FMA Blog

Plastic Flowers release a brand new 7" digital single off their upcoming debut album. It's called "Fog Song", a mix of dream pop and tape music, which was mostly recorded while Plastic Flowers were on the road in USA for SXSW last March.

Grab it for free and enjoy the lo-fi-ness. Their debut LP will be coming out right after summer.

Plastic Flowers at: Facebook | Soundcloud

Stealing Orchestra have been amazingly generous contributors to the free music world for a decade. The orchestra has provided a prolific free netlabel (also at Free Music Archive) featuring their work and the works of fellow Portuguese bands.

In 2011, Stealing Orchestra released their concept album DELIVERANCE, containing nine new tracks and celebrating the 10th anniversary of the band's netlabel You Are Not Stealing Records and 13 years of making albums together. [press release]

Now Stealing Orchestra is celebrating their 15th birthday and are giving digital versions of all of their albums as gifts to the world, including DELIVERANCE.

Happy birthday, Stealing Orchestra, and thank you so much!

A new lawsuit being filed today aims to have "Happy Birthday From You" given its rightful place in the public domain. As Eriq Gardner writes for the Hollywood Reporter, the film company Good Morning to You Productions Corp. is working on a documentary about the birthday song, and has filed a suit on behalf of all those who have paid for the rights to use it.

As we follow the case closely, you can always check out our Free Birthday Song Repository of over 140 free birthday songs that are licensed Creative Commons Attribution, and watch a video we produced of birthday song alternatives used in Film and Television. 

The newly released Artifacts/yclept 2-disc compilation Necroscopix (1970-1981) is a simple documentary survey of a very particular time and place; a sliver of a local culture — made in imitation of, or perhaps as a salute to the work of musicologist, Dick Spottswood, one of our heroes. The best stories can’t be told in this amount of space, but here’s an outline.

“...in Richmond, or in any Southern city for that matter, you do see types now and then which depart from the norm. The South is full of eccentric characters; it still fosters individuality. And the most individualistic are of course from the land, from the out of the way places.” 

 — Henry Miller,
“The Air-Conditioned Nightmare” (1945)

The oddest of us were, to be sure, not from the Big City, but while many here came from places like Boones Mill, Roanoke, Martinsville, Clarksville and Culpeper in Virginia, and Winston-Salem and Greensboro in North Carolina, nearly half came from the D.C. suburbs, all converging on the urban scene around the art school at Virginia Commonwealth University in the late 1960’s.

And, if the South is indeed full of “eccentric characters,” what is art school, if not a universally potent magnet for creative misfits? There isn’t a person on these two discs who ever intended to be what the Japanese call a “salary man,” and though most succeeded in that intention, some inevitably succumbed, while more than a few died resisting in their own way (see the list, please) — and others just disappeared.

Richmond is less than 100 miles from Our Nation’s Capital, which in pre-digital days was still worlds away from the major centers of the Counter Culture on the West Coast and in NYC, and that remove forced us to interpret and synthesize a take on the zeitgeist that was uniquely our own.

Cricket and bird songs, ice clinking in glasses, block parties, kids in the sprinkler, ice cream truck jingles, wind against paper kites, "cloop" sounds in the creek, bicycle chains, and all those other musical sounds of summer have their places in our hearts. There is still space for new sounds of summer days, and the Free Music Archive is here for your summer soundtrack. Here's one I put together for a summer evening party featuring 18 tracks across the spectrum of genres. Let's hear yours!

Sometimes the sound you're looking for is a sound that sustains. Music for sitting right where you are, but going somewhere, slowly.

This Music for Video mix highlights many shades of drone and ambient electronic music from across the Free Music Archive, including some that can set a relaxing and joyful tone, and others that can be a tool for your most tense and chaotic scenes. The best drone delivers, creating a tonality upon which the rest of the piece is built, often creating a meditative space, taking on the feeling of a sculpture, and evoking intense feelings.

PATCH is a series of curated playlists selected from the Radius episode archive. Each playlist is organized around a specific topic or theme that engages the tonal and public spaces of the electromagnetic spectrum. PATCH serves as a platform to illuminate the questions, concerns, and complexities of and within radio-based art practices.

PATCH 01: Failure

Episode 04: Art of Failure

8 Silences, part of Art of Failure’s Laps Series, offers a sensible representation of the Internet by broadcasting audio streams that travel and reverberate trough the web. In the style of encephalography, this empirical sound process gives substance to an unstable and intangible digital space. Initially silent, the streams progressively incorporate an infinity of transformations or “errors” that modify the sound as it circulates the network. These alterations are comparable to a form of erosion caused by the network space - they are a key to allow different mental representations of this digital topography. Presented as a live performance, 8 Silences is a sound immersion in the heart of data flows.

Tashi Dorji conjures incredible sounds from a prepared acoustic guitar. His spirited improvisations—recorded live without any loops or effects—evoke a composite of influences from Derek Bailey to Mauritanian pulaar to the traditional music of his native Bhutan.

"Growing up in Bhutan with little access to music except random bootlegged cassettes and shortwave radio, I listened to anything i could find," Tashi Dorji writes in an email interview. He learned guitar by ear because "we didn't have music school, TV or internet back then in Bhutan, so we had to use a lot of imagination and improvise what we thought we heard off of a tape player."

Tashi Dorji arrived in Asheville, North Carolina as an international student in 2000. He quickly fell in with the vibrant punk rock community, which flowed into free jazz, noise, experimental and other avant garde music. The Appalachian mountain town has become a real hub for experimental music thanks to longstanding acts like Ahleuchatistas, resources like Asheville FM, the shop Harvest Records, tape distributor Tomentosa, and labels like Bathetic and Headway Recordings.

Guitar Improvisations, released on cassette by Headway last year, sold out quickly but is available to download from the FMA along with his release sêp. This week, the label unveiled Tashi Dorji's self-titled follow-up, and it's streaming after the jump. Tashi Dorji also has a forthcoming release on Turned Word Records out of Belfast ME, and much more on his bandcamp.

Bhutanese traditional music is an oral tradition consisting of many marginal, isolated communities across the country, and much has yet to be documented. But for those interested in hearing some examples, Tashi Dorji points us towards a nascent archive hosted by the Bhutan Broadcasting Service.

Classwar Karaoke is an online label primarily based around an ongoing series of quarterly surveys - in effect, largescale compilations - published online mainly through the Free Music Archive, on each of the last days of February, May, August and November. It hosts material culled from the experimental scene, including electro-acoustic, improv, free jazz, acusmatic, soundart, field recordings, cut-up, avant-rock, noise, ambient and sound poetry.

Classwar Karaoke was founded by Anthony Donovan in March 2008; with the first survey appearing a few months later. The label only truly came into it's own, however, when Jaan Patterson joined as co-curator later the same year. Concerted efforts to expand and professionalise the label ensued. At the same time, Patterson founded suRRism-Phonoethics, as a platform for full-scale releases. Many crossovers in personnel and outlook were evident between these projects, and, after a two year hiatus, upon his return, Patterson invited Donovan to similarly co-curate at suRRism-Phonoethics. Between them, and via these two projects, Donovan and Patterson have, by now, released hundreds of pieces of music and short-films, attracting many tens-of-thousands of hits.  

Included in the Classwar Karaoke and suRRism-Phonoethics roll-calls are internationally-recognised artits such as Bob Ostertag, Fred Frith, Rhys Chatham, Bryan Lewis Saunders, Leif Elggren, Lol Coxhill, Peter Brotzmann, Evan Parker, Geoff Leigh, Otomo Yoshihide, Terry Bozzio, Nate Young, Michael Giles, Keith Tippett, Jaap Blonk, Jochen Arbeit, Steve Beresford, Leafcutter John, Ludo Mich, Gino Robair and Zoviet*France, as well as an impressive array of lesser-known but equally innovative artists. Live gigs, mini-festivals and specialist multi-media releases have also featured, and physical releases, of limited edition CDRs and audio-tapes, are planned for the future.

Coffee milk is the official state drink of Rhode Island. If you haven't tried it, it's basically chocolate milk's more wired cousin, but just as rich, cool and sweet.

Rhode Island's AS220 will also give you creative jolt. They're a non-profit community arts center in downtown Providence. For Spring, they've compiled a seasonal sampler, showcasing musicians from who have played at their space, including the likes of Javelin, Feels, What Cheer? Brigade, The Kolour Kult, Math The Band, Howse & Mincemeat or Tenspeed. Pour yourself a tall glass here.