Botany Bay: Soulful free rock

Cover art for Broken

I hear the word "soulful" being thrown around quite a lot when it comes to pop, rock, country, R&B, alternative, and just about every other sub-genre of modern popular music, but what does it really mean? To me, the term has always meant the ability to communicate emotion in rich and complex ways. Anyone can sing a sad song or a love song, but the rare artist brings dimension to such emotional content and paints a canvas of emotion from a pallet that is as rich as our own experience.

Such an artist is the Creative Commons veteran band, Botany Bay.

To be perfectly frank, there's quite a lot of junk on Jamendo and other free music sites. It takes me a long time to wade through it and find the gems, but when I do, I'm rewarded for the effort many-fold. Botany Bay was formed in 1995 with a lead singer whose name has since been changed on the band's Web site to protect her after falling prey to Scientology. The core of the current lineup is writer/keyboardist Stephan Kleinert, vocalist Stephanie Mühr, guitarist Wolfgang Springob, and Felix Klöckner. As gems go, the band is as lustrous as I could hope for. Their 2007 album, Grounded, is a 19-track opus whose contents are as varied as any collection I've seen on Jamendo. Some tracks harken to indie folk while others are driven pop-rock pieces. The common theme is that ineffable quality: soulfulness.

CBC Radio 3

CBC Radio 3 is an excellent Canadian radio station that's broadcast over the Internet and via Sirius Satellite Radio. They're also a curator on Free Music Archive where you can get access to reviews, concert recordings, and free music uploads from many artists featured on their station.

The service was originally modeled on BBC Radio One and similar efforts, and has been successful in reaching a wide audience and bringing attention to a number of performers. Pop and experimental pop hybrids are their primary focus, with more of the experimental work showing up on Free Music Archive and more of the mainstream on the Internet stream. The Web site is also a blog with its own reviews, artist interviews and promotional tracks.

I recommend that everyone explore the service, and thank my good neighbors, the Canadians, for supporting this sort of station!

LukHash (SH music): 8bit music for an analog world

I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, so when someone describes themselves as an 8bit rock band, my ears tend to perk up. Such is the case with LukHash (AKA SH music, and no I have no idea why they have two names, but both are used on their Web site). This project uses real 1980s era 8bit hardware such as Nintendo and Commodore64 to generate authentic 80s-era video game soundtrack-like tracks. Right now, PRELUDE, the first song on their May 2011 album, Digital Memories (also their first), is the #1 track on Jamendo.com, and after giving it a couple of listens, it has really begun to work its magic on me.

I'd also like to point out that the group appears to have made a subtle nod to ELO, one of my favorite bands. ELO's album, Time, began with the tracks Prologue and Twilight while Digital Memories begins with PRELUDE and TONIGHT. I don't know the that the coincidence was deliberate, but I'd like to think so.

I'm looking forward to good things from LukHash in the future. It will be interesting to see if 8bit rock is a sustainable subgenre past a first, high-concept album.

Atomic Cat: Electronic departure

I've been a fan of French electronic band and Jamendo regular, Atomic Cat for some time now, even though I'm not a big fan of the dance/club genre in general. Their most recent release, Rainy Day for Broken Heart, is a single song release, breaking in many ways with what their fans might expect from their frenetic, beat-driven releases of the past. Instead, Rainy Day is a bit like a Tangerine Dream piece with just a hint of Atomic Cat's usual sensibilities. It's, quite frankly, a song I'd expect to hear from Project Divinity, not Cat.

That's not to say that there's anything wrong with breaking from the mold, and in this case, the result is a pleasant soundscape that's a great way to start my day. If you're interested in exploring their other work, I recommend Trance Imagination, as one of the best examples of their work. It includes a number of instrumental club/dance/trance mixes as well as the lyrically simple, but beautiful Talking to the Moon. My favorite single from the band, however, is Time Is Running which is quite a bit more pop than their usual, making use of an array of trippy effects and morphing slowly from a haunting, one-verse ballad into an intense dance tune that reminds me of The Orb.

I hope you enjoy them. On a side note to readers: I recently contacted Google Music about including Jamendo tracks in their catalog. They dropped me a note in response indicating the method for such sites to partner with Google, which I subsequently forwarded on to the marketing folks at Jamendo. Here's hoping we'll see movement on this front in the future! I'm tired of Google Music treating all of my Jamendo albums as second-class citizens, not allowing me to share or +1 them.

Magnifier: Google Music's free stuff!

Google Music has just launched their free service, which will allow you to upload 20,000 of your own music files, and then provide additional room for purchased and free music from the service which can then be streamed over the Web or to your Android device (and presumably other platforms in the future). In conjunction with the service, they have a Web site called Magnifier, which they use to advertise free music. Right now there are some examples up from David Bowie and The Rolling Stones, but that's part of the promotion for the launch. Typically, during the beta period, they've had up-and-coming bands that are publishing free tracks as a way of advertising.

I've discovered a few gems through Magnifier including:

• Empros by Russian Circles, an instrumental hard rock piece that reminds me of some of the earlier pieces from one of Jamendo's most popular commons artists, PeerGynt Lobogris
• Baby by Alice Smith & Aloe Blacc, an American cover of a 1969 Brazilian pop tune
• Marathon by Tennis, a wonderfully upbeat and strange ballad about a sailing trip

I recommend throwing Magnifier into your RSS feed reader (e.g. Google Reader) of choice; I know I have!

I'm also keeping an eye on other services, and intend to do a post about the free stuff available elsewhere sometime this week.

Édith Piaf: Internet Archive Collection

Widely regarded as one of the greatest French singers of the 20th century, Édith Piaf had an astounding voice and the ability to convey a rich emotional tone along with her relatively simple ballads. Probably best known for Non, je ne regrette rien which translates as, "No, I'm not sorry for anything", her impact on the post-WWII cultural landscape of France is quite significant.

The Internet Audio Archive always manages to amaze me, and their 2008 collection "Edith Piaf-21-30" certainly doesn't disappoint. The recordings are relatively low-bitrate, including an MP3 VBR, OGG and MP3 64k encoding. As a result, OGG might be your best bet, as it has been shown to surpass MP3 for sound quality at lower bitrates by a substantial amount.

There are three potential problems with this collection:

1. I'm not sure I entirely believe the claim that the recordings are in the public domain. IAA claims this to be true, and I want to believe it, but they're mid-20th century recordings which, in the U.S., would mean that they're still under copyright. I don't know French law, though, and the extremely overzealous copyright periods in the U.S. may not translate directly, there.
2. The 8th track is labeled Rien de Rien, but is, in fact, a duplicate of the 5th track, Non, je ne regrette rien.
3. The 9th track is in English, and a poster to the page claims that it is actually Eartha Kitt. I cannot confirm this, but the voice is definitely very different. Then again, many of those differences may stem from the use of a non-native language.

All around, it's a mixed bag, but well worth a listen.

Album: Not Alone in Kyoto by Project Divinity

One of my favorite ambient/electronic bands, Project Divinity, has 6 free albums released on Jamendo of which my favorite is still the early, Divinity. Their recent release of Not Alone In Kyoto in August brings a calming, background-music-for-travel themed selection of three new songs to your collection.

The artist responsible for Project Divinity is also behind two other excellent electronic efforts. Finnish Matti Paalanen is the motive force behind Project Divinity, Celestial Aeon Project (now probably best known for the soundtrack to the world-first "heroic" mode kill video for World of Warcraft boss, Ragnaros) and Frozen Silence which Matti describes as "neo-folk, neo-classical instrumental".

Getting back to Not Alone in Kyoto, the songs average about 4 minutes each and the album only lasts around 12 minutes total, but it's well worth those 12 minutes if you enjoy resting, thinking, reading or doing work with soothing music.

If I had a complaint, it would be that the percussion on all three songs occasionally becomes distracting from the general atmosphere of detachment that the pieces otherwise maintain.

Song: Yakuza Baby by The Easton Ellises

Cover art from Musique

The latest netBloc release is out, and it contains a fun, upbeat, song that's categorized as electropop as its first track. I've never heard The Easton Ellises before, but they make me think of a sort of mid-80s quasi-punk, quasi-pop garage band, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that! The lyrics begin with a sort of Killer Queen litany of the titular character's attributes, but it becomes more of a love song as it progresses. Of course, comparing sex appeal to crime isn't a new concept, but the Ellises make it feel fresh and exciting.

This single can be found on the latest netBloc: Vol. 34: The Whitewash, as part of the Jamendo release, EP: One, or on their home page as a soundcloud link. You can also watch the video for this song on YouTube. As you can see, they cover the various free media sources quite well, and I think we'll be hearing more from this band in the future.

Blog Review: Free Albums Galore

As I mentioned in my first post, Free Albums Galore is no longer being updated, but the blog still exists and it's a great resource for free music of the past six and a half years. You can browse their posts by using the "Archives by Month" or "Search" widgets on the right hand side of the page.

Free Albums Galore was an eclectic resource for finding the latest in everything from Psychedelia to World music to Electronica to Prog Rock. I tried to listen to as many of these as I was able, but in the end, I only had so many hours in the day.

Some of the sources that Free Albums Galore introduced me to will become common items, here on Dangerously. Those include Jamendo (a sort of social network for music makers and downloaders alike); the Internet Audio Archive (a branch of the Internet Archive, home of the infamous Wayback Machine); and the Free Music Archive (sort of the Rolling Stone of free music archival on the Web). Along with those, Free Albums Galore introduced me to the myriad of Netlabels out there that had free and for-pay music, and I'll have to spend quite a bit of time on those at some point in the near future as well, especially the awesome and ongoing netBlocs from blocSonic!

Welcome to Dangerously Free Sounds!

A long time ago, I got hooked on freely downloadable music, thanks to an excellent music review blog, Free Albums Galore, and ever since, I've filled my hard drives with amazing music, created by some of the most creative people I've ever heard. I learned quite a lot from Free Albums. I learned that free music has a cost, and that cost is time (for-pay music has millions of people acting as my filter, sifting out the few songs that are worth listening to). I also learned that there are permutations of musical genres that I thought I knew, which have the capacity to change the way I see the culture of music production. I've bought CDs based on free albums I've downloaded. I've written my own reviews on my existing blog, and generally, I've become as involved in free music as I had time for.

Today, I notice that Free Albums has closed down, and so it seems like a good time to start my own free music review blog. Thinking about why I like free music so much, one of the words that keeps coming to mind is: dangerous. It's dangerous for the studio business model for people to enjoy a free product. It's dangerous for your understanding of the quality and nature of music to listen to a wide range of sources of new tunes.

So, danger is in the title of this blog. Free sounds is also in the title, so over the next few posts, I'm going to introduce everyone to all of the general sources of free music that I'm aware of. After that, this blog will mostly settle down into being a general music review blog dedicated to freely downloadable music.

One note about free vs. pirated music: My definition of freely downloadable music includes any music that's distributed by its creators with the intent that others download it without paying to do so. It doesn't mean that the music is free to then share, though I'll try to point out when that's not allowed.

Pirating music via BitTorrent or other P2P networks is another thing entirely. It's not that BitTorrent itself is a bad thing. I use BitTorrent to download operating systems and updates for software along with some free content that's distributed that way. I love the protocol and the tools, but I'm not encouraging people to pirate music in this blog. I think the RIAA is shooting itself in the foot, and I think that the truly free music out there is a reaction to how they treat their customers, but this blog is about downloading music from authorized sources only!

OK, the disclaimers are out of the way and I'm ready to start reviewing. Let's get to it!