When I purchased my iPhone 3Gs, I didn't know I would have had to deal with a device which is capable to make such high level music. The versatility of this phone is astonishing and the touch screen gives you an unimaginable agility and freedom to move.

Sometimes during job's brakes and at home – I used to plug the iPhone to my computer with a minijack cable, opened cubase and started improvising, choosing the apps step by step, according to what came out from the improvisations. That's how Mobile Landscapes has born: just for fun. I had never expected such a result.
The sounds are often dirty, they include interferences and little clicks, but I decided to keep them because they are part of the "live" recording: this is – infact – a live played electronic music album, made by improvised sessions in front of the computer. The only things left to the case are the computer-generated moods by Trope, Bloom, Aura and Aura Flux apps, everything else has been played using live-created loops and recorded with the minijack.

After having produced the very first material, I asked myself if adding some real instruments, the idea was to add cello and woodwinds, but then I decided to realize an album which was completely made with touch instruments, even if I had to use sampled strings and keyboards, so I could understand how much I could explore in therms of expression. I was impressed by the capabilities of apps like ThumbJam and Bebot Synth, which offer a unique experience mostly thanks to how they use the accelerometer and the bidimensionality of the screen.

The other two interesting things about this instrument are its simplicity (you can adapt it to the song simply preparing it with determined scales or notes, octaves virtual-keys distance and sometimes by quantizing notes) and its predisposition to a bi and tridimentionality of music, thanks to which the movement of the device in the space lets you generate sounds, change moods, handle expression.

From a conceptual point of view Mobile Landscapes has been formed as a concept album about travel. Different landscapes are explored, as you were sailing an hyperspace which leads you from the city to the country and than up in the space just to come back in a wood. It's an endless travel, made of relaxing moments and psychedelic loops in order to hypnotize and free imagination.

Alessandro Bider Milan, Italy, July 2011