You can download this beautiful indie rock sing by Northpilot for free. They’ve got more stuff on their Bandcamp page. Have a listen.
Author archive
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
Long time no see …
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:
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… 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.
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.
Download MP3: Lorino – What If
Links
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.
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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.
