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

• Northpilot on Facebook
• Northpilot on Twitter
• Northpilot on Bandcamp

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:

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

• SoundCloud
• bandcamp
• Facebook
• MySpace
• SongKick
• Tumblr
• YouTube

You have to listen to this. I really like it. Mazemirror is an electro-pop band from Cologne and I love them since I found their song “NGBA” (Never Gonna Back Again) about a year ago on SoundCloud. A few months later they posted a preview of their new song “Elle” and it was so catchy that I couldn’t wait to hear the finished track. Two weeks ago they put “Elle” onto SoundCloud and I’ve been listing to it a lot since then. Their website even says that the debut album will be released in 2012. I can’t wait!

Now, a few hours ago Mazemirror posted the link to the video clip on their Facebook page:

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!

Professor Kliq – Ode To Charles from the album “Guns Blazin’” (2007) released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.

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.

What do you need to compose a piano piece in only one night? Inspiration. No more and no less.

Do you know these moments, when something really unexpected happens which raises hope deep inside of you? That you finally know how your life will go on? That you finally found what your heart was longing for, for such a long time? And then again those moments when the tiny seed of hope is killed by a little incident. You realize that nothing is as it seems and you’re asking yourself: “What if things were different?” But things aren’t different. The search doesn’t end there. It doesn’t end then. And you sense that life is a roller coaster of emotions, good and bad, pleasant and painful, and that you’ve probably just passed the second hill.

I’m still working on the first Lorino album. Unfortunately, I’ve got to study very hard at the moment and don’t have as much time for music as I’d like to have. But there was this one week which gave me the inspiration I needed to compose this new piano piece. Here it is: “What If”. Enjoy.

Links

• Release details
• SoundCloud release page
• MP3 320 kbps
• PDF sheet music
• Full release, FLAC
• Full release, MP3 320 kbps
• Source files (LilyPond, Midi)

Another Creative Commons licensed photograph from Flickr which I’m going to use as a cover. This work by Quinn Dombrowski has the same title as my forthcoming piano piece. It is licensed under CC-BY-SA and so is my modification. I just removed some of the writing and changed coloring and contrast a little.

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:

Their new Single “Sympathie Ist Der Teufel” is available as a free download from their website.

Links

• Download: “Sympathie Ist Der Teufel” (MP3)
• Download: “Sympathie Ist Der Teufel” (ZIP)
• Website: Phrasenmäher

A few hours ago he published a video on YouTube thanking everyone who voted for him in the Jamendo Awards:

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“:

The best track not appearing on one of his albums is “Crystals“:

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

Links

• Website: Professor Kliq
• Jamendo: Professor Kliq
• Twitter: @ProfessorKliq
• Facebook: Professor Kliq

This beautiful song by the Swedish duo The Knife was published on their album “Deep Cuts” in 2003. It became very popular in 2006, when José González’ cover version was used in a TV commercial.

On June 21 his second album “RED” will be released. Again four tracks will be free and you can already prelisten those four. If you enter your e-mail address on the website you’ll probably get a mail with a download link on the 21st.

A few hours ago the video clip for “Enough” was uploaded to Vimeo. I already love this track. It’s aggressive electronic music but still very melodic and somehow calm. Brilliant.

I just saw that the e-mail with the download link was marked as spam. So the download is already available. Files are 320 kbps.

A friend of mine posted a link to this video on Facebook. It’s a self-made roadtrip video with this beautiful song by The Gadsdens. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard it before. Sometime, Somewhere. I really like it, so I tried to find it on iTunes, but without success. At least you can’t get it from the German iTunes store. Next I looked for it at Discogs, but The Gadsdens only have a single entry with “The Sailor Song”. No website or something. There is a second entry which is a compilation and it actually has “Lent” on it. But it seems you can only get it from the label’s webshop on CD and I don’t want to buy the whole thing. I tried Google and found their MySpace page. It says they are unsigned. Great. No link to an artist website. Excellent! How am I supposed to get this song? Steal it? Really? There seem to be lots of illegal websites where you can download the “King Kong Kicks” compilation. But I’m not stealing music, I want to get it legally for free (Creative Commons, netlabels, etc.) or buy it.

Finally I found “Lent” on Last.fm. At least I can listen to it directly in full length. You should also try “Small Town Boy“. It’s a great ballad cover version of the song by Bronski Beat from their 1984 album “The Age Of Consent” which I actually bought on Vinyl the other week. Strange coincidence.

I’m still unhappy. Any idea where I can buy “Lent”?

Southern Sun by Paul Oakenfold on YouTube

This beautiful song made my summer of 2002. For me it will always be connected to friends, sunshine, the North Sea, desire and young love.

“Southern Sun” belongs to the album “Bunkka” which I bought several years later and still love today. You can find collaborations with Emiliana Torrini, Shifty Shellshock from Crazy Town and Nelly Furtado on it.

If you don’t know Oakenfold at all you might be surprised that he produced the original soundtrack for the film Swordfish and the song “Celebration” for Madonna.

Lykke Li – Sadness is a Blessing (Director Tarik Saleh) from Lykke Li on Vimeo

Today I found this new great netlabel release. “Strobotone” is a Berlin based musician who “combines futuristic electronic dance-sound with a truckload of references from 35 years of musical history”. His debut album “Flashback Forward” was published on iD.EOLOGY about a week ago.

These are my favorite tracks of the album: “Ultimate” and “Kites”

Links

• Download (MP3)
• Download (OGG)
• Release page on iD.EOLOGY
• Artist description on iD.EOLOGY
• Strobotone on Facebook

As the title might suggest it’s a slow piece. I wrote it when I was in a melancholic mood, remembering people who I spent plenty of happy time with but for one reason or another don’t anymore. You’ll probably like it most when you’re in a similar mood, lost in thought, remembering old times and old friends.

Links

• Release details
• MP3 192 kbps
• PDF sheet music
• Full release, FLAC
• Full release, MP3 192 kbps
• Full release, MP3 320 kbps
• Source files (LilyPond, Midi)

For the last few months I’ve been heavily working on my project Lorino. I’m planing to release a CC licensed album with about twelve piano pieces on it. The composition is almost done and I’m going to focus on the post production during the next weeks. But don’t expect it to be finished before August. I’ve got lots of other stuff to do at the moment and can’t focus on music as much as I would like to.

At least on song will be released in advance of the album. It is called “Melancholy” and the music notation is already done. This weekend I was looking for a picture which I could use as a cover. I’ve been using CC licensed images as a basis for the covers for some time and I think it’s better to reuse great material of someone else than to try to make something more or less acceptable out of my own pictures.

The picture you can see above and which I’m going to use as a cover for “Melancholy” is “It’s Christmas! No, it’s a stoplight! No, it’s rain!” by Jack Mayer and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.

This is my favorite:

Links

• Download “The Little Things EP”
• Release page on 23 SECONDS website
• Henrik José’s website
• Henrik José on MySpace