Well, we're coming to the end of another year once again, and when speaking about Massive Attack in 2014, besides the tour this Summer there hasn't been an awful lot from the band in terms of new music. Sure we had the Battle Box 003 remix in March but since then things have been decidedly quiet, with Massive Attack presumably hard at work on the mooted LP6. So, it comes as a nice surprise that a sizable amount of new music has quite unexpectedly been dumped in our laps at year's end.

Where the source of this music comes form is also something that no one could have predicted. 3D from Massive Attack has taken the rather unconventional tactic of donating roughly an hour's worth of instrumental electronic music (along with the stems for said tracks) to the Game Jam site "Ludum Dare". Ludum Dare, which I forgive I was unaware of until now is a website and community centered around an "Accelerated Game Development" event known as Game Jam.

In their own words "developers from around the world spend a weekend creating games based on a theme suggested by the community. Ludum Dare events take place every April, August and December". The new music 3D provided for this Game Jam event will be used by the developers in the soundtracks to the games that the developers make. The stems will be used to make their own remixed soundtracks for the games.

Ludum Dare have conveniently made the 10 tracks available on Soundcloud to listen to (check the embed below) or alternatively you can download the uncompressed WAV files from Archive.org, which is a 349MB ZIP file. The stems of the tracks (for remixing purposes) have also been made available to download separately as uncompressed WAV files (2.1GB) again from Archive.org. As all of this has been provided by 3D under a "Non-Commercial Creative Copyright" license, so anyone is free to download the stems to make there own tracks or remixes based upon 3D's work.

The 10 tracks themselves are all arbitrarily titled with seemingly random letters except the impenetrably named final track "The Shovel". I also presume that Euan Dickinson probably assisted 3D in the production of these tracks. Euan is the new producer in Massive Attack since Neil Davidge left in 2010.

Not much else I can add on this to this story for now. Give the music a listen and let me know what you think in the comments section down below.


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