Free netlabel music may not have penetrated the orchestral hall, or been streamed in luxury hotels. But one purpose it has achieved– it has supplied a lot of fun music for people with open minds. For me, chiptune is a bit of an anomaly– why go back to primitive electronics, when it comes time to create songs? The resolution is lower– everything sounds gritty, and well, ’80′s– so– why?

In Rolemusic’s “Straw Field”, I believe I have found an answer to this question– sheerly for fun. There is something very entertaining about these pieces. They are not without complexity, but have absolutely no pretension.

It all reminds me of watching a friend’s young son huddled over a portable Mario game last year. My imagined question, “Why”, is met with the equally, if not more appealing response, “Why NOT”?

Are you a fan of chiptunes? Not sure what they are? Either way, definitely check this release out, it is a sheer pleasure.

Straw Fields at Archive.org

In respect to order and chaos

A scene or movement is always a dynamic entity, it forms itself out of people with different backgrounds and interests that atoned to a common goal or characteristic. It doesn’t mean they’ll all play by the same rules. It definitely never implied they shall all get along and share the same visions and values.

But this is a good thing. Diversity implies a greater ability to rapidly adapt to changes. Considering how fast technology evolves and how transient the human interest in new music can be, these characteristics bode well to the indie music scene. Which explains the exponential growth the netaudio scene has had and why so many models that have been prototyped first in the netaudio scene are only now getting adopted by the mainstream artists and indie label owners tired of the old models.

I don’t see the netaudio scene as having lost focus or a common ground at all. Just an ever-increasing expansion and sustained evolution and reanalysis, which every label and artist has to do for themselves and try things out to find their soft spot.

The audience

But one thing I do entirely concur with is that there is a lack of audience reach within the netlabel scene, and that we seem to cultivate a certain underlying fetishism for the introspective underground. Which is kind of ridiculous if you ask me since we don’t even know each other all that well and probably never will, since there are so many labels and artists out there. Yet we keep focusing on releasing more of the unknown to an unknown “cyberspace” audience. Casually ignoring the lack of feedback on new releases as a personal stance holding the flag on the democratization of music releasing.

Yeah, it’s a lot easier to put a new release out there these days. But you still have to build a reputation for yourself, get a network and promote the releases if you want to get anywhere beyond your circle of friends.

Free music is free

Amidst it all we have the freeness of it all, which, rightfully noted, has different meanings to different people, and for some they even change with time, i’m sure some folks can think of a few artists and netlabels who suddenly forgot their netaudio roots in a fleeting ephiphany that they might be able to achieve more notoriety if they renounce the cult of the free.

Guess they slightly ignored how many indie labels and artists have done the exact reverse path, but that’s subject matter for a whole other series of articles.

More important then the discussion of whose version of free is the most accurate and should be scribbled down on all our guidelines of standards and rules that only a few in our scene would actually abide to; is the subject of why should members of a scene atone to a single definition to begin with? Different people release in different ways, if they still have a download for free, it’s netaudio else it’s not. Each label and artist must follow their own path of figuring out what works best for them.

There are several views on whats free, some more legal than others. Some legalities more moral than others. But people will keep making, listening, promoting and distributing music regardless of all that. Monetization is a parallel paradigm. Netaudio simply removes that issue for the listener.

Free but not netaudio

Another interesting phenomena are artists, labels with albums that despite being free for download don’t like using the term netaudio applied to them. It has a negative connotation. As if the release being announced in those channels as opposed to the authors social network would suddenly get lost in a sea of unknown authors and confused for something which might or might not be mediocre.

I think this is symptomatic for the lack of trust in quality the general audience and media still has in netaudio releases, despite lots of very good efforts against that image having been made in the past few years. And this is serious food for thought which unsurprisingly ends up influencing netaudio artists and labels to try out “the dark side” once again.

[originally written for netlabelism.com]

Muhmood music is inspired by the foggy mornings in the forests and swamps, by the blasts of the wind blowing heated sand in the deserts, by the sound of cranky engines in the factories and roaring electricity in the huge power lines. Sound is like emotion, it ranges from rage and sorrow to love and joy, i am not here to impress you with some concept or exquisite musical terms, i hardly know why i am doing this – i just follow my instincts and enjoy myself making this noise…

We have two releases of Muhmood available free for download at Enough Records.

Muhmood – Tamara and Demon [enrmp174] – Cinematic dark ambient soundtrack of the 3D cartoon created By Nikolay Aladinskiy and Petr Bobryshev – St. Petersburg, Russia.

Виктор Iванiв & Muhmood – Rùt [enrmp216] – An EP collaboration with Виктор Iванiв (Victor Ivaniv) a futurist poet. They met in November 2007 when Victor came to Barnaul with a presentation of his book “A Glass Man and the Green Record”. At that time they decided to try to do 2 or 3 tracks to see what would come out. By June 2009 the four tracks EP is done. They continue to work on a long playing album that will include Victor’s poems and prose.

One outstanding feature about Adamned Age is that her brand of IDM/jazz/ambience has inspired both people I agree with and people I don’t. What I mean to say is, there is something transcendent about Hanne Adam’s musical project. And of all the many acts I have heard online, she is perhaps the most worthy of some kind of professional recognition.

“Fragile”, released on the excellent Camomille Netlabel, takes some familiar sounds and extends them nicely. Synth bells, glitchey sounds, washes, and other elements are familiar to fans of Adamned Age. But in this release, the composition sends the sounds into a spacier realm, where tension is manifested and released, and where swirls of sound relate magically to one another in ways that are pleasing to the ear. I often found myself, while listening, thinking, “Did THAT work? Yes, it DID!”.

Where some artists have resorted to cheap tricks or machismo, Hanne Adam contrinues to sketch her portrait in the world of music with painstaking detail. She is a worthy artist, and one who unites critics, until all or nearly all agree that she has achieved something noteworthy with her work. Listen or download now:

Fragile on Camomille Music.

Know your enemy

In the final part of the Enough Records Manifesto series I’m pushing into what, to some, is the most contentious point of them all – ‘to push into other audiences’. As a general rule this one should garner fairly obvious approval – no one, no matter how in love with the intricacies and eccentricities of tiny hobbyist corners would deny at least some desire to spread the word of good music to ever more people and on that level this part of the manifesto doesn’t bear up to much scrutiny. That said though there are arguments brewing around it, not because more people listening can ever be considered a bad thing but because the source of those new listeners can always draw a line between two major schools of thought within the free music movement.

On the one hand you have those who look at the scene and, finding it to be a very good one, want it to exist in isolation from the rest of the cultural world – not isolated from new input and influences but very definitely not attempting to usurp existing models, the most notable of which is the commercial mainstream. For those in this camp the main message seems to be that what we’re doing is good, undeniably so, so why frame it in any relation to the opposition? Why even call the mainstream model ‘opposition’ in the first place when their existence and ours are so obviously juxtaposed? Even if business led systems garner more listeners and more influence in most peoples cultural lives our mere presense as an alternative, albeit an understated one, proves that there are other ways and that, vastly succesful or not, those other ways are always valid in their isolation. It’s an approach which I can understand and it’s certainly the more comfortable option as far as most aspects of what we do goes; it allows us to negate the demands of competition and focus solely on the music without worrying about the wider context it takes within society. We don’t have to proselytize, promote or compare ourselves to the work being pumped out by those whose main motivation is profit and through that we don’t have to compromise an inch in search of wider acceptance. That most people beyond our still very insular world will never hear much of the music which we love is a side note, in time those who want to hear something new will, perhaps, come across it on their own or by the actions of a self-sustaining movement without our having to move into enemy territory to spread the word. And it’s a belief which will always hold sway within the movement because, as ever, no one ideology can dictate the progress of such an incredibly diverse community of musicians, listeners, writers and miscellanious others. But – and there’s always a but – there’s at least one other school of thought working away on the issue. And it’s the school that I belong to.

Cultural Law

For most of us our cultural life, be it musical, literary, visual, political, social or anything else; is dictated from birth by the financially minded behemoths of the mainstream. Billions are spent on advertising and marketing, not to mention the myriad auxiliary forces of indoctrination, which tell the majority of people what direction they should be following in their intellectual and cultural development. It’s only occasionally an aggressive force at work, indeed for the most part it presents itself as an acceptably innate influence in our lives. Certain things come to dominate the landscape because they supposedly hold the quality, or at least the mass appeal, to do so and to look beyond them is to step into an ‘alternative’ stream which, whilst rarely railed against, is perpetually viewed as the niche province of the semi-outsider in our local and global societies. Embrace the different by all means, but never suggest that it could hold a real audience because, were that the case, the forces which are mobilised to promote the mainstream would already have embraced it and to suggest anything to the contrary is to indulge in a cultural arrogance which is easily dismissed by most. That a cultural and economic elite generally do just that when they attempt to define and control each emergent trend is neither here nor there – their tools within the market and media seperate the individual from the message, thus validating the latter and freeing the former from criticism. The ‘market’ and its attachments are granted divine right in pretty much everything.

Of course there’s never a clear dividing line between what the mainstream, as represented by most commercial and media interests, will promote and what is created beyond their remit. Were the model that dictatorial it would face actual opposition but given its subtlety in assimilating the alternative it shows its true strength. New and original cultural streams can be brought into the fold with relative ease and the illusion of artistic freedom can be granted through that but there always remains the proviso that anything which is adopted must live up to basic commercial and socially acceptable edicts. Rock and Roll blossomed with the blessing of the right front men, Punk became tame and sanitised, Hip Hop was sold as a fantasy from an imagined Gangster reality – all de-clawed and stripped of the vitality which defined them before being allowed to enter the mainstream, with those who held to the original ideas and concepts held firmly down on the margins. Free music, or rather open culture, allows for no such moderations in the art. Here the audience is granted no cultural road map and sold no definite model of what is or isn’t good, the listeners simply pick up on whatever holds resonance with them. Which is why I, amongst others, do hold our scene to be in opposition to the traditional manifestations of art within our society. The intents driving the two approaches to art are violently contradictory and I take it as a fairly obvious if unpleasant truth that if we were to reach any measure of success with a mass of people the financially minded system would readily launch attacks on what we do.

Viva la Revolucion

Already rare cases of plagiarism circulate and already the public image of free music is being perpetuated as that of the inferior and the alternative. Music which we know to be amazing struggles under socially perceived truths of what the free model is capable of and whilst we’re still marginal enough not to merit any great attention the time will come where that changes and either cultural looting or negative propoganda will be used to re-inforce the truth that people, without proper guidance from the political, commercial and social establishment, are incapable of creating truly great art. It’s up to us to prove to new and alien audiences that that’s untrue, it’s up to us not to attempt to assert our own tastes but simply to prove that any individual can find a rich and valid cultural landscape without taking their cues from those with the most money and clout. Failing that we can only accept that the best of what we see, hear and read will forever be marginalised, appropriated or derided beyond the circled wagons of an insular scene.

- Dylan Orchard (more @ YouSir Libre)

(Image by Chris Corwin)

There are half a dozen different ways to look at today’s point from the Enough Records Manifesto, whether you head in the direction of expanding netaudio into other structures and models of distribution, sharing and community; to create new sound structures under the aegis of absolute freedom offered by the basic concepts of what we do or, as I myself am probably most enthusiastic about, taking the free model that we’ve created and extending it beyond the boundaries of music and into, well, anything and everything.

It’s easy to see why music stands at the forefront of the free and open culture movements – after all the technology which makes these new structures viable is the same technology which has opened up the creative process to a vast swathe of people who, previously, faced the choice of either investing endless amounts of money into the equipment and training required to put together even the most rudimentary of sounds or accepting the limitations of traditional instrumentalism, learning to use one tool at a time and, more often than not, defining your musical evolution by that initial path. The latter of course still applies as even the technology we have today can’t offer absolute mastery over sound even if it makes the process of learning vastly more egalitarian and open. At any rate, the musical revolution of home producing hit just at the right time to make this vast scene of ours an inevitability – a sense of timing which hasn’t extended to other arts for whom digital mediums, especially in their free or open form, remain something of an odd fit.

Writers, visual artists, designers and the rest can, I know, find endless potential in the new communities opening up around sharing and Creative Commons licenses but unlike musicians they still face a slightly awkward transition over to the new model. There’s been no real explosion of literary or artistic exploration borne of the internet age, no technological structures emerging around such creative acts and, by and large, no sense of community thriving around them and that’s not a result of a lack of talent or will from those seeking to get their work out there. Rather it’s a mark of the disadvantages and cultural perceptions which make the transition to independent, digital sharing rather more of an uphill struggle than our particular scene faces.

To pick out writing, as the example I know best, there remains a definite deference towards the commercial sector and the authority of traditional publishers. There are, of course, plenty of ‘Indie’ publishers out there and an increasing number of them are adapting the concepts of free culture to their work but historically there’s never been a sense of those small, often collectively run ventures being a valid part of the greater literary scene. The DIY ethos in literature has never been granted the same attention and credit as it has in music and a lot of writers are so trained into a certain sense of arrogance towards it, or at least aspiration towards the commercial alternative, that there are rarely fierce advocates of self or collectively managing the work. Which remains the case despite the fact that the mainstream of publishing is rarely any more generous or quality conscious than the mainstream of music – neither should be viewed as any kind of authority on what creative products are worth attention but the reputation of the former has taken far less of a beating over the past couple of decades than that of the latter. Add to that the revolution that centred on MP3 players and the ease of sharing music over the hitherto stunted structures for sharing words and the relative primitivism of the free writing scene hardly seems a surprise.

There are, however, changes emerging – with the advent of Amazon’s Kindle, tablet computers and even smart phones it’s finally becoming viable to actually enjoy written work which has been downloaded with the same ease as audio work and as that spreads it can only be hoped that a community like the free music one starts to emerge around publishing. As with home production of music the ease of creating a simple .pdf file and from there proprietary formats for the new generation of e-readers could mark a new epoch of distribution, attempts at which have already been made on various scales, perhaps the most succesful of which are the literary e-zines which, whilst they focus on the shorter forms, have already gained some notoriety even without a clear model of distribution. That more ambitious models such as the Portuguese ‘Synapses‘ project and my own short-lived Geckovilla site have failed to make an impact perhaps shows that in isolation, without the sort of community framework surrounding free music, the road to establishing a freely shared literary culture is a hard one to follow rather than any actual fault in the concept itself. I have nonetheless come across other similar sites around the place but again they seem to be attempts to construct something new without a genuine framework under which to do so.

That evolutionary process, however, takes time – or at least it did for music, but with an already thriving community in existence it may be the case that writers won’t have to start from scratch but may instead learn lessons from net labels and independent musicians. And that process, if it’s to flourish, relies on a certain inter-connectivity between the two movements – with the established one encouraging the new and offering a launching pad for both artists and audience to build up their own networks.

- Dylan Orchard (more @ YouSir Libre)

And if you don’t know where the heck Moldova is located, well, don’t feel too bad about yourself, i didn’t either until i got an ambient sounds demo submission from an artist called Megatone back in 2006. A project from Marcel Gherman: musician, radio DJ and journalist. That demo became enrmp087.

A couple years later we released another album by Megatone titled Imago Mundi Nova. Several releases from Megatone are available at Silent Flow free for download. Also shared artist between both labels are the [Esc. Laboratory] / Art Factory Worms collective. One such release is this SLNT012:

Also worth noting is that Silent Flow releases not only standard mp3 album editions, but also the so called Bezdna Radio Essentials, a series of radio mixes of diverse netaudio material. All following the ambient and experimental type of sounds.

Sometimes when music is just annoying enough, it no longer annoys me but entertains, and this is the case with Yair Lopez’ “epop popo”, from the Amplified Music Pollution netlabel. In lieu of a beat, there is a kind of repetition, but it is manual– presumably it is Mr. Lopez tweaking a setting on a toy or other gadget using circuit-bending techniques. This creates very nice glitch material– especially with tracks like “Altamar”, which is my favorite. In “Altamar”, all varieties of static and electrical sounds are represented, thanks to Mr. Lopez’ expert circuit-noodling. Machines can be musical– perhaps that is no surprise to some, but in cases for me it was like watching the YouTube video of the elephant that could paint itself.

Releases like these can serve many purposes– for me “epop popo” is both fun to listen to and generative in terms of the kinds of sounds possible. This release would make an excellent source for remixers. I also think that some of the sounds could be explored in a design setting, such as sound effects for a film. Abstract noises like these are so versatile! If any of these thoughts intrigue, I would urge you to have a listen to Yair Lopez’ fine circuit bending release, epop popo.

I’m maintaining Enough releases on Bandcamp, and as it’s coming slowly and painfully (converting mp3s to WAV, then uploading those huge uncompressed files takes about five hours per album – quite a lot, when you want to keep your daily job and private life intact), I hope that after some time Bandcamp will be a new way to deliver Enough music (sorry for terrible pun) to new listeners. End with chit-chat, let’s talk about heavy metal music and netlabels.

Some years ago, after my first exposure to netlabel music, I was wondering why there’s no such a thing for metal music. There was, same as today, plethora of netlabels releasing various types of electronica, but nothing for fans of constant headbanging and guitar riffs. Sure, some of the bands or solo artists were offering their works for free to download, like Burzukh, Dimaension X or Umbah, but let’s make it straight – those are quite experimental sounds, not really for a taste of your typical longhaired mofo w/ Cannibal Corpse tee. After failed attempt at making a death metal-centered netlabel (let it’s name cover in dust and never get mentioned again), I gave up on ever finding a place with fresh and free metal music.

Boy, I gotta say, I was a man of little faith.

Out of nowhere, friend of mine sent me a quite suspicious link titled “Free Metal Albums“. Imagining another “die-hard metal” fan blog filled with RapidShare and MegaUpload links of recent releases of the metal scene, I was quite suprised to find a nice organised site with legal download links for albums released “as-is” by some of the more far-seeing bands. And after even more lurking, I’ve finally found some active netlabels releasing metal music for free.

First of all, we’ve got Torn Flesh Records with it’s lovely logo: 

The official definition of TFR is “Torn Flesh Records is dedicated to working with and releasing Grindcore (all sub types), Death, Metal (all types), Industrial, Experimental/Electronic, and Extreme Rock (Punk, Psychobilly, Glitch, Breakcore, Doom, Dark Ambient, Noise, etc.) genres.” Fine, and how it comes to releases? At the time I’m typing those words, TFR has 199 releases ready to download, and the mega-compilation for marking the 200th is being finished. Those 199 releases consist of demos, eps, promos, full-length albums and compilations. And if you don’t know how from what start browsing this immersive catalogue, you should probably start with massive compilation of 44 tracks called “Torn Flesh Records Presents – Vestigial Sickness“.

Those 44 tracks cover everything you need to know about the releases here: full of grinding death metal, brutal vocals, bizzare bandnames (how you can’t love someone calling a musical project like “Vaginal Cadaver”, “The Captain Kirk on LSD Experience” or “EYETOFUK”?) and sometimes disturbing sense of humour and use of horror (or porn) movie samples. Don’t get me misunderstood – there are some examples of fine death metal here, as presented by Stillbirth, Gore Obsessed or Wraith. Still, if you never get into music presented by, say, Devourment or any other Brutal Death Metal band, maybe you should look somewhere else, like excellent noise/industrial compilation Uncomfortable Music – David Lynch’s Eraserhead Tribute, also released on TFR.

The next netlabel which I want to cover here is Death To Music Productions, and that’s the label’s summary:

“DEATH TO MUSIC productions is an “anti record label” (based in various locations throughout the south coast city of Brighton, England) run by a shadowy group of dedicated music fans known only as “The D.T.M Forward Attack Sqaudron”. All files are prepared by the “Forward Attack Sqaudron”, and then uploaded from an old computer which runs un-manned, 24hours a day at the “Council-Flat of Mass Destruction” – a secret location based somewhere amid the suburbs of this vile drug-death capital of the UK.

Founded in 2007, we have expanded to include a variety of molested musicians, aggravated artists, perturbed producers and, in general, all-round fucked-up and fucked-off creative types who are either all too aware of the nature of the music “industry”, or would rather just do it themselves.“

Nice, isn’t it? The DTM offers to it’s listeners 63 releases on various media (some of them are cd-only). The industrial metal subgenre is represented strongly here, with fine 6-part compilation “F**k ‘Em All” and highly experimental metal albums like cult demo “Dwellers on the Threshold” from Ewigkeit and EP’s from blackmetalfest Nutrition. There’s also great black metal band Old Forest and many more, all covered in anarcho-terrorism angst sauce of netlabel’s maintainer, James Fogarty.

And that’s probably all, my dear people. What makes metal music so obscure in netlabel scene? Part of the problem are probably the bands itself – while maintaining that netlabel of mine, I’ve met many different reactions after proposing the cooperation with metal bands. Some of them were very interested and really helped in making this happen, some of them have lukewarm reactions, but provided the material, but the worst kind were those touched the commercial success a little, and didn’t even want to listen about giving away for free even the old demos, which would be a treasure for the fans (probably they were keeping them for some re-releases or compilations for sell). Don’t get me wrong – I have nothing against people who want to get paid for their hard work – it’s perfectly okay. Sadly, the metal bands often will agree for even the shittiest contract with a “real” label, even if it’s home-based and pressess about 300 copies of an album, making it hard to find and buy if you’re not living in Finland or Holland, than gave away even a portion of it’s music or older tracks, just for sake of satisfying fans. Maybe I was a little idealistic, or maybe all those slogans against greedy and evil (in the “wrong” sense, of course) contracts with labels were some kind of running gag?

And I’m not calling metal bands money-hungry – recording even the simplest death metal track costs a lot more, than making a piece of electronica. Metal musicians needs a lot of gear and a specialised studio with a guy, who will help with mixing. While many artists are capable of making a one-man electronica project using home computer and keep the quality high, the metal quartet needs guitars, drums, mics, amplifiers, miles of cables and similar stuff, and lot of money for even the most basic studio with someone with working ears inside, who will help making sound everything properly. Sure, there are fanatics like mentioned earlier Dave Lanciatti from Dimaension X or Cadaver of Agent Metal fame, those guys using even Wal-Mart-grade equipment will record something interesting – but that’s not the point. There are thousands of little local metal bands everywhere, some even with members hailing from high school. It’s sad for me to see their work lost completely, after “releasing” it to some crappy label with P.O. box instead of address, which will produce (or, as I sometimes heard, not) 100 CD-Rs with xeroxed artwork. Or guys will totally abandon playing, as no-one will want to make’em those CD-R’s, and will fade into obscurity, while they can release their work on the netlabel – and keep the spirit of metal alive by bringing fresh stuff to those interested.

Or maybe I am not right? Maybe metal music doesn’t fit well in the netlabel niche? What’s your opinion on this?

Ramzes XIII