Reviews of (legitimately) free netlabel and/or Creative Commons music. Yes, the music is completely free. Yes, the musicians know. Yes, they welcome donations and purchases. No, you won't be arrested. Dive in.
This site is known around the globe* for its venerable dictum regarding dance music:
All dance tracks are a third too long.
Yes, I realise that dance tracks traditionally include extended, rather plain intros and outros so that DJs can beatmatch their sets, but the fact remains that most dance tracks, like terrorists, carry excess baggage. However, after intensive research on the subject, CTW can now announce with some certainty that there is a corollary to my (in)famous axiom:
All dance tracks are a third too long unless I say so.
I think that's reasonable. *cough* Anyway, today's Spring Clean gasps over the finishing line at a not-going-to-the-Olympics time of 8'33". Why on earth is it worth hearing? Well, there are two types of dance tracks in this world:
Bangers
Groovers
Ask Wikipedia if you don't believe me.** Bangers are generally aggressive, high-tempo, and replete with risers and drops designed to prompt wrecked nightclubbers to expose their armpits like they just don't care. Groovers are the beta males of the dance music world: they observe from afar and then quietly seduce the nubile blonde whilst the alpha male is combing his chest hair. In other words, they start off fairly sedately, gradually adding percussive (and percussively melodic) elements until they achieve an irresistibly catchy rhythm.
Too Much Botox by Alex Medina, a talented and busy DJ-producer originally from Las Palmas in Las Islas Canarias (the Canary Islands if you English speakers insist on getting all Falklandish about it) is an object lesson in squeezing disparate elements into a rapid groove. For example, the first things other than percussion to appear on the track are some lovely, slow synth chords that you'd expect to hear in downtempo jazz. When those same chords are then distorted, panned and moved back in the mix while some bass pops up, your ears will start to twitch.
Seductive things keep appearing throughout: at the two-minute mark, what sounds like a sitar chord acts as an unexpected bridge; tablas/congos drop in at 3.12; vocal snippets punctuate the track here and there, and at 5.50 a simple bassline just squats on the dance floor and digs in. In fact, there are numerous moments when the listener will feel that the bass and/or the main rhythm has kicked in, only to be surprised when it keeps getting just that little bit funkier. As I said: a groover.
This skilful and pleasurable funky minimal comes in a pack of five, the Punos Punof EP, and derives from the credit-to-the-internet Unfoundsound/foundsound netlabel. CTW is not unfamiliar with this excellent supplier of Creative Commons music, as you can read here and here.
You want the album, don't you? Hmm. You'll need to concentrate. In its wisdom, Unfoundsound does not have separate pages for each album in its catalogue. Instead you must visit its "Un releases" section, select albums "39-45" and then choose "unfound42", where you will finally alight on a little place reserved for the Punos Punof EP. Individual mp3s and flacs, and a zipped album will then be yours to keep. Should you need more of Sr. Medina's music, look for his Octupus Vulgaris EP in Unfoundsound's catalogue: it's number 45.
If you enjoy the free music, please consider thanking Alex Medina/Unfoundsound for their efforts or buying something from Unfoundsound's commercial wing, Foundsound.
In their more spiteful moments, people who hate folk music dream of the day when nasal-voiced troubadours do a Hendrix and set fire to their mandolins. With Burn, the second track of his unpredictable UV EP, Matthew Stenning almost grants a few wishes by deciding that the perfect percussive accompaniment to a lilting guitar riff is... a box of matches and a lighter. Ah, electronica: musical pyromaniacs sneer at all other genres.
The very nicely handled percussion is soon joined by a phasing pad, another stringed instrument, lashings of reverb, a reversed tape effect, an engaged telephone tone, a Moogish synth, a bit of looping and a complete non-sequitur of an ending: a ringing telephone. All this should sound like a dog's breakfast (by the way, has anyone ever heard a dog's breakfast?) but Mr Stenning, a UK-based producer, knits it together with aplomb. (Has anyone ever seen a plomb?)
Anyway, I hope the first appearance at CTW of Typepad's ugly, life-draining media player doesn't spoil your enjoyment of this lovely example of folky electronica:
If you liked it, good news: the Creative Commons music world knows full well that there are six more imaginative tracks to be heard on the UV EP, hosted at the excellent, sadly expired but joyfully ransackable Plainaudio netlabel. Now you know too.
UV - The UV EP (link to individual tracks and zipped album)
Pushkin: Farewell to the Sea. Ivan Aivazovsky [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
It won't come as any surprise to you, but Catching The Waves has come to the end of its natural life. There are two main reasons for this:
My health is woefully erratic;
Despite a desperate tussle with the laws of physics, it still takes me hundreds of hours to listen to hundreds of albums.
While running Catching The Waves, I've been lucky enough to have found some excellent free music and corresponded with terrific people from all over the world. I hope my readers have managed to do the same.
If you still thirst for legally free music, I can't do better than recommend my sidebar entitled "General Netlabel Sites", where you'll find some useful links to netmusic portals. If you're brave enough to explore the CTW archive, you'll find articles about these portals, explaining what makes them so good. The internet has not deemed Catching The Waves worthy of the same, so I'll have to beat my chest and say that this blog's chief strength was its devastatingly potent monkey-god sex appeal insistence on publicising albums whose chief virtue was the high standard of music rather than the sale price of zero. I trust that the emphasis on quality (and not my inherent laziness) explains CTW's slothful publishing schedule.
I'll keep the site online for a few months so that visitors can fight with the blog's architecture and extract what free music they can. My apologies for any dead links.
No doubt like you, I've been very frustrated with CTW's technological shortcomings. The blog format is quite a straitjacket for someone who would have liked to have a far more welcoming and comprehensive website (and escape this maximum-security institution for distressed gentlefolk). However, I am to computers what radiation is to the environment.
So, in a seamless segue, please allow me to recommend one last free netmusic portal. Netlabelism advertises itself as a "magazine for quality netaudio". Its eighteen-strong staff, composed of netlabel owners, musicians and geeks, backs up this claim by offering (deep breath): articles, reviews (by genre) of free albums, monthy compilations, interviews, a radio station, a recommended album of the month and, for those who want to give their ears a rest, a recommended album cover of the month. The attractive website is updated almost every day and (netlabel owners, please note) is it easy to use and explore. I hope the site goes from strength to strength. It also gets the last-ever place in netmusic's most hallowed arena: CTW's "General Netlabel Sites" sidebar. Ahem.
Before I close my Twitter and Facebook accounts and cryo-freeze Catching The Waves, I must issue a sincere thank you and apology to all the many artists who released their free music on netlabels or who, very flatteringly, submitted their albums to me in the hope they might get a review. Thank you so much for your effort, optimism, talent and ingenuity. May you continue to make the music you want to make. I hope it's of some comfort to know that for a few years I listened to just about every free release in the netlabel world and elsewhere. No, really, I did. (You do the maths.) I must have been mad...
As the light dims, it's time for one last free track from my "All the great tracks from very-good-but-not-consistently-great albums that I was too pernickety to review" vault of files. Year's End comes courtesy of ANgR MgMT, an artist from Arizona who, despite a sticky Caps Lock button, has crafted a beautifully meditative piece that sounds like Bach discovering the world of softsynths and then deciding to bring things to a close in a flurry of glitches because he had no more worlds to conquer. It's a fitting end for the world's worst free music blog, don't you think?
Life's hard, I can tell. Money is tight. Tinned spaghetti is starting to look good. You're selling your cat's kittens on eBay. You can keep flipping your underwear inside-out and back again for only so long. The pressure is telling. You need something cool and soothing to mop your fevered brow. Look no further than the free Grey-Purple EP by Fiji (the musician, not the idyllic South Pacific nation) and its eight tracks of ambient-tinged trip-hop.
But before you gleefully throw away your "Arse-crack available for bicycle stand" sign, please note the following. In an attempt to make the claps pop and the kicks thump, Fiji, who comes straight outta Orenberg, has overdone it slightly. Consequently, follow Uncle CTW's advice and adjust your media player's preset to "Agnostic" or something equally neutral that will stop your car's sub-woofers from blowing its doors across the street.
Today's recommended track is Hour of Glances and Kisses (feat. Kammerton). The plucked guitar and sultry, breathy female vocal that start the track are subject to a familiar production trick, apeing a lo-fi AM broadcast by cutting the low & high frequencies and keeping the stereo stream narrow. Fiji then simultaneously hits the listener with the full audio spectrum and widens the sonic field to a warm, chorus-y, your-ears-are-bathing-in-chocolate scrumptiousness. It never fails to work, both aurally and emotionally. The track then indulges in some very slow synth arpeggios that will remind those with receding hairlines of Apollo 440, and a raucous, rising synth tone that eventually dissipates under the weight of the fluffy pads and vocals.
But guess what? You can't listen to the whole track unless you download the entire album.
(IDIOTIC EDIT: Hour of Glances and Kisses is available from Fiji's own Soundcloud profile. Thankyou to @Lukelibrarian for the help. He's a lot better than Jacasta Nu. Now, listen to Jedi's Fiji's deft handling of filtered vocals:
Granted, there is a sampler for the EP, and it's enlightening to read the comments on the Soundcloud player, but I'm always surprised at the ingenious tactics that otherwise excellent netlabels (such as the fantastic and thoroughly recommended Siberian/Muscovite Electronica) will adopt to prevent listeners from hearing their music as easily as possible. There is no need for Tal-like complexity or Petrosianesque obfuscation.
Мой русский вентиляторы теперь, глядя на что последнее предложение, и думал: мы желаем вам, как пишет Филидор играли в шахматы, вы идиот. И наш лидер борется тигров в то время как твой имеет лицо, как дно ребенка.
Anyway, here's the sampler - I think you'll enjoy it. Props to the comment, "Veryyyy beauty!"
If you've simply pressed "Play" and slumped back onto your crisp-infested and beer-stained sofa, the first thing you'll hear (after a Slav Barry White intoning, "Elyectrrronicah") is Copy Paste Feelings, a pleasant blend of filter-swept doo-wop vocals and easy-paced trip-hop. The same formula is used for much of Grey-Purple, the album, and Grey-Purple (feat. Long Arm), the title track of said album, so expect to hear plenty of white noise and dollops of piano, rhodes piano, subtle pads, drones and the occasional trip-hop stutter.
The third track, Faked Imaginary Freedom, is slightly more funky. The claps are rather intrusive but the gorgeous sampled/chopped pads make up for them. Fiji beds the rhythms in a hypnotic swathe of synths and pianos; when the beats disappear, as in the latter stages of the trumpet-flecked Ocean In My Head, one feels as though the music is even better for it.
Frustratingly, the pseudo-DJ-Shadow On 17th Floor has drool-worthy sustained piano chords, but would be much better without the half-hearted breakbeat-and-clap accompaniment.
Next up is Smiles Before Bedtime (smiles during bedtime are better), which essays a lovely descending piano line in tandem with some crunchy white noise and marvellously delicate synth chirrups. Again, not too sure about the kick and clap - but bear in mind that I listen to all my music on an iTincan - so adjust to taste.
Night of White Flies - not the most enticing of titles - contains a snippet of a classical recording that I trust is old enough to be out of copyright. Mind you, Fiji may have recorded it himself and aged it in the studio. Music software can do almost anything nowadays, bar curing Country & Western. You'll like it if you like crunchiness, guitars, scratches, violin solos and Mom-and-Pop vocals.
Grey-Purple is a rare thing in the world of electronica/trip-hop; it's so warm and fluffy that it encourages one to cuddle the nearest thing to the listener, whether that be a spouse, teddy bear or the biscuit barrel. Personally, I think it's just a sneaky Russian trick to save on heating bills.
If you like the album, please drop a "thank you" email in Electronica or Fiji's inbox and/or empty your glass and throw it in your fireplace.
It's a mystery to me how Luxus-Arctica netlabel managed to take this photo of CTW's reception suite. The guards tell me that the CCTV footage went offline at a crucial moment. The only physical evidence of their break-in was the hundreds of dead starlings in the street below. Strange.
It won't have escaped your attention that computer wizardry is rampaging through electronica, IDM, minimal and hip-hop, where it's common for percussion one-shots and layered synths to be sampled and chopped to death, but I remain surprised by how relatively few artists delight in mangling acoustic instruments and "found" sounds. There's a delicious, malicious joy to be had in hearing a familiar and/or traditional sound getting kicked up the backside by music software.
I imagine that Erik Nilsson must wear a virtual pair of hobnailed boots as he stomps around Stockholm, because the eight marvellous tracks that constitute his restrained, gentle and ingenious Recollage are an acoustic mangler's delight; he makes the old-fashioned sound delightfully modern. Peruse the back cover of his album and you'll find the following:
Recollage is a development of simple musical elements and ideas towards greater complexity and richness of detail using real and sampled instruments, assorted acoustic sounds, and synthesizers & audio manipulation techniques.
Honestly, I don't know why I bother. How am I supposed to waffle on at (very great) length about records if the musicians have already written a cogent summary of said album and, what's more, in better English than yours truly can muster? What a cheek.
The opener, Into Motion, uses a sneaky compositional trick - one used to great effect by Trentemøller on Take Me Into Your Skin - whereby various elements are added one by one to create a wall of sound that, at the crescendo, drops away completely to be replaced by a quiet, fast-paced rhythm. The unexpected dynamics will tug at your ears. The track is an enticing blend of upbeat, sparkling guitar, somnolent piano/harpsichord and some ambient excursions. Its cheerful and gentle soundscape will perhaps remind readers of another Luxus-Arctica album, Global by The Lights Galaxia, reviewed here.
Timepiece features a grandfather clock's two-note chime up front and centre (and slightly too loud, methinks). I doubt whether the clockmaker would approve of how Mr Nilsson makes it repeat, stutter and pan all over the place, but I approve of the mangling, especially when it's accompanied by a gently picked acoustic guitar, a cut-and-paste harmonica and ambient crackles.
The first thirty seconds of Rumore del Roma explain why this album is such a treat for the ears: you'll hear a ghostly piano; the distant wailing of guitar feedback; a chopped and reversed bit of sound; cheerful guitar strumming; the dusty pops and grumbling of old vinyl; and the creaking of an unoiled door hinge that slurs and slows down into a snare drum roll that kicks off some semi-distorted, mandolin-backed trip-hop. There's also a violin stuffed in there somewhere, courtesy of Sofie Louzou. Phew. Then, after a couple of minutes of pleasurable head-nodding, most of the sounds fade away until only the ghostly, plaintive piano can be faintly heard on the right-hand side of the stereo field. A few bars later, it's joined by a toy-like xylophone, only this can be heard up close and on the left. It's the thoughtful treatment of such ostensibly simple elements that make the album a pleasure to hear. Try it yourself:
Erik Nilsson - Rumore del Roma
No, wait. You can't. Luxus-Arctica is like America's Liberty Bell: an inspiring symbol of independence that can't make a sound because it's cracked. L-A will give you the whole album free of charge but won't supply links to individual tracks. *bites knuckles, screams* Gentlemen, please rethink your policy.
Allow CTW to flex its mighty muscles. *thump* *yell* *bash* Got it. God, I'm good. Let's try again:
15 Minutes of Boredom might be retitled as 2 Minutes, 15 Seconds of Bewilderment. I can't explain how such diverse elements as movie dialogue, a repitched, reversed and disrespected guitar riff, heavy breathing, a high-passed filter sweep (and the occasional interjection of Fred Astaire's name) can in any shape or form constitute music; but they do. Hands up who would like to see Erik Nilsson's workflow. Yes, me too. Ableton or Logic or Cubase and an MPC, do you think? Knowing my luck, it's probably done with witchcraft, beer and Lego.
I rather like the compressed story that can be inferred from a song called Old Piano/Bad Back. What's even more likeable are the ticking clock intro, the fluttering flute, various ominous thumps and scrapes, a thoroughly unsettling vocalised noise and, best of all, the appearance of a slide guitar redolent of Ry Cooder's soundtrack to Paris, Texas. (A quick aside - we Creative Commons music fans, though fans of electronica, minimal, etc., are starved of guitar music. Please, riffers of the world, unite: you have nothing to lose but your mullets.) It's a slow, solemn, piece of ambient electronica until someone whispers "Let's go!" in your left ear, and the guitars get up off their porch seats to welcome the arrival of a kick drum. All of a sudden, the piece transmutes into neo-Hillbilly and threatens to get epic. Disappointingly, it goes back into its shell soon afterwards, but it's still a terrific track.
There's a similar flirtation with grandiosity in the title track, Recollage. It starts with manipulated kitchenware samples (I'm fond of how the sharpening of a knife doubles as a very lazy hi-hat), a fuzzy bass, inoffensive guitar doodlings, and a door opening and closing; it continues with a beautifully apt Moog-like synth, an upright piano and a not-so-happily-mixed snare drum; and it threatens to break out into a sweeping piece of Kate Bushness before fading to an ambient burble.
To my mind, the ghosts of Kate Bush (consider the gentle tempo, the mandolin and the sample of a cocking rifle in her Army Dreamers) and Pink Floyd flit in and out of some of these tracks. I get a Floydian tang from the mournful, descending guitar and bass lines to Tail Lights; as the tempo picks up and morphs into light rock, one half expects some Roger Waters kill-yourself-now-because-life-is-a-cosmic-joke lyrics and a searing guitar solo from Dave Gilmour. Instead, the track shies away from the bombastic and stays true to the album's intimate milieu with some subdued glitching.
Finally, imagine you're ten years old and have just got your hands on your first guitar. It's a clapped-out acoustic, half the strings are missing and those that remain are tired, saggy and barely in tune. Then imagine that you've just learned to play a riff that reminds you of Marc Bolan's T-Rex and, pleased with yourself, you play it repeatedly. Your pre-pubertal friends form a rhythm section by slapping cardboard boxes and bending rulers on table edges. Welcome to the first half of the pertinently-named Little Demon. Spent, you stop playing only to hear music floating across the road from that creepy house with the drawn curtains. It's barely audible but it's definitely someone playing a spooky motif on an ambient pad preset over and over again. Welcome to the coda of Little Demon.
Surprisingly, this album reminds me of, would you believe it, the ghost stories of M.R. James, which often tease their overly logical Edwardian protagonists by suggesting that there is something disturbing lurking over the brow of the next hill - if only they care to look. Thanks to his harnessing of modern techniques to long-familiar sounds, and the inclusion of the odd gasp, wheeze, scrape and scratch, Mr Nilsson's work shares the same ambivalent qualities. Indeed, I hope I'm not doing him a disservice by suggesting that parts of his album would do very well as soundtracks to James's tales.
If you fall in love with Recollage, please remember to send a "thank you" email/cash/eye of newt and toe of frog to the talented Erik Nilsson and the estimable, double-barrelled Luxus-Arctica netlabel.
Listening to the various tracks from a newly-discovered good album is like seeing familiar numbers pop up in the first few seconds of a national lottery draw. The first appearance is pleasing and so is the second; the third gives you a sense of satisfaction and achievement; two more good ones appear and you jump on your chair; one more pops up and you scream at the TV/stereo/neighbourhood that you'll devote your life to living in a huge chateau others less fortunate than you if the last two numbers are the ones you want. If you're like me, you'll end up with a lingering sense of the futility of life and a muddy sofa. But fear not - at least CTW has some free CC music for you to hear after you've stopped shaking your fists at fickle Fate.
Your post-lottery placebo takes the form of Bu-Bu-Bubbles by Foam, an English musician about whom I know little, for which I blame Wikileaks. If only he'd insulted a potenate or two.
There aren't many traditional musical elements (melody, harmony, development) herein. The eight tracks might best be described as beatless minimal and melodic ambient; parts of it are certainly experimental. Foam has a habit of combining featherlight tics and swirls with knocks and bangs that push up hard against loudspeaker cones. The good news is that his productions skills make his EP a palatable listen.
I'll start with the album's seventh track, Widget, because I'm a hip-swinging mo-fo who can't count. The first thirty seconds of Widget are nigh-on silent; the next minute consists of a metallic sound (the widget?) carrying out Chinese water torture (not quite the same as American waterboarding, my pedantic and politically correct chums) on the listener's frontal lobes before an answering beep pans back and forth. The only other element is a lo-fi organ sound that plays a couple of chords before the track (and the listener's lust for life) peters out. I've decided via a process of elimination that it's an experimental meditative piece - because you certainly can't whistle it, sing it or dance to it. (And I'm running out of brackets.)
Next up is a new piece of technology that will augment the planet's already over-intrusive surveillance systems. Gum is full of synths that are pitched so high and, towards the end of the track, become so shrill that only people under forty will be able to hear them. If you can't hear them, you're too old or a Motorhead fan or you play banging techno in your tarted-up hatchback. Or all three. I'd like to see that Venn diagram.
That's got the two most challenging tracks out of the way. You'll have noticed, particularly with Gum, that the sound quality is superb. So it is with the first track on the album, Day-To-Day, where the toy-like sound of a looping nine-note melody forms a musical backbone, around which is wrapped Geiger Counter-ish glitches, and percussive one-shots that sound like out-takes from Wall-E. It's a happy track.
Crab Attack is not a musical description of a naval doctor's waiting room on a Monday morning. Instead, you'll be faced with low-passed, bubbling sine waves, noises reminiscent of a fridge that's been left open, and some glitchy percussion that Riverdances right up against your eardrums.
The two minutes of Trouble remind me of the relentless music used to brainwash Michael Caine in The Ipcress File. Play it while switching your kitchen lights on and off and the reverberating, ambient washes will have you under the KGB's thumb in no time. By the way, Caine + 1960s + John Barry are widely acknowledged as a very good thing indeed. Resistance is futile: you're now under Jeff Bezos's thumb.
Bumbleebee is the type of track that's starting to pop up on the soundtracks of indie puzzle games: a half-formed melody from an inoffensive synth with lots of glitches and bells popping up now and then to keep you awake. Like many such tracks, they will burble away in the background so that you can concentrate on other matters - but if you sit down and listen to them, they will mesmerise.
I've left Offthesky's remix of Madness until last to reward your perseverance. It improves on the well-built but bland original (think Jane Russell) by blending minimal with ambient to become something more enticing (think Sophia Loren). Your clapped-out Nokia/it-looked-ok-in-the-catalogue Panasonic/of-course-I-didn't-mortgage-the-house Bang & Olufsen will enjoy it.
I must explain to the trendier of my listeners that Archipel netlabel released Bu-Bu-Bubbles when wing collars and monocles were the height of fashion. My apologies to the label (and its enlightened policy of making their commercial albums available for free after a few months on sale) for taking so long to leave the Sea of Despond, crawl onto the beach, walk upright and develop ears.
I've tagged the album as "experimental" because CTW doesn't have a paradoxical category. There aren't many albums that could be described as "easy to listen to" but not "easy listening". Foam has a spiritual, transcendent quality. If you're looking for a non-theological musical path to spirituality/nirvana/chocolate/becoming a hipster emo, you could do a lot worse than listen to Bu-Bu-Bubbles, contemplate the ineluctable modalities of life and wonder whether it might help to use a different set of lottery numbers next week. Or you could send a thank-you email to Archipel or - the horror! the horror! - buy one of their commercial albums.
To paraphrase Henry Ford, you can have any Broque netlabel album cover painted any colour you want so long as it is black and white. This, the latest in an unbroquen line of drab album covers, does its best to dissuade listeners from exploring Applause Phenomena, a classy minimal EP by Dennis Korsunski (A.K.A. Clapan, otherwise known as Information Ghetto), but Catching The Waves is made of stupid stern stuff. Advanced electronic rhythms from the Russian Black Sea coast via a Bavarian netlabel? Pah. It's all in a day's work for CTW. Chancellor Merkel, put your fat ankles up on a cushion and enjoy some multikulti.
The opener, About Chords, begins with skipping, scratching percussion that forms a spiky bed for the titular synth chords, which are either cold and distant, slathered in reverb and high-pitched delay, or upfront and cuddly. The contrast makes for an enjoyable listen. Yes, a driving hi-hat appears halfway through the track, as agreed in UN Resolution 1998 (Minimal Tropes Being For The Benefit Of Dancefloors), but that's merely there to keep your head nodding: the real interest lies in the off-stage noises and clever use of reverb and echoing pads that tar-and-feather the basic rhythm.
At eight minutes long, today's recommended track is a flagrant violation of CTW's renowned First Law of Dance Music (in short, two's company; three's a crowd), but I forgive it in the same spirit in which I forgive @stephenfry for jawing on and on: to quibble in the face of such good-natured entertainment would be churlish.
Applause Phenomena contains a number of Good Things: beautifully fashioned granular ticks and flecks; a rolling but polite kick drum; a splashy snare; groovy, good-natured vocal phrases; a bass line that sounds like an ogre turning over in his sleep; bursts of applause that are more like white-noise interjections than the usual hackneyed attempt to inject atmosphere; gentle pads and spooky lead synths that almost imperceptibly guide the ear through the plethora of sounds that tease the eardrum from left and right, near and far; and the dawning realisation that the track is unerringly getting groovier and yet more profound while at the same time kicking out like a potato-faced English footballer confronted by a wily continental.
Let me catch my breath for a minute. I'm not used to writing paragraphs. *puff* Right, onwards.
At its best, minimal/techno/dance/insert-suitable-genre-name-here transcends its repetitive origins to become electronica or fast-paced ambient; something that has depth. It's not just about endlessly repeating a four-bar loop and hoping that listeners will dance around a pile of handbags and manbags on a nightclub floor. Enough of my pseudery. Press the little love triangle below and draw your own conclusions:
You're allowed to dislike it. But you'll have to return my spare snuggie and we can no longer be friends.
After that comes the "Less Softbeat" remix of the same track. It relies heavily on the goodwill engendered by the appearance of familiar elements. Sad to say, it's a competent but rather anonymous track that would have benefited from more melodic or percussive variety.
The "support" in Old Cool Support refers, I think, to the Amen Break-type rhythm underpinning the crunchy and distorted pads and stabs that ready you for a dance-floor banger. However, the appearance of a simple and slow three-note bassline confounds expectations, as does the appearance of a wildly panning and repitching pseudo-harpsichord. Once another synth pops in with a rhythmic hook and is joined by a shower of clicks and high-pitched pops and crackles, the track veers between funky profundity and profound funkiness. It came a very close second to today's recommended selection and is still hoping that drug tests will reveal that it was cheated of glory.
The last track, Snow Report, threatens to disappoint with its extremely unoriginal four-to-the-floor kick intro until superb, machine-tooled incidental noises flesh out the rhythm and warm synths float in from on high to reassure you that time spent listening to this album is time well spent. I'm fond of the brief stop-start breaks made from diamond-hard percussive elements that are dropped in a sea of reverb and then high-passed and panned out to the extreme edge of the stereo field.
Speaking of which, the whole album is a testament to Dennis Korsunki's production wizardry; in places he has squeezed the proverbial quart into a stereo pint pot, relying heavily on the fact that you've probably got two ears. (A mono recording wouldn't be nearly as impressive.) Imagine you're back at your schooldesk and enjoying (ha!) a maths lesson. Forget your pimples and your crush on the teacher, and concentrate on the protractor spread out in front of you. Now imagine a click, pop, burble, snap, drum, synth and bass placed on each line of the 180 degree arch. Each element has its own niche. Imagine further that each sound sits comfortably in its own spatial reverb and has had all its superfluous frequencies cut away. Suddenly, your ears can make sense of the dozens of sounds thrown at you. You can solve quadratic equations. You will go to Harvard and bang as many students with superb teeth as possible. Life is good, all thanks to free CC-licensed music supplied by a hard-working netlabel and a maverick Russkie.
Write 100 times: I must send a thank-you email to Broque netlabel. And comb your hair.
Kemuzik One is a compilation of folk-pop songs sung by guitar-clutching winsome individuals with tremulous and/or gravelly voices. There are three acknowledged reactions to this type of thing:
Buy a machine-gun;
Stick a candle in a bottle, chill out and enjoy the glory of life;
Get arrested by the roadside at three in the morning, drunk as a skunk, clad in nothing but a pair of baggy grey Y-fronts and bawling an old flame's name at the moon.
I chose the second option; guns are expensive. Option three can wait.
Kemuzik One is an unusual release, partly because it's not one of the (very nice) ambient & electronica albums that swamp the free music world, but mostly because it's a compilation that hasn't succumbed to the "one supermodel and her East German hammer-thrower friends on a girls' night out" paradigm.* There's a spookily high number of good tracks amongst the fourteen on offer, many of which have been supplied by stalwarts of the CC music scene, though I must point out that one or two of the tracks' endings suffer from harsh edits.
To demonstrate this unusual achievement, I'll work very hard and highlight the first track on the album, in the hope you'll be seduced by Dutchman Thijs Kuijken's ukelele and the seductive sing-a-long feel of a hymn to forestry, avians and flames. (Folkies, eh? Tsk.)
Continuing my laziness, let's move to the second track. Madelaine Hart has a smoky bottom range and a tremulous upper register, so comes off as a non-substance abusing Billie Holiday. Have a listen to Inside Out, wherein a Hackney-residing Australian (who played Glastonbury in 2009) will make your bottom lip wobble:
You can pop along to Jamendo to download her two (criminally ignored) free albums or buy them from iTunes and Amazon if you want to help her out.
Cementing my slothness for all time, I come to the third track, Fragile Meadow by The Black Atlantic, who are fond of wibbling on about nature. It must be something in the Dutch water.
After mentioning that The Dada Weatherman's Painted Dream comes across as Dylan backed by a slightly confused Sibelius, and noting that the late blooming of electronica in Tim Fite's misery-fest Where Is My Woman is the only proof that Kemusik One was recorded in the 21st century, I'll leave you with Allison Crowe's Effortless, in which she croons over a piano and effortlessly evokes just about every shampoo advert ever made. La Crowe's current download figure at Jamendo stands at more than 120,000, which is a cheering thought.
Ill health and the nature of writing about a compilation has perforce meant a certain brevity in my descriptions; my apologies to the fine artists who I have neglected to mention. It might be an idea for curious (and curiouser) listeners to follow the links on Kemusik's Bandcamp page and see just how deep the free music rabbit hole goes. Please don't forget to thank the musicians and/or buy their commercial music.
My thanks to everyone responsible, especially Kemuzik supremo Przemek Bobnis, for adding this very welcome platter of free folk-pop sugar to the free music buffet. With most compilations, it's usually best to cut off the thick crust and keep the tasty but disappointingly small pie; you may find that Kemusik One will force you to loosen your belt a notch.
There's a story behind this interruption of my intensely relaxed posting schedule. Recently, I've wasted a fair amount of time on listening to, selecting and then writing about albums that I've subsequently realised contained copyrighted samples, and have been forced to toss the half-finished review in the bin and move on. What galls me is that the albums in question came from reputable netlabels who proudly display a Creative Commons licence on their website.
The whole point of a CC licence is that the holder has already given permission for the user to download and share: there's no need to ask. But if that same album contains samples that are still owned by someone else and who has not given permission for their work to be disseminated, then the whole process is rendered meaningless, irrespective of whether those samples come from an old, obscure song or album. Either an album is Creative Commons or it's not; bending the rules plays
right into the hands of those who criticise the CC paradigm and accuse
everyone who enjoys a legal sharing culture to be thieves. One of the reasons CTW is not the fastest draw in the West is because of delays caused by the above. I'm not a musical encyclopaedia and can't check every piece of music used in a song, so I rely on musicians and netlabels not to abuse the Creative Commons licence.
On a related note, and to explain my modus operandi to new readers of Catching The Waves, I usually recommend a free album and then remind readers that it's often possible to send a donation or buy more of the artist's output. Today, I'll recommend an album that is not Creative Commons-licensed and not free at all, but which is actually a commercial album that is technically and regrettably "free" despite the best and entirely honourable intentions of the artists involved. And it's not the one pictured above. It's this one:
Machinarium is an award-winning point-and-click game set in a mechanical world that looks like a cross between Sesame Street and Bladerunner. The Czech makers, Amanita, thoughtfully released the game without Digital Rights Management (DRM), which meant three things:
Buyers wouldn't have to enter tiresome sixteen-digit serial codes to enjoy what was now their property;
Equally, there would be no awkward online authentication;
Anyone could copy the game from a torrent site.
Sad to say, Amanita reported last week that "only 5-15% of Machinarium players actually paid for the game". However, they also announced a "pirate amnesty" in which everyone could buy the game plus its superb official soundtrack and a free bonus EP for just $5 instead of the usual $20, an offer that prompted geek extrordinaire Wil Wheaton to encourage gamers to "do the right thing." Consequently, Amanita sold over 17,000 copies of Machinarium in a week and has extended its amnesty until 16th August.
We deduce from this that a tweet from @wilw to his 1.67m followers...
*flutters eyelashes*
...is rather more effective than Amanita's $1000 publicity budget, and that people will pay for content that is available for free elsewhere if the content is desirable enough; if the money goes direct to the game developers; if they're brainwashed by celebrities advised by people they trust, and if they want to help the artist to produce more of that desirable work.
In the interests of balance, many of the people who have bought the game recently have done so because the publicity has led them to the game for the first time, or because they felt the price was previously too high to justify a purchase. Not everyone on the internet flies the skull-and-crossbones.
However, what sets the game's teasing puzzles, quirky humour and dusty, gently rusting cityscapes off to a tee is Tomáš Dvořák's playful ambient-electronica soundtrack. Dvořák has been called an "electro-instrumentalist" and is a graduate of the Prague Academy of Visual Arts. In Machinarium, he has cleverly spliced elderly analogue synths, smooth sweeps of radio interference/white noise and barely audible, distorted vocals (from an old Apple speech synthesiser) with traditional acoustic instruments. The latter are often filtered through a granular effect, resulting in a clanging, grimy soundscape that suggests Eastern European jazz and post-Cold War industrial decline to my susceptible and over-imaginative ears.
Rarely has such an eclectic, old-fashioned collection of instruments (piano, clarinet, kalimba, metallophones, accordion, melodica, double bass and cello) sounded so 21st century. The result is oxymoronic: melodic ambient. I'll illustrate just how melodic and just how ambient the official soundtrack is by showcasing a track from the other, free album. (Logic, I laugh in your AND/NOT gate.)
Impressive how the piano floats on top of the pads, background vocals and distorted noise, isn't it? By The Wall really blossoms if you wear headphones. The clarinet intro is better than a shot of whisky with a morphine chaser.
Here, Dvořák conveys the whimsical and enticing atmosphere of the game with a jolly bass line, reverberating percussion and, mid-track, a delicately tuneful blast of radio interference:
Please note, those tracks are from the free five-track EP. There are 14 more dreamy examples of sublimity on the official soundtrack, which can be bought separately - but it makes more sense to get both albums simply by buying the game. Do so, and you get the
remastered soundtrack, the bonus EP and a gentle, amusing, mesmerising
game that is suitable for grandchildren, grandparents and all those who
contribute to the global economy. "Buy one, get two free" is a pretty good deal. Speaking of which, I'd like to see Aminita continue its amnesty until the end of the month, when people are more likely to have cash to spare.
If you do get the official soundtrack, look out for the lightly menacing The Black Cap Brotherhood Theme, the turn-your-woofer-down Clockwise Operetta, the café-jazz of The End (Prague Radio) and The Glasshouse With Butterfly, which is one of the best crackling, echoing atmospheric pieces of ambient it has been my privilege to hear.
Failing all that, simply download the free Free Machinarium Bonus EP and keep your money in your pocket. After all, this is where you come to get good, legally free music, isn't it? I won't tell anyone that you have short arms and long pockets. But I do have a song for you:
Pixel Mixel by Bitbasic has been festering on my hard drive for quite a while. You see, I've already reviewed two of his albums and so I'm wary of appearing blinkered in my choices. In my defence, I declined to review his most recent free outing, Sprinkling Rainbows, because I found it lacklustre. However, talent will out. (Google Translation: I love this and hope you will too.) Released two months ago by Cologne's Rec72, one of the best CC netlabels around, Pixel Mixel offers 11 tracks of bluesy, glitchy, swinging, drill-and-bass goodness, and confirms the Bitster's status as a musician to follow. That doesn't mean you can stalk him or search his dustbins.
Now, I hope I don't offend anyone, but it seems to me that quite a lot of IDM/jungle/electronica seems intent on making listeners' headphones flap like a crane who's just aborted a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. Over-excited by the heady glitching and sampling possibilities of computer music, some artists tend to throw glitch after squawk after screech at their tracks and, understandably, can forget some of the compositional (Bit)basics, although I readily admit that that is their prerogative, and good luck to them. However, Pixel Mixel, like the previously reviewed Grating Rainbows and Leonard, contains melodies and riffs and, blessed relief, remembers to ring the changes with different tempi and a broad palette(SP) of sounds.
To continue this deadly dull riveting line of reason, your Honour, I should add that there are three main strands to Bitbasic's music and all of them are on display here. I give you exhibits A, B and C (and recommend that your Wigness give special attention to the jazz guitar-infused, mesmerising and schizophrenic title track):
(A) Lullaby-like melodies, often formed from bell-like tones: Bitbasic - An Opener
(B) Blistering, jungle-cum-breakbeat glitchy workouts and (C) swinging, swaggering, snap-your-hips downtempo blues riffs (I refer you to the sections at 1:53 & 4:05): Bitbasic - Pixel Mixel
But all that is irrelevant. What matters is that Bitbasic's music is melodic, funky and entertaining. His tracks are well-structured, varied in both texture and tempo (this is not as prevalent in electronica as one might think) and contain tunes that will spring from your lips while you're in the bath/supermarket/jail.
Fish Restaurant combines soothing and soaring synth arcs with an utterly mad glitch breakdown about two-thirds of the way through; Milk is as mellow and atmospheric as a Pink Floyd/Lemon Jelly mash-up (I love the stabs of distorted noise that sound like a shorting electricity sub-station); and Oily Slither will appeal to the millions tens of you out there who like to hear roughed-up synths swing in a downtempo, bluesy manner. I must also mention Sift If You Like, whose wildly panning, now-it's-clean-now-it's-dirty bass is joyfully funky. All of the tracks mentioned are stuffed to the gunnels with extraneous noises, but these are slotted in so skilfully that they enhance the listening experience.
If Pixel Mixel had turned up at the weigh-in with a nice round figure of, say, eight tracks, it would be a knock-out, an almost certain winner of the yet-to-be-invented "Netlabel Album of the Year" award. As it is, it's still a marvellous release (I like all the tracks, really) and makes me thankful, yet again, that artists like Bitbasic are having such fun with the Creative Commons model. On second thoughts, it would still get my vote. I'm so soft.
(This may come as a surprise to newcomers to netlabel land, but fans of
CC music often have to dodge a double-edged sword wielded by, no, not
record label executives, but the artists themselves, lusting madly after
triple-CD concept albums and the chance to release 18 of their best
tracks in one shiny package. Many CC releases would be all the stronger
if artists could refrain from spreading themselves too thinly.)
If you like the album, try Leonard and Grating Rainbows and put together what will be a very entertaining playlist that will make your friends considerably less trendy than you. Then please do your good deed for the day and send Bitbasic and/or Rec72 a thank you email.
Bye. What? No, I'm going. I need a crate of beer salad. What do you mean you can't get enough of Bitbasic's creamy, crunchy goodness? (Ewww.) All right, here's what I'm going to do. Just for you, I'm going to ruin my reputation for impartiality and welcome another old friend back to CTW. It just so happens that there's a stonkingly good Bitbasic track on another Rec72 release and it comes with a beautifully relaxing album picture that any ambient artist would treasure.
Heh. Yes, Professor Kliq is back in town and this time he's brought his lab rats. I'll be brief because my brain is tired and so are your eyes. Download this and you'll own All Control, a funking Big Beat track as only the Prof knows how to do it (woody synth leads ahoy!) and four remixes of said track (one of which will confirm that Bitbasic has just as distinctive a style as PK's). The remaining tracks get three thumbs up - I must see the doctor about that - and a "We're not worthy" bow to Funkmeister Zentraal, otherwise known as Rec72. (I'm sure they're following me down the street. I must secure my dustbins.) Anyway, wrap your shell-likes around this:
The man's not ready for the bathchair just yet, is he?
Sincere apologies to the obviously talented Pisu, Akashic Grenade and RoybOt for not bothering to write a proper review of their, and I quote, "perfectly sutured gabba techno dubstepped breakbeats" but my laptop has run out of ink. All Control is good, clean fun and packs a punch. It's also free. Enjoy the weekend.
Regular readers will know that it's my long-term ambition to make CTW redundant, superfluous and generally as irrelevant as BP's PR department. To that end, I sometimes add similar websites to my "General Netlabel Sites" category, an honour so highly regarded in the Creative Commons music world that it reacts as though a new star had ascended to the heavens. (Yeah, right.) And lo, it came to pass that yours truly looked upon the works of one Thomas Rauskamp and was well pleased.
Thomas is the editor of Germany's Beat magazine (it's similar to the UK's Computer Music Magazine), the only Hauptstraße periodical I know of that devotes time and space (reviews, interviews and roundtables) to the Creative Commons netlabel scene. Germany's position, Cologne's in particular, as Netlabel Zentraal makes me wonder, in a chicken-meets-egg analogy, if Beat spurred on the CC music movement there or vice versa. It's rare for a commercial publication to take the free music scene so seriously, but Beat does so because it realises that it's fun, refreshing and reflects the changes that the internet has wrought upon popular culture.
Thomas's enthusiasm for the scene is so great that he has forsaken all notions of propriety and started blogging reviews of CC albums, an idea which, as we all know, is monumentally stupid. More to the point, he reviews frequently and with great insight, and invariably explains various aspects of the netlabel scene while doing so. As such, I urge you to turn your traitorous backs on CTW and slake your thirst for good, legally free music by visiting Thomas' Posterous as soon as you can. If you do, you'll wonder why you ever turned to heroin and crack to obliterate the yawning mental chasms that opened while you waited...and waited...for the next CTW post. No, don't thank me, meine leiblinge, thank Thomas: he's the one doing all the heavy lifting.
What's that? You don't believe that there are much better free music sites than this one? Are you telling me that you are...
*digs deep into my vault of puns*
...doubting Thomas? (Sorry, sorry. That was a particularly egregious joke, a low blow in the fight for Creative Commons credibility. I won't do it again.) If you visit his website, you'll find lots of lovely netlabels to explore, and you'll have found a great new resource for squeezing enjoyment out of this magical online world we call Duhweb, or Dasveb, as my German friends refer to it. Look, trust me. I should know all about these things, having been reviewing free music for a few years. After all, I've been at it for so long, I'm preposterous.
Once upon a time, it was fashionable among the music press to denigrate heavy rock, prog rock and heavy metal (think Led Zep, Deep Purple, Yes, Rush, Motorhead) as boringly repetitive. The mantra went that rock relied too much on a single riff played over and over again ad nauseam, with endless guitar and, save us, O Lord, drum solos for light relief. Where was the innovation, the rebelliousness, the spunk? Hence, said the poet, punk. Almost overnight, the Gods of Rock were kicked upstairs to Valhalla, from where they grimaced at the usurpers who had saved music from the tyranny of repetition by thrashing out three-chord riffs at four beats to the bar. No, I don't quite understand it either.
Which brings me to electro. Or house. Or fidget house. Or fuss-budget techno doodah or whatever new genre has spawned on the sticky floors of European nightclubs. Today's slab of sound hails from Italy's Sostanze netlabel and features - how shocking - repetitive riffs in a four-to-the-floor situation. Why don't the critics stamp on such music as they did for whiskery rock? Three reasons:
The sonic variation inherent in intensely filtered synth riffs sustains listeners' aural interest. (Impressed? Yes, my brain is a sponge of pleasure.)
For all its repetition, electro contains more rhythmic variety than the average 70s rock song, due to breakdowns and glitches, although prog rock has a "Get Out Of Jail Free" card. Rush is/are exempt from this discussion anyway 'cos they are fab.
Raver Boom by Bebop The Dog is a five-track EP that minds its manners. Most of the tracks are less than five minutes long and all start quite sedately before dropping an electro bomb a minute or two later. My recommended track features no intellectual fibre whatosever (it rhymes "Aztecer" with "ass-kicker") but has a considerable amount of what car fans call "grunt". Two minutes in and your undercrackers will thank you.
It's a little raw in places, but it's energy on a stick, isn't it? And it's free.
The start of Intro is deceptive - keep a finger on the volume control or else the absolutely monstrous rising tone will pop something dear to you, be it speakers, eardrums or other body parts. Bebop The Dog gives you 60 seconds to recover before unleashing a riff that's stickier than toffee candy floss. The same could be said for the second track (which might actually be the EP's highpoint) Come Back and, er, all the other songs. (Who mentioned repetition?) I'm curious as to how the dancefloor will receive these tracks - they lack the pristine production of a top studio and producer - but I'm sure they'd provoke one or two hipsters to bust a move and flutter their eyebrows at the DJ.
Right, onwards. The title track (Raver Boom, for those who aren't taking the smart drugs) bounces cheerfully under a ragga vocal and some Daft Punk low-pass filtering. Bad Boy has fun swapping its introductory pitch-wobbling synth riff, dropping it for a fairly mellow electro bass riff (if there is such a thing) and thus embarking on a stop-start odyssey that gives poor dancers some cue points with which to regain their dignity. I laughed at the dog bark that bursts into one break. The dub-like siren is the icing on the wobbly cake.
The EP ends with Loop a Looza, the highlight of which is the dive-bombing bass line. It's not the most memorable of tracks, mainly because the dive-bombing bass line will interfere with your short-term memory.
In short, Raver Boom will supply electro, fidget and (my eyes!) nu rave fans with the recommended daily intake of breakdowns, white noise sweeps, bouncing kick drums and gritty bass lines. I am therefore grateful to Bebop The Dog and Sostanza netlabel for the free CC fun. If you enjoyed the album, please show your gratitude by sending them a "thank you" email or a donation or a bill for your new hearing aids.
Here is a true story, told in the hope that you will forgive CTW for making more comebacks than a boomerang: not ten seconds before I pressed the "Die, die, die!" button and published the very last post at Catching The Waves, one of my lackeys presented a missive, written on vellum, from a devout music fan. I sighed, pawed the letter from the proffered velvet cushion and proceeded to scream.
The letter was from a Robert Nagle, Esq. I dimly remembered some nonsense from six months beforehand, when he had contacted me and announced that he was going to investigate this "free music" mullarkey and see if there was anything worth hearing. If he found something notable, would I be interested in his conclusions? Busy as I was with matters of state, I allowed him to kiss my imperial ring - yes, thank you, that's quite enough of that, my dirty-minded readership - and shooed him away with all the panache of an in-demand haute couturier. Now, here he was again, like an audio-crazed Terminator, to announce that he had listened to 2,200 albums on Jamendo and had picked the best eleven. That's two thousand, two hundred albums, people. Murderers have received less harsh sentences than that.
The only conclusion to be drawn is that Robert is completely off his chump truly dedicated to finding legally free music and that he should be taken to a secure facility and sedated all netmusic fans and artists owe him a debt of gratitude and other clichés. Not only has he written a long article about the eleven worthy albums, cunningly titled 11 Incredible Musicians You Can Download For Free (Best of Jamendo), he has also interviewed all of the artists concerned, thus providing PR manna from heaven - and a quick ego-rub - to people who like to release free music under a CC licence. Kudos, Robert.
And that's not all. Such is his love of the free stuff, Robert has also added additional addenda to his aural adumbration (sorry, my "a" key stuck momentarily) with an appraisal of Jamendo and tips on how to get the best out of it. He also mentions old CTW favourites Professor Kliq, Josh Woodward, Brad Sucks in dispatches and recommends good blogs, i.e. the must-visit Free Albums Galore.
It was absolutely fascinating to peruse the eleven picks and travel from Hungary to Bulgaria to Germany to France to Poland and ever onwards, like a drunk student with an InterRail pass. (The train to America must have been interesting...) Some I knew (Tryad's Listen and Antony Raijekov's Jazz U amongst others) but most I didn't. Some left me stony-faced, others happy. All were worth hearing. I won't bore you with my irrelevant opinions on the albums Robert has chosen, other than to declare that the strongest of the bunch, with apologies to the other worthy candidates, is that old Creative Commons warhorse, Aleksi Virta Meets Torsti At The Space Lounge. Väinö Ala-Härkönen's opus has been out for years, got reviewed up hill and down dale, passed the 42,000 download mark at archive.org, and has its own dogbasket in the CTW household. If you don't know it but are in the market for some trippy, dubby, funky, trip-hop-funk-bigbeat-dub-hop-skip-n-jump-hop, your luck is in. Enjoy...but not on Jamendo, 'cos I can't find it there. I think the internet hates me; I'm just too sexy for it. Take two: enjoy a selected track and ignore the album cover that follows it.
It's official: Catching The Waves is the world's first zombie Creative Commons music blog. Yes, I've killed it, buried it and sowed the grave with lime, but here it is, ready to rake its filthy, jagged fingernails across the ears throat of anyone it meets. Honestly, it's not my fault. I've finished with the damned thing but something I did in December has just raised its ugly head (out of the grave, as it were) and needs hitting with a sharp-edged spade. Besides, I know you're keening with grief at the demise of CTW, and this post will recommend a place where you can find free tunes aplenty. I'm so lovely.
Let me take you to a board meeting circa 2006. Around the polished oak table are heavies from WFMU, an American free-form non-commercial radio station that has been broadasting from New Jersey since 1958, and legal beagles from the Office of the New York State Attorney General. Think ceiling fans, drawn blinds and cigar smoke.
The chief lawyer twangs his red braces and announces that WFMU is to make contemporary music of all genres available to everyone across the state and compile a podsafe online music library.
"What am I, chopped liver?" asks a sweating radio luminary who has seen too many Woody Allen movies. "Who's going to pay for this smorgasbord?" he adds, hoping to sound sophisticated.
"Fugeddabout it," responds the lawyer, doing his best Chazz Palminteri impression. "Da Noo Yawk State Music Fund...
*CTW ignores the "You are offending millions of people" pop-up warning*
...is gonna ante up the dough. Da big record companies have been running a payola racket and we're giving youse somma da court settlements."
Hands are shaken and brows are mopped. But what to call this new archive of free music, this music archive that is free? Cigars are chomped, generic Italian dishes digested (as is one Chinese take-away, ordered by a newbie lawyer who hasn't yet been hazed at the local Masonic lodge), and legal pads filled with possible titles. At 3am, they have it: the Free Music Archive.
Bada-bing bada-boom.
In April 2009, the website went live under the joint management of WFMU and some non-profit community radio stations and venues. Go there and you'll find a constantly growing library of free music that you can listen to and download. There are also short artist biographies and links to the musicians' websites should you wish to investigate further. If you're a little overwhelmed by the volume of music and not sure where to start, investigate the curators' recommendations or take a look at the FMA's constantly updated charts. I'll let the site itself take over:
Inspired by Creative Commons and the open source software movement, the
FMA provides a legal and technological framework for curators, artists,
and listeners to harness the potential of music sharing. Every artist
page will have a bio and links to the artists’ home page for users to
learn more about the music they discover via the Free Music Archive. We
also seek to compensate artists directly. Artist, album and song
profiles will contain links to buy the full album from the artist
and/or label’s preferred vendor(s). Users can also “tip” an artist if
they like what they hear, sending a donation directly to the artists’
PayPal account. Artist profiles include tourdates, encouraging users
to step away from the glowing computer screen and see some real live
music.
Legally free music is still in for a bumpy ride, in my opinion, especially if it becomes truly popular. It remains to be seen whether the Creative Commons approach and the similar format adopted by the FMA can withstand the rigours of the internet. It's early days for the FMA (which will be refined as it grows in popularity), but it clearly has the potential to be a superb asset for fans of legally free music. Fingers crossed, everyone.
Anyone can visit and use the site, although music and editorial content is posted on an invitational basis - which brings me to the December stuff I mentioned.
*switches on megaphone*
AND NOW, AT LAST, SOME MUSIC. BUT FIRST, WITH THANKS TO ENGADGET, A JAPANESE ROBOT WILL PERFORM AN INTERPRETATIVE BREAK-DANCE SEQUENCE TO CONVEY MY JOY AT FINALLY KILLING CTW. TAKE IT AWAY, MANOI GO:
Yeah, baby.
The FMA were idiotic kind enough to invite me to put together a compilation cum playlist of tracks. They'll be familiar to regular visitors to CTW, but I hope they will serve as a good antidote to the "All free music is rubbish" argument. To whit: some free music is superb. I am most grateful to Cameron Perkins, the Culture Program Assistant at creativecommons.org, and Jason Sigal, FMA Managing Director, who were very patient with me.
The Catching The Waves FMA "Mix" (I'll make you go via the Creative Commons so you can bask in the glory of the CTW logo, which is made of plasticine and a lot of swearing.)
I'm rather annoyed. The day after I decide to drown this blog in the kitchen sink, an album emerges from my hard drive and demands a review.* Will you lot out there stop releasing good CC albums so I can finally throw CTW in the wood-chipper?
*retrieves CV from waste-paper basket*
Right, let's get on with it. "Werken" is a nom de plume of Tilman Ehrhorn, a Berlin-based music producer, composer, saxophone/reed player and sound designer. I don't have time for this. I am a busy man and I want a macchiato and some cake. He's a vastly experienced jazz musician, having collaborated with the likes of Wayne Shorter (I am not worthy, I am not worthy), Hamburg Sinfoniker, L'Atelier d'Orchestre, and has appeared on many jazz and electronica recordings and been involved in numerous German TV and theatre productions. I have a novel to write and languages to learn. Please let me go. He's also worked with Native Instruments, having designed presets for their highly regarded Massive, Absynth and FM8 softsynths, and helped to develop Kore 2, NI's software controller.
So, let's take a look at that CV...modern jazz, electronica, composer, professional sound designer. Hmm. If only someone with those talents decided to release an album. Or decided not to, allowing me to crochet my nose-hairs and spend more time feeling guilty about not attending the gym. Cake, I need cake. Wouldn't you know it, Mr Ehrhorn has done just that. In Sum, you'll find 11 tracks of dubby, crackly ambient that will delight fans of the terrific Urlaub Auf Balkonien, the Qwartz-winning album from Krill.Minima. Its stately, granular milieu will be the perfect fit for your brand new and not-at-all-blindingly-expensive Google Nexus One as you trudge through snow-laden streets.
Sum is about as hand-tooled as electronica gets. Werken has made nearly every sound on the album himself, using a modular synth to build the percussive elements and the lovely stabs of crackly goodness that permeate the surprisingly light reverb. I keep expecting a run-of-the-mill kick/snare/hi-hat combo to start up, but it never does. Instead, Werken stays true to his love of jazz improvisation, preferring to search for an overall structure derived from a combination of many elements rather than conform to something more overtly rigid. It's less "tsss tsss tsss tsss" and more "zzzt kssk domp fffn ussh". I may have used different halves of my brain to write those last two sentences.
This release from Zymogen netlabel (a very strokeable Italian netlabel that gets everything right apart from...*deep sigh*...making it tricky for amateurish CC blogs to preview or host their albums) won't make you tap your feet or nod your head, but it will tickle your fancy. My recommended track is C&P, but the link isn't working [EDIT: it is now. Thank you, Zymogen], so instead I'll proffer Surrender, four minutes of chopped-up white noise dub that will convince you that Tilman Ehrhorn is a talented musician who is adept at manipulating electronic sounds.
I'm sure he'd love to get a few emails thanking him for his free CC album. After all, his EP is greater than the Sum of its parts. Ouch. Clunk. Apologies for not reviewing Sum in more detail. If I do ever write another review, I'll concentrate on the music and stop penning such godawful puns. Anything else would be punishing to read. Heh.
Last month, 1.2 million Norwegians sat down and watched Bergensbanen, a documentary showing ...wait for it...seven and a half hours of the beautiful snow-laden, mountainous train journey from Bergen, on the west coast of Norway, to Oslo, spiritual hometown of Earth's leggy blondes.
Ambient artists across the world are now flipping out. But the video is not just for cuddly, tea-drinking, sandal-wearing ocarina players. Meat-eaters are allowed to slice and dice Bergensbanen. Please do so.
What, not interested? Are you trying to tell me that nearly eight hours of a train journey might be less interesting than navel fluff? Shame on you. Here's a snippet of the journey through Finse, which doubled as the ice planet Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. Look, if George Lucas decided that the place was exciting, that's good enough for me.
*thinks about the prequel Star Wars trilogy*
It's still worth watching. Three cheers for imaginative Scandinavian state-run broadcasting systems and national rail networks!
In some electronica genres, such as IDM and Drum 'n' Bass, the drums skip, stutter and generally do everything but come up with a Unified Field Theory. The percussion to be found in Dreaming In Pieces by Hypnagog walks another path: it's well-behaved, mid-tempo dance/trance stuff that won't scare the horses. However, the synth work deserves a restraining order, an ASBO and an ankle bracelet. If Hypnagog hasn't pored over every atom of Air's magnum opus (and the most popular slice of French dinner-party electronica ever) Moon Safari, you can paint me yellow and call me a daffodil. The four tracks on Dreaming in Pieces are coated with layer after layer of melodies, diversions and digressions, all wrapped up in an analogue sensibility that en(psy)trances the ear.
During my rigorous selection process (it involves Guinness and meringues), the right half of my brain would whisper: "Meh...it's a bit leaden. It's ok, I suppose." But every time I reached for the "Destroy World" button, the left half of my bonce would butt in and exclaim: "Ooh, that glitch was unexpected. Hey, what's happening to the tempo? Wow, here comes another ice-cream of a synth. Crikey, is that three melodies at the same time? Funky, too."
My strait-jacket is tailored, you know. Only the best for CTW.
From the first few seconds of Still Dreaming, it's clear that Hypnagog (Felix Greenlees, an Australian earbender) is holding true to his stated intention to combine downtempo psychedelic breaks and IDM with his own style of psychedelic dance music. Pads, synth lines, squeaky stabs, IDM pitch-shifting: it's all there. And you get a rather nifty bassline. Job done.
Funkdiddle is full of aural cream cakes: a persuasive use of pitch-shifting and reverb in the introductory percussion section and, amongst other attractions, lots of analogue squelches. Its groove comes mostly from the walking bassline and micro-drumrolls, while the tempo variations and the cheerful, bluesy organ solos got me to the finishing line faster than a dysentery-suffering Usain Bolt chasing an Andrex puppy. Given the chance, I'd have popped Funkdiddle in your friendly CTW media player.
Next up is Tiny Little Pieces, starting with an audio sample that discusses the Biq Questions in life,
followed by six minutes of soothing Spanish guitar, unpredictable
diversions into glitch lay-bys, endlessly melodic synth doodling and
mercurial tempo changes. It should be plain by now that this is a "headphones album"; there's so much superb work in Dreaming In Pieces that it demands your full attention, even though the overall effect is like reclining in a hammock and sipping a daiquiri. Like I said, think Air.
The last track, Reflections No.2, sounds as though Hypnagog ransacked every sine-waveish preset in his synth collection and played music that made him happy. This track will be at home in a beachside bar's dirty old stereo or in an audiophile's temperature-controlled, earthquake-proofed record collection.
And that's what I like so much about Hypnagog's release. It's as superficial or as deep as you want it to be, thanks to its constant melodic invention, restless search for smooth new sounds and a clean, spacious recording.
I hope you enjoy the album as much as I have. Bye.
*thinks*
I've forgotten something, haven't I? Ah yes, the sounds. Tut, me and my memory. Well, er, it pains me to say this but Up Records, in their otherwise razor-sharp Australian wisdom, supply only a zipped album, which means that visitors to their website can't hear their music.
*facepalm*
Fear not, Dreaming In Pieces is also featured at Ektoplazm, the suitably-psychedelic-but-I-still-got-my-shit-together-man psytrance portal/netlabel, so I'll just grab an mp3 from there and...
*headdesk*
No, no mp3 files there, either. However, at least they do stream one song, Tiny Little Pieces. So go here to hear it. Incidentally, Ektoplazm do a very good job of catering to fans of free psytrance, as their charts, download figures and frequent updates will testify. It's a fun place to visit. Chapeau, gentlemen. The website's appearance can be described as... trippy.
*slapshead*
Actually, you'd be better off at Hypnagog's MySpace page, where you can listen to all four tracks and press his Paypal button. Go on, send money around the world. Do it enough and you'll get a bailout. Heh.
Harrumph. While I am very grateful to all netlabels for their dedication and hard work in releasing CC music, I must say that persuading some of them actually to part with their music is akin to tickling trout. Fernando Fonseca's (Hi F!) recent rant on this subject ruffled a few feathers. He's mostly right in what he says, though I would have phrased things rather more gently; after all, I'm a confirmed coward gentleman. Fernando himself is vastly experienced in netaudio, helps to run the excellent PublicSpaces Lab netlabel and has linked symbiotically with the internet. Think probes and aliens. Ouch.
Yes, I know, CTW is a minefield of CC netaudio information. And I'm handsome. Control that jealousy, people.
It has long been my intention to make Catching The Waves superfluous to requirements. Some of the snarkier of you out there may have thought that that day was reached at least a couple of years ago, but it has come to my attention that there are now quite a few folks who are actively promoting the cause of CC music, whether they be musicians, netlabels or CC portals. I'll keep CTW going for a bit longer, but I think it's only fair to remind my rabid, locust-like readership that there are plenty of people who do what CTW does and more, only far more frequently and much more professionally.
*Millions of voices cry out: "Freedom!"*
Not convinced? I give you Exhibit A: Phlow's Advent calendar. (I've burbled on about Phlow before, and about how they're a force for good. If CC music ever joins the mainstream, Phlow will hopefully be at the heart of it.) Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that if you're interested in Creative Commons music and would like to know more, you could do a lot worse than pop over to Phlow right now and open a few windows in their beautiful Advent calendar, which contains various netmusic luminaries' "Best Creative Commons Music Moments in 2009". Hidden behind each window are five-track mixtapes, five recommended netlabels and five recommended albums for 2009. In short, you'll find many interesting things to hear and explore, thus helping to make CTW less relevant and more redundant, something that my bed and sore ears are only too happy to admit.
But be warned: Phlow's standards slip sometimes. Don't believe me? I give you Exhibit B: click on the outmoded recording format and enter a world of pain.
These six tracks by Melbourne musical urchin Synaecide are a grimy compound of electro and, I'm sorry to have to use this term in the presence of women and children, IDM. They're also louder than a drag artists' karaoke night. Not knowing whether Synaecide sports an outrageous afro, I can't say
if he follows Phil Spector in all things - but his production
values mimic the incarcerated producer's famed "wall of sound". Your ears will
fill with as much gritty electronica as they can take. This
would quickly become tiresome were it not for the fact that the music
is dynamic; there are breathers, changes of tempo and most
welcome changes of volume, thus ensuring that Scientifica remains engaging.
First off, there's some delicious sampling work in Venom (feat. Anamé), where a cigarette lighter never sounded so good. The whispered vocals seem a little low in the mix until Anamé opens her lungs and the track soars, backed by chilly background vocals and synths that might as well have been replaced by a recording of barrage fire.
Stuttering and bit-crushed vocals feature heavily in The World Is High, a serving of gritty IDM that, like a few of Synaecide's compositions (see the reviewed remix of Halogen's Length and Brecht) doesn't really hit its stride until the track's midpoint. But it's worth the wait.
Dissolve (feat. Dima Shafro) gets through a few distorted, angsty
vocals before dropping a rather catchy electro riff. It doesn't do much
else, but it's almost a relief to find a relatively straightforward
electro track slipped in between the chaos that surrounds it. After testing it to destruction in CTW's Sound Pound (you don't want to know), I've come to the conclusion that the amount of enjoyment derived from Dissolve, and specifically its layered high/low synth riff, depends on the volume at which it's played. Try going to 11.
Today's recommended track is The Penny Drops, in which Synaecide, thanks to more sampling cleverness, literally spends drops a penny like it's going out of fashion. Electronica fans will enjoy the coinage abuse and go on to appreciate the growling, juddering yet jaunty electro bass, a tangled lead riff that would feel at home in the soundtrack of a filmed Philip K. Dick novel and the eventual appearance of a call-and-response riff - another characteristic but pleasurable compositional motif of Syn's. File under "Gifted". Right - deep breath - it's SoundCloud player time:
The rapid-fire chiptune arpeggios that mark the start of Close Bracket (feat. Apache) soon team up with glitchy percussion, yet both quail when faced with an epic electro-sort-of-trance wall of sound, and a clever-clever vocal that just about holds its own with the electronic fireworks. It's energy on a stick.
The title track delivers yet more electronica impressiveness: drums that splatter all over the place, a (Great) wall (of China) of synths, high strings and a gnarly bass, which, taken together, will result in complaints about poor sportmanship in World Cup qualifiers ringing in the ears.
It seems that Synaecide, curse him, is blessed with the ability to churn out memorable music that walks the fine line between "bloody noisy" and "invigorating". Want further proof? Try his Scientifica II, an estimable track from the equally estimable Continuum, a compilation of brain-spankingly ambitious IDM from, er, the IDMf netlabel. (Continuum deserves a much, much longer review but I'm kicking it out of bed because I need some sleep. Don't look at me like that - taxis don't come cheap.) Suffice it to say that the IDMf crew and members, to drop into London vernacular for a moment, are having it large.
For those of you who require sparkly things to attract your attention, please see below. Ooh, shiny.
My thanks to all at IDMf for the consistently entertaining releases. I'm sure they'd have to lie down in a darkened room if anyone from Teh Internets were to send them a "thank you" email. By the way, does anyone else think the term IDM would be more palatable if it were pronounced "iddum"? No? How very dare you. Mark my words, you'll all be sorry.
To Baaaarcelona, in celebration of a top-class football club netlabel that has been banging in the goals pumping out excellent releases for quite some time and has now achieved the miraculous and got Carles Puyol to cut his hair reached number 50 in their release schedule. End of football jokes.*
InoQuo has come over all giddy and released a nine-track compilation of top-class minimal/techno. Like just about every other netlabel album in this genre, Kvindek doesn't conform to CTW's infamous first law of dance music (the first of my minions to post a comment stating what it is will receive a free CC track from CTW's vaults), but that doesn't stop it from containing studio wizardry and buttock-seducing rhythms. To demonstrate, I'll recommend the first track as I'm fond of the aural tricks it plays. You get classical guitar, reverbed and chopped voices, and tooting synths - and that's just in the first few seconds, before a ridiculously close-up high/low frequency stab is plopped in your ear. It then proceeds to groove with the help of the aforementioned elements and the addition of pitch-shifted tubular bell-like...oh, hell, why am I burbling on? Suck it and see:
Hermético's Nueva Fórmula doesn't actually break new ground, but what it does it does very well. A bumping bass, abrasive snare, tannoy-like vocals, tiny little glitches (a feature of the entire EP - there's nary a moment that hasn't been worked to within an inch of its life) and a fast pace ensure that this will burn the calories. Turn up the volume and it comes to life - as does En Casa De Paola by Monokao, whose kick-snare-repeat-till-unconscious mantra drives the minimal nail into the ground with a big techno hammer, restrained only by the occasional speak-and-spell vocal. The excellent mastering overcomes the compositional simplicity through sheer power. It's a banger.
But it's not all dark dancefloors and sticky t-shirts. Modular by Saccobros is one of those minimal tracks that, if you squint a bit, could be described as electronica or even ambient, because the usual percussive framework is swamped by a Nintendo-ish flurry of triplets that swells and contracts with hypnotic rhythm. It's like listening to an electronic seashore.
Mercurio by Manuel Romero starts off ordinarily enough, but little glitches, snatches of conversations, electronic growls and whatever else he can conjure up with, at a guess, Ableton software soon alerts the listener that here is an amazingly dense track that flourishes when heard through headphones. Take it home, loosen its dancefloor clothes and you'll find that it's wearing a glitchy bra and ambient knickers.
Apologies for that last sentence and to Project Swirl and Licuadora System, whose tracks, though well worth hearing, have been brushed over because I'm about to hit my mental Twitter word limit. It's nothing personal. And despite some rather delicious jazz electric piano, Grau's Miles is, well, miles too long.
Everything apart from the hi-hats in Mikel Mendia's Takumar seems low-passed, giving it a suitably understated feel for Kvindek's last track. I liked the drop about a minute and a half in, where the track comes to a halt only to restart with an echoing snare drum flam and tiny snippets of ...cutlery. Such moments are sprinkled throughout the album. Like a hairy wart anything with hidden depths, Kvindek took time to grow on me. Turn up the volume to let the excellent recording quality shine, give it a few spins and see if the same happens to you.
*Ah, mes amis. Le Coupe du Monde. Quel dommage, hein? By the way, if you're wondering about how musicians and netlabels react
to getting prodded by CTW's smelly finger, here's a reaction shot from
the inoQuo staff (I may be lying about this). Can't you feel the love? CC music: you know it makes sense.
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