For our meat-and-potatoes music listening, most of us have key apps already picked out — either because we subscribe to MOG, Rdio, Rhapsody, or Spotify, we prefer to download stuff and play it in a regular music player app, or because we stick to our favorite internet radio providers. But one great thing about apps…
Like many of us, I’m not particularly comfortable singing in public. I’m normally an extrovert, but whenever I have to sing in front of people for whatever reason, I clam up, evade eye contact, and grow timid like The Hunchback of Notre Dame (in the first part of the film). My dad, on the other…
When we first heard about Björk’s Biophilia, the first full-realized “app album” ever released, we became a little bit obsessed with it, interviewing developers (including a 19-year-old wunderkind), reviewing the song apps, and the like. Say what you will about the music, but nothing has come close to the way Biophilia re-imagined the album as something functional. It…
Listening to electronic musicians talk about their favorite methods for producing music can be boring, intimidating, or worse to outsiders — and to some insiders as well. I’ve sat through gearheads waxing poetic on everything from the perfect software for dubstep wobbles to how no digital compressor will ever sound as good as a classic LA-2A,…
First, a story, by way of explanation: A few years ago at a Boredoms show, I watched, rapt, as singer and multi-instrumentalist Yamantaka Eye wielded two glowing orbs. I still don’t know exactly how it happened, but as he moved those two spheres around in his hands, noises emerged that seemed controlled by the positions…
This is the second part of a two-part interview. If you missed the first part, it’s here. Max Weisel, Develoe: I convinced three of my friends from Tucson to drop out and move out here with me. I said, “I’ll give you a job for the first few months. I know we all want to…
During the first internet job wave in the ’90s, ambitious graduates moved west to San Francisco to strike it rich working for a dotcom. Fifteen years later, you don’t need the degree, the dotcom job, or even a San Francisco address. Meet Max Weisel, the 19-year-old wunderkind who began experimenting with iPhone app development in…
It’s the start of a new week, which for most of us means back to the grind. Add a little rain here at our Boston and New York offices, and it doesn’t leave much to smile about. But there’s a silver lining, because at Evolver.fm, each week brings new music apps for our “This Week…
The latest episode of Björk’s album of astounding song apps, Biophilia, is now live, ready to impress us all over again. The “Virus” song app, available for purchase within the main Biophilia app, is “part musical instrument, part sonic artwork, and part scientifically-informed educational animation.” To access it, you’ll need $2, version 1.1 of Biophilia, and 287MB of…
Scott Snibbe, the app designer, filmmaker and media artist responsible for coordinating the creation of Björk’s mind-blowing iOS album app, Biophilia, impressed us mightily with his firsthand account of how the album app came to be in the first segment of our interview. In this second segment, Snibbe explains why the Biophilia album app doesn’t support Apple’s…
You might think of Björk as a quirky, charismatic singer known for her otherworldly pipes, innovative songwriting, or perhaps the notorious swan dress she wore at the Academy Awards ten years ago. But the singer has another, less noticeable side: the ability to assemble a top notch team to accomplish her latest vision in the studio, on…
Björk’s next album, Biophilia, will be released as a collection of fascinating-sounding music apps – one for each song. Fans of the preternaturally-voiced chanteuse will be able to install any of the individual song apps from within the “mother app,” which we have not yet seen, but which Björk’s people say will be “a three-dimensional galaxy in…
