The long anticipated electronic music collaboration between AD Music’s David Wright and DiNs Ian Boddy has been confirmed as Shifting Sands and is set for release on 5th September 2009 at the Derby Music Festival.

There are 5 tracks: Comets, Shifting Sands, Still Motion, Endless Terrain and Halcyon.

Some of the album will be premiered during the Boddy, Hoffmann-Hoock & Wright evening performance at the event. The album is currently in post production and sound bites and more information will be available soon.

Here are the details:

All releases from 2008 onwards are high quality MP3 format at 256kbps Stereo and come complete with artwork. Back catalogue titles are 160kbps and we are slowly upgrading these to the higher rate and to include artwork. So the digital files are ready for your iPod/MP3 or computer player without any problem and full spec artwork in jpeg format is ready for you to print if required.

The albums vary in length, but all are at least 50 minutes long – most are 70+ minutes. The file sizes are around 60 – 80 meg, so please bear this in mind if you don’t have broadband. The file you download will be a ZIP file – just double click this file to open it up and reveal the individual MP3 player.

Payment is by PayPal secure server, you do not need to open a PayPal account and can pay with most debit/credit cards.

Returning customers who have already downloaded the 160kbps MP3 versions will be given the option to download the 256kbps versions and artwork as we continue to upgrade the back catalogue and add new titles.

AD is an important label for fans of space music, ambient music and instrumental electronic music in general, so this is good to see.

AD Music has announced the relaunch of electronic music festivals in Derby, with the AD 2009 Electronic Music Festival:

It’s 20 years since AD Music was founded and so an electronic music festival seemed a suitable event to celebrate its 20th anniversary. The midlands, and Derby in particular, is considered by many people to be the UK hub of electronic music and it is where our early concerts were held in 1993 and our first festival was held in 1996, so there is a nice symmetry. The excellent “Awakenings Evening” held every two months is doing a great job as the only regular electronic music event in the area, with the Hampshire Jam ensuring interest is kept bubbling in the South. In Europe there is the continued efforts of Groove’s e-live and e-day, while Germany is seeing renewed electronic music activity with the excellent electronic circus event in Beilefeld. So it’s our hope that this event will help rejuvenate interest in an annual all day electronic music festival and if the Derby event is a financial success, then it is AD Music’s intention to organize another next year.

So, if electronic music is your thing, which it probably is if you’re reading this, then support us in bringing back a Derby electronic music festival. Being a record label, we will always seek to have at least one of our acts on the bill. But as can be seen from the strong 2009 line up, it is not exclusively an AD Music artist festival, and it won’t be in the future either.

Here are the details:

Date: Saturday 5th September 2009

Venue:
The Guildhall, Derby.
Doors open; 13:00 hours
Ticket price: £25.00 (twenty five pounds)

Tickets also available from the Guildhall ticket office

About the venue: The Guildhall has seating for 240, of which 80 are in the balcony. The balcony seats will be allocated on a first come first served basis, so please book early to avoid disappointment if the balcony is your preference. There are coffee facilities and a bar at the venue. Food is available from the many local restaurants and cafes within walking distance of the Guildhall.

Apparently Geigertek has been added to the event as opening act, followed by Bekki Williams and then Ron Boots to complete the afternoon line-up, and an interesting Ian Boddy, Cosmic Hoffmann & David Wright combination for the evening act.

A 2010 event is also being planned, when Code Indigo will appear.

You can preview them below:

Official Wim Bio

Ketil Lien, aka Wim, was born in the Viking City of Trondheim, Norway in 1972. He started listening to the electronic music of Jean Michel Jarre and Tangerine Dream in the 80’s and they quickly became his biggest early influences. He also has a great liking for Kitaro, Vangelis and Mike Oldfield and the warmth and depth of their music is clearly evident in Wim’s emotive style.Wim focused his efforts in the 1990’s on compositional skills, learning to compose in the manner required to create his own unique style of structured melodic instrumental music with warmth and emotion. The advent of virtual synths and more powerful computers in the new millennium meant he was at last able to create the musical visions he wanted.

Wim looks upon his music as paintings where the instruments are substitutes for the colour palette. He says; “I treat each song as a different landscape of sound and try to paint an expressive, emotional soundscape using warm, enveloping sounds that capture the listeners imagination.

If you’re going to submit a demo to a label like AD Music, then there are things you should definitely do before you waste your time and effort, and these tips are likely to apply to most record labels.

Tip 1 is about selecting the right label to send your demo to. On the AD Music “About sending a demo” page it clearly states; DON’T SEND US, pop, country, jazz, trance, RnB, House rap or rock etc.… we’re not set up to deal with those types of music, so please don’t waste our time and your money by sending us anything other than instrumental electronic music. Yet you would be amazed what we get sent.

Many labels don’t have the time to listen to demos that are relevant to what they do, let alone music that isn’t, so have a good look at what the label actually produces, the style of music etc before you send the demo.

Also check what format the demos are required. For example, we only accept demos on audio CD. So don’t send MP3’s by email (or on CD) unless the record label specifically requests it. Chances are that if they don’t request that format, they don’t want it and will probably trash it on receipt.

All this comes down to doing your homework first before you send anything. It’s not rocket science and it doesn’t take very long so ensure your musical creation is going to a label that will at least give it a fair listen because it’s what they deal with.

It’s all common sense that would apply to submitting a demo to any label – but it’s also clear that they must get deluged with a lot of demos that go straight in the trash.

• Bekki Williams will be releasing a trilogy of instrumental music albums based on Dante’s Inferno starting in 2009. Apparently there will be three albums released over a 12 month period, so one every 4 months, starting late in 2009, which means the releases will go on into 2010. 
• Electronic music composer David Wright will be performing in the USA in 2009 with guitarist Klaus Cosmic Hoffmann. The first concert will be at the Gathering concerts on Saturday April 18th. Although no further concerts have been announced yet, it is rumoured that a Wisconsin concert is being discussed. 
• The new Robert Fox studio album Evergreen is now available. They call the album a “Majestic tour de force”. Robert Fox is one of the leading UK electronic music composers and he also is -founder of the electronic rock band Code Indigo. 

If you’re a Synthtopia reader and you’re not checking the Free Music tab every now and then, you’re missing out. Every week, we’ve got free music for you, like the motherload of free Moog downloads last week, the DJ mixes of Noah Pred or the free music from Synthtopia readers. 

Today we’ve got a voluptuous helping of sensual ambient and space music courtesy of AD Music, a label that specializes in ambient music, synth music and space music:

You’ll find complete tracks up to 8 minutes long (or 8 minute edits if longer pieces) from albums old and new plus exclusive tracks not previously available. We’ll even be adding sneak previews of forthcoming music. So the page will be in a constant state of flux, with music being added and occasionally deleted from the selection.

All MP3’s are at 160kbps.

Here are a few examples from AD:

Check out the AD Music download page for 40+ free tracks!

Note to AD: The only way you could do this better would be to offer a podcast RSS feed for your tracks. That would let fans subscribe to your free music feed with iTunes and get AD music automatically delivered to their computer and iPod.

By letting people subscribe, you’d be rewarding them for being fans of your music, while also teasing them with samples from your latest releases. 

Also – if you’re putting free music on your site, you should explicitly tell podcasters that it’s OK to include your music in podcasts as long as they give credit to your musicians and link back to your site. Free publicity!

Image: ~jjjohn~