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A really great sounding idea in concept and visually. Still, very cool and wish I had thought of it.
Pianola City Music: Playing a Cityscape as a Piano Score - information aesthetics: <div>“Pianola City Music [akkogoldenbeld.com] attempts to overcome the almost inevitable urge to program and computerize our most imaginative ideas.
A physical model of the Dutch city of Eindhoven is rolled onto a drum and attached to a piano, so that its buildings hit the piano keys in a specific rhythm and the physical pattern of the city becomes expressed into a unique sound. The cityscape Eindhoven apparently produces a quite chaotic soundscape, although this might also be influenced by the methodology of it all, of which another beautiful example includes SolarBeat.”</div>
Listen & download the song in the player above.
A while back, we posted a recording we made while we were writing this song.
The people over at Machinima.com used it as the background music for their video “3 Last Ways To Annoy In By Injecti0n (MW2 Countdown)”.
And “5 More Ways To Annoy In Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2 Machinima)”.
As you can hear it’s changed a little since then.
We’re thinking of taking some of the recent singles we’ve released and putting them together as a physical EP/CD and a version on vinyl in the next month. Sign up for our newsletter or follow us on facebook or twitter and we’ll let you know when it’s available.
While this is my new favorite blog, this was the most impressive picture I found on it by far.
awesome people hanging out together
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</td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Charlie Chaplin and Helen Keller</td></tr></tbody></table>
Sure I make music under creative commons licenses, but I like to talk about it too.
Last year I started a podcast called Music Manumit with Doug Whitfield, another CC music enthusiast, that was part talking to musicians and others involved in the Creative Commons movement and part playing music released using it. It’s fun to do and I get to meet a lot of really cool people because of it. We’ve even talked with Eric Steuer, Creative Director at Creative Commons and Board member of CASH Music.
Well, one of my favorite sources of music in the realm is the freemusicarchive.org run by Jason Sigal of WFMU. And recently we were made curators for music on the site to add more CC Music artists to it ourselves. So I’m pretty psyched about that and just thought I’d share. There’s a lot of good music out there owned by the artists and in a sense, by the fans.
Survival of the fittest from Artur Przysiecki on Vimeo.
It's a pretty damn good film! Nice work!
The film is released under the Non-Commercial, Non-Derivative license CC-BY-NC-ND because the song "Balrog Boogie" by Diablo Swing Orchestra was under that license. He asked us if he could use our music under the same, which we of course said yes.
Enjoy.
As you may know, we’re fans of sharing music and creative commons and I just wanted to share a story about how I talked someone into doing the same.
The best part about this story is just the simplicity about how it happened. It wasn’t a big ordeal it was just a simple conversation I had on twitter with Amanda Palmer. So here’s the story…
Ben Folds, Amanda Palmer, Neil Gaiman, and Damian Kulash released an album recently on bandcamp called Nighty Night under the band name 8in8. The concept was to write and record eight songs in eight hours at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Mass. It was for the Rethink Music conference that took place April 25th - 27th. And they were selling it for $1, with all the proceeds from the first week’s sales going to Berklee City Music. Which I have to say, everything I just wrote about in that paragraph is very cool.
The conference was described as :
a solutions-focused conference, bringing together all sides and viewpoints on the subjects of creativity, commerce, and policy to engage in critical dialogue examining the business and rights challenges facing the music industry in the digital era, and to formulate ideas for the creation and distribution of new music and other creative works.
I watched some of the conference streaming online that day and liked the concept behind it. But I was a bit surprised when I saw the album they released and it was under a regular copyright. I thought from the description of the conference that they were missing an opportunity to showcase the need for artists to use creative commons to represent their art.
So I just briefly posted a message on twitter to @amandapalmer
I was delighted to find that later that day she had responded:
I was kind of confused by this second post but figured she was reading up on it and considdering it.
Then some other people viewing the conversation also asked about this move.
One was for it:
Another was wondering if it would hurt the donation they were asking for if they were allowed to share it:
I responded just by stating how I thought with the spirit of the conference that it should be offered as a medium for being re-mixable and and built upon for other artists. And that if fans wanted to promote it they would know that they were allowed to do this with permission from the artist.
The next day I got a message from the person in the previous conversation letting me know that the album was indeed now released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License or CC BY-NC
So, in brief, this means that under this artist license you could Remix or adapt the work as long as you attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). And you may not use this work for commercial purposes.
And soon after that people were talking to Amanda about wanting to make videos for the songs and other uses for artistic purposes on her twitter feed.
That’s really what I/we think it’s all about, using art to make art and to share the things you like freely and openly. So thanks to Amanda for considering it and acting on it. I hope it’s a step in the right direction to show artists how to own their own work and let the fans know that they own it too!
We previously posted a live set we did for the Local Love Fest in February. An event where local Madison bands played covers by other Madison bands. It was accompanied with a CD release of some of the songs and sold at the show.
This is the song we recorded for the CD, “H Bomb”* by The Skintones. You can hear the original on their MySpace page.
I’m not sure where you can buy the CD online (couldn’t find it by searching). But on the CD there’s an email address for Dustin Boyle from Detune Studios dustinboyle@gmail.com you might be able to contact him to get a copy.
*since this is a cover this song is available for streaming only.