 We hope that you enjoy this quite conceptual album!
Second album done by the Magpie Pirates-community. Sample Collab is a collaborative effort, where the members of the community record two 20 second samples, submit them and make tracks with the whole of them. No added sounds allowed, but slicing, dicing and spicing them in any way is highly incentivised!
Have a track for an upcoming collab? A podcast episode? A video for our YouTube channel? An idea for a new collab? Submit it!
Click the big JOIN link up above to join our discord server, then come back here and log in. Then you can contribute too!