Free Music Archive Blog

Da! Heard it yet?

2010-02-09T12:32:26-05:00

With all our Blip Festival uploads, we nearly missed noticing the arrival of Da! Heard it Records to the FMA. Having already been around for a few years, focusing on "Toyz-Pop, Electro Trash, Chiptune, Breakcore and Electro Punk among others, with a heavy leaning towards 8-bit music and pixel/net art."

Artists include the aforementioned Computer Truck, Goto80, Eat Rabbit, and Tom Woxom, but one of my personal favorites on the label have to be elechiptro-punks Ben Et Béné. The french duo, active since 2003, has many free releases scattered throughout the net (check out this rad remix of document1 by Lo-bat).

As far as their FMA release goes, check out Brest, from their Trip to Trip ep, and see you guys next week!

Ears Wide Open: Computer Truck

2010-02-09T22:30:49-05:00

So are you down with some electro party music from France? In my search for some on FMA I chanced upon these great tracks from Computer Truck (Julien Daigremont) which perfectly fit the bill.

Rock the Boulevard, Reach the Bourgeois is Computer Truck's first full length which was released in 2006 by Da! Heard It Records and offered up here on the good old FMA. This is a great release full of sweet lo-fi electro rave-ups with a touch of noise here and there. Check out "Complimenti" and enjoy.

Anticipate Recordings @ Unsound Festival: Ezekiel Honig & Sawako

2010-02-08T19:00:18-05:00

Anticipate Recordings is putting on a showcase tonight at Littlefield in Brooklyn. There will be live music from Ezekiel Honig, Sawako, Alexander Kaline, a DJ set by Borne, and visuals by Joshue Ott (details).

The Anticipate night is part of the NY incarnation of Poland's esteemed Unsound Festival, which is hitting venues throughout the city with an exciting set of music, art, and workshops until Feb 14 (check out ISSUE Project Room's write-up for more).

Anticipate was founded in 2007 by Ezekiel Honig, a NY-based electronic musician and sound designer. A few months ago, Pushbinlou featured Ezekiel Honig's It's Getting Cold Outside EP, released on Philadelphia's Unfound Sound netlabel in 2005 (not to be confused with Unsound Festival!). Here's a track form that EP

Anticipate is primarily a label dealing in physical objects -- some limited to as few as 50 copies, others distributed far and wide through Kompakt. In 2007, they released a free Creative Commons set of field recordings Japanese-born sound sculptor Sawako, recorded while on tour around the world. It was released under a Creative Commons Attribution license, encouraging the world to remix. The first volume of remixes featured members of the extended Anticipate family, including tracks from Sawako herself, Ezekiel Honig, and this one from Portland-based artist Strategy (Community Pool tapes, Kranky), while the second volume (cover art pictured above-left) featured a set of highlights from the CC-powered open call for submissions.

Last year, Sawako stopped by WFMU for a live performance on Bethany's Stochastic Hit Parade, which was featured by PushbinLou here.

unsound of mind

2010-02-08T08:44:50-05:00

Unsound Festival New York kicked off last Thursday evening (2/4) – marking the first incarnation of the innovative performance and lecture series outside its homeland of Poland. Founded in Kraków in 2003 by curator Mat Schulz, Unsound Festival explores the intersections between “electronic, experimental, independent, post-classical, and club music scenes.” After only four days time, the festival is already crowded with stunning highlights. I caught the opening night show at Lincoln Center featuring a terrific set from Finnish DJ/composer/drummer Vladislav Delay (whose Tummaa album was probably my fav release of 09) in collaboration with German video artist Lillevan. Still recovering (in a variety of ways) from a startlingly fresh sequence of programming at Le Poisson Rouge last night: performances of classical music touchstones Pictures at an Exhibition (Moussorgsky) and Bolero (Ravel) were followed by an absolutely resplendent, mind-blowing set of abstract electronic improvisations from the North American debut of the Moritz Von Oswald Trio, featuring surprise guests Francois K (!) and Carl Craig (!!). Levon Vincent closed the event with a blistering DJ set that carried on until the very early morning hours (I’m lame and only made it until about 3:30am…)

ISSUE Project Room will host two events in the festival this week. The “Electronic Bridge” program on Tuesday night (2/9) serves as the first in a thread of thematic shows under the Eastern Promise banner, seeking to highlight a number of important Eastern European artists generally underexposed in the U.S. The “Electronic Bridge” will feature a diverse array of experimental electronic music from Zavoloka (Ukraine) and Zenial (Poland), as well as a set from NY local Bora Yoon in collaboration with composer R. Luke DuBois on the live video tip. To whet appetites for what should be a fantastic show, I’ve compiled a dope little mix featuring works from the artists on the program.

Check here and here for more info on the two shows at ISSUE, and here for a full schedule of the rest of the festival.

the kids are alright (no, really they are...)

2010-02-08T12:45:36-05:00

At 36 years of age, I find myself growing more restless by the day. There are times that I feel twice my age, destined to become the ranting old coot that throws stuff from his front porch at passersby just because I can. I resent the fact that my waking hours are spent at a place doing duties I could care less about and then having to steal back time and fight off sleep to do what I'm passionate about. I resent a lot of sh*t, actually.

With that being said, it's nice to look upon the youth and see boundless potential, to know that there are heads coming up behind me that are light years ahead in possibilities. Consider the young lord out of Hollywood, Florida named Black Ant, beatmaker in training. Judging from his Free Beats Sel. 3 collection, he is well on his way to being a pad-punching, knob-twiddling Jedi. Joints like the horn-drenched "government funded weed" and the head nod-inducing "Underdog" make me smile, plus they have me excited about what this hip-hop wunderkind will be creating in the next five years.

Sit back, relax, and take a minute and change to achieve bliss with the spaced-out selection "Oh K." And once it's over, remind yourself that the brother's still in high school...

4 Moving Voices of the North

2010-02-08T12:40:24-05:00

Listen to the voices of these four male artists.

Timber Timbre is a Canadian folk rock band whose sole core member is Taylor Kirk. Taylor has released three albums. His sound has been described as "an aesthetic rooted in swampy, ragged blues" and beautifully restrained blues from an alternative universe". His stage name plays on the sound of his beat-up guitar (timbre)) and the noise his father would yell (timber) when trees fell on his farm.

Patrick Watson is a musical mad scientist. In 2007 his album, Close to Paradise, won the prestigious Polaris Prize. He's a singer, composer, songwriter and producer, he can do it all.

Bahamas is Afie Jurvanen. Singing love songs Bahamas is known to 'melt the rocks in your glass'. Bahamas solo project, Pink Strat, was released in 2009. Previously Afie played with PasoMino, Great Lake Swimmers, The Stils, Amy Millan, Jason Collett, Hayden and many many more.

There's a buzz around Calgary Alberta's Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir. The band was thrown together on a week's notice for a gig. Their 2003 debut recording, Saint Hubert, cracked numberous campus radio top 20 play lists. Singer Judd came up with the band's name as he was walking in the mountains. But they are not from the mountains, neither are they a choir and they do not preach gospel. Their music is inspired from the sounds of the Mississippi Delta and Appalachian mountains. Judd's wonderfully chewy vocals are something to awe at.

Smersh: NJ's Prolific Legends of the Cassette Underground

2010-02-05T11:41:14-05:00

When Mike Mangino and Chris Shepard started writing music together in the late 1970s, their goal was not to develop a repertoire and play gigs, or even to perform live in front of any audience. Everything they needed was right there in Piscataway NJ: a basement full of musical toys and instruments, novelty space microphones, a TR-606 (the same "Roland" who was listed as a member of Big Black), a SH-09 (Cabaret Voltaire's favorite synth), and -- perhaps most importantly -- a tape recorder. Every Monday night, they'd write a new song from scratch. A couple hours later, the song was recorded, never to be performed again.

By 1981, this dedication to spontanious creativity had already produced countless recordings, and the duo began releasing cassettes as Smersh via their own Atlas King label. A definitive Smersh discography may not even be possible, but this one lists more than 30 Atlas King cassettes. As these tapes traded their way across continents, Smersh developed a devoted following in places far beyond Piscataway, leading to releases on dozens of other labels from across the globe. A 15 song sampler featuring some of the many highlights from Smersh's vast discography, spanning 1983-1993, is now available here at the Free Music Archive.

My obsession with Smersh began relatively recently, when I first heard the song "Sweet Little Bishop" in the WFMU library, off a 7'' released by Sweden's Börft label in 1991 (listen). Then it got stuck in my head for several days straight. My subconscious couldn't remember what it was at first, mixed it up with some bizarre Prince song. But then i remembered that mysterious Smersh 7'' -- the one that stood out amongst the other Börft stuff in the library (Swedish artists like Frak and Enhänta Bödlar, who are also uncategorizable and each worthy of their own post!). I set about tracking down as much info as possible find about Smersh...

Ten Tracks to Sync - Vol 1. (mp3) (video)

2010-02-05T14:56:59-05:00

One of the biggest problems facing filmmakers and online video producers is the high cost of licensing copyrighted music to sync in their work. Many a YouTube account has been shut down for using copyrighted music without permission, and the process of securing permission can be a major barrier for non-commercial/non-profit producers.

The FMA provides a much-needed resource for interesting, soundtrack-worthy, Creative Commons-licencesed music.

This post is the first in a series hightlighting (mostly) instrumental tracks culled from the FMA that would make for great video soundtracks. All the tracks in this series have licences that allow for derivitive works.

If you make a video that uses a track from the FMA, link back to the site and let us know! We'll be featuring videos that we like on the frontpage of the FMA, and we'll keep digging for interesting music to set your movies to.

(*Be sure to hit "i" to check the song's license type before you use it in your video. And it's important to note that not all of the content in the FMA is licensed for derivitive works. If you're not sure, check the description of the different CC license types at http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/.)

Here's a video collection of Street Art Photos taken in Nagano City, Japan by Jim Atwood Photography, featuring Creative Commons music by Sunbyrn, the song "If I Wait"

Street Art Japan from Jim Atwood on Vimeo.

Faust live at WFMU Fest (mp3's)

2010-02-04T11:41:09-05:00

(Poster left Henry Owings, photo right Greg Cristman) We were honored to have Teutonic titans Faust headline the first night of WFMU Fest (which ran October 1-3 at the Music Hall of Williamsburg and also included the likes of TV Ghost, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Talk Normal, VeeDee, Pissed Jeans, Drunkdriver, Sightings, Aluk Todolo, Cold Cave, and the Guinea Worms); it's a rare occassion for these living legends to hit American shores. They without doubt had a healthy hand in shaping modern experimental, industrial, electronic and even pop music; in Julian Cope's words, "there is no group more mythical."

For those who were hesitant to see what a nearly 40 year old band held near and dear to their hearts could be up to, doubts were instantly dispelled as the crowd was treated to a heavy dose of Faust IV-heavy classics and crazed improvisations that seized the moment (coupled with live painting and cement mixer action). A few weeks back Faust OK'd a broadcast of the set, and I had an opportunity to chat at length with Jean-Herve Peron and his dog (streaming archive from my January 19th show is here, and you can go right to the interview segment here), and now we're happy to say you can grab the entire October 1st WFMU Fest show on MP3! Severe thanks to Regina Greene, Jean-Herve, and Scott Williams for the fantastic mix. By the way, a few other of that weekend's artists (namely Talk Normal and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks) have all posted some Mp3s from WFMU Fest on the Free Music Archive. Enjoy!

Euro Gurgle Pop

2010-02-04T10:33:07-05:00

I've been enjoying a number of artists from the Swiss Creative Commons label Das Andere Selbst lately: mellow, chirpy, gurgly, experimental pop with an oddball edge. My faves include Exteenager (Elia, who runs the DAS label/site), GB (pka Gateau Blasters, coming to the U.S. this Spring), and Mela Zeta (from Italy).

Related to the DAS label is Wildrfid, who put out some great limited-edition 12" records last year by GB, Uiutna, and Cancelled. Also affiliated is Zonoff, a site with plenty of Creative Commons MP3s and vids for the taking.

Check out the great track "Golosinas" by Mela Zeta below. The intro almost sounds like the opening notes to "These Boots Are Made For Walking."

Neko Case, Canadian Cyclone

2010-02-03T10:38:32-05:00

OK, first things first: She's not really Canadian.

She was born in Virginia and grew up in Tacoma. But she went to school in Vancouver, and that's where she got involved with Canadian cuddlecore band Cub (remember Betti-Cola?), and started making her own music. Not long afterwards, she hooked up with those New Pornographers dudes, and before you know it, indie superstardom.

But Canadians love her. CBC Radio calls her an "honourary Canadian," and that's where the track below is from, courtesy of new Free Music Archive curators CBC Radio 3.

But here's something I didn't know that I just found out: Her latest album actually debuted at #3 on Billboard's Hot 100 when it came out last March. So I guess Americans love her a lot, too.

I'd Like to Introduce Our Machines to You, but I Forgot Their Names

2010-02-03T01:25:55-05:00

Few musical outfits navigate the borderlands of spacetime as nimbly as EXCEPTER does; fewer still are those whose means of producing music (electronic improvisation--that heady universe of conceptual exercise) comment so groovily on that music's end. It's real simple: Excepter uses their futurist setup--the vast majority of which comprises synthesized sound, artificial-like--to get at something real primal, real natural. All well and good--shouldn't all music work on a primal level?--except these folks take it a little further: their synthwash grooves propel the listener, y-yes indeed, to realms animalistic, realms kind of, w-well, savage.

We all know and can recite by heart, for example, their simple ode from 2008's Debt Dept. entitled, even more simply, "Kill People" (there's a video too). We can thrill to fistpump remixtrax from industry juggernauts Carter Tutti and J.G. Thirlwell. We can access their backcatalog of tropical coverart and free podcast archives. Obviously these guys are no slouches on the tech end of things, and yet despite or perhaps by dint of this obstinate propensity for mechanized means, the group's rawness sticks out, wild and unadulterated--enhanced, in fact--by all the electronic spookiness. An Excepter show (for instance) means being confronted not with a clean, standardized exercise of technological prowess, but a rabid and insatiable one; a shaggy, wild-eyed (and wild-hatted) critter, all the more dangerous for those thunderous beats and synthattacks it seems so prone to pounding and howling into unholy existence. Unlike any other electroacoustic progenitors I can think of, Excepter takes hold of that staid improvised form, wrestling it from its button-down gallery atmosphere and installation hoitytoitiness, and it makes the thing scary.

Hours of this stuff is available on the band's FMA page, as well as via their own internet presence (go to their website, click around). They've a new album a scant two weeks away from release, and in a universe wherein noise-improv-ers stubbornly barrage the market with release after release after drab release, theirs is a prolificacy you can trust. So go for it, mirror Excepter's brave savagery-through-tech model, and take a computer ride into the wilderness.

Lighter than Air

2010-02-02T10:00:33-05:00

Balún are quite different from many of the artists in the chip music scene, even the exceptional ones picked by myself (humility). They are a mixed gender four piece from San Juan, Puerto Rico who "build electro-acoustic melodies for imaginary films". The chip console sounds is just one detail in their complex arrangements that include acoustic instruments, vocals, electronics, and a wonderful sense of space and ambiance that is often missing from the more traditional chip musician's work.

Uploaded for your perusal is an earlier free EP from Observatory Online, that only hints at their tiny wall of sound that is expanded upon in the just released Memoria Textil, out today on their Bandcamp page as a pay what you want download.

We are still working on Blip Festival uploads, so more on that next week, in the meantime enjoy the title track from 'While Sleeping".

See you in seven!

The Necks (a two-night engagement)

2010-02-01T21:42:13-05:00

It’s not so much hearing things happen. It’s more like noticing that things have changed, and now it’s time to re-assess your surroundings. It’s not so much listening for individual motivic and textural changes. It’s more like looking at time-lapse photography. It’s not so much seeing it all happen sped up. It’s more like looking at each image for a full minute or two. It’s not so much like noticing the movement of forms in the photo. It’s more like noticing the movement of color and shadows, whether random or patterned.

As a direct consequence of stretching one moment into such a duration, the slightest changes become tectonic shifts.

The Necks’ music comes in pockets, in revolutions per second that sometimes are very slow, and other times are very fast. Still other times, slow moments are superimposed on percussion patterns approaching twenty Hertz, the lower range of audible frequency. Phantom sounds come from Chris Abrahams’ piano strings, or maybe from Lloyd Swanton’s bass bowing in the upper registers. They could also be coming from how Tony Buck drags a cymbal across another cymbal.

CBC Radio 3 on the Free Music Archive

2010-02-01T11:38:41-05:00

Please welcome CBC Radio 3 to the Free Music Archive!

CBC Radio 3 is a service of the Canadian Broadcast Corporation with a focus on emerging Canadian music. Alongside their pioneering efforts in webcasting, podcasting, and satellite broadcasting, CBC Radio 3's website offers a free on-demand library of streaming music from over 20,000 Canadian artists. With a unique curatorial focus, CBC Radio 3 is expanding the definition of radio, so we're proud to welcome them to the Free Music Archive!

CBC Radio 3 kicks things off with live tracks from Caribou, Destroyer, Arcade Fire, New Pornographers, Feist, K'naan, Neko Case, Islands, Thunderheist, Do Make Say Think, The Sadies, Sloan, and many more. Check out their "Additive Free Canadian Blend" mix after the jump, and dig in to CBC Radio 3's FMA portal.

January 2010 Free Music re-cap

2010-02-01T10:56:54-05:00

What the what, it's already February?? Before we dive in to the shortest month of the year, let's take a look and listen back at some of our FMA editorial crew's recommended listening from January 2010...

click the image to read the full blog post!
...or, take a trip back in time thru all the featured posts

	Liz B's Creative Commons Instrumental Throw Down (mix)!!!		Macedonia features Phantogram live at KEXP
	Matthew Walker features Noveller live at ISSUE Project Room		Aaron Siegel's Counterpoint of Daydreams
	Live music from the Blip Festival! 11 artists so far, including...		Former Blip Festival performer and onebitmusic pioneer Tristan Perich
	Katya-Oddio features Argentinian Jazz group Gepel		Dublab interviews electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick
	Copyright Criminals airs on CBS / causes controversy		Peppermill's 30 Days project, and a new project, prompt Fair Use debate
	KBOO's best of 2009 mix, featuring Thavius Beck live at Holocene & more...		Creative Commons presents Catching the Waves' Mix, featuring...
	Teenage Jesus & The Jerks live at WFMU Fest Oct 2009, plus LizB's mix dedicated to Lydia Lunch		JoeMc spotlights a 1914 song that helped the saxophone rise to prominence in American jazz music
	Brian Turner spotlights Radon Ensemble (Steve MacKay, Sikhara & more)		spotlight on Haitian Rara music featuring Djarara, live at Barbés
	pushbinlou features UpitUp artist Pierlo		Golden Hits feat. dntl, frosty, and more dublab drone dreamers

Kicking Things Off with Tracks from Feist, Destroyer and More

2010-02-05T17:12:40-05:00

Greeting fellow music enthusiasts; we are CBC Radio 3, a unit of the Canadian Broadcast Corporation dedicated to finding the very best in emerging Canadian music.

We are very happy to have been asked to become involved with the Free Music Archive, and look forward to sharing music from artists we think everybody should be listening to.

We've dug into our archives to bring you some of the incredible performances and sessions we've recorded over the years. We present Canada's busiest and best independent artists, recorded live off the floor with all of the excitement, spontaneity and energy that you hear at a concert event. So expect to hear everything from punk to singer songwriter to electronic, and everything in between.

To kick things off we've uploaded dozens of tracks from A.C. Newman, Caribou, Plants and Animals, Amy Millan, Destroyer, Feist, K'naan, Neko Case, Islands, Thunderheist, Sloan, and many more. Please enjoy responsibly, and tell us who from the Great Not-So-White North you're listening to these days.

Tony Conrad's Microscope

2010-01-30T12:07:30-05:00

More from Tony's brain today: this one comes from the MIVOS Quartet's June 2009 performance at ISSUE that also featured Luke DuBois's string quartet "Hard Data." Tony Conrad's "Minor" takes a 31-pitch-to-the-octave scale (a step up from the usual twelve), and fairly common harmonies become unfamiliar.

The first chord sounds, then the second, in an angular harmonic move like something from late Wagner, and back to the first chord again. Or, wait, it sounds like a new chord now--the microtonal inflections giving each chord a different vector and acceleration, like looking at the same object at dusk instead of dawn.

The contentious history of the "minor" scale might have something to do with this. Harry Partch, whose influence trickled down through La Monte Young (and many, many others), used an "undertone" scale as well as an "overtone" scale. In this tuning, the composer would (essentially) multiply the base pitch by whole numbers for a major scale, and divide the base pitch for the minor scale. Young, on the other hand, just used the upper-reaches of the major scale (the multiples 6, 7, and 9) to form the minor triad: there were many more different conceptions of "minor" theorized in the 20th century alone, which is not to mention that the minor chord was the number one roadblock for just about every tuning theorist since "minor" came into being.

Tony Conrad uses these "minor" tunings and more to defamiliarize the scale as we know it. For this performance, the MIVOS Quartet detuned their instruments ("scordatura") so that they could play in the same hand positions to reach strange notes on mistuned strings. The performance resonates with the open strings, and feels less like moving through standard chromatic harmony than like looking through a microscope at a large object and trying to keep the whole thing in your head at once.

This is a JAM! Gunhead

2010-02-07T00:51:41-05:00

This is one of four great tracks from Gunhead's Every Chimpanzee Step EP. It's a free EP, released on the amazing Maltine Records netlabel out of Japan last fall. For more from this killer netlabel, check out the previous feature on Quarta330, and a few more selections from their vast archives here on the FMA, or dive into http://maltinerecords.cs8.biz

Gunhead is a member of Kawasaki, Japan hip-hop crew Leopaldon, and his personal myspace is here. According to lastfm, Gunhead is an "obscure 90s trance artist with a few releases on compilations in the mid-90s, most notably on the White Label series."

This track was featured on my Stuck In a Groove Mix, some of my favorite jams from 2009, check 'em out after the jump

Italian Motormouth, Zona MC

2010-01-28T10:29:28-05:00

I must admit, for a brief moment, I considered populating my New Year's Eve party playlist with nothing but Italo Disco. With song titles like "Girl On Me," "Droid," "Spacer Woman," "Sex Tonight," and (my fave) "How Old Are You," plenty of fine examples from this genre surely started some parties back in the '70s and '80s.

In the years following Giorgio Moroder's reign, Italian electronic music has mainly evolved into house/club music or the occasional pop dance tune suited for Eurovision.

Naturally, I was excited to discover Italian rapper Zona MC on the FMA, whose style I can only hope is indicative of a new wave of Italo beats. Breakcore, slightly experimental-leaning hip-hop, with the fastest motormouth rapper that I've heard in a long time.

Take a listen to "Non puoi toccarti se sei omofobico" all the way through, and I think you'll be hard-pressed to come across a faster mouth.

Zona MC appears on the FMA courtesy of the Homezero label, featuring European copyleft artists.