“With his mastery of the arcane secrets of Noodlecraft, the Pastamancer is a force to be reckoned with. He relies on his Mysticality to get ahead in the world.” The pastamance is one of the characters you can be in Kingdom of Loathing, a free online role playing game.. The same people at Asymmetric also made this beautiful Dancing Tonto!
Spent some time yesterday on Do-it-yourself games, a very good news website about independently produced games, most of them freely downloadable. It’s also a very good place to visit for those who regret the disparition of text or point-and-click adventures and that kind of stuff. Here is their mission stastement :
” * Provide our readers with honest in-depth reviews and previews of games from independent developers without hype or propaganda.
* Publish informative and educational features that cover a wide range of topics.
* Provide timely and insightful news stories that focus on the world of independent games while still covering topics that pertain to gaming in general.
* Commit ourselves to our readers, realizing that they are the reason we’re here.
* Never compromise journalistic integrity while in pursuit of a story.”
Speaking of which (indie games, not journalistic integrity), you could do worse than downloading the very nice remake of the classic Lucasart game Maniac Mansion, produced by a bunch of talented German Lucasmaniacs : it’s great nerd fun! “You guys did an amazing job. My hat is off to you. “, says Ron Gilbert, one of the authors of the original game, about this remake (about Ron Gilbert, his Grumpy Gamer blog, subtitled Ron Gilbert’s often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry is a great read).
The net labels page on archive.org is a great place to look for good music licensed under creative commons or copyleft. Each visit fill my harddrive with interesting stuff (mostly electronic, as it is the chosen specialty of most of those net labels).
Last time I downloaded some stuff from Fronha records, a Brazilian label describing itself as :
“an output for experimental electronic music made since the 80’s by artists living in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The intent is to freely distribute quality music that otherwise would be unavailable or extremely hard to find. The works range from highly experimental soundscapes to almost pop weirdness. In 2004, due to great acceptance and some nice collaborations, we decided to expand our catalogue by releasing stuff by artists from other places that would fit in our profile.”
My favourite pick at the moment would be one of the Liz albums, dreamy and melodic soundscapes with a lot of textured details, and a kind of lullaby quality. Their own words : “Surprising cut-ups and obsessive repetitions creating a highly detailed atmosphere that always tells a story. Wich story is up to the listener.”
And by the way, she’s a woman making electronic music (it’s always woth noting, some of our readers should be intrested by that fact ^_^). One of those tracks will definitely make it to the next common mix, playlist coming up soon.
Since I began this Common music series of posts, Benoit sent me a whole lot of links to websites with good (and often xprmntl) music. Didn’t listen to all of it yet so I can’t comment further. But trust me when I say you should trust Benoit ^_^
So, here are the links :
centibel http://www.sfu.ca/~pthomson/centibel/
experimental digital audio
CommTom http://www.commtom.com/ specializing
in unique electronic music for the adventurous ear.
EARLabs http://www.earlabs.org/ started
in 1999 as a public stage for composers.
FUKK GOD LETS CREATE http://www.fukkgod.org/
komplott http://www.komplott.com/site_index.asp
established in 1999 as a reaction to the limited scope available for experimental
and electronic music in Scandinavia at the time.
Observatory http://www.observatoryonline.org/
free and online sub-label for independent electronic record label Skylab
Operations. Dedicated to the electronic experimentation of sound and vision.
Observatory releases several free to download and distribute MP3 and OGG
releases a month.
sonus.ca http://sonus.ca/ houses electronic
audio from all exploratory and experimental aestheticsis. sonus.ca is a project
of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community
stasisfield http://www.stasisfield.com/
started in 2002 and is dedicated to releasing challenging works of art which
may not have the chance to find a home elsewhere.
TIBProd http://www.tibprod.com/ …
the main center shall be the music itself … [c.s.]
TILN http://tiln.aesova.org/ founded
2000. Tiln, exists as a non-profit entity under the wings of AESOVA.
Webbed Hand Records http://www.webbedhandrecords.com/
started 2003. Run by artists who wish to bring their own work to the public.
80Hz http://www.80hz.tk/ a series of microsound
compositions by artists around the world.
http://earphone.org/
There you can find a series of classic Wonder Woman covers, with also for each issue one inside page, a small sample of the William Moulton Marston stories.
And for something completely different, but still a comics, here are two pages about trucks and their natural habitat, by Isabel Rucker.
Fascinating mix of images : this is an archive of photographs coming from various p2p networks. Was the sharing of those intentional or not? One can meditate about it while looking at this enormous random selection.
Here is one to give you an idea.
(nice band-aid even if not sticky enough)
Just finished a second mix made only of creative commons tracks (and uploaded it for the radioswap stations, contact them if you’re a radio and you want to join 😉
What is in the playlist. Again Catalpa catalpa and Binärpilot (i’m very fond of those). Normal Music sounds a bit like unclean minimal techno, kind of pan-sonic under a cracking layer of dust, and is released on Autoplate. Autoplate is the sister label of Thinner, who released the elegant synth-dripping techno of Theodor Zox.
My favourite in this batch is Tree Wave. Here is an extract from the prop-text : “Instruments include an Atari 2600, a Commodore 64, a 286 luggable PC, and an Epson dot matrix printer, all reprogrammed as sound generators. In live shows, the Atari 2600 works double-duty as an hypnotic image projector.”
We also have here two tracks we could maybe describe as “amateur electropop”, very charming and effective, one from Brussels, Churchill, and the other from Vienna, Heirstyle.
Ilkae : Tin crow (Monotonik through archive.org) //
Tree wave : May banners (Observatory) //
Churchill : Target (electrobel) //
Binärpilot : Otosclerosis (microhertz through archive.org) //
Catalpa Catalpa : Mummy (opsound) //
Normal music : Migratory patterns of youth (Autoplate) //
Theodor Zox : Oker motion (download from Thinner) //
Heirstyle : Meisterwerk (Comfort Stand release page) //
/// all tracks licensed under creative commons, some rights reserved.
More coming soon.
There are of course other radio people looking for free and open audio and doing programs with it, such as tHe SiJis SHow (thanks, Benoit!) on Resonance fm, London.
On their website, you can download the archived programs and also find links to the sites where the individual tracks are available.
