Once again it’s on – after another year of touring, building independently with PL70, and releasing our eighth album, Highlighter, we’re excited to finally bring the house party back home to Los Angeles this November.

The homies DJ Day and Revolutionary Rhythm will be joining us for the evening, as well as Luckyiam of Living Legends, so make sure to get there early to catch their sets. We’re expecting the show to be sold out soon, so get your tickets today!

Part three in the “Galactic” series – if you haven’t heard Delay’s Galactic Hot Tub Music or Galactic Convertible Music mixes, check those out and get ready for Galactic Gazebo Music, coming soon to PL70. Delay’s older mixes are also available here on the PL70 store.

The LP covers and sleeves have arrived! We’ve been driving out to the San Fernando Valley on a weekly basis to document the manufacturing process, which involved a laser die-cutting machine, two-tone foil-stamping, the tip-on sleeve process, and lots of hard work from our friends at Dorado Music Packaging. We’re really excited with the finished product and can’t wait to get it into your hands and onto your turntables. Check out the video above for a glimpse into the work that went into making the cover and sleeves for Highlighter.

Unfortunately, we’re running into a slight delay with the vinyl – we got test pressings back last week, and we heard some surface noise and dullness that we weren’t happy with, so Thes drove out to the pressing plant to figure things out in-person. Our goal is to make sure the vinyl sounds the best it can get, so we went back and had both discs re-plated at extra cost – the vinyl is currently being pressed right now and we’ll be shipping early next week. Thanks to everyone for their patience – creating quality products takes time, and we trust that you’d rather have a great sounding record for years than a sub-par one a week earlier. Make sure to redeem the free digital download included with all 2xLP orders if you haven’t already (accessible on the online version of your order receipt), so that you can listen the album today. If you have any questions about your order, you can always reach us at orders@pl70.net

Over the next few weeks, People Under The Stairs will be making five in-store appearances across the West Coast – all events are free, and we’ll have CD and 2xLP copies of of their new album, Highlighter, available at each event – Stop by, meet the group, pick up a copy of the new album and have it signed by Thes One and Double K.

October 12th – Amoeba Music, San Francisco, CA
October 15th – Fingerprints Music, Long Beach, CA | RSVP required – please call (562) 433-4996
October 20th – Amoeba Music, Hollywood, CA | Streaming Live Online at Amoeba.com
October 29th – 360 Vinyl, Portland, OR
November 2nd – The Krate, Santa Cruz, CA

And for those of you in PUTS’ hometown of Los Angeles, they will be headlining the El Rey Theater on November 19th – tickets just went on sale, and the past two El Rey shows have been packed, so make sure you get your tickets ASAP.

Dear Friend,

It is with great pride that we present to you the 8th chapter of the P, Highlighter. We would like to personally thank all of you for the enormous support and encouragement throughout the years. With not a single song leaked and no indication of what was coming, we were humbled by the amount of pre-sale orders that came in over the past few weeks. We don’t take your trust lightly, so we have worked hard in preparing a product that is both musically familiar yet technologically groundbreaking. We are extremely excited to announce that Highlighter is very likely the first fully HD-AAC commercial release in the history of music.

As many of you know, the album was pushed back one week from its initial release date, and as you are probably seeing, the download size is larger than a typical MP3 album. With no label to deal with, our ability to sell directly to you and with a little extra time and a whole lot of work, we were able to take advantage of the cutting edge Fraunhofer IIS HD-AAC codec directly from our Piecelock 70B studio. Put simply, almost all modern albums are recorded in high-resolution formats, only to be truncated down to CD format at their final stage – a leftover low-resolution format from the early 80’s that the bloated and greedy music industry is not willing to move beyond. While we have seen advancements in HD video, the dying music industry still is comfortable selling the outdated technology of CD’s because they cost about 10 cents to make. While professional studios have moved on and record audio at a minimum resolution of 24 bits, CDs are fixed at 16 bits. To put that into perspective, 16-bit resolution is equal to 216, or 65,536. Our album was recorded at 24-bit, which translates to 224, or 16,777,216. It’s a big difference between the two, both numerically and more importantly in what you hear, and it is heartbreaking to hear well-recorded albums forced down to a fraction of their native resolution, just to conform to the industry’s outdated technology.

By being able to present the album in HD-AAC, a revolutionary codec which allows us to encode at full 24-bit resolution and play in iTunes and on iPods, we are able to offer an exact replication of what we hear when we listen to the master tapes at our studio. The format is also future proof – this version of Highlighter will sound better and better as audio technology advances and is able to present more and more of the nuances preserved by 24-bit resolution. Most importantly, we feel that this is a great example of the vision of Piecelock 70 and People Under The Stairs working together to make the best possible product for the fans, the people who deserve it most and who support our vision with their hard earned money.

As promised, we have also included a Serato tagged traditional 320kbps MP3 which we took great care with as well. Please be patient with the download, we are hoping our servers can handle the demand. Either way, we think any minor inconveniences will be worth the trouble, so that you hear the album exactly as we hear it when we sit in the studio – with every crackle from the original vinyl intact, every squeak of the real piano in the room, the fan on the vibraphone and the mumbling in the background in between takes. We hope you enjoy listening to Highlighter as much as we enjoyed making it, and if you think the digital version sounds great, wait till you hear the vinyl!

Thank you again for your support and your trust. Time to get your Highlighter.

Thes One and Double K

orders@pl70.net

and we’ll take care of you ASAP.

A message from Thes One and Double K:

Dear Friend,

It is with great pride that we present to you the 8th chapter of the P, Highlighter. We would like to personally thank all of you for the enormous support and encouragement throughout the years. With not a single song leaked and no indication of what was coming, we were humbled by the amount of pre-sale orders that came in over the past few weeks. We don’t take your trust lightly, so we have worked hard in preparing a product that is both musically familiar yet technologically groundbreaking. We are extremely excited to announce that Highlighter is very likely the first fully HD-AAC commercial release in the history of music.

As many of you know, the album was pushed back one week from its initial release date, and as you are probably seeing, the download size is larger than a typical MP3 album. With no label to deal with, our ability to sell directly to you and with a little extra time and a whole lot of work, we were able to take advantage of the cutting edge Fraunhofer IIS HD-AAC codec directly from our Piecelock 70B studio. Put simply, almost all modern albums are recorded in high-resolution formats, only to be truncated down to CD format at their final stage – a leftover low-resolution format from the early 80’s that the bloated and greedy music industry is not willing to move beyond. While we have seen advancements in HD video, the dying music industry still is comfortable selling the outdated technology of CD’s because they cost about 10 cents to make. While professional studios have moved on and record audio at a minimum resolution of 24 bits, CDs are fixed at 16 bits. To put that into perspective, 16-bit resolution is equal to 216, or 65,536. Our album was recorded at 24-bit, which translates to 224, or 16,777,216. It’s a big difference between the two, both numerically and more importantly in what you hear, and it is heartbreaking to hear well-recorded albums forced down to a fraction of their native resolution, just to conform to the industry’s outdated technology.

By being able to present the album in HD-AAC, a revolutionary codec which allows us to encode at full 24-bit resolution and play in iTunes and on iPods, we are able to offer an exact replication of what we hear when we listen to the master tapes at our studio. The format is also future proof – this version of Highlighter will sound better and better as audio technology advances and is able to present more and more of the nuances preserved by 24-bit resolution. Most importantly, we feel that this is a great example of the vision of Piecelock 70 and People Under The Stairs working together to make the best possible product for the fans, the people who deserve it most and who support our vision with their hard earned money.

As promised, we have also included a Serato tagged traditional 320kbps MP3 which we took great care with as well. Please be patient with the download, we are hoping our servers can handle the demand. Either way, we think any minor inconveniences will be worth the trouble, so that you hear the album exactly as we hear it when we sit in the studio – with every crackle from the original vinyl intact, every squeak of the real piano in the room, the fan on the vibraphone and the mumbling in the background in between takes. We hope you enjoy listening to Highlighter as much as we enjoyed making it, and if you think the digital version sounds great, wait till you hear the vinyl!

Thank you again for your support and your trust. Time to get your Highlighter.

Thes One and Double K

As a listener, I love Spotify. I’m constantly on the move, between computers, in the car, on a flight, and the convenience of having unlimited streaming music on a cell phone is something I couldn’t have even conceived back when I was sitting in the courtroom watching the Napster trials unfold over a decade ago. I’ve discovered dozens of new artists and gotten a glimpse into what my friends are listening to in real-time. The social playlist and sharing functions are incredible, and with the release of Open Graph at F8 last week, I have no doubt that they will continue to grow and become the primary means by which people discover new music. It’s easily the best $9.99 I spend every month.

The artist side of the equation, which so often goes untold, is a completely different story. Streaming services are, in theory, a perfect way to compensate artists – the amount each artist gets paid is directly proportional to the number of times people listen to their music. But in practice artists receive only a fraction of one cent per play on Spotify, Rdio, or any other streaming service. Think about that for a second. A song is worth less than one cent now. Your favorite new song, that you listened to 78 times start to finish last week, is worth less than a pack of M&Ms. That means it takes over 1000 plays on Spotify for an artist to make the same amount as someone buying the album on iTunes.

Spotify argues that since 90% of Americans do not spend money on recorded music, the goal of their service is to convince that 90% to subscribe to their service, and in doing so, recapture money otherwise lost to bootleg downloads and Youtube plays. While this is a noble aspiration, I think all of you who are reading this, part of that 10% who do spend money on music, are different. You buy albums because you care about music and the people behind it. Maybe you’re a musician yourself, or run your own business, and understand just how much a $10 or $20 purchase can mean. We always hope that one day that other 90% will wake up one day and press pause on the latest Lady Gaga video to take a listen to Radiohead, Public Enemy, or maybe even some People Under The Stairs. But we release music for you, the listeners who care, not for the maddening herd.

And so, we’ve decided not to put Highlighter on Spotify, Rdio, and other streaming services. It’s been a tough decision. We know that if we were to make Highlighter available on Spotify and Rdio, a few thousand more people might hear the new album. We might be missing out on a whole new wave of social music sharing. But we refuse to simply be at the will of new technology companies without being given a voice and a chance to negotiate. For the past decade, musicians have been the perpetual guinea pig of the internet. Music has been the litmus test for P2P, torrents, social networks, Twitter and more, and has been the viral backbone upon which tech innovation prospers and profits. In an age when millions of dollars in venture capital is awarded almost haphazardly to a group of six programmers with an idea, all we ask for is a bit more than one cent when someone plays a song. I think that’s fairly reasonable, and I hope you do too, and will show it by buying a handful of albums every year from artists that you believe in.

This decision tested our mission statement, of being an artist collective dedicated to sustainable creative independence. As it stands today, streaming services are not sustainable for artists. Hopefully, one day, they will be. You have our word that when that day comes, we’ll be there.
_____________________
Brendan Irvine-Broque
Director of Operations, PL70.net

As I’m sure you have all heard from Brendan, I am have been forced to make the decision to push the album back a few days.

First off, I’d like to explain just how difficult this decision has been for me. I was caught completely off guard by the amount of preorders that came in over the past week and by the anticipation and excitement regarding the album.
I was hearing reports back of people who had taken today (Friday) off just to spend the day with the music, and that is truly humbling for myself and double. The sheer amount of presales, sight unheard, shows just how much you trust us and that weighs heavily on me. This decision has not been easy, and though frustrating, I feel like it is the right one – HIGHLIGHTER is forever, and I want it to come out the way it was intended to. The record is extremely complicated and ambitious with massive track counts and performances that have taken weeks to mix and get perfect. I have worked every day and night this week (well actually this month) trying to juggle the deadline and releasing something that makes double k and myself happy, forgoing sleep and sanity in the process. I didn’t consider pushing it back until I absolutely had to, and so last night, at about 2AM, faced with a finished album that was not mastered to the best of it’s potential, I had to call it.

With these extra couple of days, we will be able to step back and present the album the way it was meant to be. For everyone that has pre-ordered, we will now also be including with your download a behind the music video documenting some of this madness. I apologize for any inconvenience or frustration this may cause, but I promise that the wait will be worth it, and that we will all be happy with the end result. The album will now be released (absolutely) at midnight PST on Thursday Sept. 29th. The physical release (vinyl and CD) is still on the same schedule.

Thank you all again for your support and patience. It will be worth it.

Thes One
People Under The Stairs