Group: Tunguska Electronic Music Society

The cover of the first album:
Chillout Grooves

The Tunguska Electronic Music Society is a loose-knit group of mostly ambient and electronic artists, that was started in Russia. A quasi-netlabel in its own right, the Society has now published over a dozen albums through Jamendo.com, and continues to publish new music to this day.
The first album, Chillout Grooves, gives an excellent sense of the project. The first track, Tunguska M by Bigfoot is a bit more rock-oriented with electric guitars, drums and keyboard setting the stage for the rest of the album.
Euphoria by MoVoX is a much more experimental piece, with complex timing and wild electronic effects that are almost theremin-like.
Vacuum Fields by Aquascape is a very traditional style of relaxing ambient composition with the addition of electric guitar.
Overall, the album plays as expected of a high-quality, modern electronic project, anywhere in the world.
The most recent album, Craters: Romeiko seems to be taking on the native North American musical traditions, attempting to forge a modern re-interpretation of the classic tribal rhythms. There's more vocal work on Craters than the earlier work, and for a Western audience this might be a problem, but for my money, a good foreign vocal is just an extra instrument.Grust' Devushki by Panna Cotta is a lovely trancy number with a beautiful female lead vocal track that's mesmerizing in any language.
Craters is currently the most popular album on Jamendo.com, and in my opinion, that status is well-deserved.
There's so much more to go into, and I probably will write individual reviews of each album if I have time. But for now, why not go down load an album or two and see what you think?

Album: Epic Soul Factory - Xpansion Edition

Epic Soul Factory is a band that I've been aware of for a while now, but who I was never terribly impressed by (though I certainly didn't think they were bad). Their section album, Xpansion Edition, which was uploaded to Jamendo in January of this year, changes all of that. This album is an ambient, orchestral, soundtrack for everything from quiet nights to the most epic of video-game battles. It's a real suite, and well worth listening to.

Val Davis raising funds for a new Album

Cover of Val Davis's first album

Val Davis, whose first album is a rock/country/folk hybrid called Immortal, is raising money for a second album. His first work was characterized by an acoustic sense of open spaces, wonder and humor, best summed up by the dreamy Texas Sky and the tongue-in-cheek Court of Greedy Kings. I suggest giving the album a try (the Jamendo download has some really annoying song naming problems with underscores all over the place (intentional?) but you can find it on Amazon's MP3 download service for just $9 if you want to save the time in correcting song names.

Anyway, if you like it, consider contributing to his next album. I'd love to see more patronized free music production, and to that end, I've already thrown a few dollars his way.

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.