The World's First Album Made on Vine

Earlier this week Aidan Moffat, under his long-standing moniker L. Pierre, released a new album. With a running time of less than one minute, The Eternalist is not what you'd think of as a studio LP. But then Aidan did put the record out through social video site Vine, with each track taking the form of a video loop which you can listen to for as long as you want. At first you might think thats a bit of a clickbait gimmick, but when you start listening to these ethereal loops expand slowly over ten or 20 minutes, you start to realize Vine's potential as a sonic utensil.

Here's a cut from it:

Moffat is known for his romping adventures in sound—his involvement with Arab Strap, Mogwai, and Bill Wells has produced music that pushes the lyrical and musical conventions of pop. But this latest project is stark in its simple utilization of technology, ending up with something that hinges somewhere between ambient noise and meditative drones.

We asked him why he did it.

Noisey: Is it weird doing album promotion for six-second songs?

Aidan: It does seem a bit strange, but I think it’s the future aye.

I was going to suggest we do a track-by-track review, but perhaps that’s taking it too far.

I don't know if you could because the track length is entirely up to the listener. It’s part of the thing, it’s your choice when you want to turn it off. Do you remember those FM3 Buddha machines that came out?

Yeah, with the drones that you could meditate to. My hippy mom has one.

I was always insanely jealous of those Buddha machines, it’s one of those "I wish I thought of it first" ideas. I’ve always wanted to try something with small loops and Vine is the perfect place to do it and do it for free. You could make it an app, but apps cost time and money. The technology to do this is easily available and I thought that I’d just utilize it.

Had you been using Vine before you made the record?

I do normal Aiden Moffat Vines on my Twitter. It’s usually just comedy stuff that involves me sitting on the toilet; I get bored quite a lot.

Up until now I thought it was mostly a medium for watching other people fall over. This is one of the first artistic ventures. Could you see other people using Vine creatively?

It certainly lends itself well to what I want to do. Deciding what you can do with loops, there's very much an ambient drone. It’s not intended to be listened to as a proper album in that sense. It’s really about ambient music and ambient sounds blending within your environment. That purpose in doing small loops is perfect, because that’s what it is for artistically. People also make some interesting films on it too. It’s certainly still good fun for films.

But it is a kind of sampling, which has been around a long time.
It does give people a chance to do something with it. Some of the best stuff that I’ve seen on there is often little things from TV, that have been taken out of context and become hilarious in these two second bursts.Why I wanted to do it is because the way a Vine works is if you just look at my profile page you’ve got all the eight tracks, all in the sequence that I want them to be in as well. It’s like having a free digital loop album. I really like the design of Vine as well.

Did you work with Vine at all or is this all unbeknown to them?

Completely unbeknown to them but I think someone from my record label is trying to contact them. I didn’t want to make a big deal of it; I didn’t want it to look like I was trying to promote Vine cause that’s not what I’m interested in. If Vine see it and want to do something that’d be lovely.

Are you a new technology person in general?

I didn’t jump at the first chance, I only started using Vine quite recently, it takes me a while to get used to things. I mean I don’t keep up with everything, I like the things that I like, I’m not looking for something new to grasp my attention, I’ve got enough things to do in my day as it is. These things tend to be time vampires so I tend not to get too involved. If something good and interesting comes along then I always keep my eye on it.

There’s going to be a new EP as well. Is that an accompaniment to the Vine album?

There’s a 10” EP called Softest Noise, based around rhythms with old records and surface noises of clicks and pops. I think that’s in mid September.

Do you think there’s an untapped surface, I mean there was Gold Panda rap that’s different every time you hear it and people have been working on things where songs go on for however many millions of years, constantly changing. Do you think that there is untapped potential in this world of loops and samples that we’re yet to get to?

That idea really interests me that you could have a continual piece of music that changes. Obviously it’s been done already but it depends on how you do it and who you do it with. It’s something which hasn’t reached its potential yet, I think it’s something which could be really spectacular, I just haven’t quite worked out what it is and I do hope that I work it out first! But I’m sure someone will beat me to it.

I remember something in the original Millennium dome which was fairly terrible but that was supposed to be the idea that you’d go into this room, that wasn’t exactly a cultural zenith.

After it changed to the O2, I saw Bruce Springsteen there. So, swings and roundabouts.

Cool, thanks Aidan.