This Week Music: 1st April 2021

A weekly update on all things music, advertising, and technology coming straight to you from Anthony Vanger at MassiveMusic. #TWIM

ARTIST OF THE WEEK: MAISIE PETERS

First love, first kiss, and first heartbreak. Listening to up-and-coming pop star Maisie Peters’ latest single John Hughes Movie snaps me back to the heady days of teenage summer. Movies like The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off blew the lids off our lives and dominated popular teen culture in the 80s. For her latest single, Maisie Peters cleverly turns the Hughes formula on its head, painting the picture of a world where the girl does not always get the guy. Her charming confessional style is reminiscent of Taylor Swift, but there is often a nod and a wink alongside the tears. With a series of strong singles and a new album on the horizon, Peters is pushing for a bigger slice of the pop cake. If she keeps putting out choruses like this one, just like in a real John Hughes movie, she may get her wish.

@maisiepeters #maisiepeters #johnhughesmovie

AD OF THE WEEK: FISHER-PRICE: TOYS ARE ALL AROUND US

How clever is it to make an ad about toys without showing a single toy. Fisher-Price’s latest ad shows that everyday objects like ironing boards and bananas are transformed by children into toys. As Ad Week explained, “Remember when you used to be able to dream up exciting adventures inspired only by your mundane surroundings? How useful would that have been during lockdown, when we’ve all been stuck in an endless Groundhog Day?” The ad was created by Wieden + Kennedy Portland.

COVID-19: 5,000 MUSIC FANS ATTEND BARCELONA GIG AFTER PASSING SAME-DAY CORONAVIRUS SCREENING

Five thousand people attended a rock concert in Barcelona on Saturday after passing a same-day screening test for COVID-19. The music fans piled into the Palau Sant Jordi arena where indie rock band Love of Lesbian were playing after having received the all-clear from a coronavirus antigen test taken earlier in the day. The show took place with special permission from Spain’s health authorities in a pilot to examine whether the rapid testing system could effectively prevent COVID-19 outbreaks.

In surreal scenes after a year of social distancing, people danced close to one another, but the sea of faces covered in masks showed that things were not quite back to normal. Health controls at the entrance delayed the start of the concert, but could not dampen the celebratory spirit.

MALCOLM CECIL, CREATOR OF THE WORLD’S LARGEST SYNTH, DIES AGED 84

Synthesizer legend, Stevie Wonder collaborator and inventor of TONTO – the world’s biggest synthesizer – Malcolm Cecil has died aged 84. Cecil was one-half of TONTO’s Expanding Head Band, which used Cecil and band member Robert Margouleff’s giant modular synth as its key instrument across two albums. His death was announced on the Bob Moog Foundation’s Twitter on Sunday, March 28th.

They caught the attention of a young Stevie Wonder who enlisted them to work on his groundbreaking albums Music Of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions and Fulfillingness’ First Finale. Cecil also worked alongside Gil Scott-Heron, The Isley Brothers, Quincy Jones and Bobby Womac and is considered a synth pioneer.

TONTO was eventually incorporated into the National Music Centre in Alberta, Canada, where it’s still used to this day. Watch a video of it in action below.

PIONEER DJ LAUNCH NEW STUDIO AND DJ MONITORS

Pioneer DJ has launched a new series of near-field DJ and studio monitors, the VM range. The VM comes in three sizes: five-inch cone, seven-inch cone, and eight-inch cone and all three sizes come with DSP technology to ‘tune’ the speaker to the space that they’re placed in. They’re designed to be used for both DJ monitoring at home when either practicing, preparing your set and live streaming – where the speakers can be tuned to have more of a ‘hyped’ sound – and for use in the studio where you can switch the frequency response back to flat. There are 16 total settings across both speakers, with four options on each, changed using the indented rotary on the back of each speaker.

Find out more about the VM range here.