End the week on a hard note. Newly up at archive.org, the instrumental “mechanized wisdom (burzum rmx)” (attribution unclear), which is pithily billed, with full self-knowledge, as “experimental, electronic black metal music from taiwan.” There’s little more than a …
You might read the URL, wanderingear.com, as Wandering Gear instead of what it actually says, which is Wandering Ear, but either way, you’d be right. Wanderingear.com is a new netlabel set up Mike Hallenbeck and by Nathan Larson, the …
In about a week or so, the Disquiet Downstream will feature a pretty cool take on the ongoing remix festivities at bush-of-ghost.com/remix, the site set up in tribute to the rerelease of the David Byrne and Brian Eno album …
Overdose Kunst is two Japanese musicians, Takeshi.f and Ryuta.k, who are well represented by a pair of recent five-track netlabel releases. War of Kelgenetu, on Umbrella Noize (umbrellanoize.com), moves easily from brash static to light field recordings to somnolent …
Come 2006, there are more than enough netlabels to fill even the most discerning of harddrives. A “netlabel” is a web-based distributor of music that charges nothing for the music it promotes. Though the concept seems to not only flout but upend conventional wisdom about how a record label functions, there are hundreds of these enterprising organizations around the globe, the significant majority of them focusing on electronic music.
Releases on netlabels are often the focus of the Downstream section of Disquiet.com, in which each weekday I recommend a free downloadable piece of music. From that Disquiet department’s beginning, in the fall of 2003, netlabels have been a major source of its material, including such destinations as 8bitrecs, Stasisfield, Kikapu and Monotonik.
To dig a little deeper into the subject, I ran a short-term discussion group earlier this year with the administrators of three exemplary netlabels. As with a previous Disquiet-based online discussion (”After ‘Thursday Afternoon,’” on the 20th anniversary of the Brian Eno album), the conversation transpired in private via an Internet-based forum, and what appears below is a transcription that was lightly edited after the dialog had reached its natural conclusion.
The participants were Andras Hargitai of Complementary Distribution (bitlabrecords.com/cod), based out of Budapest, Hungary; Nathan Larson of Dark Winter (darkwinter.com), based out of Minnetonka, Minnesota; and Pedro Leitao of Test Tube (monocromatica.com/netlabel), based out of Lisbon, Portugal.
Over the course of a couple of weeks, the discussion ranged from the theoretical to the practical, at times serving as a sounding board, at others as a technical support group, as Hargitai, Larson and Leitao discussed the cost of free downloads, the online community of uploaders and the transition from physical distribution to virtual.
The uploads to the Other Minds collection at the archive.org has a stellar new item. Well, new to the archive. Back in early 1973, Other Minds guru Charles Amirkhanian visited the Oakland Museum and recorded a walking tour of its …
DJ/rupture is no reductionist, but he does sum up his one-hour, two-part “gold teeth thief” mix with some pithy accounting: “43 tracks, 68 minutes, mixed live on 3 turntables.” And for some additional numbers, he says of the files, “[T]he …
Darren McClure and Hiroyuki Ura performed live at a spot in Tokyo, and in preparation to do so, they brought the outside in. According to the brief liner notes that accompany Content in a Void, a four-MP3 document of that …
As of today, 119 remixes have been uploaded to the website set up in tribute to the album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by David Byrne and Brian Eno. Many of those remixes are interesting not simply because …
The seventh and, according to the publisher’s introduction, final edition of the print magazine e/i has been published, and it features my interview with laptop-enabled guitarist Christopher Willits and a small heap of record reviews I wrote, including Battles’ EP …