Lawrence Lessig's New Gig

The San Jose Mercury News offers this interview with the founder of Creative Commons. Lawrence Lessig remains as CEO, but he's started work on something new.

Ganga Giri

Vacation, travel and other distractions... and I'm not sure I'm even back yet, but I did make it to the Vancouver Folk Festival... wow... Ganga Giri knows how to put on a show... though I'm not sure everyone would call this folk music. Festival rules say no dancing in front of the stage -- but for Ganga Giri, that's impossible -- everybody was dancing.

Creative Commons in the news

Google Earth is getting an audio layer. Bernie Krause has been recording the planet for 40 years. He has released part of the collection under a Creative Commons license, for listening on Google Earth.

Tim O'Reilly has published a lot of books... I've been buying them since the 80's. Now he's written a case study of sales vs. free downloads for one of his titles. The free downloads are under a Creative Commons license.

Larry Lessig says in this interview, that there are now over 100 million objects licensed under a Creative Commons license. He participated in a panel discussion at the recent "copyright summit" in Belgium.

Other items: Know your rights with this simple chart that explains copyrights. An open source film project has over 1000 members. The Creatives Commons license, applied to dance.

The Silent Ballet - Volume IV

Various Artists - The Silent Ballet - Volume 4
Lost Children Netlabel release
post rock, instrumental, ambient

The Bird Ensemble: Part 1 No. 4

Signal Hill: This New Year's Absence

The Lost Children net label celebrates a year of showcasing new artists, and presents their fourth compilation release.

Blocsonic: netBloc Volume 5

Various Artists - netBloc Volume 5
blocsonic net label release
rock, post-rock, jazz, hip-hop, electronica, glitch-pop, dub, pop

This month's netbloc compilation held onto me for quite awhile. It's a great (to my taste) blend of music this month.

Misery (myspace) - Misery Sara

Lucrecia (myspace) - Like Being Home Counting Backwards

Easily Embarrased

Easily Embarrassed (archive.org)
Sublogic Corporation net label release
ambient, psychedelic, chillout

From Sunset Last Night to Sunrise This Morning (I Don't Want to Sleep)

Four tracks released in one mix with a cue file... I've had it on repeat play over an hour now -- it wanders off into different musical territories, and comes full circle when I press play again.

The Internet's new walls

American Internet radio webcasters can no longer offer connections to international listeners. Has anything like this happened before on the internet? I guess there's always been illegal data, but this seems big to me. I lost Pandora yesterday. Too bad too, according to this study 77% of music listening internet users, use the internet to discover new music. Obviously, it's not about getting artists more fans.

American soldiers in Iraq lost their radio too -- no more radio or YouTube for them... they say the soldiers are using too much bandwidth, there are also concerns about security. Now the Pentagon has a YouTube channel -- not sure how that works -- they have a channel, but American soldiers will have to go to an internet cafe to watch it.

Meanwhile, back home, webcasters got some breathing room... the new royalty rates are now due in July -- hopefully the deal makers and law makers can come up with a system that will keep the webcasters we've grown so fond of in business. More news about this here.

The Resonance Association

The Resonance Association (myspace)
Mrs. Vee Recordings releases
ambient, experimental, post rock

Appendix One: Heroes of The Atomic Age (live at Immersion)

Appendix Two: Lower

Be prepared for a listening journey on these releases. The Resonance Association have also orchestrated the "Fake Numbers Station" that you can hear on short wave radio bands, believed to be encrypted messages sent by either a friendly or unfriendly government to their agents, wherever they may be. Here is a short version:

Appendix One: Fake Numbers Station - Transmission Two

Update May 31, 2009: These releases on archive.org are down for the moment

The week in post-rock

I've been listening to the post-rock keyword on archive.org for a week now. I'm going to split my search results down to a few posts, starting with these tracks which are not part of bigger releases:

Sickoackes: Wedding Rings And Bullets In The Same Golden Shrine

Tom Sweetlove: Janvier Ier

From Delta Waves Under Clouds Over Ground release on Earth Monkey Productions:

Delta Waves: For Your Smile

And also a track from a Gasgiant release on Floppy Records I stumbled upon a while ago... The Silent Ballet raves about Gasgiant in their review.

Gasgiant: Slocore

Save Net Radio, update

There has been a lot of coverage of the internet radio Day of Silence next week (May 8th), a protest against the new royalty rates. Those that don't turn the music off will be playing Public Service Announcements. NPR, ClearChannel, SomaFM, and Digitally Imported are the strangest group of bed fellows I've seen in awhile. But with 25% of radio listeners now tuning in to web simulcasts, you'd expect the big boys have a concern about this too. And the U.S. Congress has listened... it introduced bill HR 2060, "the Internet Radio Equality Act". As you can imagine, SoundExchange is not happy about this; their offer of special deals for selected webcasters fell on flat ears.

But it's not over until it's over. So don't forget to either call or email your representative in support of HR 2060, The Internet Radio Equality Act.

A Beautiful Machine

A Beautiful Machine (archive.org page)
Embryo netlabel releases
Post Rock, Shoegazer

Solar Winds, White Noise, Antigravity: Shining
Home: Home
Another Time EP: The Last Time

A Beautiful Machine -- a band from Australia, I'm not sure they're together anymore. These releases are from 2004 and earlier. And again, so hard to just pick a few to post here, I had their complete releases playing all weekend.

Berklee Internet Radio Network

Finally, a post about internet radio that is not (entirely) about a recent copyright board decision. Berklee College of Music presents BIRN: four internet radio streams including one that features Berklee graduates, and another about what they listen to.

I spotted this item about BIRN on Wired's Listening Post. The Listening Post (RSS) has been coming up on my Google news alerts a lot lately.

Just in case you haven't yet, it's not too late to inform your members of congress about your views about the CRB decision. Pandora co-founder Tim Westergren explains that the higher rates won't mean more money for artists, and even with the royalty rates in place now, nobody is expected to retire to their yacht in the Caribbean anytime soon.

French Teen Idol

French Teen Idol (myspace): Enlightened False Consciousness
LostChildren netlabel release
post-rock instrumental ambient

Enlightened False Consciousness
Ode To A Departing Friend

French Teen Idol (myspace): self-titled release
Nishi netlabel release
Shouting Can Have Different Meanings
Lamb

Many many gems here, hard to pick just two from each of these releases. This is mostly instrumental music, and orchestrations of found recordings. Beautiful awesome music.

News Update

The Sansa Connect is the newest MP3 player on the block, featuring wifi, and the ability to download from Yahoo's music service, as well as stream internet radio.

Radio? What Radio? The copyright board didn't budge on it's decision to greatly increase royalty rates, and the future of net radio now hangs on an act of the U.S. Congress to restore the diversity we've become accustomed to. David DeJean wrote about the decision in Information Week... he also wrote a pretty good survey of Internet Radio sites recently. I wonder which ones will be able to afford the new royalty rates.

Meanwhile, over in the music download business, AnywhereCD, offered customers download only copies of CDs for sale. This was for customers who didn't want to take delivery of the physical CDs. Somebody balked, I read it was a record company. You can still get your CDs in MP3 download only, but AnywhereCD will store the physical CD, and destroy it after the auditing requirements are met. Read the whole story.

Noise Room

Noise Room: The End of the Lord's Constellation
LostChildren netlabel release
post-rock post-metal instrumental ambient

Friends

Back. Vacation, visits with relatives and friends. All good. Thankfully Lost Children haven't been on vacation -- new releases await. I think Noise Room (from Italy) have personally welcomed me back with this anthemic homage to friends.

Michael Sandler

Michael Sandler: archive.org myspace
Farther From Home - archive.org release
ambient, drones

Spring is here. Time for another reset. I'll be returning to San Francisco soon, after spending a winter on Vancouver Island. It's always an adjustment switching homes.

I scanned drone on archive.org -- lots to listen to there. Today's reset is an hour-long guitar drone piece:

Michael Sandler: Farther From Home

This weeks copyright and copyleft buzz

RIAA won a worst company in America contest. Halliburton came second: taxpayers are pouring billions down Halliburton's throat, but somehow RIAA is even worse than that. Meanwhile, RIAA says that students are settling piracy claims, but university of Nebraska wants RIAA to pay up for wasting it's time.

The Copyright Board decided to review the webcaster royalties decision.

The San Jose Mercury News profiled Brazil's Minster of Culture, Gilberto Gil, who happens to be performing in the Bay Area.

Nic Bommarito

Nic Bommarito - Taciturn - 12rec.037 - netlabel release

I heard Nic Bommarito's music on the BlocSonic Volume 3 compilation... enough to get me listening to all of Taciturn. It's all good -- I'd have picked one of these for the compilation:

The Academic (Life and Afterlife)
Badly Asbestos Covered

Check out Nic Bommarito's blog -- there's a lot more music there, including this gem from the Paranormal is Normal EP:

Pure Sound

Seeq and ye shall find

My friend in Halifax pointed SeeqPod out to me. It's a web2 music site... think Hype Machine with saved/shared playlists like Streampad, and add music recommendations to that. When you're listening to something you like, click "music", and get a page of listening recommendations that you can add to your playlist. There's no links back to the music blogs but I think that's okay -- usually it's the music I'm after, not what somebody else says about the music.

Iambic2

Iambic2 released Under These Stars, We'll Sleep Again a couple of months back. Thirteen beautiful emotional indietronica tracks on the Laridae net label. Hard to pick just two from this release, since the whole release sort of works together, but these two caught my attention:

Rain Drop
Going Home