A few of my recent favorites from the Free Music Archive (had a long list for this that I'll have to get to at a later date, but feel free to share your favorites!)
The FMA loves Lucky Dragons (Lukey Dargons and Sara Rara) for two simple reasons: 1. Their music and visual art taps into Earth's eternal hot spring of positive energy, and remixes its best elements, and 2. They return the favor by feeding it all back out into the world under Creative Commons. Lucky Dragons have a new 12'' out on the Teenage Teardrops label called Open Power (pictured R), here's Power Melody (mp3, one more on the FMA)
Among the recent adds from KEXP (who, as I type, are uploading more tracks by Obits, Ladytron, The Lights and NOMO), I'm particularly excited to hear from Idle Times. Based out of KEXP's homebase of Seattle, whose HoZac and Woodsist 7''s were played a bunch on WFMU. And it's incredible to hear new music from Thomas Mapfumo, the influential "Lion of Zimbabwe". In the late 1960s, he combined traditional mbira-based music with western instrumentation to create a powerful (and political) new musical style called Chimurenga. Tsuro Magena (mp3) is a track that'll appear on Thomas Mapfumo & The Blacks Unlimited's forthoming album Exile (titled as such because Mapfumo has been living in exile in Eugene, OR).
I first heard about Michael Stasis from Nadav of Phoning It In who, knowing my fondness for Ariel Pink
and GBV, thought I might dig these mysterious home-recorded psychedlic
folk-pop sounds. He was right! Take a listen to Air of Happiness (mp3, + one more on the FMA) from his self-titled
cassette (pic L) on the Natural Resources imprint. It's on-sale at a few local record shops. I
got mine at Other Music where it's hidden behind the counter and you
have to ask for it by name as if it's made with pseudoephedrine.
New Jersey's own Pre has a new album of instrumental hip-hop beats called The Woodgrain Sessions. Here's one called Lampion (mp3), available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License so if you wanna do something with this beat, please go ahead and share it!
We're building an embeddable player for the FMA, but in the meantime, you can follow the links to freemusicarchive.org for more free mp3s from these artists (and thousands more), plus ways to donate/purchase their music if you like what you hear.
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