Review - MILES PROWER - 'PNEUMATIC EP'

A while back, I promised to review this EP for Netlabelism but sadly as it is a paid release it does not really fall into the remit and so I thought I would pop my review here instead.


Not being a gamer myself, I had to Google Miles Prower to understad the reference. Being a fan of pop culture however, I can appreciate the reference in the same way I can appreciate Upcdownc's ubiquitous name too!

It is pop culture that we are concerned with here. Every track is bubble gum. The saccharine sounds on offer, evoke memories of first year freshers parties, living room mega-drive sessions and that movie with that Ryan guy that everyone fancies. The relentless 'whomp' of the kick drives this collection of infectious melodies deep into your skull until you see rainbows.

Stand out track for this reviewer would be 'San Francisco Nights'. It's stuttering arpegiator bass is clean and pulsating while the celestial delayed synth melody washes over you; all ear-wormy and lush. It's like the title track to a cult classic TV series in a perpetual 80's decade. It's like Bladerunner but Rick Deckard is a Powerpuff Girl.

Another moment of brilliance is the song 'Starlight Burning' at 2.31 as the beat breaks; all clicking hats and panning delay while a half time beat creeps in to accompany a steadily evolving filtered bass. It practically wubs it's way back into the refrain where Alice Maria Sparey's vocals glisten like angel fire.

There are times when this EP is trying to push new territory. The throbbing sidechain at the start of 'Second Chance' is forward thinking and Dan Mur's vocal is a revelation to this genre; it is immaculate and mainstream but reminds me more of Apparrat than Savage Garden in this context.

There are other times when the sacharine becomes almost too much but I get the impression this is what the focus was. 'Pneumatic EP' is a time machine. It's a nostalgic shell suit of an EP with a strong emphasis on synth pop and House. I have lot's of time for it.

You can purchase the album from Future City Records here for the modest price of $4.50 USD.

Press Campaigns

Rysic Cygo Press Release

Today I thought I would blog a bit about how Shep and I have chosen to promote our artists on Bitnormal Records and about the things we've been considering with regards to press campaigns.

When starting the label, we asked ourselves what we felt we could offer artists who might potentially sign with us. We decided that a netlabel model was best for us as we had no capital to press and distribute physical releases and we had limited time alongside our various other projects to commit to the full time promotion of the label and its roster.

We decided that what we could offer was promtion through Twitter, Facebook etc, a nice, functional website providing info and links and a space from which to stream and download releases.

We also felt that it would be fair to offer press campaings for new releases. This would involve building a network of reliable contacts that would be happy to feature and review our artists. After scouring the internet and building a list of the websites that looked like they would welcome a press release from us, we set about looking at how best to capture the writer's attention and not over-step the social parameters of sending out lots of info on a regular basis.

It was my thinking that it would be best to build an email template in html so that press recieved one email that looked sweet, exhibited the label branding and all the artist info in one foul-swoop. The problem we hit upon instantly was that most email clients filter images contained in emails and it is up to the user to enable visual content. This negates the impact I was aiming for and forced us to consider other options.

So the choice was either a plain text email (often widely accepted and preffered by many) or an attachment.

I still felt that an attachment would be better. As someone who has written reviews in the past, I still felt that a one-stop-shop for all links, bio and art work etc would be better for the writer than a plain text email that forced them to dig out info themselves. Also I thought that building the brand was an important aspect of standardising our press releases and creating a sense of community and cohesiveness.

Above is an example of what we have been sending out. This isactually the press release for my forth coming album under the name Rysic Cygo. The template is standard and we just drop the pics and the text in for each release. We add the links in with InDesign and export as a pdf document. This then gets attached to a personalised plain text email which goes out to the press contacts on the 3rd Monday of each month (as and when we have a release obviously!)

Eventually I would like to look at the question of how often we send out press and create a 1st, 2nd and 3rd waves of press that builds towards a wide spread campaign for our international artists but that will take time and we need more contacts to make that worth while.

Props to Pete 'Dedpop' Clark for the design elements of the rpess release which are taken from the website he designed for us.