A lot of people today are claiming that the cost of recorded music is approaching zero. I tend to agree. That’s one of the reasons that I make my own music available for free. Although I am not really a fan of P2P file sharing and pirating music over the internet, I have found that there are a lot of places to find interesting music for free online, legally. I thought I would share some of my personal favorites here.

• The Ibiblio Library: Here you will find a huge amount of recorded material from around the world. My personal favorites are the Puzzling Music Archive, Pandora, and Gamelan Nyai Saraswati (I really can’t resist a good gamelan ensemble…)
• Steve Layton’s “Click Picks”: Music picked out by Steve Layton, a composer with a keen eye for interesting talent.
• ccMixter – The Open Source Alternative: I have actually spent a lot of time here lately. While a lot of the music uploaded here is kind of pop/electronica oriented, there are definitely some interesting artists here. It seems like it is still a relatively small community, all mixing each other’s music and sounds. If you are interested in free samples (smaller snippets of recordings, as opposed to songs), you could also try their sister site, Freesound.
• The Avant Garde Project: This interesting project digitizes out of print albums of 20th century music, and includes composers such as Morton Subotnik, Ben Johnston, John Cage, Harry Partch, Toru Takemitsu, Luciano Berio, Pauline Oliveros, and many others. I have not yet had a chance to sample the music here, but I am looking forward to it. Be warned – the native format here is FLAC, so if you don’t know about it you might want to read their technical information page.

Hopefully some of this information will help you find some new and interesting music. Let me know if there is anything out there I have missed.

I visited last.fm today for some reason and found out there was already a page set up for me there.  I figured if I am there anyway, I might as well upload some music.  So now you can download Softshoeballet and tones(a)tones on my last.fm page.  The rest will be going up in a few days, then hopefully the cover art.

So… anyone know who my music might be similar to?  And while I’m asking, anybody want to write an artist description for me? 

Yesterday, Napster began selling DRM-free mp3 recordings individually and by album.  They claim to have over 6 million songs, comparable to the DRM-laden iTunes Store.

I figured I would check it out.  Following my usual routine to judge a music retailer, I searched for Morton Feldman.   One of the first things I noticed was that they carried the Flux Quartet recording of his String Quartet 2.  If you’re not familiar, this is a six hour long work in one continuous movement, and a notoriously difficult piece to play.  I have this piece on DVD-Audio, but I have never been able to listen to it on a portable music player.

iTunes carries the entire Flux recording, and sells it for $45, which is less than the 6 CD set, I believe.  But when I viewed this album on Napster, I saw that each of the 29 tracks was available for $0.99 each, but that you could buy the entire 6 hour album for only $9.95!

I am not sure if this is a mistake, or if Napster has some kind of different agreement with Mode that allows them to sell for this price.  Regardless, I bought the album.

As of this morning, the price is the same.  If you have ever thought of buying this recording, I would say now is the time.

I am brewing another batch of beer tonight.  This one, according to The Brewer’s Apprentice, is supposed to be similar to Old Speckled Hen, one of my favorite English beers (and available, I may add, at the Cincinnati Airport).I am finding that, while cooking up the beer, I have started to listen consistently to a Jethro Tull playlist.   There seems to be something fitting there for me.  The woodsy flute-induced classic rock mixes well with the act of brewing an old English ale. To contrast that, I have gravitated to listening to Gary Numan while mowing the lawn.  I can’t quite rationalize that one, but it’s the truth.  And the soundtrack to writing functional specifications for complex software systems (my bread and butter)?  Morton Feldman, of course.  Or possibly Lief Inge or some other extremely slowed down piece of music.

Long time contributor and friend of the Journal Matt R. has pointed out a free download from the inestimable record store Other Music. The artist, a Finnish singer who goes by the name of Lau Nau, has a pretty interesting sound.  I haven’t heard of her until now, but I’m intrigued.  Is it just me, or does the instrumentation sound reminiscent of one of my pieces?  I guess there are just no new ideas under the sun…

As anyone most people who have spoken to me about music know, I like my music slow.  Sometimes extremely slow.  Sometimes ridiculously slow.  That’s not to say I don’t appreciate the occasional fast piece of music, but my interest lies in the slow an gradually evolving tune.One piece that really scratched this particular itch was Lief Inge’s “9 beet stretch“.  Allow me to print the score for you below:

A recording of Ludwig van Beethoven’s 9th symphony is to be stretched to 24 hours, with no pitch distortion.For installation or performance, use either supplied material or augment any full length digital recording of Beethoven’s 9th symphony. As the length of the source recordings varies, so will the ratio of the augmentation vary to reach the full 24 hours length. With a partial performance, the performed part must be augmented with the same ratio as would the whole recording.There is a version for 9 Beet Stretch for each recording available of Beethovens 9th symphony. If there for any reason is hard to obtain a copy of Beethoven’s 9th symphony, please use Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem.    

 So really, this is an idea more than a composition.  But I have listened to many hours of the free audio files provided, and there is something there that is extremely interesting.  I have been searching for a way to do this since  have heard this piece, but all the ways I knew were prohibitively complex.  Until now.I recently stumbled across Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch, which seems to hold out the promise of providing that Inge-esque sound with an easy-to-use interface.  I can’t find a version that I can compile on Mac OS X, so right now I am running the PC version through Parallels, but I have had good results so far.  Perhaps I will create the Mozart Requiem version of 9 beet stretch.  Or I may see how Conlon Nancarrow fairs after be slowed down a few dozen times. 

OK, so it’s been over a month since I’ve written in my journal.  Hey, it’s my journal – I can write when I want to!

That being, said, I have a whole list of things on my iGoogle task gadget to write entries about, but I have not made the time to write.  Why is this?  I have always had issues when starting a journal, but once I get the ball rolling things usually pick up steam.  It doesn’t help that I have been incredibly busy lately, but I digress…

Part of this, in addition, is that I have another journal that competes with my time.  That one is made out of paper.  Making the transition to an online journal (not a “web log”, or “blog”, mind you – a web log to me is a list of http connections and other system events, not so exciting) is very similar to my transition from recording on analog tape (Istill have my Yamaha MT-120 4-track in the closet, just in case!) to digital recording.  This transition is still ongoing for me, and may be one of the reasons why I haven’t made a lot of recordings since that transition.

So I will try to get these posts up in the coming weeks…probably.