FMA Blog

WM Recordings celebrates its 9th birthday today! On November 7, 2004, we released our very first compilation "Water, Wind and Sails" featuring 16 tracks inspired by water. Over 120 free album releases have followed since then, all available here on the Free Music Archive.

Every day is a chance to get a new song stuck in your head. Subscribe to our Song of the Day podcast in Feedburner or iTunes to find out what we're really into every day. Past song selections include Kurt Vile, Deer Tick, Glass Candy, The Relatives, Sharon Van Etten, What Cheer? Brigade, Dan Deacon, and Lonnie Holley.

Suggest your own favorite songs in the comments section below, and see what we feature in the weeks to come!

Plastic Flowers release a new single off their upcoming LP, but this time it's a local collaboration. Sarah P from KSiA joined them in "Ghosts" and the result sounds hazy, dark and haunting. Download their latest EP Fog Song / Silence at Bandcamp and make sure you get the cassette edition coming out November 18 through Crash Symbols.

Plastic Flowers at: Facebook | Soundcloud

Former LE FLY PAN AM bassist/Los Discos Enfantasmes founder Jean-Sébastien Truchy plays live on CKUT's If You Got Ears. In the studio, JS' operatic tenor shook the room, inside the headphone mix: lynchian soundscapes, eerie and beautiful.

As a Halloween treat, we bring you a few favorites to keep away begging children from Dr. Phibes and The Ten Plagues of Egypt, a.k.a. João Mascarenhas of Stealing Orchestra and founder of You Are Not Stealing Records. Enjoy these dark experimental unions of classical works and metal, including selections from the Carmina Buranais, and an interpretation of Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring."

It's getting cold, things are dying, leaves are alluringly pretty, people shiver on the beach-- their sweaters thick and wooly. No one is getting tan. It's autumn in Rhode Island and it's profound and frightening. However, the scariest thing of all is the sickening amount of talent on the AS220 Fall Sampler. It's just stupidly grotesque. In the karmic schema of the world it is definitely not fair that the smallest state is endowed with the crushing force of artistry found in all these musical acts. So, grab a pumpkin spice latte, an apple dripping in caramel and your favorite pair of speakers and blast these tunes from a handful of bands in the ocean state. It arrives just in time for Halloween. Listen here!

Well, here it is! Your Halloween miracle, Volume 1 and Volume 2 of Manos: The Remix of Fate!

Back in June, I discovered that in addition to the film Manos: The Hands of Fate being remastered in hi-def for DVD and Blu-Ray, the soundtrack to the cult-classic bad film was also released under a Creative Commons license. The call for remixes was issued, and these compilations are the result. 

Triskaidekaphobiacs beware because here are 13 tracks for Halloween 2013!

This Samhain we've got William S. Burroughs getting magickal, Aleister Crowley getting remixed, haunting apocrypha, beatboxing death metal, something Balkan that sounds like an outtake from Eyes Wide Shut, and lots of spoken weirdness... but wait! There's more! Check out Halloween mixes of yore here.

After you've wiped all the makeup off your zombie actor friends, it's time for the real scarey part -- picking out music for your Horror flick. Music to Video has assembled a mix that will send shivers down your spine, make all the ghouls dance, and get grandma to climb out of her grave, just to tell you to turn down the volume.

Here's a trick! Try mixing these tracks with the Prelinger Archives for a real treat. May I suggest their footage of a Halloween Party or Experiments in the Revival of Organisms? 

The Future of Music Summit is coming up on Oct 28-29 in Washington DC. I’ll be there tweeting updates, but first I wanted to chat with their Interim Executive Director Casey Rae about what topics will be on the mind of musicians, policy makers, and others involved in the music industry at the summit this year.  

Think of this interview as a quick study, so you’ll have smart things to say between summit sessions, or while following along online. In addition to a bit about Casey himself and the history of the FMC, we also discuss low power FM, the economics of cultural production, voluntary agreements in copyright enforcement, preliminary steps towards copyright reform, and the arrival of iTunes Radio in the digital music landscape.