October 29, 2016

Kyteman jamming at home on his Eurorack modular synthesizer

Filed under: Music by Branko Collin @ 8:10 am

kyteman-eurorackWhen Colin Benders aka Kyteman gets home, he kicks off his shoes (or so I imagine) and turns on his impressive looking Eurorack modular synthesizer for some jams, which he films and the best of which he puts on YouTube. As Metafilter says, just let it run.

Kyteman wrote: “Ever since I came back home I’ve been pushing out tracks non-stop. Finally got something of a workflow going it seems. Not looking forward to editing it all later but that’s another story.”

And tonight on his webcast on Twitch.tv he added: “Next stream is probably going to be on Monday, … Monday and Tuesday. […] After that I am going to get back into recording mode. I really have to start pushing out a couple of tracks, because I want to work to an EP release or something like that.”

So if you want to see him play live, tune in to Colin Benders’ Twitch.tv channel this Monday.

Previously:

(Illustration: crop from the video; video: YouTube / Colin Benders)

Tags: , , , ,

June 26, 2013

Music blog EHPO calls it quits

Filed under: Music by Branko Collin @ 6:09 pm

After blogging for five years Niels Aalberts, the former manager of Kyteman’s Hiphop Orkest, will discontinue his popular blog for musicians, Eerste Hulp Bij Plaatopnamen or EHPO.

Aalberts feels he has said what he had to say and that his blog has run its course: “What I dreamed about five years ago has now become reality. Beginning musicians can do many things themselves, professionally, quickly and cheaply. […] What I tried to do with EHPO is done. I am sure to return to blogging, but in a different way and about different subjects.”

EHPO told musicians how to use social media, how to deal with contracts, what venues there are to sell music and so on. Aalberts also let producers and marketers from major Dutch acts use his site to tell their story. Both David Schreurs of Caro Emerald and Fulco Polderman of Marco Borsato used the site to explain how they marketed their respective acts.

The name is a pun and literally means First Aid For Music Recordings. The Dutch phrase for ‘first aid’ is ‘eerste hulp bij ongevallen’ and is abbreviated as EHBO.

See also:

(Link: Jeroen Mirck)

Tags: , , ,

March 22, 2013

Skrillex’ Bangarang sung a cappella

Filed under: Music by Branko Collin @ 8:49 pm

Says 3FM: “3FM DJ Roosmarijn asked a Dutch choir to make an a cappella version of Bangarang by Skrillex. She got Dario Fo to sing it in her program 3VOOR12RADIO on Wednesday 20 June [2012].”

Skrillex’ own version never got higher than 59 in the Dutch Mega Single Top 100 according to Dutchcharts.nl.

The Theatre Choir of Dario Fo, as its full name is, has a ‘making of’ video on its website.

(Video: Youtube. Image: crop of a video still.)

Tags: , , , , ,

April 1, 2012

The Kyteman Orchestra

Filed under: Music by Branko Collin @ 1:49 pm

Kyteman, a.k.a. flugelhorn player Colin Benders, has started a new project called The Kyteman Orchestra, which released an album of the same name last Friday.

So far only one or two reviews have appeared on the web, but I could no longer withhold giving you the opportunity to listen to the following track, which was released by the Kytopia studios on YouTube:

We wrote about Kyteman’s previous project, Kyteman’s Hip Hop Orchestra. Since then he has moved from dreary Overvecht (although the place does have a nice slide these days) to the buildings of the former Jongeneel saw mill on the Zeedijk in Utrecht, where he built Kytopia, a complex of recording studios, a theatre and apartments.

For the orchestra some of the MCs were dropped, but an entire choir was added. The album was recorded on analog equipment, HP De Tijd writes.

De Volkskrant thinks the fans will be taken aback:

The lines between pop and bombastic classical music are blurred [on this album]. While I Was Away, Day One, pop rarely approached Richard Wagner so closely. Preaching to the Choir is top heavy opera. Impressive? Well made? Good? Yes, but some of the energy and spirit that made The Hermit Sessions so irresistible was lost along the way.

This is heavy duty stuff, also lyrically. Titles such as Angry At The World and The Mushroom Cloud set the tone, judgement day is just around the corner.

(Photo by Oxfam Novib / Marielle van Uitert, some rights reserved. Video: Youtube / Kytopia.)

Tags:

August 29, 2010

Biggest pop artists work outside traditional record company structures

Filed under: Music by Branko Collin @ 5:37 pm

The past week Kyteman manager Niels Aalberts has been posting and annotating a six part e-mail correspondence with Caro Emerald producer David Schreurs about how they got to their respective successes.

One of the most remarkable ideas in the stories of both Kyteman and Caro Emerald as noted by internet marketeer Erwin Blom is the one of developing success outside the framework of traditional record companies. Schreurs mentions that this makes it easier to make quick decisions (you don’t have to keep track of everybody’s agendas), and that since your money is not disappearing into the deep pockets of the share holders of the likes of Sony, you can allocate resources for expensive projects more easily.

Kyteman is young jazz musician Colin Bender’s project, a hip hop orchestra containing 12 instrumentalists and 10 MCs. Their debut album The Hermit Sessions (2009) has been in the Dutch Album Top 100 for the past 79 weeks, and has sold 60,000 copies so far. Earlier this year the orchestra won the Popprijs.

Caro Emerald (Caroline van der Leeuw) is a jazz singer whose A Night Like This shot to the top of the charts, and whose album Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor easily took over the record for most weeks at number 1 in the Dutch Album Top 100 (30 and counting)—the previous record was held by Michael Jackson’s Thriller (27 in 1982). In the second quarter of this year, Deleted Scenes accounted for 10% of all album sales in the Netherlands.

(Photo of Kyteman and a smattering of his MCs by Oxfam Novib, some rights reserved)

Tags: , , , ,