Are parts the future of electronic music releases?

Are parts the future of electronic music releases?

13 March, 2009 | 2.20PM

• Written by: Terry Church
• Filed under: Music News: kevin gorman, mikrowave

After a 10-month hiatus, Kevin Gorman’s Mikrowave label has returned with an innovative new series ‘Elements’, in which component parts of the releases are offered separately.

The Manchester label that has welcomed the likes of Marcel Dettmann, Mark Broom, Alex Under and Tadeo on previous releases, will output a further three installments of a series that will run through until June.

In addition to the three traditional tracks ‘Elements Part 1’ is bundled with pads, beats, riffs and stripped down versions of the source material.

With the steady rise of applications such as Traktor, Serato and Ableton Live allowing users to manipulate audio on a microscopic level, it stands to reason that many more labels will choose to adopt a similarly detailed approach in the future. Techno guardian Richie Hawtin is rumoured to be considering a similar plan for his Minus label.

The inspiration behind Mikrowave’s concept apparently arose from Gorman’s recent Ableton-based laptop tour that included sets at Fabric and Watergate, and Gorman is even suggesting that producers submit their own remixes and versions of his material with a view to a possible release through his Mikrowave label.

That’s the kind of cyclical collaborative mind-set that has permeated dance music culture since day one. Remixing, sampling, even DJing - they’ve all been built around the simple principle of the inspired, in turn inspiring others.

We’d like to get the Beatportal community’s input on this idea. We’re sure that all DJs out there at some point have said, “I like this track, but not the vocal,” or “The hi hats on this track would fit nicely with this other cut.”

Being able to isolate and choose only the beat, loop, vocal or synth of a record will change everything: the way DJs play, the technology they use for live performance (or did the technology change the format?), the way producers put together tracks in the studio, and the way labels release music.

But might it be akin to the death of the longplayer (because digital downloading allowed you to choose only the tracks from an album that you like, it arguably pushed the album format close to redundancy)?

Might the same thing happen to 12” singles? Should labels release source material loops with tracks?

These are important questions, and their answers may define a changing DJ generation caught in the whirlwind of technological determinism.

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• Get 'Elements Part 1' on Beatport