If you like 80s synth pop you should check out Fm Attack. It’s a project by Shawn Ward from Vancouver. It seems he has been active for a few years already but I only found out about him recently. Especially his remix of Richard Marx’s “Should Have Known Better” is pretty sweet and you can download this track for free from SoundCloud.
Archive for category ‘Scene’
More than one year ago I somehow found this promo video on YouTube which I liked very much. But there wasn’t much to find out about VISITOR on the internet at that time. There were ten artists with the same name on Discogs. However, none of them seemed to be involved in the track I was looking for. For the following few months I was checking several online music stores every now and then but never found the song I was looking for.
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A year later I had almost forgotten about “Coming Home” and the LifeLike remix, when I received an email promoting “New Music from VISITOR”. I’ve received a few emails like this before and as I was on vacation, I didn’t pay much attention and wanted to look into it later. But suddenly there was this hunch. VISITOR. This name sounded familiar. And after a moment it came back to me.
I guess that VISITOR are already on Discogs. At least the triangle on the cover of this release looks very much like the one on the Facebook and Twitter page.
This is the promo video for their forthcoming album. Check it out:
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This sounds very promising, guys. Keep me updated!
You can download this beautiful indie rock sing by Northpilot for free. They’ve got more stuff on their Bandcamp page. Have a listen.
Links
I’ve been listening to the recommendations for the best albums of the year of some blogs and came across a few very great one I haven’t heard of before. One of them is “Lifeforms” by Fotoshop.
Fotoshop is a Helsinki based producer who published his debut album in November. You can listen to it in full length and also buy it at bandcamp.com. I would recommend buying from bandcamp, because you can get lossless formats there. But it’s also available on iTunes and Amazon.
Fotoshop – Too Little, Too Late:
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You can actually download “Too Little, Too Late” for free. Don’t worry, that’s not an illegal download, Fotoshop posted it himself. Just click the download icon on the SoundCloud player, follow the “buy” link, and you’ll see that it points to the download.
Find Fotoshop on
… and probably never will, is that people aren’t only willing to pay for music, they even donate for music which is given away for free.
Musicians like Nine Inch Nails or Radiohead showed us that fans do pay for music even if the could get it legally for free. NIN for example released The Slip under Creative Commons, so everyone could (and still can) download it for free from their website and legally share it with friends. If someday NIN won’t provide it any longer by themselves, it would even be legal for me to upload the album so that people can keep downloading it. At least if I don’t do it commercially. How they got money out of the free album you’re asking? Well, NIN did the same before with Ghosts I-IV where the prices are still on the website. You could buy a CD for $10, a deluxe edition for $75 or a ultra-deluxe limited package with vinyl for $300 of which there were 2.500 numbered copies. Guess what, these 2.500 packages sold out in only three days. So this makes $750,000. There were 2.500 people willing to pay $300 for music they could have downloaded for free. Amazing, isn’t it?
But what’s really amazing is the College Fund Professor Kliq started about a weeks or two ago. He has been releasing music under Creative Commons licenses for several years, downloadable for free from his website, Jamendo, SoundCloud and I mentioned him two times before. Now he’s at his last semester at Columbia College Chicago and can’t pay for it. So he started the college fund where everyone can donate via PayPal. By now he has collected $1,570.03 of the $5.000 he needs.
So what? Still thinking people don’t want to give money for music? Really? Go buy yourself a strait jacket! 😉
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Professor Kliq – Ode To Charles from the album “Guns Blazin’” (2007) released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.
About two weeks ago I got an email from Jon Spriggs, the man behind CCHits.net. It’s a website promoting Creative Commons licensed music and podcasts. Once a CC song is submitted, users can vote for it resulting in a chart of currently popular Creative Commons music.
As it turns out, someone submitted my piano piece “One Almost Perfect Night” to CCHits.net. I’m not quite sure how the submission process works. Maybe it’s by recommodation, because Jon asked me for CC songs I like. I told him about “Flachback Forward” by Strobotone, which is really awesome.
Anyway, thanks to the person who submitted my song! I’m very honored.
If you’d like to vote for “One Almost Perfect Night”, please do so on this page.
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A friend of mine was studying with two of the band members in my hometown and so I came to visit a concert in 2009, shortly after they got a new drummer. Since then they have been playing concerts all over Germany. Their booking agency is Four Artists which has several popular German artists as clients, like Die Fantastischen Vier (who are the founders of Four Artists), Nena, Peter Fox and Clueso.
“Phrasenmäher” is a compound of the German words “Phrase” (engl. phrase) and “mähen” (engl. to mow). They said the name comes from their habit to build the lyrics out of numerous phrases.
The lyrics are in German and I don’t know if you might like their songs if you don’t understand them. I have to admit that the lyrics are very important for their songs, because they are very funny and contain many wordplays. But as there is at least one internationally popular German band with German lyrics (Rammstein) you should give it a try.
A really cool thing they are doing is writing hilarious songs about cities they are touring, like this one about Flensburg:
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Their new Single “Sympathie Ist Der Teufel” is available as a free download from their website.
Links
He is my favorite Creative Commons musician. Not only because he’s constantly putting cool stuff out there for free. But he seems to be a really nice guy, who’s just as crazy about music as anyone can be. As far as I know Professor Kliq is based in Chicago, where he’s studying music.
A few hours ago he published a video on YouTube thanking everyone who voted for him in the Jamendo Awards:
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There are several albums he published on the web under a Creative Commons license. My favorite is “Guns Blazin’” with the awesome track “Ode To Charles“:
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The best track not appearing on one of his albums is “Crystals“:
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So if you like his music, too, maybe you’d give him your vote an Jamendo. You need to have a Jamendo account to vote: Jamendo Awards 2011
