HUPOMNEMATA

I did a first 30minutes-mix of tracks under creative commons, here is the playlist. Maybe will make it available through constantvzw one of these days. In the meanwhile, all those tracks are freely downloadable.

Paranerd : extract from Little Shames (one.dot9.ca) //

Yosuke Hayashi : BrunovsMasaki (opsound) //

Lullatone : Resound (observatory) //

Symphonic Stereo : I hope (camomille) //

Vim : Thin strips of you (monotonik through archive.org) //

Text Adventure : If it could talk it wouldn’t say anything (observatory) //

Catalpa catalpa : Putty in your paws (opsound) //

Binärpilot : Tjaere igjen (microhertz through archive.org) //

Alosyus : Play more with claymore (alosyus on electrobel)

/// all tracks licensed under creative commons, some rights reserved,

If you like folky guitars drowning in lo-fi bleepy sounds, with some fragile voice in the mix, Text Adventure is for you. Particularly suitable for sad indie shoegazers, but also really enjoyable for the rest of the world. Released under creative commons by observatory, one of the numerous netlabels you can find on archive.org.
Download ogg files here (mp3’s available also).

Or where I start searching the Internet for good free music : things that are copyleft, or public domain, or creative commons, or watherver.

Why would I do that? I work for a radio station called campus and for a project called radioswap. The first is a non-commercial, independent radio station (you should listen to it, it’s rather good ^_-), the second is an exchange platform for, again, non-commercial radio stations.

Some months ago, I was at a meeting organised by the crid (centre de recherche informatique et droit). Around the table, lawyers, university people, radio people and people from the music industry : two from a society collecting royalties for authors and composers, one from a society representing the record producers (major companies as well as a good deal of the independents). And these were very fast to say that it was absolutely impossible to make radio without using their “catalogue” or “repertoire” (as they see it, it is clear they represent the owners of at least 90% of what’s broadcast on any radio, and it would be impossible for things to be different).

Around the same time, the amount of money the radio stations have to pay for copyright went through the roof, for various belgian reasons (won’t go into details here).

And so, here I am, trying to see if it would be possible, or even interesting, to make radio with only content that is free to use with a non-commercial purpose.

The answer seems to be yes. I started looking yesterday, already found loads of stuff. I will post on a regular basis about the results.

DJ nurse dancing at the Felix Kubin concert in cité administrative, Brussels, august 2003.

You asked me: ‘and you what did you think of it?’.Time to answer, but the way, what if temporarily we call this blog HUPOMNÊMATA (il s’agit non de poursuivre l’indicible, non de révéler le caché, non de dire le non-dit, mais de capter au contraire le déjà-dit; rassembler ce qu’on apu entendre ou lire.’) To go back to saturday morning http://www.arsmusica.be/agenda/15-1.htm, I had the feeling to assist to the remake of an historical moment when every instrument is explored, deconstructed. Where every musician give to hear every tone possible deconstructing their gesture, their instrument. We saw their relationship sometimes intimate to their instrument, could be also the sound of a voice for one woman. What was surprising and and the same time desappointing was that the experiences, the sounds were placed side by side, in place and time. They were playing their partition, not going very far in their intimate relation to their instrument, to the space avoinding us to become voyeurs or alone facing a solitary pleasure exhibited, even if we had pleasure looking at the light on a neck, a face, a decolleté, an arm, a face. This exercice of making hear, seems to make impossible to play together, to play against each other, to play with, to exagerate, to leave. What was the relation between each other, with the audience, with time? The only relation they seemed to have is to a notation.