Celebrate! I’ve now posted more than 100 hours of free music to Free Albums Galore.
I finally wrote a FAQ. It’s also linked on the sidebar.
The best way to “give back” to Free Albums Galore is to help me with my Badly Wanted Music list, also linked on the sidebar.
Not enough of you are using Firefox or reading Scaruffi. :-)
That is all.
TranceVision play “entrancing world pop”; a delicious blend of slightly “world” music with thick trance textures, ethereal & wordless vocals, and pop-rock instrumental backing. Great electronic landscapes, very spiritual. A cross betwen Coldplay, Delerium, and Adiemus, if you will.
Because Magnatune only provides links for streaming their MP3s (128kbps) via M3U playlists, I’ve provided direct file links below to all 10 MP3 files. If you like this music, please support the artist and buy the album in higher-quality files (including FLAC) or on CD.
The Kuttner String Quartet performs 3 string quartets for our listening pleasure. Suffice it to say that the Mendelssohn sounds like Mendelssohn, the Beethoven sounds like early Beethoven, and the Janacek sounds like a typically baleful Eastern European composer. They are all very good pieces.
Download
Mendelssohn - String Quartet #2: 1 2 3 4
Beethoven - String Quartet #6: 1 2 3 4
Janacek - String Quartet #1: 1 2 3 4
Boing Boing covered the albums, so I’d better jump on the bandwagon too, right? Actually, I’ve been meaning to write up Brad Sucks for a while and now seems like a good time to finally post.
From Brad’s Magnatune page: “Brad Sucks is a one-man band who writes, records, mixes and distributes his music from his home in Ottawa, Canada. Dripping with grooves, a vivid lyrical style, and an incredibly catchy pop sensibility, Brad’s music has been likened to that of Beck, Moby, Folk Implosion and John Vanderslice.”
I Don’t Know What I’m Doing is catchy electro-pop that, like Beck and Moby, uses studio production to sound more interesting than it is. If that sounds like a slam, it’s not - that’s the bread and butter of one of my favorite bands, Radiohead.
Brad is pretty tech savvy. He’s got a blog, a podcast for new song demos and another for newly submitted remixes, and he’s using the Internet to get heard, if not paid. “If the worst-case scenario is becoming a well-heard musician who never gets paid, I can live with that,” he says. To further promote his music, Brad put up the complete source recordings (torrent) for I Don’t Know What I’m Doing so fans could remix all the tracks. Brad picked his favorites and compiled them as I Don’t Know What I’m Doing Remixed.
The remix album is, naturally, an even more adventurous textural and rhythm exploration from a variety of very skilled remix artists. The sound remains electro-pop, though usually with a strong emphasis on the electro. The highlights for me were “You’ve Got the Message (Red(d)Mix)” and “Bad Attraction (Earjamm mix)”
It seems to me that Brad doesn’t suck, and he knows exactly what he’s doing.
I Don’t Know What I’m Doing is available in 128kbps MP3, and the remix album is available in 192kbps and a full-album ZIP (for best speeds, use the torrent). In case the site’s bandwidth gives out, the first album is also available from Magnatune: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12.
Download
I Don’t Know What I’m Doing
I Don’t Know What I’m Doing Remixed
Christopher Bailey’s modern composition, copiously but aptly titled The Quiet Play of Lights on my Grandmother’s Bedroom Ceiling, is a meandering piece that had my mind’s eye seeing lights and shadow playing on a ceiling for 20 minutes. It’s very dynamic, evocative, and engaging. Certainly not for all listeners, but I like listening to it.
The 128kbps MP3 is one of several Bailey compositions available from his home page.
Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B Minor is a seminal work of Romantic piano sonata form and one of the few works in nearly every pianist’s repertoire. Not to be missed.
You can download performances of the work by Brendan Kinsella or Michael Hawley at the Piano Society in 128kbps MP3.
It’s not a proper “album”, and it’s been around a while, but I can’t not link to 250 covers of “House of the Rising Sun” in MP3.
If you’re looking for more free music that won’t show up here because they don’t match my tastes or the criteria for this blog, feel free to browse the same collections I browse: Internet Archive Netlabels, Magnatune, Classic Cat, Oddio Overplay, EC Brown’s MP3 Links Archive, UbuWeb’s MP3 Archive, and, well, Google.
I’ll wait to launch “Free Films Galore” until I have more readers here and until I’ve found more films actually worth posting about. The recent return of UbuWeb’s film section makes that easier.
I’m putting together a FAQ for this site, so if you have any questions you want answered, please ask them in the comments section below.
The Kyiv Chamber Choir gorgeously renders some Ukranian baroque choral music. I may never know what differentiates Ukranian baroque music from German or French or Italian baroque music, but it’s all good.
Because Magnatune only provides links for streaming their MP3s (128kbps) via M3U playlists, I’ve provided direct file links below to all 11 MP3 files. If you like this music, please support the artist and buy the album in higher-quality files (including FLAC) or on CD.
Kaminari Synthesis (Vincent Fugère, owner of netlabel Camomille) delivers some very pretty and wholly hummable ambient glitch indie-tronica ballads. At 35 minutes, the album straddles the line between EP and LP. Its 11-minute closer, “Blue Skies, Winter’s Final Cry and Other Relevant Love Stories”, is a wonderfully crafted slow-builder and plays like an understated electronica Mogwai track. Great listening; perhaps the only moment that will interrupt its induced reverie comes near the end of “To Rise Above One’s Self”, the most furiously exciting passage on the album.
The tracks are available as 192kbps MP3s and a full-album zip via the Internet Archive.
The late, legendary performer John Fleagle brought 800-year-old poems to life with his contemporary vocal interpretation and his own reconstructions of the lute, gothic harp, and hurdy-gurdy. Worlds Bliss is a collection of several ancient tunes perfomed by Fleagle and Shira Kammen. From a fansite: “His uncanny voice, with its extraordinary range, brought vivid life to these ancient songs of love and death, magic and mysticism. He seemed to have stepped directly into this world from the 13th century, to walk lightly among us and, in his singing, to direct our attention to concerns and questions still unanswered at this brutally prosaic end of the millenium. He was a quiet, unassuming soul; his gifts were not marred by excessive ambition or ego. He was unique. There is simply no one who can replace him.”
Because Magnatune only provides links for streaming their MP3s (128kbps) via M3U playlists, I’ve provided direct file links below to all 15 MP3 files. If you like this music, please support the artist and buy the album in higher-quality files (including FLAC) or on CD.
4boxs (”Your home for Pimprovisation”) is an exciting music project headed by Mike Hagedorn. From his press release: “Trombonist Mike Hagedorn has been testing his theories of style, genre and technique in Chicago ongoing ten years. His current project, 4boxs, begun in 2001, is a 10-year recording and performance plan where he combines musicians from various backgrounds into unconventional groups to push the evolution of popular and improvised musics.” His website hosts 7 albums of jazz, improvised, and avant-garde music, recorded by Hagedorn and his collaborators.
Ol’ Sparky is a collection of “preconceived and accidental solo, duo, and quartet improvisations digitally reassembled into four unpretentiously titled untitled tracks.” The first and third tracks are almost an ambient landscape with meandering trombone solos laid on top, the second and fourth tracks are more aggressive and speedy.
Beekey is a heavy, deeply-processed, industrial-sounding rock album that still retains some of the jazz techniques - if not the sound - of the 4boxs project. Like nothing you’ve ever heard before, but hey - that’s true of most 4boxs music.
Total Improv! is a continuation of Ol’ Sparky but with the intrusion of Subotnick-esque electronic noise.
Temeritorium is an energetic jazz record. “The challengers: four diverse improvisers swapping roles and ditching preconventions. The match: a one-hour one-time-only recording session yielding bizarrely unique results. Truly, this is a swing-based free-improvisation album like no other.”
The Ridiculous Trio Plays the Stooges is easily explained: “trombone, tuba and drums (no vocals!) covering Stooges classics.”
The Driver is an avant-garde jazz piece by Mike Hagedorn.
anaananaan: Part one is 20 minutes of rockin’, noisy jazz chaos. Part two is definitely Subotnick (to my ears) with a furious rhythm and varied instrumentation. Strangely, the second half suddenly switches to a more Aphex Twin-like sound.
MP3s of varying bitrates for all the albums are available at the page below.
Edward Martin plays Renaissance music for the lute. Early music is so simple and folksy and fun; I love it! Tracks are usually shorter than 2 minutes. Highlights include tracks 13, 17, 34, and 36.
Because Magnatune only provides links for streaming their MP3s (128kbps) via M3U playlists, I’ve provided direct file links below to all 36 MP3 files. If you like this music, please support the artist and buy the album in higher-quality files (including FLAC) or on CD.
Download
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36
KKFS spliced together samples from 50s and 60s pop and lounge LPs and added some effects and electronic instruments to produce this fascinating cutup of “experimental pop”. The download page even provides all the original samples for remixing purposes. Definitely one of the most interesting purely loop-crafted albums I’ve heard. Just don’t ask me how to pronounce the album’s title.
The Internet Archive hosts the album as 256kbps MP3s or a ZIP file.
Skidbladni was made entirely from the output of an image synthesizer that turns pictures into sounds. Akashic Crow’s Nest spliced the music and added effects, but provided no additional instrumentation. From the variety and naturalism of the music, I’d never have guessed. Lots of droning, sparkling, twanging, moaning, popping, and shining. By the way, “Skidbladni” does actually mean something: “A ship made by the dwarfs, large enough to hold all the gods, but which could be folded together like a sheet of paper, and put into a purse when not required for use.” Whatever. The music doesn’t sound process-generated to me, so there’s definitely a future for this kind of processed soundscape experimentation. I wonder what kind of music Picasso’s Three Musicians play?
Skidbladni is available from the Internet Archive in 192kbps MP3s and as a full-album ZIP.
A founding member of pioneering post-industrial/experimental band :zoviet*france: (AMG), Rapoon (AMG), aka Robin Storey, has produced a large body of solo work that is influenced by Can, Neu!, Stockhausen, Cage, and especially Eno and Hassell. Rapoon is one of the most musically important non-classical artists I will ever be privledged to post about on this blog. He has released 7 of his magnificent, groundbreaking albums through Magnatune.
Vernal Crossing finds a “magic balance between percussions and electronics. ‘The Same River Once’ mixes exuberant Indian dance music and languid galactic drones and ‘Bol Baya’ propels a distant chant with frantic tabla beats and the crescendo of a majestic ultrasonic wave” (via). The music is often frighteningly intense.
Fallen Gods is a louder, heavier, faster, more overtly “world music”-sounding ambient album.
Cidar is the transition from Vernal Crossing to The Kirghiz Light, and a strong soundscape in its own right.
The Kirghiz Light is a 2-CD epic ambient poem that pushes percussion to the background in favor of sound texture manipulation and loop mixing. The human voice is often invoked. Several tracks “We Fell Like Rain”, “Frostling Merge”, and “Into Light”) introduce entirely new ideas to the genre, however minute. The album is monumental.
Easterly 6 or 7 is Rapoon’s most ambient album, and relies on stretched textures entirely until its final track, “Rattling Sabers”.
AMG on Tin of Drum: “Anything that is deeper and darker is no longer music. The atmospheres are bleak and hopeless. There are moments of brief respite when the spirit lifts up to merely evil. This absolute masterpiece is as scary as, well, hell!”
What Do You Suppose? is a departure. Rapoon uses his ethnic electronica as the soundtrack for alarmist speeches about covert government activities and UFOs. Yes, it’s satire.
Because Magnatune only provides links for streaming their MP3s (128kbps) via M3U playlists, I’ve provided direct file links below to all 71 MP3 files. If you like this music, please support the artist and buy the albums in higher-quality files (including FLAC) or on CD.
Download
Vernal Crosing: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Fallen Gods: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Cidar: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
The Kirghiz Light: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
Easterly 6 or 7: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Tin of Drum: 1 2 3 4 5 6
What Do You Suppose?: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
I will be in the boundary waters from Sept. 8th-11th, but will maintain my pace of one album per day.
I’ve noticed that some readers try to post a comment twice, presumably because they do not immediately see it appear on the blog. Comments from first-time posters are held for moderation, and may take a while for me to approve. This is to prevent spam.
I’d like to start an identical blog for movies called “Free Films Galore”. I would post about one free, legal, downloadable film (short or feature-length) every week. I would only post about films that I think are genuinely very good, rather than endless amateur animated shorts, Warner cartoons and B-movies from the Internet Archive, fan films, and parodies. But before I launch, I’d like to hear any suggestions my readership may have regarding implementation.
Subscribe to this blog with Bloglines, an excellent and free aggregator that can be accessed from any computer and saves bandwidth.
Tell your friends about Free Albums Galore, post about it on your blog, sing it’s praises from the rooftops! I need more readers. :-)
