transmothra - signs of the collapse

Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.

Recently, a friend asked me (me: the master of all things electronical) for some recommendations for downloading free music legally. Although i was hard pressed to name any legit source of free major label music, i have enough links to some really amazing sites that feature and host very good free music. Much of it is licensed under various Creative Commons licenses, and most is both free (as in beer) and free (as in free speech). As always, read the fine print for exact details for each site and every download. Additionally, check your local laws if you’re unsure about the license (personally, i have not found any gray areas here, since most of the music is either offered by the artists themselves as free, or is licensed freely, or is in some cases even public domain).

Since many of these are blogs, i highly recommend getting to know RSS feeds, and adding their feeds to your favorite feed reader. If you have no favorite feed reader, Google Reader is a great place to start.

So, without further ado, here are my top picks for really cool free, legal mp3 sites, in no particular order…

Amazon.com

Here are some free albums and some cheap albums. A whole lot of really good free stuff. At the top right you can select “Price: low to high” to get all the free stuff listed first, but the default setting is “bestselling, so that one shows the most popular free stuff, mixed in with some good cheap deals too. You can also go to single songs, too, and browse the links on the right by price and genre, etc.

Archive.org’s free music and netlabels categories

I could spend days without sleep sifting through some of these really amazing collections. You can drill down by keyword and genre and popularity. Very little big-name artists, but some serious gems (also a lot of duds, too, but if you look at the download counters you can tell which ones are liked – or at least downloaded – the most).

BlocSonic

This netlabel has tons of free samplers and whole albums by nobody you’ve heard before but every minute is really good, and they have an excellent mix of genres. I guess you could call them a metalabel, since their compilations frequently feature artists on other netlabels. One of the best free music sources around.

Note: these next two exemplary sites, despite my egregious lack of better-apt descriptions, are among my very favorite resources, not only for the wonderful personal touch you can find, but also for the incredible variety and sheer scope of their blogs and the insight gleaned from reading their notes on each feature, which are like meta-liner notes. These are both, as they say, earnest labors of love for their respective curators. As i’ve noted in a comment below, the best possible thing to do in lieu of giving you a lengthy and drooling description, is to implore you to go and dig deeply and feel the fresh cool sand between your fingers, and linger, and wonder at how new and interesting things can truly be when experienced with fullness and vigor. And maybe leave a note of thanks whenever you see something really cool that you enjoyed.

Free Albums Galore

This site frequently features avant-jazz and minimalist techno, but you can also find some fantastic alternative, pop, rock, folk, et cetera. Another great resource.

Catching the Waves

Another great free music source. See Free Albums Galore above. Same thing applies here.

Bandcamp

Bandcamp has tons of music from indie bands. Some free, some not. It’s fun to sift through, and you can find some real cool stuff here, sometimes even some up-and-coming bands that are just beginning to fly above the radar. Try this link for free stuff. I don’t use bandcamp that often, since i’m usually directed there by one of the other sites above.

The Peppermill

I have not heard anything from this label that i didn’t fall in love with immediately. TRUST ME ON THIS ONE. And try The Box: I cannot tell you anything about this record, except that it is freaky and weird and quirky, and yes, you DO recognize that tune.

I would be not only remiss, but probably also shamed before my peers, and quite possibly also drawn and quartered, if i didn’t point you to

Phlow

…who have awesome compilations and records, covering all kinds of genres, though a lot of it is maybe more techno and hip-hop and trip-hop oriented. Their massive year-end best-of mixes last year were pretty amazing.

Free Music Archive

Possibly the granddaddy of all free music sites, the FMA is a project of WFMU, “the most renowned freeform radio station in America”. They feature music of all kinds. This is one amazing resource that is just as much fun to sift through as it is to listen through.

Lastly, here’s one i just found out about:

Thomas’ Posterous

Having no experience with this one, all i can say is that it comes highly recommended from Catching the Waves.

Other great sites, archives, and blogs to check out

Oddio Overplay
The Silent Ballet
Netlabel Index
largehearted boy: daily downloads
RedFerret’s wikidump
3hive
FreeIndie
WFMU’s Beware of the Blog:mp3s
Netlabels Noises
Ektoplazm: free music portal
FrostClick:Audio
Jamendo (the King of free music sites)

Lastly (ok, really lastly), here’s my Google Reader bundle: Free Music et cetera (OPML)

Happy sifting!!

Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.

I put together this YouTube playlist of Carl Sagan’s “You Are Here”/”Pale Blue Dot” speech. I highly recommend checking it out.

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ’superstar,’ every ’supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

“The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

“It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

“Ann Druyan suggest an experiment: Look back again at the pale blue dot of the preceding chapter. Take a good long look at it. Stare at the dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself that God created the whole Universe for one of the 10 million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of dust. Now take it a step further: Imagine that everything was made just for a single shade of that species, or gender, or ethnic or religious subdivision. If this doesn’t strike you as unlikely, pick another dot. Imagine it to be inhabited by a different form of intelligent life. They, too, cherish the notion of a God who has created everything for their benefit. How seriously do you take their claim?”

- Carl Sagan

Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.

Martin Sargent (from Unscrewed, Infected, Web Drifter and Internet Superstar, also formerly of TechTV’s The Screen Savers) and Sarah Lane (from popSiren, also formerly of The Screen Savers and later on Attack of the Show) have been canned by evil Revision3 execs, along with their respective shows. Several others were also let go. (Here’s Martin’s heartbreaking Tweet.)

Revision3 just went down to Revision2 in my book, and maybe not even that. Those shows had a lot of heart, a lot of soul. I loved Martin’s shows, and popSiren has no doubt influenced a generation of young women to take up careers in technology, geekology, or to otherwise become visionaries like the bold, talented, and fun women on that show. It’s a sad, sad day for Internets.

But hey - Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht still get to giggle hysterically while drunk and looking at Kevin’s ATM.

For my own records, here are some comments/posts i’ve made about this tragic malarky, most of which are just ranting and whining about this crappy, crappy turn. You can skip them, i just want to go back and see if anyone wants to fight me or anything.

http://revision3.com/forum/showpost.php?p=454311&postcount=13

http://revision3.com/blog/2008/10/27/changes-to-revision3/#comment-10623

http://blog.sarahlane.com/2008/10/look-ma-im-a-fr.html#comments (moderated)

http://louderback.com/2008/help-im-infatuated-with-my-fable-2-avatar/#comments

Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.