Free Music Archive Blog

CTV

2010-03-15T11:05:19-04:00

Ranging from the melodic to the absurd, CTV is Christian Television is Joshua Inwood. Currently residing in Portland Oregon, CTV mixes, makes, tapes and tempers on his keyboards and laptops. Included in his soundscapes you can hear television chefs whirring chocolate mousse while simultaneously tasting a sweet absence of linear rhythms.

The many shades of Graphiqs Groove...

2010-03-13T13:02:10-05:00

I first came across the work of Graphiqs Groove last year via Mevio's Music Alley. Six months later, I still don't know that much about them, except that they hail from Japan and describe themselves as a sound creator, drummer, and graphic designer. Graphiqs places the emphasis squarely on the Groove for their selections, crafting machine-driven and rhythmically complex house, techno, and drum and bass. The song titles are all different colors such as "Reed Gray" and "Deep Sky Blue." Different moods and textures accompany each shade, their common thread being a jazzy aesthetic that shapes each arrangement.

It's good to see these pieces as part of the Free Music Archive. Hardcore gamers out there may get some Sega Genesis flashbacks listening to some of these songs: they wouldn't be out of place as part of the sound test for your favorite racing game. For today's featured track, take "Sea Green" out for a test drive...

18,000 mp3s / Jason's recent faves

2010-03-12T14:52:04-05:00

We surpassed the 18,000 mp3 milestone this week. That's nearly 4 times as much free quality audio as when we launched the FMA less than a year ago -- a lot to keep up with!

To break it down for you, we highlight a few gems from the FMA on this here blog (RSS), on Facebook, and on Twitter. And I've made a mix of some of the sounds that've bent my ear lately -- most of them uploaded within the past month or so.

We're curious to know -- how do you go about browsing the FMA? Do you browse By Curator? By Genre? Search for music that fits your Creative Commons criteria? Or do you just dive right in to the Recently Added RSS feed and hit Play? We're going to combine our browse functions (by curator and by genre) with our search filters and add a bunch of filters to make it easy for you to find music that fits your criteria. You can read more about what's in store here, and leave a comment to share your feedback

Sharp/Centazzo

2010-03-12T10:52:58-05:00

To kick off ISSUE’s Chamber Music Month, downtown regular Elliott Sharp brought himself and Italian-born conductor/composer/percussionist Andrea Centazzo out for a few excellent improvised sets. As one might expect, it’s all good—check out Centazzo’s three cymbal trees in the above picture. Although according to the Wikipedia Centazzo’s a “minimalist” composer he, like Sharp, never seems to fit into that box. What they do both take from Reich & Co., however, is a concern with the effect of repeated sound on the sound. What they don’t take is diatonic harmony and pure “process.”

That downtown improvisation departed in style and content from minimalism is nothing new. This music turns a fixed process into an arbitrary element, and in that it seems to break the mold. Any aesthetic element of minimalism that seeps in—repetition, strong rhythmic pulses, ebow drones—is arbitrary and bound to change, and seems in active discourse and even disagreement with its downtown friend.

In the very last improvisation (below) just a few minutes from the end, Centazzo begins to play repeating patterns on his hanging gongs (parts of a gamelan? I can’t quite tell—check the above picture) and the decay of the gongs never really meshes with the next attacks from his yarn mallets. For one, the yarn mallet does not cause the sound to instantly appear, but rather draws the sound out a split second later, by which point he’s already moved on to the next note. It’s like looking at a spinning wheel that looks like it’s beginning to spin backward, where no percussive hits really make it through—they’re coming too quickly—and instead the focus is not on the actual attack, but on the point at which the tone from the gong becomes audible as a tone.

This takes maybe a half-second, by which point Centazzo’s already made it just about through his loop. Additionally, this repetitive auxiliary percussion calls to mind a certain someone, but evokes no tonality or central pitch, or even mode. This is why I suggested gamelan; these non-equal-tempered tunings defamiliarize a very familiar percussion pattern (extra credit to anyone who transcribes and analyzes these pitches). This is important: as the attacks quieten, and as the mallet sounds soften, the inharmonic sounds take over, and draw ears in. The attacks melt together, like fondue. All important things become as one and the differences have disappeared.

Sharp’s playing is always enveloping, a virtuosic display meant not to impress, and a rarity of form and ethos among musicians. Too often, those with the technique compromise or use it to replace real content, because they can get away with it. But in this—in never seeking to impress, only to convey—Sharp is in a rare territory.

Welcome S.S. Records to the FMA!

2010-03-11T18:20:20-05:00

I was a fan of Scott Soriano's Cali-based S.S. Records from the getgo. Exhibiting a full understanding of what made esoteric independent weirdo/garage/artpunk labels of the 80s and 90s so beloved, and globbing handfuls of that stuff into the S.S. aesthetic automatically set 'em apart from the myriad of Bingenheimer-bowl-cut revisionists, Blues Magoos copyist losers, and future fellators of Little Steven's cult of blah rock. Rock is certainly served up by the likes of Lamps, the Intelligence, etc., but the lygergic injection, nods to unlikely sources of influence, and even some heady dozes of Siltbreeze-friendly WTF unchartedness all run through rampantly.

Via his mailorder catalog distro, Soriano has truly scraped into unknown areas to dig up bands completely unknown that you can't discover otherwise (with a special connection to the teeming French underground), and his Z-Gun print zine is the greatest print-media gift to the scene since the halcion days of Forced Exposure. From the Metal Urbain/via gal-garage vibe of Lili Z to the sublime Chairs Missing nods of Germany's excellent Krysmopompas, to the Butthole Surfers-meets-Chrome zonk of Mexico's XYX and the alien transmissions of Los Llamarada (both of whom have played WFMU SXSW events!), S.S. comes up with the goods and it's a joy to welcome some sounds to the Free Music Archive.

Monoshock (a 90's Cali band that ranks in my book as one of the greatest trashmasters of American music period) have their singles comp on S.S. and a few Mp3s on the FMA, and that's reason enough to celebrate! Dig in!

>> S.S. Records' FMA hq

R3Labs: The R3 40 Million

2010-03-10T23:46:52-05:00

Hidden deep beneath the surface of the R3 website, guarded by a team of trained rabbits and layered under a deep film of secrecy, there is a huge pile of pristine, untouched data.

Gathered over the last 9 years, this massive store of information is a treasure trove for music fans and info-nerds alike. Here at R3Labs, we've been working hard to dig through this data. Over the next few weeks, we'll share our discoveries, and build a set of useful web-based tools that will let you do some exploring of your own. Our goal with R3Labs is to put this data to work for listeners, for bands, and for R3 itself.

What can we do with this data? Well, for starters, take a look at the above video. Each tiny coloured block represents a user listening to a track. Not surprisingly, listenership is concentrated in Canada, but you can see a lot of hot spots in the USA and elsewhere in the world (R3 seems to get a lot of play, for instance, in Cuba! Fidel? Are you listening?)

It can also give us answers to some fairly straight-forward questions:

What is the most-played song on R3? ('Love Letter' by Stars, with 83,890 plays)
What is song in the most user playlists? ('Weighty Ghost' by Wintersleep on 3,417 playlists).

But it also lets us dig deeper into the psyche of the R3 community and ask more in depth questions.

Which band member is most often listed first in band profiles? (guitar)
What about last? (the drummer)
What province listens to the most country songs by percentage of plays? (Quebec)
What about metal? (Alberta)
Or Hip Hop? (Newfoundland)

There are thousands of questions to ask, and even more answers to be found. We'll be posting all kinds of goodies in the upcoming days, but of course, we need your help:

What would you like to find out from the Radio3 data stores?

We'd love to hear your suggestions.

[R3Labs is Colin Brumelle and Jer Thorp.]

Cyclic Bits: The Raymond Scott Variations

2010-03-11T06:34:09-05:00

"Cyclic Bits" is the first remix album of the music of remarkable composer and inventor Raymond Scott.

This album is a series of reinventions of the work of a true musical maverick, remixed by a host of today's most inventive musical mavericks. The diversity of the release reflects the profound influence Scott's work has had on composers working across the board of styles and approaches.

Originally created as a special for Ergo Phizmiz's Phuj Phactory on WFMU, a projected release never happened.

This, at last, is it.

Although this work is FMA licensed, please contact the individual artists regarding any usage permissions.

- via Chinstrap Music, the new noncommercial netlabel from Ergo Phizmiz

2010 Golden Festival Mix/Collection

2010-03-10T10:29:12-05:00

For a quarter of a century, NY Balkan music scene pioneers the Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass Band have organized the annual Golden Festival. a massive two-night grassroots Balkan and East European music and dance festival at the Good Shepherd School, 620 Isham Street (near Broadway and 207 St.) in upper Manhattan. The festival is the biggest event of its kind in New York City: The second night (Saturday) is a marathon featuring 40-50 bands and artists performing on three stages from 6pm until 4 in the morning. See: http://www.goldenfest.zlatneuste.org/

With the help of co-host / tech guru Irene Trudel and our peerless crew, WFMU's Transpacific Sound Paradise broadcast all the music from the Golden Festival's Kafana stage from 6pm until midnight on Saturday January 16th. Kafana is Serbo-Croatian for "cafe"; the stage is located conveniently near the food!

We are now proud to present a collection of recordings from the festival on the Free Music Archive. The full collection is here, while a mix of highlights is available at right (please click "i" for more info about each artist).

>> 2010 Golden Festival photo gallery on Flickr
>> 2010 Golden Festival mp3 collection on the Free Music Archive

Us, Cactus

2010-03-09T12:34:39-05:00

This week we are looking at a musician who has recently come back to chip music thanks to an invite to Blip Festival. More well known to electronic music fans as Khonner, he also released a chip music release for 8bitpeoples under the pseudonym I, Cactus. Owing as much to bands like Boards of Canada as lo-fi chip burbles, the release shows Khonners tracking prowess with easy going and precious beats, still holding up nearly 8 years after its initial release. Finally asked to play the 2009 Blip Festival has seemed to energize Khonner's involvement in the chip music scene, with a recent flurry of uploads to Chipmusic.org, produced on a Playstation Portable using the simple sample tracker littlegptracker.

Khonner is incredibly prolific, so you can stuff your pods with the tunes found here, or start crawling his discography. Until next time, enjoy Ruby Cactus, and see you in seven.

Greatest It: Six Netlabels Join Forces

2010-03-09T17:22:35-05:00

Six of the world's raddest netlabels -- UpItUp (Italy, Germany, U.K.), Ego Twister (France), Peppermill (Canada), Proot (France), Cock Rock Disco (Germany) and WM Recordings (Netherlands) -- have teamed up for a collaborative greatest hits compilation.

Their reasoning? Well, it's a similar reason to why we started the Free Music Archive: in this era of infinite free music at our fingertips, we need curators like these fine netlabels to help us discover the good stuff.

Each label picked three favorites for this 18-track compilation, titled "Greatest It". Many of these tracks were already on the FMA, but even if some of the labels, artists, or tracks are familiar, there are bound to be some new sounds here as well, and it's a nice bridge introduction to some of the leading lights of the netaudio world for anyone who has yet to delve in.

Though the sound is extremely varied -- from Rafter's vocoder & cowbell-laden smoov jam to Roglok's future disco to The Rabbits' squeeky jazz -- Greatest It maintains a cohesively playful vibe throughout. It's definitely inspired by early netlabel pioneers like Comfort Stand, and sounds of the demoscene.

I'd love to hear some other likeminded netlabels join forces for their own Greatest It-style release. There's a lot of great music out there and the more bridges we can build, the better!

guilted by the sun

2010-03-08T10:59:20-05:00

As one of the grand finales for this year’s fantastic Unsound Festival (making it’s first appearance in NYC), the excellent Canadian experimental-drone-ambient-shoegazer-doom-metal duo Nadja -- Aidan Baker and Leah Buckareff – conjured an absolutely massive soundworld of near-impenetrable density at ISSUE. Nadja design jagged, skyscraping architectures out of scalding and charred streams of noise and distortion, abstracting gestures of drone and doom into complex, infinitely detailed structures of intense beauty. Amidst sprawling ambient landscapes that are at turns placid, quivering, frightening, and impassable, Baker and Buckareff erect looming, spiraling towers that jut, writhe, and twist into the boundless vertical dimension before culminating into screaming spires of searing energy. Be braced to emerge/escape in a collapsed crawl – drained, soaked, cleansed, and exorcised.

There is always comfort in Choklate...

2010-03-06T12:17:13-05:00

It's always wonderful to stop by the Archive and find some new soul or R&B that hadn't been there before. It's even better still when it's a live recording from one of the great radio stations serving as curators for the FMA. Today, let's get to know Choklate, Seattle-based singer and songwriter. Her voice is Godiva sweet and equally as smooth, stirring the listener's emotions and causing them to reflect upon the ups and downs within their own lives.

While not a widely known name within mainstream circles, her 2006 self-titled debut was the toast of soul music's underground. Her latest album, To Whom It May Concern, was released last year and many of her fans and peers agree that it avoids the sophomore slump. I encourage you to check her interview with Fave of the Friday Favecast to learn more about this talented songstress. In the meantime, here's a selection from her debut album recorded last October in the live studios of KEXP...

Fields of rising, falling sound

2010-03-05T16:01:22-05:00

David Daniell works in transparencies and onion-skin shapes, and recurring, overlapping tones. Daniell slices the layers of drone to create something optimistic and mobile. As he layers the sounds, each new sound changes somewhat the meaning of the ones that already exist, and these sounds cycle in and out so that the shapes are constantly shifting. Daniell interrupts these environments with loose, melancholy pickings, that evoke some kind of campfire in the forest, where the pulsing high pitches are a cicada choir.

Daniell’s work gives the impression of travelling through a universe of sound sources, so that they fade in and out with no perceivable order. It is not quite narrative, but a slow transition, building to a one-man guitar army with some clear connection to Daniell’s work as concertmaster for Rhys Chatham’s large-scale guitar performances.

Yet, the one-man performance, while similar sonically, is far removed from Chatham’s compositions. Daniell, in a feat that would be impossible with a guitar army, oscillates between the cosmic and the personal, effortlessly fusing orchestral power and scope with the intimacy of a solo performance.

This recording, from Daniell’s February 12 performance at ISSUE, was a part of the Unsound Festival, presented by the Polish Cultural Institute, among many others. Daniell’s recent Table of the Elements release, I IV V I, was a part of their Guitar Series, which is ongoing. All of his albums are available from his site, as well as from various other independent stores.

Infinite Limbs: GDFX, Thick Business

2010-03-05T12:22:16-05:00

At a Monday night Death By Audio show a couple years back, Greg Fox, one of Teeth Mountain's four percussionists, passed along a sampler from his new Infinite Limbs label. This hand-painted cd-r introduced me to so much good music from the likes of Prince Rama of Ayodhya, Twisty Cat, Liturgy, Ducktails, and one Willy Weird...

Willy Weird, now known as Thick Business, is the solo project of frequent Infinite Limbs collaborator Tyler Dussenberry. Take a listen to the bad acid electro-surf jam "French Beach" (off that Infl comp), and the aptly titled, trance-inducing layered minimalism of "Smoothest Runes" (originally posted by 20 Jazz Funk Greats)!

The Infinite Limbs compilation also featured a track from Greg's solo project 5 Limbs, now known as GDFX. Greg's early solo stuff applied a percussionists' approach to loop pedals and sequencers to create hyper-active beat-oriented composition. Take a listen to the epic Altered Ego -- especially the 23rd and 24th minutes...

Audrey Chen

2010-03-05T01:55:10-05:00

Solo improvisation is not an easy thing. Being able to carry a cohesive piece of music directly out of one's mind and through his or her fingers, voice, whatever, takes incredible skill and concentration. I had the good fortune to see a masterful solo improvisation set from cellist/vocalist Audrey Chen a few weeks ago while she was in the WFMU studio during Strength Through Failure with Fabio. The intense, haunting, fragile, and beautiful sounds she created with her cello, throat, and electronics both tease and please the ear with fragments of melody, noise, and drone. Listening back to her set just now its surprising that this all came from one person at on time.

One of the most fascinating things about Audrey's music is the way that timbres of her instruments overlap. Aside from the rich bass and midrange of her cello, Audrey emits incredibly high frequencies from her vocal chords as well as the chirping electronic box she played with on Fabio's show. She also gets similar high partials out of her cello by using various extended bowing techniques. The closest point of reference with her vocals are perhaps throat singing and the warbling vocalese of legendary free percussionist Milford Graves, or at times a creaky door being opened slowly.

Duo improvisation is also not an easy thing. The almost telepathic communication required to form a piece of music with little or no pre-conceived structure is difficult to master especially where the concepts of mode, rhythm and tempo are their most abstract.

A few weeks after i saw Audrey play at wfmu I had the chance to see her play a duo set with percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani at a small club in the lower east side called the Stone. Tatsuya, who I have seen play before with another brilliant extended technique percussionist, Jake Meginsky, creates sounds with with a small drum set augmented with gongs, bows, small metal bowls that resonate beautifully, and many different sized cymbals which he most often played by scraping against his floor tom or tiny roto-tom like drum. The sparse and somewhat cosmic qualites (the first time i saw Nakatani play I kept imagining soundtrack to some sort of outer-space collision) of both Nakatani and Chen's music make them perfect partners for improvisation. Just as the tones of Audrey Chen's instruments overlap with each other, the soundwaves coming out of these two seemingly completely different groups of instruments were often strikingly similar. At one point in their set Chen was filtering overtones out of white noise with her mouth and Nakatani hit the same notes by adjusting the pressure with which he was scraping his cymbal. The two of them have a recording called Limn although I have not been able to find it.

Nakatani also has an excellent performance here on the FMA. Chen has a great duo set with trumpeter Nate Wooley on here as well, from ISSUE Project Room.

Speed the Blau

2010-03-05T01:54:13-05:00

It's already Thursday and Karl Blau hasn't put out a new album yet.

Something must be terribly wrong!

Of course, I jest. But if you think I'm kidding about how prolific this fellow is, check out this list of releases from his Kelp Lunacy Advanced Plagiarism Society label that feature him in a primary or supporting role:

The Dark, Magic Sea :: The Coconutcracker Suite :: Turning Tutu/Turning Leaves :: Dunkel Blau :: Purple Heart :: Baby Nettles :: Remember Tomorrow :: Clothes Your I's :: Nature's Got Away :: Dubble Dooty Booty :: Trust in Sirens :: It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water :: Welsh Phantoms and Other Ghosts of Western Europe :: Sea/Saw :: Stereoearrings :: If I knew Zen What I Know Now :: AM :: Sing Together/Alone Under the Covers :: Beer and Chai :: Flotsam and Jetsam :: Let It All Out :: Sigh Lens :: Bread-n-Grease :: Trunkal Howl :: Free the Bird :: Dance Positive :: Good Lovin' Country and Beyond :: In Return from Ghost Country :: 1,000 Pictures :: An Unconscious Pattern :: Blue Nomad :: Doin' Things the Way They Happen :: Dragon Tape :: Into the Nada :: One Summer Night on Halloran :: Purple Shack of 4-Track :: Songs to Make a Living :: Beneath Waves :: 96

And these are just his self-released items. I'm not even counting his albums on Knw-Yr-Own records or his last three on K Records, including last year's Zebra. Does Robert Pollard have something to worry about? I should say so.

Happily, this quantity makes for great stylistic variety--sometimes folky, sometimes electronic, sometimes poppy. I'm partial to the pop mode. Back in 2006, Mr. Blau released a swell tune of this type on K Records as a single. It was called "Slow Down, Joe" (fine advice I'm taking to heart, thank you). This song also appeared in slightly different form on the Dark, Magic Sea release, and that's the one I'm spotlighting today. Its propulsive, march-like rhythm and bristly guitar get me every time.

Listen, and then see below for a bit more on the Blau.

Richness Comes for Free

2010-03-03T15:29:44-05:00

The real wonder of WFMU, the nurturing freeform motherwolf to the Free Music Archive's enthusiastic internet pup (which loving parent happens to be, ahem, having its annual fundraising marathon at the moment), is that it offers listeners the opportunity to map his or her own constellations of musical reference points. It starts out acousmatically enough--you hear a completely off-the-wall track, and well, you just may love it but still, the connection to your musical world seems more or less nonexistent, and, well, you're not sure, the whole thing's sort of new, maybe a little nerveracking but wait--suddenly you hear another track, one which connects the referent-less one you just heard to one of your preexisting favorites, and behold: you've got a new beloved song, set in place like an armillary sphere's realm of the fixed stars, and drawn into your very own burgeoning network of celestial giants--a constellation of jams.

The Free Music Archive, in this conception, offers the listener a 21st century map of the skies as useful as any that's guided previous generations of humanity. If the genius of radio is that it can pinpoint a specific coordinate in the musical universe and cast it in brilliant light--a forgotten song streaking across the sky like a comet--well, then, the genius of the FMA is that it can refer you at a glance to the solar systems and galaxies of which each mysterious body is an indispensible component.

I've been thinking a lot about this while navigating the FMA of late--with all the content it's been building up over the last year, it's really taken on an astonishing complexity--and noticing that artists I've seen here before have reappeared in various guises, uploaded labels' worth of audio or otherwise tripled or quadrupled their presence here on the site. It's really inspiring to see the Archive--whose ravenous wolfcub dream is to be a reliably great depository for the varying currents at work in music today--beginning to really map out previously uncharted galaxies; looking at previous blog topics alone, we've Providence's Free Matter for the Blind, which, in addition to the extraordinary audio zines already mentioned, has presided over a label curatorship packed with full albums by the likes of Leif Goldberg and Area C and, well, just see for yourself. So too have the works of previously-spotlit Montrealers brought plenty of new work to the table--check out tapelabel Campaign for Infinity's steadily-growing list of great bands. Lots of incredible WFMU Fest sets from last fall are now up--including that of Talk Normal, about whom I wrote in November.

You get the point--as the site grows, so too do the complexities of the constellations on our trusty and ever-richening charts. As we listen, so we discover. Keep it up.

Ladies & Gents… netBloc Vol. 27: Straight Outta The FMA

2010-03-03T08:55:32-05:00

As of the time of this writing, not even a year after it’s launch, WFMU’s Free Music Archive already boasts nearly 18,000 free music tracks from a wide array of genres. It’s an interesting collection in that it not only features music that comes from the world of netaudio/netlabels, but many signed indie artists can be found among the FMA’s selection as well. It’s definitely an incredible archive of music to explore!

After a good three months of listening to thousands of FMA tracks, I somehow managed to whittle the selection down to 11 exceptional gems. It was really a difficult choice, but in the end the final line-up proves to be a terrific mix of Rock, Pop, Punk, Indie, Trip-Hop and even a splash of humor thrown in for good measure.

A special thanks to Jason Sigal over at WFMU and FMA who was most helpful in getting me access to lossless copies of the two Live At WFMU tracks which are featured here. Thanks also to the labels, artists and to CASH Music for participating and helping me pull together all that was needed to make this release happen.

Since this netBloc release features music that’s already available here at the FMA, I’ve put together this mix for you to enjoy here. If you’d like the complete release, see the link below.

Want the PDF album booklet, high-resolution album art or any of the high-quality audio formats (MP3, OGG, FLAC)? Check out the blocSonic release page!

Los Amparito!

2010-03-02T21:02:17-05:00

Today the 58th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. I am proud to introduce you Los Amparito!

For every carnaval moment!

Los Amparito is the third pseudonym of Carlos Pesina Siller who is a tiny guy with a lot of musical energy.

In his USB we can find some .als files (Ableton Live Sesion) ready to be open and make dance everyone at every party!

¬ pepepe.als > 8-bit, geekcore.

ChopMusic

2010-03-02T10:10:39-05:00

Along with Starpause, Overthruster was one of the most prolific of the the Minneapolis based lofi break-ish chip music assault group, :|krew. The group (pronounced COLON PIPE CREW) is one of the earliest US chip musicgroups to spring up in the early 2000's and their development, unchecked and Galapagos like in the wilds of the Twin Cities, owes a lot more to Punk, Breakcore, Bastard Noise and other types of harsh genres that you would not typically use to describe the sound that comes out of a Game Boy.

Overthruster has dozens of recordings on numerous lo-fi and no-fi Netlabels, and the tools he used to make these releases are equally diverse. His Game Boy material, showcased on his 2007 Dramacore release Slug Cock show a Game Boy that is far from interested in a nostalgic look back to one's childhood, and would rather focus on pushing the LSDJ tracker into its utmost limits, with harsh modulations, brutal hacked samples, and pulsing square percussion. Having always focused more on the noise and breakcore scenes, Overthruster is sadly not as well known in the chip community, especially amongst fans of the happier and poppier chipbreak artists like Saskrotch and Sabrepulse.

That's all for now, so enjoy Slug Cock and the rest of the Overthruster catalog elsewhere on the web, and see you guys in seven!