#Writing #MusicMonday: selling your friend (for cash) by subatomicglue

This album ought to have been posted on 11 July 2016.

I’ve shared one album by subatomicglue before, globalenemy, and I still love it.

selling your friend (for cash) was a few albums and years later, and while it is a very different album (not telling a horror movie story, for example), it is definitely a work by the same composer.

It is driving synth work, most of it danceable and thus, probably, qualifies as techno, but good even so.

The composer himself says:

an ecclectic mix of hard aggressive action and musicbox charm. in an age of instant satisfaction and consumer whoring, it is all too possible to forget or even discard that which is important.

Download selling your friend (for cash) by subatomicglue from the Internet Archive or get it directly from the artist’s own website.

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selling your friend (for cash) by subatomicglue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Unported License.

#Writing #MusicMonday: noaccordion by noaccordion

[Yes, I crapped out on posting yesterday. But I’ve got albums selected to the middle of next month, at least, and easily can go beyond that, I just have to write them up and prepare the posts. And it’s clearly much better when I do that well ahead of time.]

Though she has been making music for a long time, and releasing as “noaccordion” since 2010, I only chanced across Onah Indigo’s work quite recently.

She seems to be a restless soul, ranging across genres and styles at whim, almost like Miles Davis, needint to finish one thing, then do something completely different, then do something completely different from that.

This first, eponymous, EP has a mix of sounds that’s hard to describe, but if you cross the French grunge girl band UNKNW with Le Tigre, that captures some of it. Toss in a dash of the Raveonettes, too, while you’re at it.

And that’s part of why I’m having a hard time describing this EP. Each song is different. They’re all obviously by the same artist, but they’re all completely distinct.

And they’re all worth listening to, at the very, very least.

Download noaccordion free from the Internet Archive or from Soundcloud.

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noaccordion by noaccordion is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

#Writing #MusicMonday: The Beautiful Machine by Josh Woodward

I feel like kind of a schmuck.

See, I’ve known about Josh Woodward for pretty much the entire time I’ve listened to Creative Commons music, close to ten years now.

And I kept trying to listen to his music, now and then.

And… I just didn’t care for it. He clearly had musical chops, but something rubbed me wrong about his songs for a long time.

And so, I’ve never really promoted his work. Like, ever. Despite the fact that he’s like the flagship musician for Free Culture (along with Incompetech).

Well, after the Great Laptop Disaster earlier this year, I went and started rebuilding my CC music library, and I revisited a song of Woodward’s that I definitely liked from recently, “Airplane Mode”.

And yeah, it’s fun. And even if it retains a bit of the attitude I disliked in a number of his other songs, it’s well-camouflaged.

Then I listened to the whole album it came from, The Beautiful Machine. And this album, more than any of the previous ones, worked for me. The elements that rubbed me wrong previously do remain, but as with “Airplane Mode”, the songs are fun enough, and bury those elements deep enough, that I can easily ignore them.

And the songs are very fun.

So, finally, I am pushing some of his work. Without reservation. Hie the over and acquire it!

Download The Beautiful Machine by Josh Woodward free from the artist’s own site.

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The Beautiful Machine by Josh Woodward is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

#Writing #MusicMonday: So Much So Young by Secret Babies

This week, I bring you the only Attribution-Share Alike licensed album for Lyrical April 2016, meaning if you use lyrics from this album in your book, you need to also release it under the same license.

Secret Babies have, as far as I can tell, only released this one album, and while it’s a full-length album, clocking in around fifty minutes, it definitely leaves me wanting more. And all I know about the band is that they claim to be from the USA.

The lead singer, an unknown female vocalist, strongly reminds me of Margo Timmins of Cowboy Junkies in her delivery and vocal quality. Some songs could be done by the Junkies, and others are in different styles entirely, but the singer holds it all together.

And it is the strength of that singer on which the album is built. Everything else ranges from good enough to very good, but the singer is amazing.

The Cowboy Junkies comparison, as I indicated, doesn’t really hold up beyond the singer’s vocal qualities. The closest the songs come to sounding like the Junkies’ work are the first two tracks, “Aloof Tops” and “Bicycle Tunes”.

After that, the style of the songs ranges all over the place, but never feels like a strain on either the singer nor the instrumentalists.

“Greatest Start” could be a ’70s singer-songwriter piece, and a good one.

“Knots and Seams” has a slight Mexican influence to it.

“Own This Road” goes ’80s new wave electronic in sound, and works just as well as everything else on the album.

“Russian Wind” stirs up a nostalgic feeling in me, but I can’t even begin to pin down why.

And the final track, “Sugar Pane”, sounds like it might have been a minor hit on alternative radio stations in the early ’90s.

So, basically, this album is a gem, entirely worth downloading and listening to, even if you never intend to make any kind of derivative work from it at all. I want more, but Secret Babies hasn’t been active, even on their Facebook page, in several years. So this might be the last we ever hear of them, or they might suddenly come out with more lovely work like this.

Download So Much So Young by Secret Babies free from the Internet Archive.

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So Much So Young by Secret Babies is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

#Writing #MusicMonday: The Black Hole by lo-fi is sci-fi

Welcome to Lyrical April 2016. This year, as with last, I’m not only sharing music with vocals that you might like to write to, but deliberately sharing Free Culture music with, for the most part, easy-to-discern lyrics, so that you have four more albums’ worth of lyrics to quote in your books, if any of them catch your fancy. This year, it’s very Free Culture, with only one of the three albums carrying a Share Alike restriction. That’s right, three of the four albums, including today’s, only requires attribution for you to create any kind of derivative work!

This is also an album, and frankly a group, that I personally have saved from vanishing from the internet. That is not an exaggeration.

lo-fi is sci-fi was a duo comprised of Chris Zabriskie and Marc With A C that put out four excellent albums from 2006 to 2008, and appear to have kept planning more projects through at least 2012, though nothing appears to have come of that. They had all four albums available on BandCamp, as well as a website for the project, and all of that is now gone. Vanished. I have no idea what happened, but the two appear to have parted ways for personal reasons, and pulled their collaborative work from availability.

I don’t care what the reasons were for ending the project, that’s not my business. What I do care about is that four brilliant albums, albums with Free Culture licenses, were pulled from public availability. One of the main reasons for Free Culture licensing, so far as I am concerned, is to enable works of art to achieve longevity even without popularity or institutional support. A digital release is not something you’ll find used, hanging around old book or CD shops. If it’s not posted somewhere, preferably to a stable place like the Internet Archive, it’s gone. (Insert rant about Jamendo being hideously unreliable and dishonest here.)

Wait, you’re thinking, if these albums vanished, how in hell did Fleming preserve them? And no, the answer is not, alas, that I snagged the lossless FLAC files from BandCamp while they were available. I only discovered lo-fi is sci-fi after their disappearance. How?

Well, the memory-holing of the band’s work was slightly incomplete. Their albums were posted to the Free Music Archive. And at least some effort seems to have been made to pull them from there, but it didn’t take. If you try to find the band’s page, or the album pages, you get kicked to FMA’s main page.

But. If you pull up individual track pages, or search the band name , you can download the MP3s one by one.

And so I did that.

Also, thanks to the Archive’s Wayback Machine, I was able to view the band’s site as it existed in 2013, verify that I got all tracks to all albums, and get copies of all four album covers.

But that’s all background, and you likely don’t care. What about the actual music?

To start with, when I first ran across them, I heard one song that I loved, found the band name, and almost immediately realized I was going to like most everything they did.

Why?

I’m 90% certain that the band’s name is a reference to an album by one of my personal favorite bands, Dramarama, whose last album cut before breaking up (and later re-forming) was hi-fi sci-fi.

And as I’ve been exploring their body of work, that reference is appropriate. They don’t sound much like Dramarama, but they have the same pop cultural, metatextual sensibilities. There are a lot of science-fiction themed tunes, including “The Stars Are Closer Than You” on today’s album, as well as “You’re Assuming the Gravity Wouldn’t Crush You Instantly” on their last one, among others.

As to pop culture, consider that the band’s songs include “Joss Whedon”, “I’m On A Talk Show”, and “The Script You Wrote is Terrible”.

The Black Hole is their first album. And it is as good as any of their others, excepting possibly their last. Possibly.

The recordings manage a complexity of effect despite being produced with relative simplicity. Consider the first track, “You’ve Got The Body + I’ve Got The Brains”. It sounds like a practice session for a Broadway show tune done, at first, with just a piano for backing. It grows more complex as it goes on, but it’s still done relatively simply.

It is entirely satisfying and stands up brilliantly to repeat listens.

And the entire album is like that. It just works, each song, and as a whole.

Download The Black Hole by lo-fi is sci-fi free from the Internet Archive.

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The Black Hole by lo-fi is sci-fi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

#Writing #MusicMonday: Far From The Earth Beneath Your Feet by So Far As I Know

So here’s a case for the Creative Commons. Jamendo, as I recently ranted, has been trying to hide the fact that its business model rests entirely on CC licenses, for whatever reason.

I’d had this album queued up for Music Monday for some time, gave it a few listens, and lined it up for late November. Then Jamendo decided to betray its users and the very foundation on which it is built, and I have no wish to continue directing traffic, however little, to them. But this album, under the CC license, is not available elsewhere.

But I have it under the license, meaning that I’m free to share it, so I have now uploaded it to the Internet Archive. And unlike Jamendo, I won’t hide the license from you or lie to you about what it means.

So far as I can tell, So Far As I Know is a Russian progressive rock group that specializes in evocative, emotionally complex and textured melodic tunes that work together to create journeys for the listener. Or at least, this album is such a journey.

Far From The Earth Beneath Your Feet begins with a lonely, almost mournful piano solo, before the second track plunges you into the full experience of the album.

If you want an idea of how interesting the whole album is as a listening experience, and how all the compositions work together, listen to track 5, “Down Back on Earth”, and track 6, “Siberia”, nd listen closely to how the one transitions into the other. That will either do it for you, or it won’t. For me, it really, really does, along with a number of other moments on the album.

You can download Far From The Earth Beneath Your Feet by So Far As I Know under a Free Culture license from the Internet Archive.

You can also get it from the band’s BandCamp page, sending well-deserved money their way, but without a Creative Commons license — their BandCamp downloads are all rights reserved.

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Far From The Earth Beneath Your Feet by So Far As I Know is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

#Writing #Music Monday: Changeover by Sim Band

Back in 2013, I shared Sim Band’s first album, today I share his last. Someday I’ll probably also share the one that came in between.

Sim Band is a German fellow named Simon Brenner, who plays all five instruments in these albums of bluesy instrumentals. He writes that they constitute a “musical diary”, and it’s unfortunate that he never continued the diary. This last album was first released in 2006, and he’s never added to his body of work.

Changeover is bluesy and jazzy, as with Sim Band’s other work, and while there is occasional cheese, it somehow fits the overall mood of the album. The whole thing is pleasant and relaxed, and makes excellent background music for writing in general.

Download Changeover by Sim Band free from the Internet Archive.

You can also download it directly from Simon Brenner’s website.

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Changeover by Sim Band is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

#Writing #Music Monday: Urtzi Azkue by Urtzi Azkue

Bring the funk and make it upbeat.

I’m afraid I don’t have a lot to say about this. I know nothing about Urtzi Azkue outside of this album. But this album? It is the best kind of funk. It’s hard not to butt-dance in my chair when it plays.

It’s got that ’70s sound that I so often loathe, but it makes it work, and makes it optimistic and fun, rather than aggressive and negative, as I personally find so much funk to be.

If you like funk, you must give it a try. If you don’t like funk, you should still give it a try. That’s how good it is.

Download Urtzi Azkue free from Jamendo.

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Urtzi Azkue by Urtzi Azkue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.

#Writing #Music Monday: Adventures by madelyniris

You’re writing a Young Adult book, and need lyrics to a song that’s at least a little bit like Lorde or some singer or artist who sounds contemporary.

Meet madelyniris. You’re welcome.

It’s entirely professional, to my ear it sounds exactly of a piece with today’s pop music.

And this might mark the change of everything. Why? Because it was:

Recorded in the closets of sorority houses and wintered piano rooms at a midwestern university with a broken macbook…

I’ve heard professional-sounding amateur recordings for years, in the Creative Commons and elsewhere. But usually, there’s some element that’s off, a little or a lot, purposely or due to lack of experience by the artist. There is nothing off here. At all. Everything it aims for, it hits, and each hit is a bullseye.

You can do that, now, in closets, with a broken laptop. Now the only thing the recording industry has as an advantage is marketing.

So you’ve got five completely legitimate contemporary pop songs under a straight Attribution license. Quote away, give the artist attribution, and you’re set.

Download Adventures free from Jamendo.

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Adventures by madelyniris is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

#Writing #Music Monday: Pen by Jeffrey Philip Nelson

Jeffrey Philip Nelson is a singer-songwriter in the ’70s mold, and I basically mean that as a compliment.

This album of folk-ish songs is quiet, evocative, and entirely appealing. And they’re the product of an interesting life. Nelson didn’t put everything down on “making it” as a musician. He owns a construction business in southern California and has a family. His songs are the result of living life, and his life supports his art.

Isn’t that refreshing?

But back to the actual music. I’m going to say something about it that will be too easily misconstrued, so I’ll try to make clear what I am and am not saying.

The quietness of the songs, the spareness of the arrangements, and the focus on the carefully crafted lyrics put me in mind of Townes Van Zandt.

But I am not suggesting his lyrics and songs are as brilliant as Townes’s work. Nobody’s is, honestly. But Nelson has a bit of the same feel as Van Zandt’s recordings, and some of the soulfulness as well.

This is another treasure trove of lyrics that you can quote freely in your books, with the only requirement being that you give proper attribution for them (Credit and copyright on your copyright page, along with a link to Nelson’s site, and a direct link to the song’s download page would, I think, be appropriate.)

Listen to and download Pen by Jeffrey Philip Nelson free, from Jamendo, from NoiseTrade, or pay for it on Bandcamp (and still get the same license!).

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Pen by Jeffrey Philip Nelson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.