Long a source of often highly recommendable downloads, the kracfive.com collective/website — home to such lo-fi luminaries as Kettel, Aghost, Miragliuolo and Octopus, just to name a few — has decided to do away with its monthly free “MP3 rotor” in favor of a dedicated streaming hub at last.fm/label/kracfive. The move to streaming makes sense, especially as wifi becomes more ubiquitous — and since hosts such as last.fm and myspace.com carry the bandwidth burden and costs.
Still, the Disquiet Downstream will remain focused on legal, freely downloadable music, so sadly kracfive.com won’t be as much of a presence here as it has been in the past. To bid quasi-adieu, here’s one favorite, Colongib‘s “Flat Hombre,” which has a mournful, sub-Casio-quality melody above a scratchy, distorted shuffle (MP3). Most of the past free Kracfive downloads are archived at this single page: kracfive.com. And the label will reportedly continue to post free full downloads of a handful of tracks from each of its “physical” releases.