WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Brian Chippendale's Black Pus Live on WFMU (MP3s, Video, T-Shirt)

Black Pus is the many-armed beast of a solo project from Brian Chippendale, one of the most distinct musicians and visual artists of our time. If you're not already familiar with the sounds of Black Pus, you may recognize Chippendale's many-armed drumming style and masked mic-in-mouth vox from his duos Mindflayer and Lightning Bolt. A co-founder of the storied Fort Thunder artist collective, Chippendale still lives in the Olneyville neighborhood of Providence, in a former mill building where lately he seems to be writing a new Black Pus song almost every night. So while we're wrapping our heads around 2011's Primordial Pus (Load Records) -- not to mention the limited edition CD-R series of Black Pus 1, 2, 3, 4 and 0 -- there's already a seventh Black Pus album ready to pop.

This live set on Marty McSorely's WFMU program is a special treat because, though he is a prolific musician, Black Pus doesn't tour nearly enough to quench our thirst for Pus. The set was expertly engineered by Ernie Indradat, and the interview covers recent collaborations with Björk and the Flaming Lips. Chippendale also talks about how he assembled such a unique setup, including an oscillator pedal that was originally a gift from Shinji Masuko of DMBQ. When Marty McSorely asks "What is Brian Chippendale's Black Pus?" Chippendale responds that it's reggaeton. He goes on to elaborate on a range of influences from the free jazz assault of Peter Brötzmann's Machine Gun to the unpredictable rhythms of Sightings and Black Dice (who started out as a hardcore band in Providence around the same time as Lightning Bolt).

In some circles, Brian Chippendale is known as much for his fine art, comics and graphic novels as for his music. His visual style can be experienced as part of every Black Pus and Lightning Bolt release. And, as those of you who are on the WFMU swag mailing list may have heard, Brian Chippendale designed an awesome Biker T-shirt for WFMU's marathon which begins later this month!

For more, check out the Black Pus blog, which just debuted this trippy surrealist video for "I'll Come When I Can," off Primordial Pus:

Music Blogs React to Megaupload Seizure & Cyberlocker Lockdowns

The day after last week's inspiring protest against overreaching anti-piracy laws, the US Department of Justice demonstrated that they don't need those laws, anyway.  They just went ahead and unilaterally shut down Megaupload, the world's most popular cyberlocker.  Rumor has it that similar sites like MediaFire and 4shared are under investigation and have been deleting files, while FileSonic preemptively disabled all sharing features.

As a result, much of the history of recorded sound has been made inaccessible to the public.  I'm talking, of course, about the music blogosphere.  The best music blogs aren't pirates.  They are libraries, sound archivists and music preservationists sharing recordings that would not otherwise be available.  And now sites like Global Groove, Mutant Sounds, and Holy Warbles have lost large swaths of the material they'd salvaged from obscurity.

Megaupload's Star-Powered Music Video/Endorsement Won't Censor Itself

You know Megaupload. It's one of those sites you sometimes encounter en route to download stuff. Ads pop up, and you try to avoid purchasing a Premium account, even though if you'd just give in then your download would be done by now.

Megaupload is different from Rapidshare, Hulkshare, and other similar sites because they have this new song w/ video endorsements from P Diddy, Lil John (pictured), Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Chris Brown, The Game, Mary J Blige, Kim Kardashian, Floyd Mayweather, Jamie Foxx, Russel Simmons...

 

It's a video that the participating artists' labels don't want you to see, because it doesn't fit with their depiction of Megaupload as a "rogue site". The RIAA and MPAA have already convinced Google to censor "Megaupload" searches, and if SOPA and Protect IP pass they'll banish megaupload from the web once and for all. Since this video seems to imply that some of the world's best selling musicians think differently, the major labels tried to censor it under the guise of a DMCA copyright infringement notice. They did not succeed. So go ahead and let the soothing sounds of this song-length mega-mercial wash over your brain, and/or check out the additional celebrity endorsements at Megaupload's website (which looks to have been purged clean in anticipation of this viral campaign).

Some of us may remember earlier incarnations of Megaupload with more obtrusive ads and general sleaziness. In fact, the site was founded by Kim "Dotcom" Schmitz, a notorious sleaze. After his convictions for credit card fraud, computer fraud, insider trading, and embezzlement, Dotcom procured a fake Finnish passport under the name "Kim Tim Jim Vestor" and took up shop in Hong Kong as director of several "Mega-" companies. These include not just Megaupload but also Megavideo, MegaLive, MegaPix, Megabox, and Megaporn.

Job Opening: Freelance Web Developer at the Free Music Archive

The Free Music Archive is looking for a freelance eveloper experienced with PHP, MySQL, Javascript and HTML/CSS. If you have the serious web dev chops, bring them to our headquarters in the magic factory that is WFMU. It would be great if you’re local to NYC, but we will consider remote applicants, too.

Please drop a line to dev -at- freemusicarchive -dot- org and give us some idea of your best work with urls, including your github account if you have one. If there are any music sites or apps that you like to use on a regular basis that might inform your work on the FMA, please be sure to let us know.

ABOUT THE FMA: Inspired by Creative Commons and the open source software movement, the FMA launched in 2009 with support from the New York State Music Fund, and has been covered by Billboard, Pitchfork, The Wire, New York Times, Spin, CNET, Mashable and many others. 

We’ve come a long way, but we have even bigger plans on our roadmap including implementing a recommendation engine, mobile-friendly players, social network integration and lots more.

Free Music Archive Radio & more from Music Hack Day

One of the 50+ projects to spring from this weekend's Music Hack Day, Free Music Archive Radio is essentially the template for a Creative Commons Pandora. Enter the name of any artist, and FMA Radio taps into the Echo Nest's musical brain to generate a similar playlist from the FMA's curated library of 40,000+ legal mp3s. Tweak your station further with Mood and Style parameters, and/or Creative Commons license filters.

Despite the fact that it's just a demo (works best on Chrome, not so well on Firefox) FMA Radio has already been written up in evolver.fm, the Dutch blog Muziek & de bibliotheek, and Germany's Progolog. Its awesomeness is enhanced by the fact that it's html5 (plays nice with iPhone/iPad), it's open source, and it was built over the course of 24-hours (whoa!). I spent much of the weekend hanging out with FMA Radio's creators Jeremy Sawruk, Robby Grodin (ConductiveIO) and Julie Vera, the Music Hack Day veterans whose previous projects include Sawruk's Feedtunes (turns Twitter trends into playlists based on song lyrics) and Grodin's Toscanini gestural interface. In addition to releasing open source code, Sawruk and Grodin are Creative Commons musicians, and they've really done an incredible service to the community via FMA Radio.

Music Hack Day is a series of music/tech gatherings fueled in large part by APIs. After the big news last month that FMA's API had been revamped and mapped to the Echo Nest's Rosetta Stone leading up to WFMU's Radiovision Festival, this weekend introduced the FMA to the mother of all music hacking events. It was fantastic to take part -- some highlights after the jump:

Radiovision Hack Day Oct 30th: Demo a similarity-based HTML5 Free Music Archive player, powered by The Echo Nest

Following up on last week's announcement that The Echo Nest has indexed the Free Music Archive catalog, Mike Adler put together an open source hack to demonstrate one of the myriad possibilities when this most incredible music intelligence platform is applied to the finest collection of free music.

The demo lets you search for any artist in the universe that Echo Nest knows about, and returns similar results from within the Free Music Archive's catalog in an HTML5 audio player. Go ahead and try it out. This is an incredibly powerful music discovery tool, though it's just the start of what we can build together. Sign up for API keys at the FMA and The Echo Nest to begin tinkering with our demo hack.

Next week, we're holding a Hack Day as part of WFMU's Radiovision Festival: Sunday October 30th we will "Re-invent Radio" with The Echo Nest, the Free Music Archive, and Zeega's new HTML5 platform for digital storytellers. There'll be workshops on Musical Timelines, Hacking Physical Spaces, and Multimedia Mash-ups, so plenty of opportunity to participate in the hands-on making of stuff whether or not you've got the proverbial coder's neckbeard. The Radiovision Festival takes place atop WFMU's annual Record Fair at NYC's Metropolitan Pavilion (125 W. 18th St), and Hack Day is free with RecFair admission as long as you reserve a spot in advance.

Excavated Shellac: Guest DJ Set & "Africa at 78 RPM" Box

Now available as a podcast: Jonathan Ward of of Excavated Shellac swung by Talk's Cheap / WFMU to share gems from his personal collection of international 78 RPM records.

The 90-min guest DJ set features tracks that have never been posted online, and also debuts selections from Opika Pende: Africa at 78 RPM. Compiled and edited by Jonathan Ward, the 4-disc set of 100+ previously unissued recordings also includes a 112-page softcover book.

Opika Pende will be released next week by Dust-to-Digital, just in time to stock the label's booth at WFMU's Record Fair, Oct 28th-30th.

WFMU's Free Music Archive presents Grey Area with Jason Sigal from 10/17/2011

>> playlist / mp3 / iTunes / xml/rss

originally aired on Talk's Cheap // Support Talk's Cheap on WFMU!!

RadioVision: Free Music Archive Melds w/ Echo Nest's Musical Brain

The Echo Nest has indexed the Free Music Archive catalog, integrating the most incredible music intelligence platform with the finest collection of free music.

The Echo Nest has been called "the most important music company on Earth" for good reason: 12 years of research at UC Berkeley, Columbia and MIT factored into the development of their "musical brain." The platform combines large-scale data mining, natural language processing, acoustic analysis and machine learning to automatically understand how the online world describes every artist, extract musical attributes like tempo and time signature, learn about music trends (see: "hotttnesss"), and a whole lot more. Echo Nest then shares all of this data through a free and open API. [read more here]

FMA's library of 40,000 free & legal music files have now been analyzed by the Echo Nest and made easily accessible to the developer community through a common Artist, Track, and Album ID system. Licensing information is included as part of the API, and so developers working in the Creative Commons sphere now have an incredible pool of curated audio to draw from for their noncommercial music applications.

Combining The Echo Nest's music intelligence tools with the FMA's curated approach opens up exciting possibilities for interactive music applications and new music discovery. For example, the Echo Nest's sandbox documentation describes how to query for artists who share music via the FMA and are similar to Radiohead

>> Read More About FMA + Echo Nest

The Echo Nest presents as part of WFMU's RadioVision Festival NYC, as part of the October 30th "Reinventing Radio" Hack Day along with the FMA and Zeega, an open-source html5 platform for digital storytellers -- RSVP here

Vimeo's new service connects videomakers w/ video-safe Creative Commons music from Free Music Archive

The classy video-hosting site Vimeo launched a new service to connect their noncommerical community of creative independent video producers with quality legal music options. The Music Store utilizes the Free Music Archive API to index the portion of the FMA library that can be used in video projects under the Creative Commons framework (i.e. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike; about 11,000 tracks) and offers these curated jams as its free options. This is an exciting moment for those of us who share our music under open licenses to inspire new collaborations and expand our reach.

From Vimeo's announcement:

As many of you know, finding music for your videos can be somewhat... well, painful. Licensing music on your own can be confusing and finding good free music can take forever. Many of us here at Vimeo are video creators or filmmakers as well and we experience these frustrations on a regular basis. So, we decided to do something about it.

The majority of FMA's library is pre-cleared for noncommercial use only, so it might seem strange at first that free music is included in something called a Music "Store" alongside paid music from a company called Audiosocket. But for many artists, allowing for hands-on engagement with their work in the noncommercial sphere plays into a broader promotional strategy, and even leads to lucrative commercial licensing opportunities. We always love to hear about the collaborations that result when producers who actually have a budget discover one of the many great artists who share their work via the Free Music Archive, about artists being commissioned to score new documentary films, mobile app soundtracks, and viral videos that reach 2 million views.

Vimeo introduced Creative Commons licensing for video last summer, and we've already seen a flurry of videos powered by CC music from the FMA -- everything from educational projects, travelogues, time lapses, recipe-sharing, and science videos to the immensely popular cute animal videos (although I guess that's more a YouTube thing). I'm including one example after the jump, along with the latest in FMA's series of mixes curated with the online video producer in mind. Vimeo's Music Store seems is totally new, so it's sure to be refined over the course of time. If you have feedback you can leave a comment here, and we look forward to the new collaborations that this bridge between the CC Music Community and the CC Video Community will inspire!

Silent Barn Robbed / Party Lab Lives On (mp3)

Terrible news this weekend, as Silent Barn -- the one-of-a-kind venue/laboratory/gallery/space/place in Ridgewood, Queens -- was robbed of $15k-worth of gear/equipment (read the note here or after the jump | UPDATE THERE IS NOW A KICKSTARTER).

Among the many amazing components of Silent Barn -- the Baby Castles video game installations + hacker meetups, murals and art everywhere, live performances booked by some of the city's best curators -- here's one of my favorites:

http://partylab.swillchildren.org/

Party Lab hosts straight-to-cassette mixes of not just the live performances, but everything that's going on in and around the entire space at that moment in time. Just look at the diagram -- there were microphones everywhere, even outside! It's all part of G Lucas Crane's vision of a "Center For Non-Amoral Surveillance," which he explains with this manifesto. I remember this one show, being so stunned by Grasshopper's set, I went over to the Party Lab booth to ask James (who'd been doing some mixing while hanging by the door) how he thought the recording turned out. "Great!" he said, "An ambulance came by, got some of that in the mix, plus a fight broke out so that's in there too..."

These tapes survive to document an environment which is sure to be reincarnated before long. We're all eager for an opportunity to show support for Silent Barn, because we need a space like this now more than ever, what with the shutdown of CoCo66 and this rumor of a gigantic Whole Foods coming to bulldoze some of Williamsburg's finest venues... So, stay tuned to Silent Barn (fbook/twitter/email) and read their note after the jump:

Primavera Sound 2011 New Adds: Aias, Glenn Branca, Fresh & Onlys, Moon Duo, No Joy, Soft Moon (mp3s)

Last week, we kicked off a collection of recordings from WFMU's two days of Primavera Sound coverage with Prince Rama, Swans, Oneohtrix Point Never, Suicide, Pissed Jeans, The Monochrome Set, Ducktails, and Half Japanese.

This week, we bring you six more from Barcelona's incredible multi-day / multi-stage music festival! Check out free artist-approved mp3s by...

Aias  ::  Glenn Branca Ensemble  ::  The Fresh & Onlys  ::  Moon Duo  ::  No Joy  ::  The Soft Moon

(( click for mp3s or listen after the jump... ))

Primavera Sound 2011 MP3 collection kickoff (mp3s)

Primavera Sound held its eleventh-annual festival in Barcelona Spain last month, and we are proud to present mp3 highlights from what is truly one of the world's most incredible live music events. This year, a record-setting 120,000+ attendees were treated to several stages'-worth of top-notch headliners, special reunion performances, and many up-and-coming artists who you might not expect to see in the festival setting.

For the third year in a row, the freeform-inspired folks at Primavera invited WFMU to broadcast live [playlists here and here], and we are kicking off the PS11 Free Music Archive collection with sets from...

Prince Rama  ::  Swans  ::  Oneohtrix Point Never  ::  Suicide  ::  Pissed Jeans  ::  The Monochrome Set  ::  Ducktails  :: Half Japanese

Sun Araw live at WFMU: improv / Crown Shell / Hive Burner (mp3s)

Fresh off appearances at Montreal's Mutek and the 2011 WFMU+FMA SXSW Showcase, Sun Araw took a first-ever trip to the WFMU studios for a live session that aired yesterday on Talk's Cheap.

Originally envisioned as a solo project from Magic Lanterns' Cameron Stallones (also ex-Pocahaunted), Sun Araw has evolved into a full band live performance experience alongside a flood of releases from labels like Not Not Fun, Woodsist, Leaving Records, and Araw's own Sun Ark.

The Sun Araw band features Cameron Stallones on guitar/synth/vocals, backed by two equally awesome players: Barrett Avner (also of Sadistic Candle) on the Shahi Baaja (pictured at left) & Monotron, and Alex Gray (Deep Magic / Deep Tapes) on extra guitar + MPC.

The session commenced with a 30+ minute improv to get in the zone for one new song, and one old song. The studio version of "Crown Shell" will be available on Ancient Romans, the forthcoming Sun Araw 2xLP due out on Sun Ark via Drag City August 23rd 2011. Ancient Romans will be Sun Araw's fifth full-length in three years, and "Crown Shell" provides a staggered, spacious, aquatic, and deeply hypnotic glimpse at what's to come. The band closed out with "Hive Burner," a psych-rock comet that originally appeared on Sun Araw's 2008 debut, The Phynx.

Sun Araw's WFMU session was rec'd on June 7th and aired on June 9th [playlist for Talk's Cheap/WFMU, June 9th 2011]. If you like what you hear, dig deeper into the Sun Araw universe here on the FMA and at sunaraw.com.

S.S. Records 10 Anniversary in SF May 20-22 // mp3 mix

The great Sacramento CA label S.S. Records celebrates their 10th Anniversary this Friday, Saturday and Sunday, with three shows in San Francisco (details).

"Over the last ten years, the label has built a reputation for discovering great unknown bands, finding hidden underground music scenes throughout the world, and digging up obscure and forgotten recordings." (-ssten.com)

It's true! In welcoming SS Records to the FMA, WFMU's Music Director hailed Mr. SS himself Scott Soriano's "full understanding of what made esoteric independent weirdo/garage/artpunk labels of the 80s and 90s so beloved." Soriano's been carrying on the torch not just through the label itself, but through a well-curated mailorder/distro and the essential Z-Gun print zine, which Brian calls "the greatest print-media gift to the scene since the halcion days of Forced Exposure" (-Brian Turner).

Though they specialize in vinyl, the SS Records downloads page offers a great batch of high-quality paid downloads, as well as a link to the SS Records Free Music Archive portal, which houses some real gems too.

The SS 10th Anniversary shows include label staples like Nothing People, Charles Albright, Lamps, Wounded Lion, and Liquorball (memb Monoshock!), plus special guests like Hank IV and the Mantles, a Sunday afternoon record swap, and renion performances by Nar, feedtime (first & only North American appearance), and the A Frames' original lineup (feat Lars Finberg of The Intelligence, A Frames were the first band to be released on SS, and this is their last show ever!).

SSten.com   //  SS Records Home Page  //  SS Records on the Free Music Archive

Howard Stern tells The Beets they sound like his 6th grade psych band (which was awesome) [YouTube]

Who would have guessed that The Beets, former guests on WFMU's Beastin' The Airwaves With Keili, are huge Howard Stern fans?

In the clip below, their devotion to the show inspires Howard to play a bit of The Beets' music, which reminds him of recordings he made in the 6th grade.

So then Howard Stern plays some of his own lofi recordings...and they're really awesome! One of the songs, "Psychedelic Bee," is an anti-drug song about addiction. The other is "Silver Nickles and Golden Dimes."

"My singing style is very much like The Beets," Howard acknowledges. He encourages The Beets to cover his music, too: "I don't approve of cover versions, but in this case I will."

I'm guessing that's only become Stern's covers policy after "Psychedelic Bee" was covered by Sugar Ray. I wonder if that was done with his approval though, because you don't need approval to cover a song as long as you pay the compulsory license... Anyway, some other clips of these two great songs, plus the ridiculously awful Sugar Ray version, after the jump!

WFMU Webcasts The BLIP FESTIVAL live from Eyebeam, May 19-21st (mp3s)

THURSDAY NIGHT >> PLAYLIST // STREAM (.pls)

The world's premier international chipmusic event event, the Blip Festival returns to NY May 19-21. WFMU will be there live streaming direct from Eyebeam to your home computer!

Produced by 8bitpeoples & The Tank, the Blip Festival celebrates the best and brightest from the realm of chipmusic and its related discilplines. This year, artists from all over the world will converge at Eyebeam, the leading not-for-profit art and technology center in the USA, for three days of arresting music and visual art utilizing former heavyweights of computing like the Commodore 64 and Amiga, the  Atari ST and 2600, the Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy.

WFMU will once again be webcasting live from the Blip Festival! So if you’re not able to make it to Eyebeam in the flesh, you can surf on over to wfmu.org each night for the live stream, Accu-Playlist, photos and a realtime comments board. WFMU DJs Bennett4Senate, Marty McSorely, and Jason Sigal will be joined by special guest DJ XC3N from Montreal CISM | 89.3FM to host and DJ between sets both on the stream and in-person at Eyebeam.

Highlights from these performances will be available from the Free Music Archive, where you can also enjoy a vast collection of mp3s from the 2009 Blip Festival at the Bell House in Brooklyn! After the jump, True Chip Till Death's Peter Swimm (who is also a 2011 Blip Festival performer!) made a mix of highlights from the artists who performed at the most recent NYC edition of the Blip Festival...

Ellen Fullman's Long String Instrument @ ISSUE Project Room May 22 [mp3's]

via ISSUE Project Room's Andrew C. Smith at the Free Music Archive:

 In the early 1980s, Ellen Fullman began developing the "Long String Instrument," stringing tuned piano wire across her Brooklyn studio. In the last thirty years, she has moved this instrument all over the country, and for one day she'll perform in ISSUE Project Room's new space at 110 Livingston, in Downtown Brooklyn (May 22: 3 pm & 7 pm: brand-new ISSUE members get two free tickets). It's been compared to standing inside an enormous grand piano, or "some cyclopean subterranean grotto" (The Wire). She has an upcoming release on Important Records, Through Glass Panes, and the mix below includes a few of these tracks as well as collaborations with the artists she'll be joined by later this month.

These comparisons, like "standing inside an enormous grand piano," don't quite convey the symbiosis between Fullman's instrument and her way of playing it. It's true, the audience is sitting in a room with seventy 80-foot, precisely tuned wires strung across it, but the comparison seems to fall apart when you realize you've never quite heard a piano that sounds like this. Instead of playing digitally, Fullman's playing seems to live on the threshold of audibility. The on/off of the piano seems distant — can a light brush on a single string be counted as a "note," in the same way that pressing a key constitutes a note?

The careful tuning of the strings causes sympathetic resonances among them. The wire is strung between resonator boxes made of Sitka spruce, built by a harp builder, and the sound is entirely acoustic. This setup, which on the surface seems simple, like a giant guitar with no frets or a harp with no pedals, creates infinitely complex resonances and acoustic effects. In a resonant space, the line between the instrument sounding and not sounding could be blurred.

The uploaded tracks include collaborations with the musicians she'll be performing with on May 22. Through Glass Panes, her new CD on Important Records, includes a duet with Theresa Wong, "Never Gets Out of Me," and other tracks include a duet with percussionist Sean Meehan ("untitled 3," out on cut), electronic musician David Gamper, and trombonist Monique Buzzarté ("Fluctuation 5," from the album Fluctuations on Pauline Oliveros's Deep Listening label).

Photos by Judy Dater (bottom) // this post via ISSUE Project Room's Andrew C. Smith at the Free Music Archive

Amateur Cylinder Recordings: experimental sounds from over a century ago [mp3]

The largest online collection of historic sound recordings, UCSB's Cylinder Preservation & Digitization Project, is a new Curator on the Free Music Archive sharing Creative Commons selections from their  ~10,000 recordings. Today's feature is by Berto Solis, the UCSB digitization lab's team leader:

Brown wax cylinders, the primary medium for commercial recordings between 1895 and 1901, were in circulation much longer as wax “blanks”—to be recorded on and "shaved" (erasing the old grooves) and recorded on again.

The following is a selection from our minor collection of these. Each recording is a small wonder, for it is highly doubtful that their creators would ever have imagined that they would be heard so many years later.

A boy recites a psalm in the sober, headlong fashion of a child. How old is he? Men sing to the tune of “John Brown’s Body.”  Have they had too much to drink?  The vocal duet of Suwanee River—is that a husband and wife, brother and sister, friends? And then there are the animal noises--is that a real cat or someone imitating a cat? We hope it is the latter...

These few minutes of sound give us an aural snapshot of the lives of people from a previously silent era. This glimpse into the quiet past has its complications though. Since amateur recording practices weren't standardized at this time, level discrepancies, speed fluctuations, and unintended noise were recurring issues that we have to deal with while preserving and digitizing these cylinders today. In spite of these engineering problems, the essence of the past remains. It is this, more than anything, that keeps us listening.  [Berto Solis @ Free Music Archive]

A couple weeks back, Berto Solis and David Seubert called in to my WFMU program to talk about the Cylinder Preservation & Digitization Project and DJ some selections -- download the podcast here and check out CPDP on the FMA and at cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/

Welcome DRAM to the Free Music Archive! (mp3's)

We are pleased to welcome DRAM (dramonline.org), an essential scholarly resource for experimental music, to the Free Music Archive!

From DRAM's FMA Curator Portal:

DRAM (originally the Database of Recorded American Music), is a non-profit source for institutional research of contemporary and historical composed and improvised music.  The database grew out of the original Anthology of Recorded Music project which, in 1976, released a set of 100 LPs of American music to libraries all over America in celebration of the U.S. Bicentennial. 

In keeping with that spirit, DRAM features some of the work of America's most important contemporary composers and performers, including Robert Ashley, Phill Niblock, Pauline Oliveros, Elliott Carter and others through partnerships with such labels as Mode, XI, Pogus, Lovely, Deep Listening, Firehouse 12, Porter, Edition Wandelweiser, B-Boim, Albany, New World Records, CRI, and others...as well as a growing number of recordings brought on through archival preservation and curation, including upcoming archives from Niblock's Experimental Intermedia, early Sun Ra recordings curated by John Corbett, live performances from Mills College, and Ben Hall's amazing collection of Southern Gospel 45s with an introductory essay by Rick Moody.

We are incredibly fortunate to have Nate Wooley as our guide to the DRAM archives. The Jersey City-based trumpet player is already a household name for anyone who follows the Free Music Archive's free jazz, improv, and experimental genres; his solo performances and collaborations with C. Spencer Yeh, Chris Corsano, Mary Halvorson, James Ilgefritz, Audrey Chen, Reuben Radding, Joe Morris and more have been curated by ISSUE Project Room (where he was a recent Artist-in-Residence) and hometown radio station WFMU.

To kick things off, Nate introduces us to "Ben Johnston: The Baddest Composer You Probably Don't Know" (pictured left, via New World Records) and the label Edition Wandelweiser, "Conceptual Music That Just Happens to be Gorgeous".

Much more to dig into at DRAM's FMA portal, where new sounds are being added as we speak! And if you like what you hear, DRAM is also exploring options for individual subscription to have streaming access to all the great music featured at dramonline.org, which has previously only been available to college libraries -- contact Nate Wooley for more information.

FMA 2 Year Anniversary! Celebrate w/ 50+ MP3 Mix

The Free Music Archive went live two years ago today! 

We celebrated by throwing a launch party, featuring live music from Thee Oh Sees, Sightings, Excepter and Pink Noise which you can listen back to via the FMA.

We thought about throwing an anniversary party this year, but at this point there is so much incredible music events flowing through the FMA from all over the world that it would be difficult to sum it up in one cohesive event. We've come a very long way since April 4th 2009. The library has grown from 5,000 to 33,500+ mp3s, all curated by an ever-expanding worldwide curatorial consortium. We have some exciting new features in development including a recommendation engine that will bring the library to life, and an expanded API that will open up a new world of possible uses for all the great music that wants to be shared.

Leading up to the launch of the FMA, we curated two FMA Samplers (volume 1 / volume 2) to hand out at the Free Music Series of concerts, previewing some of the sounds that would appear on the FMA. I think they hold up pretty well as a template.

Here's a new mix of 50+ of the many highlights that've been added over the past two years. As always it's just the tip of the iceberg, so keep on diggin' deep and helping get the word out about good music that wants to be shared!