Archive for the ‘BY-NC-ND’ Category
re:Sound: Work & Play
Welcome to a new series of articles called re:Sound. The idea for this column came from a couple of magazine columns I have seen in the past. Basically, the idea is to dig back into my collection and select a recording that is worthy of tracking down and listening to. While many of these will be netlabel releases that you can find fairly easily, some of them may be commercial releases that may be more difficult to find. (However, I will stay away from RIAA releases as much as possible in favor of true independent releases…)
So, let’s get to my first choice.
Review: Pharmacore – Utopia
Pharmacore: Utopia
Title: Utopia
Artist: Pharmacore
Label: Pavillion36
Catalog No: P36-037
Release Date: 11 January 2010
License: Creative Commons BY-NC-ND
I have to say, this is a first for me. I had not actually heard of a style listed as “IDM with Drill & Bass influence”. However, that being said, I don’t find this release to be un-impressive.
The dark, edgy with some more mechanical elements seems somewhat like Future Sound of London meets Nine Inch Nails. But, this isn’t music that tries to imitate either of these groups. This is music that is very much in the IDM genre, and builds from that into it’s own form. Definitely kind of a nightmare meets the robots.
Finding Music Online: Part Two
This time I’m focusing on Netlabels. What are Netlabels? Well, like the Kahvi Collective mentioned in the first article they are community organizations that have decided to release collections of music either by individual artists, or in compilations in a way that is analogous to what the large record companies do. Many Netlabels release these recordings for free (as in without $$$ charges), and under a Creative Commons license, or a license that is very open.
The other aspect of Netlabels is in their history. Many of the Netlabels have been around for quite a few years. They derived from the Demo Scene: a group of hackers (hackers in the good and correct sense of the word) who work with computers at the lowest possible level to produce demonstrations of what the machines can do. In some cases you would be quite astounded by what could be done with an Apple ][ or Commodore 64. A lot of the music that these intrepid hackers wrote for the demos were initially released as “tracker” files, which predated MP3’s. Eventually, with the rise of the Internet and MP3’s these intrepid multimedia artists started releasing music on their own for the world to listen.
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