Gorillaz and the future of the mobile app electro-music sketchbook

This fall, while Damon Albarn was on a U.S. tour with his animated super group The Gorillaz, he was experimenting with his new iPad and boldly blazing a new trail in music making.

Check out a video from the new record here.

With a dozen or so mobile apps -- from software emulators of the Korg Electribe drum machine to a goofy app that translates line drawings into sound -- Albarn composed 15 songs (or 14 songs and one bizarre yodeling track) that he mastered and released as a free Gorillaz album, The Fall, available on the Gorillaz website. (Albarn lists the apps he used to create the album here, too)

The result -- the first record I've heard of done entirely on a single mobile device --  is an album that is much smaller scale than a regular Gorillaz affair. There's not a revolving cast of special guests -- no De La Soul or Snoop Dog -- though one song features Bobby Womack singing and playing guitar.

There are other minimal contributions from a few guest musicians -- Damon's pals Mick Jones and Paul Simonon (both of the Clash, in case you don't know) add guitar and bass to a couple tracks* -- but The Fall maintains a much more intimate feel. Mostly, it's Albarn's voice and his iPad.

Amazingly -- and it can't be long before this ends up in an Apple commercial (if it hasn't already)  -- The Fall surrenders very little in sound quality to its predecessor, last year's Plastic Beach (an album I found boring but grew to appreciate more over time). Absent is the masterful studio depth Danger Mouse lent to Demon Days, but The Fall does not sound like some sort of old-fashioned, 16-bit synthesized video game theme song. It sounds like a legit record. It sounds dynamite on a good set of speakers.

Taking the iPad/iTunes thing further, The Fall exploits certain advantages of being a truly digital animal. Damon recorded most of the songs in the Western half of the U.S. -- songs carry titles like "Phoner in Arizona," "The Snake in Dallas,""Bobby in Phoenix," "Seattle Yodel" -- and each song file has a specific piece of art attached to it. The result is a musical and visual tour sketchbook in which every song calls up a neat new picture that bears some significance to the song. One of my favorites is the song "Little Pink Plastic Bags." Damon croons "They're just little bit pink plastic bags blowing on the highway...." over a simple electro drum beat and a two-chord synth oscillation. The image is a sun bleached palm tree... It's as if the song were a postmodern Beach Boys number.

As a record in the greater sense, the album succeeds at developing a consistent and coherent feel. It sounds like a melancholy trip across the U.S. It's the kind of laid back record made by a man who might be slightly homesick but comepelled to sketch the expanse through which he's traveling through song. I picture Albarn propped up in hotel room beds and in the back of his tour bus, tapping away at his iPad to program beats and synth loops, his face illuminated by its back-lit screen.

Gorillaz fans might be a bit let down by the record. It doesn't have the heft of the debut album or Demon Days, though Albarn clearly didn't intend The Fall to be a "proper" release. It was released as a free download after all. It's not a party record and there are no obvious singles like "Clint Eastwood" or "Feel Good, Inc."

Personally, besides the geek-cool factor that the whole thing was made on an iPad (but mastered at Abbey Road Studio, so not every kid with an iPad is going to make something that sounds just like it), the nicest thing about the record is the absence of the big Gorillaz guest star circus, an element that lent a silly, big time commercial hip hop feel to Plastic Beach. I've always been a big fan of Albarn and hearing him at the real creative center of this project adds something that I would have liked to see in an even bigger project.

Is The Fall an amazing, life-altering work? No. It is definitely worth hearing, though. It's the kind of record that could be seen some day as a sort of mobile digital watershed, another big footstep in the further mass democratization of the methods of making and recording music. Just as the electric guitar and amplifier launched a million teenaged bands out of American garages, Albarn has demonstrated the power of a mobile platform running a dozen apps, none costing more than $20. The iPad can be a tool to launch a million electronic outfits from a million American couches and bedrooms.

Listening to this, I get the sense that Albarn's onto something. And that in itself is pretty cool.

* Those instrumental performances were captured with Amplitube, a brilliant little app that emulates guitar and bass amplification and a dozen or more different effects pedals. with a $40 iRig jack adapter, you plug your guitar or bass right in and play.