- logging coolness from 127.0.0.1, daily.
Since this question came up over at the Internet Archive's Netlabels Archive (which I co-founded and continue to run with the help of the _amazing_ Internet Archive crew, helping set up a nice, stable hosting platform for free music), here's my pick for the Top 10 net.label MP3 releases for the year, in no particular order, all freely downloadable and Creative Commons licensed:
1. Transient - Over The River And Through The Woods [one16]
[Transient's own label Noisy Vagabond has a plethora of gorgeous laidback electronic releases from the man himself, but this latest album of his, on excellent Canadian netlabel One, is, as the release text says, 'his own niche blend of downtempo mixed with, well, everything else'. Essential.]
2. Inceptdate - Attics and Inventory EP (lp002)
[The Atlanta-based Lifeform Project was by far my favorite net.label to appear out of absolutely nowhere this year, and of its initial 8 releases, leechable via LegalTorrents, this 'dreamlike' cut-up hiphop release from a musical contributor to Cartoon Network (Adult Swim, Toonami) is perhaps the most vital.]
3. Text Adventure - Fantastic Disaster [os036]
[Although Observatory Online's releases slowed down quite a bit this year, the net.label counterpart to the excellent Skylab Operations still released some gorgeous EPs and albums, and Glasgow-based Text Adventure did the indielectronic thing with laidback, laser-guided precision.]
4. Psilodump - Washed [ECL001]
[The only release so far on the mysterious Eclectro, but Sweden's Psilodump, recently seen releasing on real-life labels Sound Of Habib and Q-Records, mixes up contemplative piano tracks and pretty spectacularly funky Yello-style groove in a truly beguiling style.]
5. Edith Frost - Demos [csr027]
[From one of the truly unique netlabels, the exotica/kitsch Comfort Stand, comes an absolutely beautiful whispered album of older demos from Edith Frost, signed to seminal label Drag City, and purveyor of tremendously evocative languid, downtempo indie music.]
6. Dub Jay - Songs For A Room [kpu055]
[The previous Dub Jay EP released in late 2003 on Kikapu is also excellent, but this collection of pulsing ambience is also symptomatic of his structured, melodic approach to music, and, more than that, of Kikapu's thoughtful, quality approach to the net.label concept.]
7. Bubzigohn - The Left-Hand Path To Jahweh's Doorstep EP [aCb.nl.0001]
[One of those albums, from the Florida-based Alpha Cat Boogie collective, that's pretty much indescribable, so we'll use the official release description, shall we? It's 'a seditious rock-opera response to American culture' which 'focuses on Harry, a burrito enthusiast who watches the war in Iraq on TV... works a lowly tech-support job, indulges in internet dating, and occasionally dips into deconstructing the flaws of humanity.' Just... wow.]
8. Kernel32 - Little Things Count [open001]
[Openlab Records are one of the newest additions to net.labels, and their debut release, by Manchester, UK-based Kernel32, mixer of the Soulseek Allstars Vol.1 compilation on ShutUpAndListen, is pure, pure idm of the highest nature, all sine tones and cathedral beeps.]
9. Proswell - Dryrot [one05]
[An album-length track from Proswell on One, mixing up old and new material from his releases on the ever-smart real-life label Merck Records. Basically, essential twisting electronic idm bidness, to borrow a phrase from another Merck album title.]
10. Tree Wave - Cabana EP [os034]
[Another Observatory Online gem, from Paul Slocum of Atari 2600 hacking and HomeStar Runner RPG fame, alongside vocalist Lauren Gray. 'Instruments include an Atari 2600, a Commodore 64, a 286 luggable PC, and an Epson dot matrix printer, all reprogrammed as sound generators.']
While work has been getting somewhat horrendously busy, my Caltrain time still allows me to do a little light reading and video game playing. So here's a few of the more intriguing trifles I've been checking out, of late (missing 3 or 4 other books that I already returned, oops):
'Hollywood Causes Cancer' by Tom Green - if you've read this blog, you may realize that I'm rather a major fan of Tom Green, and yes, that even includes Freddy Got Fingered. Although he wasn't necessarily the smoothest interviewer in the world, even his MTV talk show was intermittently genius, his joyful embrace of the surreal is borderline Python-esque, and this autobiography explains it all, from the Canadian beginnings to the ill-fated Barrymore marriage. It's tart, and puppyishly honest, but it doesn't really tell us where Tom, the gonzo Harold Lloyd of his generation, will surface next.
'The Murder Room' by PD James - although in her eighties, James continues to produce outstanding, higher-echelon detective fiction, and this latest Adam Dalgleish mystery, focusing on a struggling private museum in London and the dignified, quiet English lives there-in ripped apart by murder, is spectacularly evocative and densely plotted. James' books are, most of all, character studies, and this is another impeccable study in mystery, motive, and resolution.
'Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls' by Square Enix (Game Boy Advance) - since I was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, then Commodore Amiga kid, growing up in the UK, I didn't have a NES, and so didn't play the initial Final Fantasy games. But I'd forgotten how much of an enthusiast I was for simple, level grind heavy turn-based RPG action. And heck, if I liked Biomotor Unitron on the Neo Geo Pocket Color for the same reasons, you can be damn sure that I'd like these progenitors, here in their NGPC-enhanced state - much better than Golden Sun, my other Game Boy Advance RPG purchase thus far.
'Sojourner: An Insider's View of the Mars Pathfinder Mission' by Andrew Mishkin - this fascinating book follows the development of the Sojourner rover, which, on a 'micro-budget' of $25 million, albeit built on previous Jet Propulsion Lab concepts, was a tremendous success after the Pathfinder probe landed on Mars itself in July 1997. It's not afraid to talk about the problems, the software bugs (even potentially catastrophic ones, such as Mars time set wrong, which was only found accidentally in a simulator!), and the setbacks, as well as the amazing successes of the mission, whose spiritual successors have been trucking very happily around Mars recently. Damned cool.
Ahead of whatever weekly review gubbins I may or may not get to, let's try a little update on random music label, BitTorrent, and website fun I've been getting up to.
Firstly, a new release on our net.label Monotonik today. We've been releasing electronic music on Mono for over 8 years now, and even though my work schedule is reasonably packed, it's wonderful to come home at a weekend and put out something new for free on MP3, in this case, Aleksi Eeben's 'The White Box'. Aleksi 'Heatbeat' Eeben was simply a legend on the Amiga demo scene in the early '90s, making some amazingly groundbreaking .MOD music files, and this compilation of his recent Commodore 64 .SID tracks shows his abstract, wonderfully bleepy stylings. Plus, there's a great bonus track, featuring the equally legendary Juha 'Dizzy' Kujanpaa doing a jazzy real-instrument mix of an Eeben tune.
Secondly, LegalTorrents, the legal BitTorrent site I founded about a year back, is only getting more popular. It's been featured on NPR and Reuters, and I was recently interviewed for Wired Magazine about it - we've done 14.65 terabytes of Creative Commons-licensed content since we've started - I think that's over 2 million songs from the music section alone, by some very amateurish calculations. Anyhow, the latest compilation is the Lifeform Project Archives Vol.1, the first 8 releases from the great Atlanta-based electronica netlabel - worth checking out for the phenomenal Inceptdate mini-album, and, come to that, all the others.
Finally, my dayjob on Gamasutra at the CMP Game Group is still going wonderfully. For the last couple of weeks, we've managed to put up a feature every weekday (up from three per week normally), as well as our requisite 30-ish news stories per week. Since I'm going to be helping out in other departments at work (more on that soon), we'll probably drop down the features speed a little as we track toward Christmas. But it's all about quality, not necessarily quantity - our UK news guy, David Jenkins (now the Teletext games correspondent, as well as an Edge contributor!), is doing some great analytical news, as is a fresh freelance face, Nich Maragos (formerly of 1UP). So... yay, basically.