Miniature Airlines is a Seattle based producer of melodic yet experimental electronic music, with influences ranging from new wave, hip hop, IDM, glitch, and pop styles. Armed with a laptop and some MIDI controllers, he's released several free EPs, and plays the occasional live PA set in the Pacific Northwest.
Last Wednesday’s installment of Show and Tell at the Living Room has to be one of my favorite shows I’ve played so far. I mean that both from the perspective of the quality of the set I played, and the atmosphere and reaction of the crowd. I felt really good about how I played, and got to debut some newer material to a room full of smiling friends. You can’t ask for anything better than that. Hjalti also threw down a brilliant set of entirely new material (including a cover of Poison!!!), some of which you should be hearing on d.iscontent later this year. Heartfelt thanks to Verse for putting this night together, and the Living Room for being great hosts.
Quick tracklist for my set:
Last Leaves of Spring (live debut) The Distant You Untitled (w/ glockenspiel) Our Hope Is Limitless Horses Never Know The Odds Skirt (live debut) Cankles (Slender Wrists remix written about one week ago, live debut) Unmoved by Jazz (live debut) Survive to See Tomorrow (excerpt) Untitled (w/vocals – brand new track written about one week ago, live debut)
I neglected to record te set, but I may do a “live in the studio” version, and throw it online. Unless someone would like to invite me to play their house party or something, and I’ll record that (nudge nudge, wink wink).
I may have another show lined up soon, but I’ll wait for confirmation to tell you those details.
It’s finally here. My debut full-length album, Arrivals & Departures, is now available as a free download. It’s been a long time in progress; some of these songs have been around for years, and the vague blueprint for the album itself has been evolving ever since my previous release, First Snows & Last Leaves. Eleven tracks, clocking in at about 57 minutes from start to finish. How to describe it? Good question. I feel like I’m so close to these songs that I can’t say anything objective about them, but some of the adjectives that have been tossed out so far: blissful, nostalgic, melancholy. I think those are all pretty fair.
So please, go download the album now and give it a spin. Spread the link, share it with your friends, post it wherever you’re inspired to post it. I hope you enjoy. And if you do, be sure to stay tuned for the forthcoming remix EP. I’ve got some really great artists reinterpreting these songs as we speak, and I can’t wait to hear what they come up with.
And finally, I’ll be playing live at the Living Room Bar in Seattle’s Capitol Hill on June 16th, and some of these new songs are sure to show up in my set. See you there…
I guess now is a good a time as any to announce the (still a little tentative) plans for my upcoming album. I’m in the home stretch of this thing – the first round of rough mixes is complete, and while there are definitely issues to address and another round of mixing to do, it’s basically all downhill from here.
So here it is – my new 11-track album will be entitled Arrivals & Departures, and it will be released in Mid-May, with a remix EP to follow in June. As always, this will be a digital only release, freely available to all.
Speaking of remixes, I’m preparing remix kits for upload this weekend, and I still have some slots available if you’re interested. You can leave a comment here, e-mail me (dylan at miniatureairlines dot com), or send me a reply or DM on twitter (@miniair) for more details.
So yes, please spread the word, and give my old EPs another listen while you’re waiting for the new record to drop. Oh, and stay tuned for details about an upcoming show this summer as well, hopefully the first of many.
So there’s a new folder on my external hard drive, and it contains about 18GB of 24-bit wave files. These wave files are the rendered tracks for 10 of the 12 songs that are making the final cut for my new (and much-delayed) full-length album. The last two tracks will be bounced down soon as well.
I’ll be starting mixing sessions shortly, with Hjalti assissting, and hopefully get this album cranked out in short order. I could’ve spent ages making minor edits, tweaking drum sounds, and fiddling around the edges, but at some point, you have to just move forward, so that’s what I’m doing. I’ve got all the tracks into a state that I’m really happy with, and they’ll only be improved by some detailed mixing and mastering.
Other than that, I need to name 4 of these tracks still. And work on artwork. No small tasks, but it feels good to be drawing closer to the finish line on this set of songs. Some of them are over 5 years old at this point.
If you’re interested in remixing any of these tracks, please let me know. The plan for now is to release a short companion EP of remixes after the album is released. I already have 2 or 3 lined up, and the more the merrier. Drop me a line.
Once upon a time, approximately 5 years ago, I hand-coded a static, one-page website in Notepad as a place to host my music, and updates about events, etc. Back in those days, I was hand-editing an RSS feed for the site, and keeping everything as minimalist as possible. Time went by, and I never got around to redesigning, but kept cobbling bits together on this basic little page. 5 years is a long time on the internet, and this site got to look pretty dated pretty quickly.
So here we are, with a brand new design! I’ve ported everything over to WordPress, and slightly modified the Transport theme, so my web presence is much tidier and easier to work with. I’ve been planning on creating my own design for ages and ages, but I got sick of the current site, and this took a single evening to put together. So I think I’ll stick with it for now, and see if I can settle in, make a few tweaks here and there. Let me know if you run into any issues with the new site…
I just realized I never posted a follow-up to the Laptop Battle. End result: Vincent Parker (Van) won the evening, after a tie-breaking round with Graintable (PDX). I was elminated in the last battle of the first round, by the soon-to-be-champion vincent Parker. A good time was had by all.
I’ll be playing again on Feb. 12th, at Re-Bar, with a great lineup (Relcad, Skoi Sirius, Potatofinger, and DJ Travis Baron). More info soon!
So, the 6th Annual Seattle Laptop Battle is officially a week away, and I’m both excited and intimidated. Excited, because it’s going to be a big show, with an engaged audience, and a hell of a good time. Intimidated, because the competition is stiff, I still need to do a lot of work on my battle tracks, and because I have a lot of little odds and ends to finish up before next Friday.
The biggest odd and/or end is the promo CD I’ll be bringing with me. I’ll have a limited amount of free CD-R promo CDs to hand out at the event, so if you’re interested, ask me about them at the show. It’ll be a 3-track EP showcasing some songs from the new album. Rough versions of these songs have been around for a while, but the versions on the CD will be closer to their final form.
Hope to see you all out at Chop Suey next Friday! Here’s some extra informtion to help you all remember:
That’s right, I’ll be fighting it out with 15 other laptoppers in this years Seattle Laptop Battle. If you want to see me go mano a mano with the likes of Naturebot, xBen, Potatofinger, Dash EXP, KFO, and more, come on out to ChopSuey on December 18th. It’s a single elimination tournament of beats and bass, and audience response helps determine the victor. So please, come out and and cheer me on!
A new rough mix, posted over at Soundcloud. Very much in progress. Feedback encouraged. This is the most recently “completed” track from the forthcoming album. Possibly the opening track? I haven’t decided yet. Tell me what you think…
See this chart? This chart shows the amount of stuff I need to do to be finished with my current album project(s). Each one of these boxes needs to be checked off. There are 14 tracks that I consider to be contenders for the album, and 6 steps to completing each track. That makes 84 boxes to check off. I’ve currently got 15 checked off. That may not sound like much, but the first column (composing) is the hardest part, and most of that column is done. Bouncing, mixing, choosing a track order, and mastering are all challenging as well, but less so. The last step, encoding and tagging, is a formality. I guess I could add a check box for artwork as well, since I’ll be handling that, as usual.
Anyways, this is a progress report. Expect updates.
