Adrian Belew launches a Kickstarter for his app called FLUX

Adrian Belew launches a Kickstarter for his app called FLUX

We've talked a lot at Adland about how the advancement of technology has unfortunately eroded some of our ethical standards, especially when it comes to music. And yet for every musician rightly shaking their fist at what streaming, webcasting and big tech companies have done to their livelihood, a few are attempting to circumvent the issues.
And then there's Adrian Belew.
You may not know who Adrian Belew is, but you know his music. One of the greatest guitar players in the world, the dude has played on albums from artists like Nine Inch Nails, David Bowie, Talking Heads, The Tom Tom Club, Frank Zappa, one of my all time favorites, King Crimson. Not to mention a slew of excellent solo albums. And that's only a tiny portion of his resume.
Now Belew has taken his experimental or "progressive" music to a whole new level, with an upcoming, ever-evolving music app called FLUX. In addition to Belew, FLUX was created by sound engineer Daniel Rowland, and Nick Meuller, the ECD of MOBGEN in Amsterdam. On the surface, FLUX is a music app, featuring Belew's music as well as other sounds and visual art, back stories about the songs, lyrics and more. In reality though, it is so much more than that. And tailor made for the digital age. FLUX is hyper, ever-changing and never the same thing twice. It's as if Belew spent time on Tweetdeck, looking at his feed, while simultaneously browsing a few dozen other windows and watching his TV and thought to himself "there's music in this." Belew has essentially turned the way we process content into an oeuvre in and of itself. Oh, did I mention Belew plans to keep adding content to it? New music? Ever changing? Ever expanding?
Here's a description from their Kickstarter page. (More on that in a second.)


FLUX is an ever-changing variety of music, songs, sounds, and visual art, that comes at you in quick, surprising pieces--the way life does. You get exposed to a lot of interesting content quickly. And every listen is a new, unique experience, that will never happen again for you or anyone else. While songs do repeat over time, the song forms themselves are short and varied. Songs even appear in multiple versions, with different lyrics and instrumentation. Sometimes a longer song will play in its entirety, but most often you'll only hear a portion of it, which may be interrupted by something else: a startling sound effect or a common everyday noise. There are hundreds of these songs, pieces of music, and sonic "snippets", along with engaging visuals randomly changing with the music. A content management system has been built that let's us assign probabilities to tracks, determining how and when they appear. This insures that FLUX never plays the same way twice.

Great! You’ve successfully signed up.

Welcome back! You've successfully signed in.

You've successfully subscribed to AdLand.

Success! Check your email for magic link to sign-in.

Success! Your billing info has been updated.

Your billing was not updated.