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We got an email last week from one of our friends and sonic heroes, Eric Persing (of Spectrasonics). He had a project for us.

Located : one vintage Vako Orchestron polyphonic organ, the successor to the Optigan.

Our mission : head to a basement in ‘Stallis (West Allis for those of you outside the Milwaukee area) and record samples of this rare and coveted beast.

Happy to say, the fine gent who was brokering this gorgeous piece of synthesizer antiquity, Jim Davisson, could not have been nicer or more accomodating, and our recording session was a complete success. Jim had done a remarkable job of restoring the instrument after having finally convinced his long-time friend to sell it, and we were able to grab some super clean samples of the entire keyboard (and most of the limited soundset).

I know Eric has some surprises planned for the sounds, and he always does amazing work, so we’ll be super stoked to finally get Spectrasonics’ new software instruments (next year?)… until then, the only place you can hear this incredible bit of music technology history is in music produced right here at Burst Labs.

We’ll post an update when some of our latest tracks featuring the Orchestron are uploaded.

For those among you with two feet solidly planted in the world of music-technology-geekery, Jim has agreed to come by Burst HQ and talk about the history of the Orchestron and his restoration process. Check back here for an update soon. [dh]

The first-week sales figures are in for the big-box-friendly indie comp This Is Next. I’m gonna level with you… they’re not great.

Units Shipped: 100,000
Units Sold: 1,014

If you would indulge me in some gratuitous back-slapping, please refer back to this post where I get my Nostradamus on with some serious prognosticatin’ business.

Thank you, that is all. [ms]

1982 was a pretty amazing year if you dug Sci-Fi.

ET. Bladerunner. Tron.

And now Tron gets a sequel.

I want to know about the new soundtrack, though. The original (by Wendy Carlos) had such a great interplay between analog synthesis and live orchestral score (provided by the London Philharmonic). Who would provide such a great musical metaphor for humans/machines these days?

Maybe BT? For my money nobody gets the marriage of human and machine better than Mr. Transeau. His recent 5.1 release, This Binary Universe (get it at Amazon), is breathtaking in it’s emotional depth, which is an accomplishment considering the man is aligning the sound of rain to a mathematical grid at times. But it’s those high-level, cpu-intensive-moments that balance the heart-wrenching and soul-dripping arrangements BT deftly manipulates into one cohesive work. Check out This Binary Universe in surround as soon as you can.

I could also make a case for Imogen Heap, if only for her stunningly perfect specimen of the humanization of technology, Hide And Seek (iTunes link). She manages to use only synthesis (with her voice and lyrics as an input source) to extract tears from my eyes every single time I hear that beautiful song. Could she do an entire movie score (I’m not aware of anything she’s done other than have her songs licensed in movies and television shows)? But imagine Ms. Heap paired with someone as emotive and orchestral as James Horner (who comes with a ton of sci-fi cred, having done Star Trek II and III, Cocoon, and the Academy-Award-Nominated score for Aliens), or Eliot Goldenthal. I like the sound I’m hearing in my head.

We have other votes from our studios here today (Old Man Malcolm and Kyle are exploring Logic together and Matt is putting the finishing touches on some new chilled out tracks for our production music catalog). We’re all vibing pretty hard on Justice and MSTRKRFT. Who could they pair with on the symphonic side to create a hybrid dream-score for the new Tron? Drop us your ideas in a comment below. [dh]

This feels a bit like Spinal Tap + American Idol + The Office.

I hope the full movie is as good as the trailer - check out Great World Of Sound :

Absolutely perfect bit of music used in marketing (and we’re not even swayed by the fact that the production company, Glass And A Half Full, clearly loves the music of the eighties as much as we do) :

Check out the ridiculously great Cadbury Gorilla here.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, AdFreak! [dh]

St. Louis agency Moosylvania (home to a longtime friend-of-Burst, Judson F. Snell) has been described as “the Manson family of integrated marketing.”

What we know is this… they’re a renegade agency with a team of church-dwelling phantoms and their new Agency Simulator game Moosylvasion : Attack Of The Suits is online now. Go play!

Check out the bitchin’ retro music of the in-game soundtrack :

More music from ‘the decade of greed’ is on the way this week… here’s a clip that has brought us much inspiration and joy as we’ve been prepping the latest specimens for upload to our Lab. [dh]

Here’s a wicked cool site that should yield hours of fun… we preloaded the link with a special message just for you.

Send us an email with a list of all the songs sampled and we’ll ship you a prize package full of Burst goodies.

Found this browsing Digg this morning - where it had already been ‘dugg’ more than 2000 times in 24 hours! [dh]

It’s not every week that we get to affiliate ourselves with MC Hammer, Antonio Banderas, AND the hottest reality dancing competition on television.

So, here’s some cool news… music produced by The Burst Collective was used in the Emmy-nominated show Dancing With The Stars.

Of course, there were some great songs featured in the final showdown (dance-off??) between Mario Lopez and Emmitt Smith, including :

“Sir Duke” by Stevie Wonder

“Que Bueno Baila Usted” by Oscar d’Leon

“Cancion Del Mariachi” by Los Lobos & Antonio Banderas

“You Can’t Touch This” by MC Hammer

“It Takes Two” by Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock

In addition to custom scoring and record production, we do production music (or licensed music / library music) as many of you know. Which means we’re the team that sits behind the scenes making the instrumental breaks and musical intro bits to help keep things exciting, or dramatic, or tense, or heartwarming, or whatever the music supervisor thinks is needed for the show.

And we’re content with that. Really.

But we did get a little jacked this past week when our royalty reports showed up and revealed that Dancing With The Stars clearly digs the music we’ve produced for the Velocity Music Library (distributed by FirstCom Music). In addition to a bevy of uses throughout last season, they used two of our pieces quite prominently in the Emmy-nominated Episode 310 :

“Heroes” by Holter/Mosher


“Gonna Getcha” by Ecoff/Holter

And now we find out that that very episode is the one nominated for an Emmy!

Well, we’d like to think we played some small role, but clearly the show’s musical director, Harold Wheeler, knows what he’s doing and deserves all the credit.

Congratulations Harold, and everyone at DWTS!! We’ll be cheering for you from afar on September 16. [dh]

Click here for the complete list of Emmy nominees.

“Heroes” and “Gonna Getcha” are © FirstCom Music / ZFC Music and are provided here for demo purposes only.

There’s great news at studiodaily.com about vintage and classic music library tracks possibly being spun again by Steinski at his reborn radio show on WFMU.

The article’s author, Bryan Frazer, asks

“which of today’s library CDs some eccentric DJ may be spinning, 40 years hence?”

Hey, if you’re talking sampling, remixing and spinning, we’ve got some ideas for you from our Lab :

Grandma Says

Coco The Mutt

Escape Strut

Mamasita

Taxi

Of course, there’s the new gospel songs we’re producing right now for a kickass music library based in the U.K. Those would be ripe for sampling, greasy and old skool. They feature Shon Hinton (guitar and drums, Mary J Blige). Maybe we’ll keep a few of those tracks for our loyal Burst Labs fans… [dh]