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 (archived) – 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 (archived) is not bad and might even compare to more known contemporary artists like Wir sind Helden. Update: Sadly they removed themselves from Jamendo, they have their own website now, but unfortunately there is no licensing info available about the music.

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 (archived) 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…


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