Welcome to the Free Music Archive (Beta)

After our debut show at SXSW in Austin in 2008 and our joint show with our pals at Aquarius Records from San Francisco last year, we're happy to be returning to Encore (formerly Spiro's) on 611 Red River Street on Friday, March 19th!

The show is open to badge/wristband types, but also to the general public for a mere $7! That's 50 cents a band! We're super-excited about being back and also excited about the bill (which is a pretty unique blend of the poppy, psyched-out, heavy and otherwise that seems catered to both FMU and AQ listener/customer tastes!) The lineup:

We've got a heady mix of the heavy, damaged, darkly, punk, weird, noisy, poppy, trippy sounds, some hometown NY/SF heroes representing in Austin, and even a full on Cambodian psych-pop dance party at night's end. Check out the lineup, and a mix of audio from some of the aritsts who already have some music on the FMA

We're broadcasting live this Friday night 8PM to 3AM ET on WFMU, and we'll feature highlights for download here on the Free Music Archive. In the meantime, check out our 2009 and 2008 SXSW collections, with music from Obits, Gunslingers, XYX, Mayyors, Half Japanese, Homosexuals, and more

An all-timer of avant-garde creation myths is the one, apocryphal though it may be (all the good ones are), that tells of a conversation between Brahms and Mahler held along the Danube’s Vienna banks, wherein the former, decrying the state of contemporary composition, lamented for the lost spirits of Mozart and Beethoven and the long-gone golden age, in response to which der Mahler merely pointed to the river, noted it was impressive, sure, but that its flow ensured new waters for every consequent glance, so that one could never greet the same river twice. The Danube, yea though it may be immortalized time and again in story and song, doesn't even really exist, not as a changeless constant at least. Heraclitus, probably talking about a different river, nonetheless sez it best: "the river is never the same river, nor the man the same man."

Then there are those who get in on the river-flow act in different ways, not content to fight the current or transform with it or get dumped out into the Black Sea of time or, uh, wherever. Nah, some folks might be better thought of as prowling the edges, like a 'Big Ole Bear' of song on the lookout for prey, poaching discrete ideas and forms from the ever-shifting waters of musical tradition like a grizzly poaching those salmon from the river. And like poached salmon, the result is often weird and tasty. One such practitioner of a timeless mixture of musical forms is LITTLE HOWLIN' WOLF, whose presence on the FMA enables you, lucky listener, to get in touch with some of your own time-animal tendencies.

Little Howlin' Wolf's work is somehow simultaneously junkyard cutup from the American Folkways archives, noisy outstrumentation, and wild animal sound that'd be equally at home nowadays as in the days of neolithic river worship. There's lots of essential stuff on that FMA page, including the 2006 set from Brian Turner's show to which you had better just listen--I'll stop blathering, as I can't compete with the essential indescribability of these riverrun fragments--just start prowling 'em yourself.