Free Music Friday: Not getting enough free music?

We’re here to help! Here’s a house music mix of Yoko Ono’s I’m Not Getting Enough (twisted morgan page remix).

What do you think? Does it need a little ululating?

via the audioperps at APC

This is sort of amazing – Mat Jarvis (Gas) has announced that a fan video for his track Microscopic has just reached the quarter million barrier on YouTube, with 250,000 full views.

That’s amazing for an ambient music video, but even more so since it’s fan-produced.

Check out the track below and see the Microscopics site if you want to get the full album.

The album features 10 new tracks, recorded in London, Barcelona and New York with producers Brian Eno and Markus Dravs.

To build interest, they’ve released a free single, Violet Hill, that you can download via their site. (email required)

Tracks:

• Life In Technicolor
• Cemeteries Of London
• Lost!
• 42
• Lovers In Japan/Reign Of Love
• Yes
• Viva La Vida
• Violet Hill
• Strawberry Swing
• Death And All His Friends

Amber Nixon is a San Francisco-based techno and tech-house DJ and producer with a taste for driving beats and aggressively risky mixing.

Aggressive and risky is good.

Her unique approach to mixing is featured on her three CD releases, Live with Friends and Family (2004), Gold (2002), and CityDweller (2001), and her latest track, Your Love, is featured on the CD Altered Evidence (2004).

In 2003, Amber co-founded NorCal DJ and Music Production Academy in San Francisco, where she develops and instructs DJ courses. She is also a recurring guest lecturer for the UCLA Graduate School of Musicology course on The History of Electronic Music.

Amber is a resident with the San Francisco branch of Sister USA, a cross-genre, all-female DJ collective. Amber and her projects have been featured in Remix Magazine (US), XLR8R (US), Etc. Magazine (US), Karma Magazine (US), Szene (Germany), the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Magazine and numerous online publications.

You can preview Amber’s aggressive and risky mixing style with her grinding, feverish acid trance mix, CityDweller. Amber’s got more mix MP3s at her site, along with her performance schedule.

Yeow! What’s not to like about DJ Diamond?

She’s an international DJ, she’s Hawaiian and she’s been featured in Playboy, Maxim, and FHM. She’s even got a degree in sports medicine, in case you get whiplash turning your neck when she catches your eye.

She’s DJ’d from South Africa to China to Russia to South America, delivering mixes of electro, house and progressive to hard trance music. In between touring, she’s in the studio working on original productions.

You can get a taste of DJ Diamond’s sound with her Shine mix, below. More MP3s & videos are available at the DJ Diamond site.

The EP represents a new direction for Mashed Buddha, who’s orchestrated grooves have thus far lacked one thing – improvisation. Whereas debut album Subdue Your Mind was an experiment in electronica composition, the EP and upcoming full-length album Zen Conspiracy are a collection of layered funk, drum n bass, and downtempo grooves that allow for jamming keyboard solos.

You can preview the EP below, with the track Mystery Dropper, or get the full EP at the Mashed Buddha site (registration required).

The files are high quality (320 kbps – stereo), DRM-free mp3s, and are released under a Creative Commons license, which means that you can copy, burn and share the tracks.
“I want as many people as possible worldwide to hear Four Keys To Zen,” noted John Corda aka Mashed Buddha. “It really introduces a more improvisational style than my debut album Subdue Your Mind that culminates in my upcoming ‘Zen Conspiracy’. The Creative Commons route seemed like the best way to get my fans excited about my new work and spread it beyond.”

Track Listing:

• Hype – featuring the voice of legendary guru of all things enlightening and bender of spoons, Uri Geller, waxing hypnotic over a chill yet driving groove.
• Mystery Dropper – Organic drum n bass combined with sick keyboard chops.
• Spikes – from Mashed Buddha’s debut effort ‘Subdue Your Mind,’ this is a descending drum n bass pattern that evolves and replicates. Spiky, like crazy Aunt Mable’s cookout punch.
• Temptation – Damn funky catchy clav electronica.

part2 is a new label, launched in March 2007. The label features ambient, abstract and hard to define electronic music. While currently a net-label, part2 plans to offer cds and other media soon.

Current artists include Elfish Echo, Ian Stewart, James Murray & Lackluster.

You can preview or download Ian Stewart’s ambient track Driftwood, below, or download the label’s first four EP’s at the site.

part2’s philosophy:

part2 exists for several reasons. the obvious one is to release music that we love, that explores new territory, that rewards considered listening.

but part2 is about more than just the music. part2 is about culture, art, change and experimentation. we’re also very much about community — the community formed by our artists, our listeners, and all the other great artists, labels and people that make up the ambient and underground electronic music community. any such community can only work through mutual respect, responsibility, support and encouragement.

we also take our responsibility towards the planet on which we live very seriously. when we start releasing printed material, we will ensure that all of it is manufactured and printed in a low-carbon, sustainable manner. those items that can’t be sustainably produced (i.e., cds themselves), we will offset as best we can.

part2 is also about change and growth. that means cultural, musical growth… and that means not worrying whether our output is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, or whether it will have popular appeal.

Diatonis is also heavily into surround sound and video. An example is embedded below, and there are many more examples available at his site.

Diatonis’ latest release, perception, is a 5.1 release that offers his abstract expressionist music as both a stereo mix one CD and a surround sound mix on DVD.

All month, we’re going to help you kick the RIAA habit by highlighting great electronic music that’s available for free on the Internet.

Binary Mind is a French electronica group that has released several CDs of free music. Their tracks range from ambient to techno to industrial.

You can preview one of their tracks, Naia, below, and download full CDs at the Binary Mind site.

Cinema Du Lyon is podcast project that features experimental ambient soundscapes in podcast and video podcast form.

Here’s their description:

Cinema du Lyon are not from Lyon … they are from your head, the way films and TV effect our lives all the time. Playback from scenes witnessed on the screen. The dialogue leeches into our living narratives, taking it over at times. The found scraps of speech resemble toast crumbs upon an audio duvet, the harshness and the irritability, the sweetness and the sadism.

You can preview their latest podcast below, or subscribe to the podcast using this feed URL:
http://funk.co.uk/pod/cinema.xml

Today we’ve got a free MP3 from Mudville. Their music is described as future-soul, and combines electronic and acoustic instruments along with electronic processing.

On their new release, Iris Nova, producer/bassist Benny Cha Cha uses lush soundscapes to spotlight the chops of songwriter/vocalist Marilyn Carino.

Mudville is using free music as a way to let you sample their music and find out more about the band.

You can download the free track Eternity below, or learn more about Mudville at their site.

March 17

If you haven’t discovered it yet, check out DJ Steveboy’s Podrunner podcast.

DJ Steveboy is an LA DJ that creates two podcasts, Podrunner, which features pounding non-stop electronica mixes designed to get you exercising, and Groovelectric, which features dance music mixes.

You can find out more about DJ Steveboy at his site, where he has info on his latest mixes. And you can preview Podrunner with his recent Groundpounder mix, below, which has two hours of driving 180 BPM tunes.

You can also subscribe to his podcast by adding this URL to iTunes or other podcast software:
http://www.djsteveboy.com/audio/podrunner.xml

March 15

Previously, we’ve looked at free trance music, free electroacoustic music, Berlin-school bootlegs and some 8-bit madness.

Hopefully, you’ve got some hard disk space left, because we’re only halfway through the month.

Monotonik is a net music label that releases music exclusively online in the mp3 format. Monotonik has released over 300 tracks from a variety of talented idm-ish electronic musicians from all over the world.

All their releases are distributed under a Creative Commons license, which means you can download them and share them with your friends.

You can get a taste of Monotonik’s music with the minimal techno track Deep Impact, by Hoffman. Preview Deep Impact below and check out more great tracks at the Monotonik site.

Image: Lorri37

March 12

Little Things Count is a free CD of minimal ambient electronica by Kernel32. It’s released on OpenLab Records, a label that releases music under a Creative Commons license, which means you can legally download and share it.

Description: “There are some things that my friends have done for me in the past.. not huge favours or anything, just said somethin or done something nice for me and i always look back and remember it. that’s where the title comes from. This album might be dedicated to my friends… there are tracks on it that mean different things to me. The period i wrote the album in was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster, some days i’d be a bit depressed and fragile, some days i’d be happy. So thats where the general mood of the album comes from. My music start off as mind and develop a little into instinct i think.”

You can preview Little Things Count below.

March 11

Archaic Horizon Records is a cool label focused on the experimental and eclectic. It releases music under the Creative Commons license, which means you can download the music legally, copy it and even share it as you like.

There most recent release is a free EP called Distancing, by a New Zealand band called Sora Shima.

“It’s full of lush reverb drones and textures made purely with broken guitars, a $50 MP3 player with built-in microphone and software,” explains Sora Shima guitarist Jae Lurman.

The four song EP’s title, Distancing, alludes to a beautiful naturalistic setting free from any disrupting inhabitants. Yet all of the songs are given an edgy quality with the occasional hollow or sharp tones increasing tension. These agitated sounds are eventually subdued by their softly moving counterparts composed of minimal textural drones.

You can sample Distancing with the track Monsoon, below, or download the full EP at their page at the Archaic Horizons site.

You can learn more about Shora Shima at their MySpace page.

The podcast features music, interviews and more. A recent podcast features a conversation with ambient artist Steve Roach.

Audio podcasts are shows that you can subscribe to like a magazine. Add the podcast URL to an application like iTunes, and new shows will be automatically downloaded when they become available. More info is available in the Podcasting News article What is Podcasting.

The podcast feed URL for the Music is Art podcast is: http://www.spottedpeccary.com/podcasts/sppodcastfeed.xml.

In iTunes, select Advanced – Subscribe to Podcast and paste in the podcast URL.