first, listen to the song:
Feel the distortion infiltrate your body and begin to wake it up up over a Daft-Punk-like distanced intro. Rest in the rapid momentary silence and get ready to move, whether you want it or not. Take a breath together with URL, and let Daniel Allan’s undulating beat take over the next 3 minutes of your life. Mentions of cigarettes in a high-pitch reverberated voice over a cymbal-heavy beat take us straight to an Upper East Side club, we’re in it now. The amorphous bass line bounces around us under harmonic synths, brightening up and giving depth to the sound. It’s a well accomplished sound, though monotone and lifeless at times.
“Daniel Allan - UES (w/URL)” is the first drop on the second edition of NOISE’s editorial, High Frequency. NOISE (Short for NOISE DAO), a decentralized investment group comprised of investors, music industry vets, and artists, has quickly become an onchain music institution. A true supporter of all ranges of historical work, NOISE has invested in projects from generative music (e.g. Dadabots) to companies (e.g. Catalog) to protocols (e.g. Nina) to artists (e.g. Matthew Chaim) to even other DAOs (Heds). This music collective knew from the start that investment would not be enough to help herald this movement, which is why it started an editorial arm. At first sharing artists’ stories in written form, High Frequency evolved to releasing compilation albums from top artists in web3 under its own name. NOISE represent a new class of actor in the music space, one that fulfills two key roles for artists releasing music onchain: the experimental onchain investor, and the distribution collective. While there are other projects focused on each of these roles (e.g. Coop Records as an onchain investor, LNRZ as a distribution collective, etc.), NOISE is the only collective attempting, and succeeding in our opinion, to serve as both.
Bouncing over a mumbled lyric and a quick fourth wall break, UES starts its first rise with a consistent snare and muted rhythmic synths accompanying the song’s main line of “I’ve got my head on your shoulders”, sang in a predictable melody without much emotion. Becoming more unintelligible as the song goes on, the vocals are probably UES’ weakest link. Often overshadowed by the beat and production, the little we can understand from URL leaves us none the better for it. Although this might be par for the course in dance music, it doesn’t add much to the song beyond a nice melodic line. In fact, the song hits its best point after the first drop, when Allan shines alone with, as one of our musicollectors says, “nice nods to french house that gives the track a nostalgic summer vibe”. The stacked wavy voice samples, combined with the amorphous bass now as full as it can be, ripple through and has us rocking our chair.
There is no denying Daniel’s talent and grind. Known as the guy who goes to parties with his laptop and headphones to keep making music, Daniel is a clear example that focus and hard work are required for talent and creativity to cut through the noise (no pun intended). A web3 music darling in his own right, Daniel has had a prolific couple of years. He is Sound’s second best selling artist (246 ETH), only after Snoop, from 26 Sound drops with 6.7k mints from 1.3k collectors, likely the best selling artist on Catalog with 33 records all above 1 ETH, and has released 2 full albums and a few EPs. He has also been at the forefront of onchain music innovation consistently. Just to mention one of many examples, Daniel was a participant of project Astro’s first release, which was one of the first projects to introduce rarity and burn-to-earn mechanism into the ecosystem. Astro was also one of the first projects to use both Bonfire websites and the Sound protocol. He has paved the way for onchain artists in countless ways, including raising a $1M Artist Seed to remain independent while aiming for scale, in a move that might be looked back on with the same level of historic importance as Bowie’s “Bowie Bonds” in 1997.
Often opting for quick releases instead of overthinking song for months like many artists do, Daniel is putting out music at an impressive, seemingly unsustainable, pace. Just last week, he had 3 songs released: one of his own as part of his latest EP “Duality”, a collaboration with 4 other artists as part of a LNRZ release, and this NOISE release. Citing the need for release cadence control as one of the main reasons to remain independent, Allan is in his own lane at his own rhythm, aware that great artists keep getting better by releasing more music and continuing on the grind. This rapid fire approach has served him well so far, allowing Allan to take advantage of more opportunities to grow or deepen his collector base, sharpen his music / production skills, and monetize his growing perception as “web3’s breakout artist”, but it does not come without downsides. Trying to be everywhere all at once also means that the music quality takes a hit sometimes, as is the case with UES. Although UES might not be a favorite, go listen to the entirety of Criteria or Glass House with DLG for a more experimental innovative side of Allan’s catalogue.
After a successful Volume 1 mixtape that involved 16 artists, generating 26k mints from 6k collectors (95%+ of mints coming from a single Reo Cragun record), NOISE evolved its relationship with its collectors by allowing anyone who minted in Volume 1 to choose the artists that make up Volume 2. Another great example of the creator <> collector relationship evolving in front of us in real time. Not only that, they did the voting by leveraging a voting mechanism created by hedsDAO, a distributed audio visual community that has generated 110+ in ETH volume through their community-voted HedsTAPEs (partly from investments from NOISE itself). So, to recap how this song came to be: a group of artists and whales put magic internet money into a digital contract to invest in cool new onchain music stuff, they started an weekly editorial that evolved into curated mixtapes in collaboration with top onchain artists, and they let anyone who minted their previous mixtape choose the artists for this new one through a voting mechanism created by another innovative music collective, which the first group invested in. Got it? Daniel is himself a member in NOISE, so we can imagine that, after being voted into the mixtape by the community, he would not turn down the opportunity to be a part of this exciting release.
It is this spirit of distributed wisdom that encouraged us to introduce the musicollector rating, an aggregate score of our collectors’ taste, into our review moving forward. An objective metric (like our 0.0-10.0 point scale) for subjective taste is clearly incongruent; it is only when we start putting it in context that we can start making sense of it. One piece of context is in the aggregated review history: a 5.0 rating might mean something different to every one of us, but we can get a sense of musicurators’ taste when we view it next to previous reviews. The musicollector rating is another important and new piece of context, as it allows us to have a larger data set and get a global taste of the wisdom of a small crowd (in this case, this crowd is made up of a mix of artists and collectors passionate about onchain music). All of our individual tastes are still subjective, but, when looked at in context and in aggregate, they may start to paint a picture. We will continue experimenting at the intersection of curation and onchain music, opting also, like Daniel Allan, for a quick release approach and understanding the risks of not always hitting the perfect note.
UES picks back up after a second verse and hook with an elongated echoed rise, leading into a drop full of smartly cut stacked vocal synths and exciting back-and-forths with low-range notes, almost like a choppy conversation between far away strangers getting lost in translation. Playing more with alternating silence than with the nuances of storytelling, the song stays in trance and bring backs the main hook once again, even if we might prefer it wasn’t there. UES comes to an abrupt ending mimicking a scratched CD skipping pieces of the song, which strangely feels like a metaphor for this song. While we do not expect this song will stand the test of time, we believe that Daniel Allan and NOISE already have and will continue doing so through their shared quest towards creative innovation and experimentation.
More on the song:
Date of mint: September 28th, 2023
Mint details: 0.003 ETH, 93 limited edition mints (timed, 1 day left), 46 Forever editions
Current price: still minting, 0.003
musicurator