It’s always exciting when one of your favourite artists are about to drop a brand new record, and it’s even more exciting when they release a stream of the album before the release date, which is exactly what one musician has done – but with one little catch.
Josh Tillman, recognised under the performing moniker Father John Misty, is gearing up for the release of his highly anticipated sophomore record I Love You, Honeybear, and being the gracious dude he is, has provided fans with the opportunity to listen to the album online before it hits shelves, however it’s in complete MIDI-format, as Pitchfork point out.
To access the lower-quality version of I Love You, Honeybear, one must visit Father John Misty’s new streaming website, “Streamline Audio Protocol” aka SAP, which is a joke website that he claims he’s been “developing” for some time now.
Josh Tillman writes on the hilarious website, “I am pleased to introduce SAP, a new signal-to-audio process by which popular albums are “sapped” of their performances, original vocal, atmosphere and other distracting affectations so the consumer can decide quickly and efficiently whether they like a musical composition, based strictly on its formal attributes, enough to spend money on it.”
Hilariously, he continues, “SAP files sound incredible when compressed and streamed at low resolutions over any laptop speaker or cell phone. They are cheap to produce and take up even less space than the average MP3. They contain just enough meta-data to be recognized by sophisticated genre aggregation software. Everything you love about discovering and sharing free music, minus the cost to anyone: artist or fan.”
Obviously designed as a hit-out against musician’s favourite musical platform of streaming services, SAP has been created as a piss-take on existing websites that stream musician’s albums, as well as a clever way to promote the forthcoming I Love You, Honeybear.
Despite the comical nature of the “sapped” quality tunes that chime like a mobile phone’s polyphonic ringtone, the 11-tracks of I Love You, Honeybear still sound surprisingly good and this listener is inspired to purchase Father John Misty’s record to hear the full sound.
Kudos to you, Father John Misty.
You can hear the full MIDI record right here.
