[digital:meditation]

A few days ago, while browsing archive.org I stumbled across “Incubi Succubi” by Daina Dieva and Svart1. Somehow, this 25-minutes beast of an ambient track has caught my attention and been played quite a couple of times ever since. Initially, this track partially reminded me of Vangelis’ incredible soundtrack to “Blade Runner”, but “Incubi Succubi” is way more, way stronger in some respects: The course of a nights worth of dreaming, travelling through its different stages from nightmare to relieving wake-up in the morning, captured altogether in soundscapes somewhere between (dark) ambient, industrial and folk. Ethereal, somewhat distant voices (I don’t want to call them “vocals” as I don’t know whether there are any articulated lyrics), deep distant drums once in a while, all kinds of noises and sounds, and an overall construction of “atmosphere made sound” all around this. A perfect soundtrack to a movie taking place in your head, and you decide what kind of movie this might be. And, asides being a great audio track, thanks to stumbling across this release I also learnt about Daniele Serra, a truly interesting artist, and I dared to discover more musical doings both by Daina Dieva, most notably darkwinter dw056 (another rather strong ambient production), and the doings of Svart1, a very effective merging of audio, visual, … into one working “whole”. A good way to spend a winter evening, I guess. ;)

Music to code to, in some way: Browsing the darkwinter.com archives, I stumbled across “Glaciations” by Canadian ambient/electronics twopiece Kalte. The page says it all, I guess:

…
Inspired by the isolation and emptiness inherent in the Polar Night, the Toronto-based electronic duo Kalte has released “Glaciations”, a series of five sound environments made up of cold elements and deep darkness. Drawing from a range of organic sound sources which have been altered and reassembled, “Glaciations” immerses the listener in a space that evokes the feeling of solitude and glacial winds, where dark tones drift through the soundscape, shifting in subtle ways.
…

Go get your headphones and check it out. ;)

Wow, looking at the timestamp of the last entry, it seems it’s been a while, vacations and project business included, since I wrote anything here. Anyway: As a regular follower / user of jamendo, I am by now pretty much used to stumbling across new and interesting music and average quality on jamendo.com seems pretty high which is a good thing. However, even given this high level of quality, once in a while there are albums, bands that just excel, either because of being especially original, or because of being especially good at what they do, or because, for reasons unknown, their music just works out. Been browsing and searching for some darker, noisy electronica a while ago, I eventually found “Grounded” by German trip-hop-world-music-electronic-jazz-whatever “crossover” twopiece Botany Bay. Listened to it once on my mp3 player, listened to it a second and third time while in car, and eventually kinda fell in love with the music on it, although it actually seems nowhere next to what I am usually listening to, at the moment…

I don’t know… it just worked out. No matter whether talking about instrumental or vocal performance (both male and female, even though I prefer the tracks sung by Laura), production, song writing, the video clips they did so far or (cover/booklet) artwork, the album to me is on an exceptionally high level of quality – way better than just “garage band” and like some of the releases to be found “on-line” today, in some respects even better than records to be found in regular CD stores sold by major record companies.

Adding to this, however… but even more, it just works… the music sounds and feels pure to the core, one literally can hear the musicians are pretty honest about what they are doing, and they are pretty effective at creating songs and sonic landscapes reaching one even without actually knowing why: Listening to the album on a grey autumn morning, it’s not just listening to the songs but rather being surrounded by the music, feeling it, eventually breathing it, and, eventually, when Laura starts singing “Tu m’as dit” (my French is way too limited to get the meaning of the title or even the lyrics, however), one knows this album, even though it might not work out in all situations, has found its way to the shelf of all-time favorites pretty quickly. Maybe, from an effectiveness point of view, this is the best an album eventually can achieve. Knowing the album is released under CC BY-NC-ND ;), giving it a closer look (listen?) won’t hurt or cost much except for a download, so maybe this is the first and foremost thing to do in order to start discovering the world of Botany Bay.

By the way seeing the “Old Men With Ballpoint Pens” clip and reading some of the (German) blog posts related to internet culture and censorship in Germany, it is pretty good to see that, while being focused on music, the two people in BB aren’t limited to it. Really enjoyed discovering this ambitious, inspiring band.

Links

• Botany Bay Website
• Botany Bay blog
• “Grounded” on jamendo.com
• BB@last.fm

Amongst all the net labels out there nowadays, then and now I come back to the stuff found at darkwinter.com, as overall quality of these releases usually is pretty good. At the moment, however, I feel mesmerized by “elements”, which, in my opinion, is an exceptional release even by darkwinter standards. One hardly could say there is a lack of dark, “drony” ambient music these days, as it seems creating this kind of soundscapes is trivial at least from a technical point of view, you’re not really likely to need a lot of equipment and skill to get this kind of stuff. And still, listening closer to some (most?) of these releases, one quickly learns that indeed there are differences both looking at technical aspects and, even more, talking about originality and inspiration found in it.

Talking about this, “elements”, the creation of Australian one-man project Abre Ojos, surely knows how to excel. Earth, fire, water, air – each of the “four elements” captured in one long piece of musical creation, in one great, musically evolving world. In the end, these four elements end up forming an acoustic universe dense and inspired, moody, electronic and yet evolving and highly “organic”, directly next door to releases like the incredible ‘Zeit’ album by Tangerine Dream, created in 1972, or, same as ingenious, Coil’s ‘Time Machines’ released a couple of years later. From this point, I dare to consider “elements” the logical successor to the both of these records at least talking about music.

But there’s more: Along with the music, “elements” also does come with a video clip (or, better, a visual collage) for each of the elements / songs. Initially, I felt torn about this idea, given that this kind of music usually works best being a “soundtrack” for a movie to evolve in your mind while listening to it. But, however, after looking at parts of the clips I have to say that, fortunately, they indeed work out emphasizing the effect of the music itself, indeed working out as “…sound reactive looping visuals and animated mandalas to create an immersive synaesthetic experience to give time for reflection and meditation…”, as the release liner notes claim.

So, coming to a conclusion, I have to say that “elements” is one of the most outstanding pieces of drone ambient music I have been listening to in quite a while. Given it’s available on-line for free download (and, actually, under a Creative Commons license), one shouldn’t hesitate checking it out, listening to it, eventually drifting along through the worlds of Abre Ojos for while. And, if you decide you actually enjoy this one and want to show your appreciation to its creator, there’s always a carefully packed and designed CD/DVD box available to be ordered online. Worth checking out definitely, I am thinking about creating a PayPal account. :)

See:

• abreojos.net – official web site
• darkwinter dw057 – download page for “elements” on darkwinter.com

Well… after looking into this quite a while ago already, I finally did it and used the German version of the amazon.com MP3 online shop in order to do my first-ever music purchase not involving any kind of actual “physical” medium. And… yes, it feels kind of strange: On one side, if you “just” want to listen to music, it’s next to perfect – browse the album list, search whatever you’re looking for, eventually find it, buy it, download it – that’s it. No waiting for the CD to be delivered right to your mailbox, no additional shipping fees, plus (which used to finally make me actually go for it) the chance of finally getting hold of music which ceased to be availble on “physical media” (in other words: CD or vinyl…) years ago ( leaving second-hand stores aside).
On the other side of course, buying music digitally online gives you an arcane feeling of actually being “left with nothing” in some way: In the end, a collection of bits on your hard drive or music player is all you get from that. Buying a CD at least “feels” like getting more “value for money”, at the very least talking about cover artwork, packaging and all this kind of stuff.

But let aside this, I was surprised to see the amazon.com MP3 shop being a rather friendly thing. Overally, first and foremost, knowing that the music they offer is not polluted protected with DRM (and, thus, usually bound to special player software and devices) was an important thing.

Then, downloading the actual files you’ve bought there is done using a proprietary piece of software called amazonmp3, which is available for download and installation on virtually all important operating systems. Getting this piece of software to work on my Ubuntu 9.04 installation was as straightforward as downloading the .deb file, resolving a few additional dependencies and launching the application. Good. Doing the actual purchase of any MP3 music, while in there, basically works the same as purchasing anything else via amazon.com, which is a good thing if you’re an amazon.com customer anyway, as, in terms of payment and billing, it works just as you know it, keeping you from having to provide your accounting information to one more online shop. After completing the purchase, you’re left with a .amz file which, opened using the amazonmp3 application, automatically starts downloading the files that belong to your purchase (with the files being downloaded one by one, preconfigured to $HOME/Amazon MP3). This worked pretty smoothly as well and, overally, something like two minutes later the “album” I just bought was stored on my hard drive. At the very least it’s rather convenient…

… but the strange feeling remains, especially after burning this music to CD-ROM, ending with a blank, hand-labeled representation of it. Oh well… I surely will not do that every day, especially given that, looking at how fast it overally works, this seems the perfect way of wasting vast amounts of money rather quickly. But if occassionally buying a (rare?) piece of music not offered on CD or by its original author for download anymore, this seems a way to consider.

Now that’s something you don’t see every day: Quite a while ago I stumbled across the musical doings of nordvargr (and, eventually, wrote a review on one of his releases for German webzine medienkonverter back then…), and, sort of starting to like these dark, inspiring sound scapes, loosely kept track of his doings now and then. It seems Mr Nordvargr is pretty active also regarding communication and music distribution on “the internet” and in places like virbr, where he also uses to provide music for the “get-it-for-free-and-run” generation.

His latest action, however, seems at least somewhat surprising: “Interstellar 2″, a new release provided on-line, is officially available as a “Torrent Edition” – via piratebay.org. Almost an hour of dark space drone music provided right through what some people still tend to refer to as the “hub” for internet music piracy – seems a rather daring move, even better considering it is being done ” as a way of showing support for free speech and free internet”. Check it out anyway, and also feel free to read Nordvargs reflections on piracy to be found somewhere on his news page. Seems worth supporting, in any particular way.

Adding to this, quoting from the Interstellar 2 announcement on virbr.com:

[...]
I will not go in to a long rant about free internet and piracy, but to sum it up:

Support what is good and worth supporting (small independent labels are always good
and should be encouraged and supported).
[...]

Not much to add, I guess. Go and support that friendly dark drone musician next door rather than dealing with the latest artificial “superstar” in any way.

They did it again: Announcing the 17th Klub Moozak events, Clemens and his co-workers once again honoured my visual doings by using one of my pictures for the announcement flyer again:

Thanks for that as well as for the credits, I surely like it… :> By the way the “blank” version is here, CC-licensed as all my stuff. Well, as stated before: Seeing ones pictures used for something like this is even better knowing it is used for something rather good, given the music involved with (Klub) Moozak events usually seems to be rather interesting (listening to Strangelet at the moment which I also got to know following one of the KM event announcements). Hope for more of this, and still pondering a trip to Vienna right for that. :)

Der tagesspiegel berichtet über den Status Quo im Umgang mit Online-Musik, testet verschiedene Werkzeuge und Plattformen und resümiert:

…
Die meisten Songs gibt es im Internet bereits jetzt ohne Beschränkungen. Doch damit sind längst nicht alle Barrieren beseitigt. Dem Nutzer steht teilweise ein regelrechter Hindernislauf bevor.
…

Insgesamt ein lesenswerter Artikel und ein schöner Punkt, wieder einmal auf Creative Commons hinzuweisen. Entsprechend lizensierte Musik findet sich u.a. unter Jamendo, bei orangemusic, blobu.de oder creativecommons.org. Zwar finden sich an all den Stellen weniger “große Namen”, sondern vielmehr unbekanntere und/oder Indie-Artisten, aber schließlich ist dies keine Aussage zur Qualität von Musik, oder? Wer doch einen etwas größeren Namen will, für den bleibt immerhin “The Slip, das bislang aktuellste Album von Nine Inch Nails, als CC-kompatibler Download. Und während der Beschallung mit diesen Klängen bleibt dann auch Zeit für die Lektüre von “Was ist CC?”, um zu lernen, daß Creative Commons mehr als kostenlose Downloads und “Selbstbedienungskultur” sind. Die Bilder auf [z428] stehen übrigens auch unter einer CC-Lizenz zur Verfügung.