[AVA] AVA Venture into 'LOVE'

On a rainy Tuesday evening in Angels & Airwaves' suburban Carlsbad
recording studio, singer Tom DeLonge pondered ice cubes. Specifically,
the ice cubes made famous by the Japanese writer-mystic Masaru Emoto,
who claimed that projecting positive vibes into water could make it
freeze into more beautiful crystals.

"This guy taped pieces of paper with words like 'Love' and 'Hate' to
cups of water and froze them. When he looked at them under a microscope,
the ones with 'Hate' looked chaotic, but words like 'Love' made them
perfectly symmetrical," DeLonge said. "So we thought, what if we could
use our album to do that to people, who are made up of mostly water?"

Hence the epic, electronica-infused emo band's new album, "LOVE." Angels
& Airwaves released it independently as a free download on Sunday,
the latest in a string of multiplatinum rock bands -- including
Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails -- to use new, free albums to build their
brand and fans' loyalty, instead of seeing them as profit-makers.

The album is just one facet of a larger business experiment for the
band, which hopes to seamlessly incorporate pervasive social media and
corporate sponsorships in ways that might make Naomi Klein shudder. But
their approach could be a new avenue for self-sufficiency amid rock
music's commercial swan dive.

As appropriate for a band obsessed with science fiction, it's all about
trusting the Force. In this case, it's the force of branding coupled
with the allure of free content.

"We created this whole world around the band as a deep and philosophical
adventure and immersed ourselves in it," DeLonge said. "We personally
went $500,000 in the hole on this album. But I believe music should be
free. If I have to, I'll go sell blood and sperm to make that happen."

As the longtime singer and guitarist of recently reunited '90s pop-punk
titans Blink-182, DeLonge probably won't have to hock his plasma any
time soon. But it's clear that Angels & Airwaves, founded after
Blink's breakup in 2005 in part as a healthful escape from DeLonge's
drug and personal problems at the time, holds his interest in different
ways than his easygoing, frequently naked punk act.

"LOVE" is clearly a labor of such, where the planetarium-sized
synthesizers of M83 bolster chiming arena-rock in the spirit of U2. The
band members, including guitarist David Kennedy, bassist Matt Wachter
and drummer Adam Willard, wear jackets emblazoned with the band's logo
while working in the studio. Lyrics like "Do you believe in
hallucinations? Silly dreams and imagination?" purposefully invite the
group's young audience to join Angels & Airwaves in their stylized
fantasy land.

But a walk around the band's vast recording complex -- which also houses
the offices of DeLonge's skate-shoe company Macbeth, and ModLife, a new
social-media interface he co-founded -- suggests Angels' earnest music
is balanced by a cool-eyed capitalist instinct. Once hooked, fans can
invest in the band's output at a variety of price points -- from the
free download of the album to pay-per-view concert streams to copies of
their forthcoming feature-length film, a kind of "Event
Horizon"-meets-"Avatar" CGI epic also called "LOVE."

"I'm a businessman and I want this to be as big as it can be," DeLonge
said. "I felt we could do the business end of this better ourselves with
new partnerships. We could strike a deal with Ford where they put a
copy of the record in every new car and they use one of our songs in an
ad. We can do anything we want, and I have no problem approaching this
band as a venture capitalist."

"Does a musician end up looking like a NASCAR driver at the end of all
this?" DeLonge asked. "It's up to them. I have no problem with
corporations -- I own two of them. It's about letting the musician
choose what's best."