Oddio Overplay : spreading happiness

Musician and composer Ant Neely made the release of his first solo album, Not Fit For Human Consumption, a global experiment by leaving copies of the CD in public locations for people to find, copy, and then leave someplace else. He originally tracked the movement of his album on his site with help from those who copied and distributed it. One copy of this album traveled all over the United Kingdom then moved on to Africa, and another hopped from England to Brazil.

Neely's bandmate from Los Angeles-based experimental jazz trio Subthunk, singer Lisa Moore, performs vocals on the first track "with a mixture of funky beats, bleeps, old public domain voice recordings and orchestral textures." Not Fit For Human Consumption covers multiple genres of electronica and incorporates samples from the Prelinger Archives.

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!

These are the eleven songs added to FMA in 2011 sung most this year at Oddio Headquarters.

TSS Tortue Super Sonic has released, exclusively at the Free Music Archive, a deluxe version of his album B with a few new titles. B was originally released last year as a gift to a limited audience of TSS fans.

This new 17-track album, B 2.0, is made up of production music, also known as stock music or library music, and is pre-cleared for use in video, radio and other media under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. The range of these TSS instrumental tracks includes spy movies, blaxploitation flicks, action scenes, and Westerns.

Give the album a listen to see how it might work for your A/V project. Enjoy the entire exclusive release here at the FMA, where you can also contact TSS for commercial use inquiries. A sampler of tracks from B 2.0 follows.

Composed in 1723, The Four Seasons (Le quattro stagioni) is a set of four violin concerti by Antonio Vivaldi. Some of the most beautiful music ever written, The Four Seasons is Vivaldi's most famous work, and is among the most popular pieces of Baroque music. Brilliant violinist John Harrison performs on this gorgeous performance of Vivaldi's classic here at the Free Music Archive.

Any fan of Hollywood soundtracks should know composer Carl Orff's Carmina Burana (album). Countless films and trailers employ it, especially the ominous first movement, "O Fortuna."

The Carmina Burana, or Codex Buranus, is a medieval manuscript of 254 poems and dramatic texts dating to about 1230 AD. Several more pages were bound with it into a small folder in the Late Middle Ages.

The authors were theological students who worked within and satirized the Catholic Church. They protested through song, poetry, and performance the growing contradictions within the Church, such as financial abuses and the failure of the Crusades. Pieces also address everyday subjects such as the "fickleness of fortune and wealth, the ephemeral nature of life, the joy of the return of Spring, and the pleasures and perils of drinking, gluttony, gambling and lust."

Every album by the French group The Juanitos is a party. The newest release, Welcome in the House of F.U.N., lives up to the band's party standards. Welcome in the House of F.U.N. delivers a sonic soul party, a vacation in the tropics, and time travel back to the swingingest '60s hot spots! There are even tips of the hat to the Chambers Brothers and Jimi Hendrix. Enjoy!

Today the U.S. nation celebrates the life and work of prominent civil rights activist, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Here are three speeches by Dr. King hosted by the Free Music Archive. The first is King's infamous "I Have a Dream" speech delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. on August 28, 1963.

The second is a speech given January 14, 1968, at a demonstration supporting anti-war activitists, including singer Joan Baez, imprisoned at the Santa Rita Prison in California. The recording of Dr. King's speech was produced by Colin Edwards for KPFA radio the day after the demonstration. (BB1460 Pacifica Radio Archives, CC by-nc-sa)

The third of King's speeches presented here is from March 16, 1968 at the event "Men and women in the arts concerned with Vietnam" in Los Angeles, California. The speech is prefaced by a six-minute introduction by novelist, playwright, and poet James Baldwin. The recording was made in the audience and aired on KPFK on April 4, 1968. (BB4661 Pacifica Radio Archives, CC by-nc-sa)

The toy piano is historically more than just a plaything. Quality toy pianos stay in tune, because they do not employ strings. Toy pianos offer a unique timbre unlike a piano and more like a celesta or a member of the harpsichord family. It is this unusual sound that has been the key appeal to a small number of composers and performers through the centuries.

Twelve years ago, the vintage recordings website Dawn of Sound released a compact disc collection of public domain early recording artifacts called Voices of Christmas Past. The recordings were cylinders and acetates from 1898 to 1922. Every year after the release, the website was inundated with requests for the CD. Once it was out of print, Dawn of Sound released it online for free.

Apart from the religious material, there are some fun winter-themed treats, two pieces from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, and some spoken old time radio theatre selections.

Dawn of Sound writes:

The artists featured here were pioneer recordings artists whose names were well known in the era they lived. They helped start what is now known today as the record industry. They were popular artist in their time, and their records sold well in an era when movies were silent and radio and television did not yet exist.

Of all things Christmas nothing is more traditional than the singing of carols and songs....