Music links 2005 quarter 4, archived section of music links blog. It all starts from here.
Removed some dead links in June 2008. Actually, I'm glad to see quite a many links still alive, anyway.

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As long as you are sitting at the end of a network cable you can listen to a network radio and you don't need to worry about copyrights. There are zillions of radios in the web, just select your favorite. My favorite is no indie, no pirate, no desperado radio, but the grand old BBC and of its channels Radio Scotland. I don't understand much but I love the accent anyway.

The tribe I just joined with that "some rights reserved" sticker delivers a search engine for cc-licensed music in the web. Write the name of your pet genre,"jazz" or "world" or whatever keyword pops in your mind. Then ride boldly towards your adventure. Nobody knows what you'll encounter.

Finnish Mikseri is a wide collection of hobby musicians products freely downloadable for private and personal use only. Beware, turn off Javascript from your browser to stop those pop-ups jumping at your face. Be prepared for Finnish language user interface, however, you can still find hi-fi and lo-fi buttons to test listen and d/l button to download. The quality is variable and you have to search for a while to find the better ones.

Ogg Vorbis pages contain a list of interesting sites, but don't expect much mp3:s here. Make familiar with Monique Brumby. (If they will not include me soon, should I publish something in mp3...?)  Yes, and actually I found that Creative Commons folk through a Vorbis link.

Magnatune is everywhere. You can not pretend you didn't see them. They are commercial, are they alternative. They are no major label, they give you better terms. You can test listen everything and most of the time 128k mp3 sounds pretty good. I have listened a few songs, nothing was bad. Nothing was mediocre, either. I don't know yet if they understand euro-money, but they will learn. The world is better with Magnatune than without.



I only had about a week to compose this list and the supply of music seems to be enormous. Just wondering how the Major Label is going to survive if they don't change their business model. And the list will go on...

The Urban Crow is an excellent, glorious, magnificent rock band and I can not express myself honestly, because my brother plays the bass there. Anyway, a couple of songs are available.

The Cow Exchange is trying to be fun... The sound quality is a bit overdriven at times. I like more the instrumentals. Tri-State Area is fun, like an animated film soundtrack. Obviously one man's band playing one man's rock. Around 100 songs.
2008 it contains a webblog, but you'll find the cow if you search for a moment.

November 2005

*** Derek K. Miller's Penmachine (he is not the famous Canadian) delivers instrumental tunes with rhythmical, brisk, merry mood, but not much melody. He seems to find a new approach for every tune and there is a presence of humor without actually telling a joke. Some of the solo instruments sound a little thin, but the overall sound is good with 160k mp3. I guess, I'll visit this site another time. Around 18 tunes available.
2008 Derek is moving to podcast.penmachine.com

That Podcast Song (dead link 2008) contains five mixes of an honest rock song. Not exactly my best favorite, but you might like it. The guys have an attitude - and a very soft and thick bass drum.

Incidental Fusion (dead link) delivers guardian and some gaurdian angels, tinkling and shimmering music with peace in its heart. They seem to have a whole archive of music, but the server is sluggish to download.

Another Incidental Fusion page (dead link) contains A.L.G.O. Rhythm's Asgard: fast dance beat with a conceited piano solo, backing vocals. Slippy-T's Not down with this is hip hop, but not too hip hop, and with some reggae influence. Nice jazzy male vocals go softly in minor key. And a couple of other songs.

Antony Raijekov plays easy and friendly jazz and there are 31 tunes waiting for your download command.

Starwreck is no music but a full length film parody of Star Trek. It's a 560 M file, so it can be burned on a single CD. Still, it's no mean feat to download by a slow line. Besides it you'll need a small xvid codec, it's easy to install and Starwreck shows a link from where to download it. The film itself is a lot of fun. A version with English subtitles can be selected, but if you are familiar with nuances of Finnish language, you'll get a couple more jokes. On the moral point of view, if you want to point out the total craziness of war, the proof is here. The story has a nice loop structure, it starts when the guys from the future have crashed their time vessel and got stranded in current time. The ending is somehow similar and still different ... colder. And now you have to see it by yourself.

Funktifyno (dead link) plays funk/jazz/rock/reggae and everything, but I think funk is here the biggest influence. The three or four man band produces friendly, almost shy sound, but the bass drum sometimes is too big - and the sax is too far away. Bill Newmann makes nice things with his bass. Joe Hall sings some tracks. A couple of first tracks surprised me, the 128 k hifi sounded exactly the same as the 64 k lofi, fortunately, this is not the case with all the tracks.

When I search by the cc-engine, I have to reject pages for two reasons. If I can not figure out, how to play something or download something within few minutes, I will go on my journey. And of course, all too often, the sound produced is dull or even painful to listen. (Again, today, I had a noise attack and some uninteresting talk.)  This far, I have not found too many singers.

Numavox (dead link) is energetic rock with slight proge influence. 12 songs with good sound quality and professional mixing. And some singers, too. I had strange trouble in downloading their oggs, but the mp3:s go fine.



A break for a joke:
Berlusconi and Chirac learning Finnish cuisine

In spring and early summer of 2005 Mr. Berlusconi and Mr. Chirac expressed some imprudent opinions of Finnish food. We Finns understand very well this is caused by ignorance only. We would be pleased to make the two gentlemen more closely familiar with Finnish cuisine.

Thanks to Akseli Gallen-Kallela for some ideas with the background.  Please note that  despite of publuishing this picture, the French and the Italians  have not burned garbage bins, not crashed windows, and not  demolished Finnish Embassy. Strange behaviour, indeed.

JZO is not my great favorite, but if you consider the preceding list a bunch of lullabys, go ahead, wake yourself up. Several singers demonstrate a singer is not a musician. Among the punkish noise Citric Acid is worth a try. The Golden Delicious and Bjorn Kleinhenz are not too bad either. The site is German language, however, I had no problems with downloading. Strange, indeed.

*** Citric Acid
December 2005

And now I feel, my drill has hit the bedrock, a silver lode, indeed. DMusic is a community of artists containing several hundreds of artists and even more songs. It seems, there are lots of skillful musicians among them. I just searched with CC engine for "Irish" music, got one uninteresting singer with a guitar. I was about to leave him, when I realized he was a member of some larger unity, which turned out to be DMusic. And still, I haven't got my Irish music here. The funny thing here is whatever keyword you put in the CC search engine does not have any correlation with which kind of music you'll have.

I always feel uncomfortable, when an ad says something like: "Over 90% of all PC:s are infected with ... click here to begin scan...". Do not click. Too often these are just traps and cause more trouble than healing.

Another just tremendous storage of music is The Archive, available to you in case you feel like a researcher, historian, or scholar. And even if you don't feel, they can hide with a password anything they don't want you to access. Follow the terms of Creative Commons license next to your song. The Open Source Audio alone boasts with over 12000 recordings. Unfortunately, the big size does not make the music any better, you have to search for the good ones. The user interface is complicated at first, but you'll find alternatives to stream or download hifi/lofi etc.

I visited again Derek K. Miller's Penmachine. He has made five more tunes. I still like his style.

Hamsa Lila in Archive, Live Music Archive makes strange, peculiar and still fascinating music of an ethnic and jazzy brew. Once it started jogging I felt no need to interrupt.

Acoustic Junction recalls images of a hotel in California with their opening song. Another Live Music Archive sample conveys the charm of living performance. A singer, an acoustical guitar, light percussions, at moments two singers, a violin, a flute, and noises and voices from the audience

Recordoffice.net is a commercial site, they are craving you money. Anyway, they are alternative enough to be included in my log. They are a Finnish site and you can select the user interface in English or Finnish. I had to make a painful exception to listen to the samples: I had to give up my pet browser and use IE. The sound quality was very good in every song I heard. The music quality is variable and, of course, it depends on your taste, but the excerpts are long enough to get the idea. Bands Ahava and Ageness are worth making familiar with.

Dilvie contains no more music, but if you are interested in photography, this is for you. And, I must say, I like his shots.

And some more commercial stuff: Johanna Iivanainen (dead link) is the best unknown singer in Finland. What do you call music clips of over 4 M each? Are they songs, I think so. In the near future you may find me searching in a record shop somewhere between I and J. Buying such small labels just irritates the major labels even more, but this album is not easy to find.

A Windows trick: I just added a line "127.0.0.1 adserver.adtech.de" in the end of my hosts file. Lots of annoying blinking ceased and intrusive ads disappeared from several websites. If you don't know how to find and edit the hosts file, the trick is not for you. (...if they just learnt to make ads without blinking!)

And the highlights of this quarter are Derek K. Miller and Citric Acid - but you have to dig Citric Acid up from a bin of punk.
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