Well, I got the itch tonight and had to relieve it. The result is the following song, a very rough demo type thing. Before posting, however, I have to express thanks to the people whose work enabled this:
- Ubuntu, the best operating system for me, bar none. Seriously, try it out, see if you like it.
- Hydrogen, a wonderful little drum machine. One of my favourite applications.
- Ardour, a digital audio workstation. Free, open-souce, and I’m pretty sure I’m only using about 1% of its functionality. Is better for me than Audacity was
With no further ado (as none is needed) I present the song as both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis.
Ghetto (OV)
Ghetto (MP3)
This work is licensed as per:
I made a little something tonight, as my wife looked on, giggling. You may judge for yourself what it is, as I believe it’s rather un-classifiable.
What? (MP3)
What? (OGG)
Here’s a little something I composed in Notion. It’s fairly straightforward: violins, violas, cellos, basses, and a xylophone. I call it Brutus Comes Home. Please note that it’s not finished, it is in fact still in heavy development.
Iron & Wine’s song Boy With a Coin is so amazingly addictive, I’m trying to boil it down right now so as to make some sort of pill I can swallow or snort or something.
You can download it here; I’m not going to keep this sort of thing to myself.
Here’s something a bit different: an instrumental album, at times ambient, at times very in-your-face. Really, you’ll have to hear Silence’s L’autre endroit for yourself, which is pretty easy via either the Jamendo player or via Bittorrent.
Artist Page
Album Page
.torrent for this album
And for those of you who would like a sort of Jen Knapp/Ane Brun-ish type female indie singer, with keyboards instead of guitars, Allison Crowe’s This Little Bird may just be your cup of tea. She’s quite good, and I say this with the full weight of my constant snobbery at my back.
Artist Page
Album Page
.torrent for this album
Yeah, I know, it’s Wednesday, and I skipped a week. Shut it.
Today I feature some high quality, eclectic music from a band called Meridiano Zero. The album is AmberDrops
I was actually surprised at the quality of this release: the sound is much better than what you usually get from netlabel acoustic stuff. That said, if you grew up in the eighties on an Indian reservations and your parents were the Grateful Dead and Led Zepplin, you’ll probably like this. Or, I have no idea. Just give it a shot, will you?
Label Page
Album Page
Download Link
I know, I know. I’m boring, and so you have two FMT’s in a row. I assure you there are lots of things I’d love to write about, but between my work, my woman, and my (not drinking any) wine, I seem to have lost most of my free time. Not that I’m griping. I’m just saying.
This week’s FMT comes courtesy of 12rec.net, a pretty fantastic Netlabel I found the other day. Fantastic because it’s the home of bands like Milhaven, and records like Milhaven’s Bars Closing Down.
Now, some of you know I’m a sucker for postrock. I’ve said as much before. I’ve this funny idea that — in terms of pop music, at least — postrock is the new instrumental Common Practice Period.
That said, Bars Closing Down is not spectacular postrock. It’s solid, and it’s competent (two things very difficult to find on the Netlabel scene, at least when looking for music that is a) not electronica, and b) any good at all), which is enough for me to recommend you download Bars Closing Down and give it a listen.
Zip set; 192kb MP3
Release Page
Label Page
Okay, so I was sick and I missed Tuesday and it is instead Free Music Wednesday. But let’s not quibble about technicalities.
The real question is this: what does a 10-piece drums and bass outfit sound like in their seminal years? Keiretsu, a UK band consisting of horns, guitars, drums, and other live effects, answers with their debut EP, “Seismosis”.
You can download the .zip here, if you so wish. It’s fun music. Danceable music. But above all, it’s free music.
In music today, you can do a few things to expose yourself to new music (and depending on how you do it, there’s a good chance you can be rehabilitated and re-integrated into society, even!):
* Buy an album with an inflated price ($15 – $21 or so, probably helping to fund major labels and the godless RIAA Nazis)
* Buy a reasonable priced used album ($10 or less, but no additional profit to the majors or the RIAA)
* Buy the good songs and skip the filler by buying online ($1 – $4, probably both helping fund the majors and RIAA, and infested with Digital Rights Management or Digitally Restricted Music or whatever you want to call it).
* Buy from the artist themselves (usually a good price, but also harder to do, and you have to search out the music yourself, but also helping to support the artist directly)
* Be a pirate (free, doesn’t fund the majors or the RIAA, has no DRM, is easily available)
Isn’t it sad the easiest thing to do is be a pirate these days? I mean, it’s a crying shame that getting music online is so difficult that it’s simply easier and monumentally cheaper to just download uTorrent or Ktorrent or Limewire or Soulseek and download away. Which really speaks to the atmosphere of the major labels, though not so much with indie labels, who would rather sell you nothing at all than drop their prices. Which, of course, makes no sense, and speaks to how much of a cartel the major labels have become.
But in the interest of helping you escape all the above paradigms, I’m going to post a link to an excellent album its creators are offering for free: download the ZIP file of Dead Heart Bloom’s Chelsea Diaries here.
Also, enjoy.
Again with the Notion, and again with the staying up well past any sort of bedtime. But this little ditty is the result, and for once I quite like what I’ve made.
Chroma (MP3)
Tell me what you think, peoples.
