Lately I've been thinkin of what's keeping me hooked to free music — and I found the answer: the joy of discovery!

What I mean by that is probably best explained by examples.

In the MTV era that we (still) reside in, "discovering" an artist means pretty much being the first bloke or lass in your class who saw the video on the music channel. Then you can brag: "Aye, I've been a fan of Bloc Party even before they were hip — I saw the video to Banquet just when it came out on MTV" ...yeah, I've been like that as well ..and, yeah, it's not really thrilling.

Now let's see how I find new free artists nowadays by looking at two examples that lead me to discover uncharted seas of music.

First, a (for me) very typical "Jamendo" scenario:

1. I was browsing along the Jamendo website when I saw an interesting cover randomly appear in the player applet.
2. I clicked "play", I liked the song and clicked on the album's link, which lead me to Team9's profile page.
3. Listening to the rest of the album I fell in love with it and wanted to learn more about it and see if there's more! Sure enough there was a link to the band's/artist's website.
4. On the website I found a huge amount of awesome mashups, which of course they couldn't publish on Jamendo. I listened to them and downloaded some ...but more importantly for this example, I looked at their links to affiliates and artists they (actually Team9 is just one guy) like(s).
5. A name cought my eye, I followed the link and landed on the website of World Famous Audio Hacker.
6. There I saw even more mashups (including the famous 8 Minutes of Madness) and a link to a brand new project/album — Tron 1.5. Seeing the movie as a kid, it brought up nostalgia and I checked it out
7. Needless to say, I checked out the (surrealistic prank) album and amongst the artists listed and linked I saw Solcofn, Tiger Mendoza and Lilith the Kitten, all of whom I liked a lot on Tron 1.5.
8. More link-clicking and more great music revealed — Lilith the Kitten has some mean remix of Prodigy's Invaders Must Die and some very nice tracks completely of her own as well (I adore Jewelbox); Tiger Mendoza also has some nice tracks on his self-titled EP on BandCamp; while apart from his music Solcofn has lead me to discover a new netlabel — Corpid, which I'm still dicovering.

The next example goes around BlocSonic — another netlabel I frequent:

1. While checking out the (then) newest release of NetBloc — BlocSonic's regular compilations of music from other free netlabels — I heard an enchaning pop song called Animals.
2. BlocSonic offers direct links to both the artists' and their netlabels' (if they have one) websites, but at that time I just wanted to see if Entertainment for the Braindead (that was her name) has any other songs available and if they're equally as good.
3. Sure enough on her website there was a videospot and a short discography — it turned out that she hand-crafts every single CD's art, making it unique and doesn't want in return anything more then enough money to cover the material costs of the CD and the cover. Wow!
4. Browsing around on her website I found a link to her netlabel (because I didn't bother to click on it on BlocSonic) — Aaahh Records. Surprisingly it's a netlabel that specialises on acoustic pop/rock, which is not easy to come by nowadays.
5. On Aaahh Records I also found The Wind Whistles — not my favourite, but very good acoustic pop/rock all the same.

And least, but not least, how I discovered one of my favourite artists in the world — Jimmy the Hideous Penguin:

1. I was bored and, being a Linux geek, searched for "penguin" in Amarok (it uses Jamendo API) and Jimmy popped up. Imagine the chances! I laugh a little inside by only thinking about it :]

Yes, it takes some more work (although less time) then sitting hours on the couch gawking at MTV and being fed the latest ads and fads. But, boy, was it worth it! Not only is there (again) the thrill and joy of discovering completely new artists and new music, but you have more control, make your own choices, find out what you like and what not. And, yes, being able to talk with the artist instead of only about his/her music, is a lot more fun!

Bottom line: finding free music is a lot more thrilling and gives a lot more joy of discovery! Not because of the (lack of) price, but because of the artists' freedom of speech, the listeners' freedom of choice and the freedom of both to communicate.

hook out >> happy birthdaying and going to bed

P.S. I've decided to slowly stop promoting TGJE blog entries to the front page and keep them in the personal blog area only. Both to keep the front page cleaner and to keep TGJE more personal by being less tied to (self-imposed) rules by which I try o keep the front page more serious.

For quite some time I missed (i.e. did not find any) proper garage rock on Jamendo.

Today, by randomly looking at the site, I stumbled upon just what the doctor prescribed:

69 Club & Station — I cannot say a lot about this band, because on Jamendo their account is still empty of any information whatsoever and their so far only album Tokio Proprio has been uploaded only two days ago. This EP consists of only three tracks, so I will take the time to dissect all three:

• Nuvole Viola — starts out pretty funky and promising, but to me the vocals on it and the speedy bridges just make it sound too much like high school rock. This track has quite potential with some polish, but as it is it's my least liked on the album.
• Brian — sounds the most like oldskoolish garage rock on the whole (erm) album. The vocals on it sound a bit like Kurt Cobain trying to sing to the Ramones, which although is not polished out, sounds pretty good. I like it a lot!
• Card on Cello — reminds me somehow of early the Hives but with a little less spunk. On this track (at least in the second half) the drums feel too powerful. Also the organ(?) and the clapping are a very nice touch. Although both would feel better louder.

I sure hope to hear them perform live someday in a small open air festival or a small smokey club. From what I can judge, that would be an awesome evening/night out for me. :]

hook out >> studying bites, but has to be done :P

First off, I want to apologise to all the readers who follow me on Jamendo. A module caused my RSS feed not to be W3C valid anymore and therefore Jamendo did not aggregate it. Today I fixed the problem by removing the troublesome module and it should work again.

Now, if you followed my blog you noticed that my laptop died again, meaning that I am still depending on borrowed hardware and PortableApps.

The good news though is that I started using SongBird (packaged as a portable app), which means that my basic needs in music — scrobbling to Last.Fm, streaming from Jamendo and rating tracks — are met and I can write again about my musical discoveries from the land of the free. Although both its interface and Jamendo plugin are not nearly as good as Amarok's and the lag caused by running it from an USB key is sometimes driving me up the wall, it is bearable.

To keep up with my promise I will also try to post more often, even if that means shorter posts (e.g. only one or two artists per post).

Right now I am too tired to write a longer post, so I will just conclude it with what I am currently listening to:

• The Morning Light and their (first?) EP — The Morning Light EP. The album was released on Jamendo only yesterday and, truth be told, I found it at the bottom of the page. Their style is a mellow mix of post punk with electronic elements, which takes me through the whole history of the post punk genre, without going too much into the noise rock section. At certain moments (e.g. in the track Troubles and the Low Profile remix of Scars) there are some more trashy or even industrial touches, while others (e.g. Scars) include some riffs that remind of surf rock and UK underground. The vocals are mediocre, but all in all I really really liked the EP and it seems like perfect music to walk around at night to. Mellow, yet powerful at times. Can barely wait to hear more from them!

hook out >> trying to study a bit, going to bed soon, in dire need of a new laptop...

Due to my laptop being dead I am not behind my regular desktop and thus not seeing the statistics what I have listened to the most in the past weeks. So I will take this oportunity to reflect on what I dislike on Jamendo. There is not much, and its mostly just annoyances, but it is only fair to say it out loud and hope things improve.

For starters, I dislike the Flash player. There less volatile and more open technologies out there — e.g. The Yahoo! Media Player that is also being used by BlocSonic seems to be written in JavaScript/EcmaScript and feels nicer to me. I am even thinking of implementing it on my page.

The OGG/Vorbis torrents are sometimes seedless, which makes it sometimes a bit of a drag to wait days or even weeks for an album to finally download.

Already after my first TGJE report mareviq suggested to me Rob Costlow — a great pianist who offers his music under a CC license. Sadly though, his music can be heard on Jamendo, but not downloaded. After I contacted Jamendo with that problem, they responded that Rob Costlow is an exception. As someone who does have some idea of IP law, I find this really odd. Considering Rob Costlow has published his works under a CC BY-NC-SA license at least on Magnatune, it should not have been any problem with anyone who got the music legally to share it with others.

But even graver then the above case is HYPE — a french band whose music is not available on Jamendo anymore at all. From what I could gather from e-mailing Jamendo, is that HYPE got a record deal and the label gave the band an ultimatum to get all their free music offline. If anything, this looks like a school example of a copyright violation. Sure, an artist has a right to revoke his work under certain conditions, but a better commercial exploitation is hardly one of them. Again, since they (most probably) had their work on Jamendo under a CC license, it is a violation from their part to take back the rights that they already gave away to the public.

This brings me to free singles of non-free albums — lately I have found a lot of singles on Jamendo and when looking at the artists' sites I usually found out they have full albums released as CD's and nowhere any notice of any CC. Quite a lot of these I found were promoted by Open Music Wire. After looking at the Open Music Wire website it seems to me that in some cases both Open Music Wire's and in turn also Jamendo's services are being misused for promoting non-free labels and artists, by CC'ing just one track. This gives me very mixed feelings. On the one hand it does promote some lesser known artists. But on the other hand, it (ab)uses free services to tease people into buying non-free content. Moreover since CC is not mentioned anywhere on the artists' homepages, I wonder what would happen if, e.g. a user would get sued for copyright infringement of a track that is under a strict copyright on the CD, yet freely available under a CC license on Jamendo or Open Music Wire.

In other news: Since I started this experiment I have listened almost exclusively music from Jamendo. This will probably change a bit in the future, not because there is much wrong with Jamendo, but just because after proving that one can survive for a month of listening only to music served by Jamendo, I will go on with a normal life and expand TGJE over other free netlables non-discriminatory. This way I will try to make a user case of a normal, internet-savvy music lover.

hook out >> listening to Jamendo Radio on my dad's laptop and slowly going to bed

As forecast in a previous blog post, this is the first "weekly" report from my Jamendo experiment. In the first part I will talk a bit about the player that I use (Amarok), after that will be a short report on where I get my music fix now and how it fares and in the end I will introduce some artists and albums that I found on Jamendo and like.

Amarok 2.0.2 sadly has a bug that makes it lack some Jamendo albums. This makes searching and playing Jamendo albums directly from Amarok a bit less then perfect and forces me to still use Firefox (and Adobe Flash) to browse music on Jamendo. Otherwise Amarok with its version 2.x has become an amazing application or even platform, if you will, not only for playing and organising, but also for discovering new music. You can even mix in the same playlist your local collection with tracks from web services and even streams.

Most of the music I got directly from Jamendo, a bit less I listened online from Magnatune and the rest was streams from Last.FM (mostly from my recommendations). As far as music on Jamendo and Magnatune — both offer almost exclusively CC licensed music — I honestly found it equally as good, if not better, then what conservative record labels and stations offer. This could in part be because of my music taste, but even so, I am rather picky with music. As far as the quality of the sound is concerned, being able to download music in Ogg/Vorbis (quality 7) made me smile and my ears as well. If only I had a better set of headphones!

Now here's the list of artists that I absolutely must share:

• Jimmy the Hideous Penguin — Jimmy Penguin is by far my absolute favorite artist right now! His experimental scratching style over piano music is just godly to my ears — the disrhythmia that his scratching brings over the standard hip hop beats, piano and/or electronica is just genius! The first album that made me fall in love was Jimmy Penguin's New Ideas — it starts with six tracks called ff1 to ff6 with already the first one (ff1) showing a nice melange of broken sampling layered with a melody and even over that lies some well placed scratching. The whole album is amazing! From the previously mentioned ff* tracks, I would especially like to put into the limelight apart from ff1, then also ff3 and ff4. The ff6 (A Long Way to Go) and Polish Jazz Thing bare some jazz elements as well, while Fucking ABBA feels like flirting with R&B/UK garage. On the other hand the album Split Decisions has more electronic elements in it and feels a bit more meditative, if you will. The last of his albums that I looked at was Summer Time, which I have not listened to thoroughly enough, but so far I like it a lot and it's nice to see Jimmy Penguin take on even more styles, as the track Jimmy Didn't Name It has some unmistakable Asian influences.
• No Hair on Head — very enjoyable lounge/chillout electronica. Walking on Light is the artist's first album and is a collection of some his tracks that he made in the past 5 years. It's great to see that outside mainstream artists are still trying to make albums that make sense — consistent style, but still diverse enough — and this album is just such. The first track Please! is not a bad start into the album, Inducio is also a nice lively track, but I what I think could be hits are the tracks Anywhere You Want and Fiesta en Bogotá — the first one starts rather standard, but then develops into a very nice pop-ish, almost house-like summery electronic song with tongue-in-cheek lyrics; the latter features an accordion and to me feels somehow like driving through Provence or Karst (although Bogotá lies actually in Columbia).
• Electronoid — great breakbeat! If you like Daft Punk's album Homework or less popular tracks by the Chemical Brothers, you will most probably enjoy Electronoid (album) as well.
• Morning Boy — great mix of post punk with pop-ish elements. On their album For us, the drifters. For them, the Bench, the song Maryland reminds me of Dinosaur Jr., while Whatever reminds me of Joan of Arc with added pop. Although All Your Sorrows is probably the track I like best so far — it just bursts with positive attitude while still being somewhat mellow.
• Bilk — a fast German pop punk with female vocals that limits on the Neue Deutsche Welle music movement from the 80's. Their album Ich will hier raus is not bad and might even compare to more known contemporary artists like Wir sind Helden.
• Ben Othman — so far I have listened to two of his albums — namely Lounge Café Tunis "Intellectuel" and Lounge Café Tunis "Sahria" — they consist of good lounge/chillout music with at times very present Arabic influences.
• Silence — this seems like a very popular artist, but so far I only managed to skim through the album L'autre endroit. It seems like a decent mix of trip-hop with occasional electric guitars and other instruments. Sometimes it bares elements of IDM and/or dark or industrial influences. I feel it is too early for me to judge if it conforms my taste, but it looks like an artist to keep an eye on.
• Project Divinity — enjoyable, very calm ambiental new age music. The mellowness and openness of the album Divinity is very easy to the ears and cannot be anything else then calming.
• SoLaRis — decent goatrance, sometimes wading even into the dark psytrance waters.
• Team9 — after listening to some of their tracks on Jamendo, I decided to download their full album We Don't Disco (for free, under CC-BY-SA license) from their homepage. Team9 is more known for their inventive remixes of better known artists' songs, but their own work at least equally as amazing! They describe themselves as "melodic, ambient and twisted" and compare themselves to "Vangelis and Jean Michel Jarre taking Royksopp and Fad Gadget out the back of the kebab shop for a smoke" — both descriptions suit them very well. The whole album is great, maybe the title track We Don't Disco Like We Used To and the track Aesthetic Athletics stand out a bit more because they feel a bit more oldskool and disco-ish then the rest of them, but quality-wise the rest of the tracks is just as amazing!

As you can see, listening only to free (as in speech, not only as in beer) music is not only possible, but quite enjoyable! There is a real alternative out there! Tons of great artists out there are just waiting to be listened to — that ultimately is what music is all about!

hook out >> going to bed...