Free Music Collection: November 2010

Another month has come and gone and my hard drives are now less another 50GB of space. But worth every byte. October was extremely busy for me and I honestly feel like a slacked a little bit in the new music department but thankfully there is an amazing cast of blogs I can scour when I need a fix of new artists. There are a handful of killer albums in this months batch but I’ll leave that for you to discover.

If you need new music daily rather than monthly, follow me on twitter @thinkorsmile. I typically post links there as they are discovered. Or you can follow my twitter list of music bloggers who are doing the dirty work of digging these artists up. Happy exploring.

Think or Smile | Free Music Collection: November 2010

Not ten minutes after I complained on Twitter about a lack of Halloween mixes, unholy rhythms dropped this gem of exclusives on us. It features darker tracks from Pepepiano, Closed Cassette, Ghost Animal and even a track of her own with Young Henry under the guise, eros+massacre. It’s perfect for the dark nights of autumn and I’m totally in love with it. Here’s her rundown of it:

“Abraded Ghosts” is really a celebration of Halloween through the eyes of artists of different genres. I asked 13 wonderful musicians to give me their interpretation of creepy Halloween music and what I received is the most varied, delectable selection. From the sweet imagery of kids trick-or-treating at night, to dark, murky gothic swampfi that drags you to Hades.

Grab unholy rhythms ~ ”Abraded Ghosts” ~ Exclusive Halloween Mix here or click the image above.

• Stephen Farris – Alphabet soup – raw synth pop goodness.
• WASKERLEY WAY – holly – from the man who brought you Cat Music, here’s some more lo-fi dreamy space pop.
• Ariel Pink Special Pingcast – Soundtrack EP – remixed/covered Ariel Pink by Bullion, Waskerly Way, Echo Lake, C Powers + many other gems.
• Heart Music Group – The Tribe – chill hop from Baths, Star Slinger, Coolrunnings, Hard Mix, Wise Blood, Fol Chen.
• Yellow Ostrich – The Mistress – wonderful folk pop. show him some love and toss him a few bucks. or help support the release on vinyl at his kickstarter.
• guards – guards ep – new wave power pop with rock drums.
• Selebrities – Ladies Man Effect – dances between angular synthpop and New Wave atmospherics.
• Paperfangs – ePop006 – warm fuzzy finnish pop.
• Liquid Vega – LV – mysteriously wide open pop. cocteau twins meets goldfrapp perhaps?
• NazcarNation – Dynazty: The Remixes – chill tropic pop remixes from Star Slinger, unouomedude, StewRat.
• Now That’s What I Call Krista and the Whale: Volume 1 –  all the cool 90’s jams covered by chill synthpoppers Teenage Reverb, Coma Cinema, unouomedude, Mutual Benefit + more totally rad peps.
• Nueva Forma Listening Pleasure – good podcast for when you need to just chill. beautiful art direction as well.
• Airliner – Self-Destruct Pt. 1 EP – more chill beats from another Com Truise alias. + bonus track.
• Hunting Hat – Vampire Xmas – beautifully lonely tunes.
• Michael Parallax – Mountain – spiritual revival tent music, raw, organic, electric and full of soul.

• sane smith – robots will kill – funked electronic hip-hop. dance party. if it makes you move show some love and buy him a drink.
• Electric Sea Spider – Mohican Beats – glitched out, sample heavy, electric hip-hop.
• Seeing Suge – Breaking Single – delicious dream-hop.
• Emay – all his material to date. emcee/producer who collabs with the likes of Star Slinger, Blackbird Blackbird.
• STAR SLINGER – HANDSOME RADIO – delicious mix of beats.
• Stones Throw Podcast 62: Adventures with Paul White – solid hip-hop set. your head will nod.
• StewRat – Summer – chillwave hip-hop instrumentals.
• Micah Smith and mirF – Kosmos – sample heavy beats dabbling in jazz and eastern sounds.
• Handbook – The Shape of the Universe – chilled abstract beats.
• Qurious – Planet Plant – space noise with a pop sensibility.

• Body Language – Social Studies EP – detroit soul/disco. equal parts funk & sex.
• Low Light Mixes – vox electronix – electronic vocoder gems.. Eno, Air, Boards of Canada.
• matthewdavid – DISK COLLECTION – a sonically dynamic, personal immersion in electro-acoustic experiments.

• Denver Afterdark Compilation – mysterious sounds of the ‘mile high’. Late night listening is encouraged.
• gorilla vs. bear – halloween mixtape 2010 – indie/chill on the creepier side.
• Young Henry – U/N – post punk noise pop.
• KILLED in CARS – Special Halloween Mixtape – dark, foreboding, synth-heavy.

If you’re feeling any of these artists show ‘em some love and go see them live. As always, if you have any music to share hit me up on Twitter, Facebook or good old fashioned email.

At the Hour of Our Death

There are few things in life that we as a culture tend to shy away from, death is one of them. Talking about it is rarely done and thinking about it, even, seems to have such a negative connotation attached to it. I personally try not to dwell on it as there is too much good in life to experience, but understanding it and accepting it as part of life I think is important. It helps take some of there fear out of it. That’s part of what photographer Sarah Sudhoff is trying to do with her work. Looking at her images of death stains above at the very least confronts you. And hopefully makes you stop for a moment and think. There can be beauty in all things, even death. It depends entirely on how you choose to look at it.

Death, like birth, is part of a process. However, the processes of death –- the events leading up to the end of life, the moment of one’s last breath, and the aftermath of death — are often shielded from view. Today in Western society most families leave to a complete stranger the responsibility of preparing a loved one’s body for its final resting place. Traditional mourning practices, which allowed for the creation of Victorian hair jewelry or other memento mori items, have fallen out of fashion. Now the stain of death is quickly removed, and the scene where a death occurs is cleaned and normalized. As Phillipe Aries writes, “Society no longer observes a pause; the disappearance of an individual no longer affects its continuity”. The modern means of dealing with death promises to shield mourners from the most graphic aspects of death, yet the emotional and psychological impact of such loss lingers long after any physical evidence of this process has been erased.

You can see/read more from her series At the Hour of Our Death here.

Wanderlust: Get out there and live

Inspired by Stefan Sagmeister’s TED talk, Wanderlust, is four minutes of beauty captured by a couple as they traveled through South America, Europe, and New Zealand. I must admit I’m entirely jealous of their experience yet grateful they shared it with the world in such a beautifully edited way. I know I’ve been severely slacking on the posts here lately and I wish I could say its because I’ve been off exploring the world. While I have done a little traveling, much of my time has been spent in front of a computer screen either working or living vicariously through others. However, I think the latter needs to change.

I’ve recently begun reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature on a complete whim and to my delight, it’s absolutely amazing. I find myself in awe of nearly every passage and have to constantly set it aside to process his well composed thoughts. The quotation below is from the introduction and I happened to read it around the same day as viewing Wanderlust. Both seem to be poignant reminders that I/we shouldn’t allow life to simply pass by. There are too many beautiful things to experience.

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

-Introduction to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature

While I realize that reading Emerson now is contradictory to his own ideas, I still find it inspiring. So I think I’ll consider it supplemental to my own life and not seeing it through his eyes. That’s my rationale, but you’re of course entitled to your own.

The sun shines to-day also, so get out there and live.

Free Music Collection: October 2010

October is upon us and, at least in the Midwest, Mother Nature has made her shift to sweater weather.. in my opinion, the best kind. Accordingly, this month’s collection features a few more albums on the darker side to balance out the flood of sun-drenched tunes over the summer, but still includes plenty of beats, electronic and even a few mixes on the jazzy side.

Unfortunately, this month we saw Bandcamp change their terms of service and are now asking artist to pay to give away music, but even though they haven’t been playing very nice there’s still a lot of great music being shared. Some are finding alternate routes of distributing and others are trying to make due with the new system. So I apologize if some of these links (or past month’s) have hit their quota and are no longer free, but you can still have a listen.. and if you dig it, show them some love and help fund their next album.

If you need new music daily rather than monthly, follow me on twitter @thinkorsmile. I typically post links there as they are discovered. Or you can follow my twitter list of music bloggers who are doing the dirty work of digging these artists up. Happy exploring.

Think or Smile | Free Music Collection: October 2010

Collaborations presented by Dead as Digital, Stadiums and Shrines and The Road Goes Ever On.

Featuring collaborations between:  Top Girls and Guerre, Teen Daze and Jaded Hipster Choir, Weed and Foxes In Fiction, Closed Cassette and Top Girls, Ghost Animal and Rachel Levy, Ghost Houses, Holy Spirits and Gem Club, Seeing Suge (Star Slinger, Emay, Blackbird Blackbird), Pepepiano and Warm Waves, Gay Boiz (Kumon Plaza and Rachel Levy), and Star Slinger and Pandit.

• WALSH – Smoke Weed About It EP – aka Brandon Biondo drops some post rad electronics.
• Naminé – EP – slow motion lo-fi disco.
• Soft Powers – BAD POP – dreamy fuzz pop.
• Craig Cruiser – Cruising The Night Away – made for cassette fuzzwave jams.
• Hard Mix – the chill world mixtape – nice ride all the way through.
• pears – soft plans – lush samples swirled into tropical lo-fi.
• Olde English Spelling Bee – Greatest Hits “Danse Pop” 7″ – hyperactive and robotic electropop jams.
• My Friend Wallis – When the Blue Turned Yellow EP – pretty airy tropic pop.
• Ra Cailum – “Souvenir” EP – synthpop happiness.
• Waskerley Way – Cat Music – spaced out fuzzy cat concept album. lo-fi goodness.
• PERSONA LA AVE -  Brothers was taken – music to sit on the dunes and watch the tide come in.
• Korallreven – A Dream – blissed out mix featuring a few clips from the Baraka soundtrack and a little Weezy.
• WGWB & Friends Volume 3 – rad jams made for cassette.
• Jon Lemmon – Kindling EP – lonely music for androids.
• BIGCOLOUR – Centuries of Summer – lo-fi minimal folk psych.
  
• WALSH – Lost in NY DJ Mixtape – funky.
• Holy Spirits Mix 10.0 for FWBA – Detective Community – lots of lovely finds to discover from the collection of Holy Spirits.

• Star Slinger – Remixes 2010 – some of the years best dream-hop.
• Space Ghost – P Y R A M I D D R E A M S – beats to space to.
• Unknown Mortal Orchestra – UMO screwed tape #1 – psychedelic hip hop mixtape.
• Ohsaurus – 3 Pounds of Flax (FD005) – electro-hop beat music.
• Bahwee – HEADNODDERS VOL. II – tasty beat tape with a nod to middle eastern vibes.
• Kanye West – GOOD Fridays – free tracks on Fridays feat. Jay-Z, Common and other heavy hitters (guilty pleasure).
• 1320 Records Volume II – sampler of new beats, hip-hop and electronic beats.
• Svetlana Industries – Come On Lets Go – wonky dubstep beats.
• Lukid – Brainfeeder Mix – signature brainfeeder beats + glitch yet pretty chill.
• Ohsaurus – The Energy About Us – dubstep meets electronic hip-hop.

• Slow Hands & Friends – Fabric Exclusive Mix – keep your soul moving.
• Ghostly International – Ghostly Essentials: Rarities Two – unreleased, hard-to-find music from the vaults. not anymore.
• Pro~Ef – So Let’s Take a Trip – jazzy beats mixed up for Monday Jazz.
  
• Gay Boiz – 429-2649 – this album was written/recorded in about a week’s time on a Samsung cellphone, and an iPhone. experimental telephone pop.
• King of the Rowser! – Best of – spacey electronic.
• earrings – wilderness e.p. – r&b for a club in your dreams.
  
• Miguel Atwood-Ferguson feat. FLYING LOTUS – Drips/Take Notice – jazz ensemble meets beat junkie and makes beautiful music together.
• Low Light Mixes – footsteps – starts off psychedelic then quickly veers into something funky, something jazzy.

• Dream Boat & Ʌ – “True Love” split – darkwave anyone? bad ass nightmare music.
• Dream Boat – Slow Gems – mix for dark dream from your past. also check out his new full length, Visions.
• Vortex Rikers – Untitled EP – some darker ambient, slow-mo witch house.
• silent farm – memory screen ep – not ambient and not totally chill, but kinda both.
• B. Young – B. Young – slow moving bedroom ambient pop with a few philosophical samples.

If you’re feeling any of these artists show ‘em some love and go see them live. As always, if you have any music to share hit me up on Twitter, Facebook or good old fashioned email.