Catching The Waves

Farewell to the Sea

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:

1. My health is woefully erratic;
2. 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?

ANgR MgMT - Year's End

Spoomusic netlabel

Thank you to ANgR MgMT, and thank you to everyone. Happy exploring.

No Doubting Thomas

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.

*rimshot*

Suck it, bitches.

Thomas' Posterous

My life is not my own

I'll make this not-quite-brief. It has been touching to receive so many kind-hearted and encouraging comments from music fans and stalwarts of the CC netaudio world, so much so that I have decided to continue Catching The Waves, although in a reduced capacity due to my irritatingly fragile health and my exasperatingly robust laziness. If none of you object, I shall post reviews and articles rather less frequently than before, and I will continue to recommend other legitimate free music sites in the devout hope that CTW will finally, once and for all, become superfluous to your music needs.

Thank you to each and every one of you for making the effort to post a comment, tweet a tweet, or write an email. Such interaction, to use a rather dull word to describe such a happy experience, came as an unexpected and welcome surprise. Please feel free to drop in at anytime and let me know what you think (good or bad) of the blog, or if you simply want to complain about the level of the euro, the weather or my grammar. I will endeavour to respond either in the comments section itself or via a new post.

(By the way, this being the internet, I am duty bound to point out that my choice of illustration does not reflect any political leanings but was merely an opportunity for a giggle. I remind you of the web's informal motto: "The Internet - Promoting Ignorance Since 1985".)

Before I go, I feel I must respond to a couple of the comments:

Embe, thank you for your suggestion about writing for the lovely and cuddly Phlow. During the last couple of years, I have had a number of undeserved but very flattering requests to write for other websites, all of which are much better than crumby old CTW. To my regret, I have had to turn them down because I am an unreliable individual and I would hate to damage the reputation of any of the (now numerous) estimable CC music sites, including Mo's marvellous website, by missing deadlines or not being able to write anything comprehensible.

Additionally, though I have been shocked by some of the extraordinarily nice things that my cuddlesome readers have said about CTW (though note with disappointment the paucity of offers of sex or money or money for sex), quite the most outré sentiment in the comments section came from David McMahon. Mr McMahon is obviously a devotee of Jane Austen, for his message was in the finest tradition of that peerless stylist:

I jizzed in my pants when I checked my email and I saw a new email from my subscription to CTW.

Well said, David, well said. World, you can keep the Booker. Don't bother with the Pulitzer. Stuff the Nobel. Catching The Waves will make you jizz your pants.

Revival or revolver

Photo: lakewentworth

It might have come to your attention that health and time issues have delivered a steel toe-cap to CTW's love-plumbing. The only thing to do is to turn around and hope that the same toe-cap will add momentum to this dead blog by administering a swift kick to the nethers.

So... to gauge whether the enormous, brian-bursting* effort to maintain CTW is worth it, I am asking you, my insane fans, if you want me to carry on getting my fingernails dirty. To do so, please do one or all of the following:

1. Leave a comment at CTW
2. Tweet the tag #ctw
3. Send me a private email declaring your undying love

If enough of you wasters respond, I might - might - plant CTW's flagpole in the internet's soft, pliant earth. Yeah, baby.

If not, thank you so much for everything and have a great life, you wonderful people. Take care.

*This typo is so good that I'm keeping it.

BBC via CTW

EDIT: I, er, forgot to include links to the videos. Mistake now remedied. *Blush*

Good lord, there's no sound to this video. Has CTW gone stark raving mad? Have the BBC's editorial standards finally fallen through the floor?

[/60s Batman]

Fear not, my media munchkins. The BBC has released this video as part of their efforts to film a major new series, Digital Revolution, that will analyse the impact of the internet on an unsuspecting world. I've made a chump of myself on the DigRev website numerous times through self-contradiction and concentrated blathering, and you're more than welcome to do the same.

Yes, yes, you cry - but what about the video? Well, the video (actually a "rush" or unedited film) was released under the BBC's special Digital Revolution Licence, which is similar to a Creative Commons licence, but with a less catchy acronym. The Beeb want you to download it, chop it up, remix it, mash it, generally have your wicked way with it, embed it on your website (should you so choose) and then return it, rosy of cheek and slightly flustered, to the Digital Revolution website, all in the spirit of openness and sharing that makes the internet such a *cough* kind, gentle, unassuming and forgiving place. DigRev's Dan Biddle tells me that you can also download a higher quality .mov file without the BBC logo, if you don't want your opus to be sullied by any mention of the planet's finest broadcasting organisation.* Please note: the download or embed link is immediately underneath the video on the BBC website.

Watch the film and you'll see some stunning images of a design classic that moves beautifully, shows serious stamina, asks searching questions and would be just the ticket for a period drama. Aleks Krotoski isn't too shabby, either.

But there's more you can mangle. How about 12 minutes of the fluffy Stephen Fry, untouched by editorial hand or sartorial taste, burbling on about the benefits and dangers of the internet? The video & download info is here.

Or the fragrant Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post, chatting about citizen media, editorial hierarchies and political activism? Go on, you know you want to. Video & download link here.

I hope you have fun playing with these rushes (and all the others). Please think about joining in the debate at Digital Revolution and helping to refine what might become the geeky equivalent to David Attenborough's Life on Earth.

*Thanks for agreeing to get Tomorrow's World back on our screens, Dan. Lunch with the Director General was most pleasant. ;)

All your mobile are belong to us

Ah, my first use of a classic internet meme. I'm so down with the cool kids. Right, pay attention. Run your eyes over my body this website and you'll notice a blue blob that, as Prince Charles once said of modern British architecture's effect on London, is like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend. It's for all you trendies out there, swanning around with your iPhones and Nokias and cranial-audio uplinks. In other words, Catching The Waves is now formatted for web-enabled mobile phones. Please use the button or bookmark this link: http://catchingthewaves.wirenode.mobi/

Like any other new technological wheeze at CTW, the blob is there on sufferance; if it doesn't work or if I don't like it – it'll disappear.

Inevitably, there will be some teething problems. I'm not sure if my recommended songs will be playable for now, and Jamendo's media player doesn't want to appear at the moment. However, the links to recommended albums will still be at the end of each article and will still work.

So here's a rare request (apart from my pleadings for you to shower the musicians with “thank you” emails and maybe even a little cash) for user comments/emails: please let me know if it works or if it doesn't. You may laugh at the new cack-handed logo as long as you tell your trendy friends with trendy phones about CTW – I need to know if the service is compatible with the major phone brands.

Yes, that last plea was a blatant attempt to court popularity. Sue me. My next post but one will feature someone who has helped me tremendously with "CTW Mobile", as I like to call it in my more pretentious moments. Next up is - and I know you'll find this hard to believe - an album review. I like to ring the changes. ;)

Woodward Wules The Wacetwack

Wegular weaders - sorry, regular readers of Catching The Waves will know of my fondness for the music of Josh Woodward. I reviewed his music a while back, discussed a song, I Want To Destroy Something Beautiful, recommended another, Shadows In The Moonlight, and gave another of his songs, Stickybee, the unmatchable honour of first dibs at the unveiling of this site's shiny new Yahoo Media Player. The more I've listened to Josh's work, the more I've come to value him as a songwriter and singer. How can I put this?

He. Is. Talented.

Was that last sentence of mine irritatingly pseudo-trendy and patronising? Look, it's the internet - the twin graveyard of grammar and good manners.

...anyway, Audiosurf is a rather good computer game that adapts music, the actual mp3 files of songs, to produce racetracks for people to race around and have fun on instead of doing some work and saving the global economy. The chart of "Most Played Songs" (click image to enlarge), taken at 1500 GMT today, shows that the most popular "racetrack" is I Want To Destroy Something Beautiful. Stickybee is at No.3. Methylchloroisothiazolinone, a hairy-chested rock song, is No.4. And there are a couple more of his songs in there too. (Even Jonathan Coulton sticks his oar in. I'm a fan of JoCo but I've been too lazy to write a review.)

Coldplay gaze up in awe from their lowly eleventh place. It's great to know that Josh is getting run over. Repeatedly. There's only one thing to do. Press the button and have a listen to one of his most beautiful efforts:

Josh Woodward - Gravity

Many congratulations to Josh - he's finally gathering some momentum thanks to his talent, hard work, and the decision to release his music under a Creative Commons licence so that people could hear his music for free.

See, folks? I knew he was good.

Either that or his music is only good for driving over.

Josh Woodward

Audiosurf (a clever, cheap, fun game that uses indie music. Hats off!)

Here's what I had for lunch

The above cartoon (click to enlarge) from Penny Arcade is the perfect accompaniment to the announcement that Catching The Waves is now on Twitter. I don't know whether this will be of any use to anyone; we'll see how it goes. But if you want to read the once-yearly update of a sloth browsing the internet, you've found the right place. You may also find some rather good free music, released with the full knowledge and approval of the musicians and netlabels who made it. It's up to you whether you give them any money, you bums.

Other thoughts:

• Please visit Penny Arcade;
• It's Typepad's fault, not mine, that Twitter doesn't align in the sidebar;
• It's Twitter's fault, not mine, that my username is "catchingthewave";
• I promise not to tweet about what I had for lunch.

Okay, I have to go now. Poop time. While you're waiting for me to return to the table, please listen to Flu - Também and try not to think about the noises you can hear coming from the cubicle. If you like the track - and why wouldn't you? - there's more Brazilian samba-ish funk at the link below. In fact, there's twelve more tracks of the stuff, it's all free, and some of it might find favour with you. My thanks to Flu for the highly enjoyable album and my sincere apologies, too, for being too lazy to review it properly. Installing Twitter drained all the juice from my personal battery.

Okay, poop is coming out. You could always ask the management to turn up the volume.

Flu - No Flu do Mundo (link to zipped album and individual files)

Flu on MySpace

Bump Foot netlabel (One of the many reasons to like Japan.)

Unscheduled Wormhole Activation

 

In which I apologise to my readers in this galaxy and others:

Internet and lifestyle problems have caused a temporary hiatus in CTW's stream of witty, prescient, and dazzlingly handsome reviews. This blog, the literary equivalent of a Bach cantata, should be back to "normal" in a week or two.

You'll just have to go cold turkey.

To help you while away the intervening hours as you crouch naked in a corner of a dank room, rocking gently to yourself and whispering, "Free music...catching the waves...creative commons...catching the waves...love-god...music of the spheres...catching the waves...":

...here's a "song" that will help you with intestinal cramps and in your everyday life. It's one minute and six seconds of irrefutable logic that will provide the last word in workplace disputes, pub quiz arguments and frank exchanges of views with your family and partners. Please send it to your boss, your sister, your friends, your lover, your colleagues, your sister, your utilities supplier, your internet company, your sister, or anyone who you know hasn't quite grasped the essential truth of a situation. Or you could send it to your sister.

Don't worry - it won't annoy them in the slightest. Not at all.

Supertalented - You're Wrong

Supertalented on MySpace

Birdsong netlabel (who specialise in lo-fi "home recorded" releases)

I Feel Like Johnny Mnemonic

 

(Sorry if this picture appears as enormous in RSS feed displays - I really don't have a clue about html, the internet, life, etc.)

The above photograph, taken yesterday at one of Manhattan's most exclusive bars, offers a glimpse into the lives of my readers at the very moment that they first experienced the glory that is CTW's new media player. Nearly every article at Catching The Waves now contains, where possible, at least one playable track. (Just press the little arrow when one appears next to a song title.) For example:

Josh Woodward - Stickybee

(If you liked that track from the album Dirty Wings, you'll find a review of Josh's stuff here.)

I hope that you'll find something to your liking and thus go on to visit some of the many starving talented artists featured in this humble blog. Additionally, I've repaired any broken links and done some invisible housekeeping. Please tell me if any part of the website is not working properly. And get me some aspirin.

There's just one more thing to mention before I collapse onto a chaise longue and call for the nurse: due to my limited computer skills, it's very easy for visitors to overlook some of the older reviews at Catching The Waves. If you travel to the very bottom of this webpage you'll note an "Older" link - this won't take you to music suitable for old age pensioners (if there is such a thing), but it will introduce you to other pages of CTW's reviews that you might have missed. Once on a new page, please use the playlist on the media player to listen to a few tracks at a time and confirm what you've always suspected: I have terrible taste in music.

Terrific, I meant terrific. Nurse, get me some absinthe at once. I hate html...