Free Music Archive Blog

Individual Subscriptions to DRAM, Experimental Intermedia Archives and a new site: Sound American

2012-02-07T14:40:23-05:00

One hell of a sexy title, am I right?

Well, the fact of the matter is this: I have a lot of good news and not a lot of tippity tappity in my fingers to waste on pleasantries, so let's get down to the proverbial metal fasteners. DRAM has been one busy mug over the last year and, as these things sometimes happen, everything we've been working on has come to fruition at one time.

First of all, DRAM is very pleased to announce that you can FINALLY get an individual subscription to the database. After years of only being available to universities and public libraries, we've finally figured out a way to allow the average joe or josie get their hands on 3, 6, or 12 months of unlimited streaming music by composers like Robert Ashley, Morton Feldman, Michael Pisaro, and James Tenney (and many more on our over 3,000 recordings and counting).

How? Well, right, that's a good question. And, it leads me to the next portion of our good news. DRAM has started a brand new website and quarterly online journal called Sound American. On this site, we will be featuring streaming audio interviews and archival material available only in DRAM (and in some cases specifically made only for Sound American) as well as essays and visual art. All of this is geared toward being a more relaxed, casual companion piece to all of the research new music engines out there.

Sound American is a place to gain context on new and experimental music and to discover that new and experimental does not in any way equal difficult and inscrutable. Upcoming topics will include the new additions to Ben Hall's amazing collection of Southern Gospel 45s, interviews with electronic music and computer networking pioneers John Bischoff and Tim Perkis of the League of Automatic Music Composers, as well as a discussion between Nate Wooley and electro-acoustic composer Chris Brown. Later in the year, we'll be doing a feature on John Cage in conjunction with the massive Bowerbird Cage festival in Philadelphia.

For the time being, Sound American is celebrating the inclusion of the first wave of recordings from Phill Niblock's Experimental Intermedia Archive. The first 31 pieces are up now in DRAM and feature live performances by and interviews with such artists as Eliane Radigue, George Lewis, Alvin Curran, Pauline Oliveros, Lois V. Vierk, Carl Stone, and many more....including multi-instrumentalist Ned Rothenberg, whose program we feature for download here at FMA.

So, three pieces of good news, three times to beat our breasts with pride. It's a rare occurence and we are excited to share it with you. Please stop by Sound American, linger, enjoy, maybe make a tax-free donation to DRAM and get the fantastic premium in return of 3, 6, or 12 months of access to the site. Drop Nate a line and tell him he done good.....he's so fragile.

My Bubba & Mi: String Band & Jingle Factory

2012-02-07T01:09:50-05:00

My Bubba & Mi is the duo of Gudbjörg Tomasdottir and My Larsdotter. Originally from Iceland and Sweden, they are now based in Copenhagen. They've been playing music together since the late oughts, but theirs is a timeless sound: two acoustic stringed instruments (guitar, banjo, bass) + two sweet harmonized vocals. Occasionally sprinkled with organ, harmonica, a scraped washboard or train rumble:

"Steamengeene" is a track off of How It’s Done In Italy, a Creative Commons full-length from Utrecht's great label/netlabel Beep! Beep! Back Up The Truck. Last year, they followed it up with two EPs: BOB (in tribute to Bob Dylan?) and Wild & You, which are also available on very vinyl looking CDs from Beep Beep.

My Bubba & Mi recently founded the Hello Jingle Factory. They exhibited the project at the Reykjavik Art Museum, but it's not just art -- they've got a real jingles and an application form if you'd like to put your own message to song. Here's the entertaining infomercial:

New music from Thomas Buckner

2012-02-06T11:09:36-05:00

On Thursday, Thomas Buckner presents his 24th annual concert of commissioned works for baritone voice. Composers featured on this evening include his long-time collaborators, esteemed composers Robert Ashley, Annea Lockwood, and Alvin Lucier, along with New York premieres by Anne Guthrie, Narong Prangcharoen, and Kit Young.

In anticipation of this event, we are offering a recording of Thomas Buckner premiering "37 Haiku" by Christian Wolff, recorded at Buckner's April 12, 2007 Interpretations event.

With Gerry Reuter, oboe; Jill Van Nostrand, french horn; Liuh-Wen Ting, viola; Jennifer Devore, cello; Petr Kotik, conductor. Interpretations series, April 12, 2007

Also, here is a video of Thomas Buckner discussing the history of Interpretations, and also his collaborations with the composers featured in this upcoming concert!

Golden Festival 2012: Balkan Vocal Groups in the Atrium Room

2012-02-03T09:12:44-05:00

The Golden Festival is a massive Balkan and East European music and dance bacchanal. On January 14th, WFMU's Transpacific Sound Paradise presented its fourth live broadcast from the event's main stage in Brooklyn's kitschy and fabulous Grand Prospect Hall. The Grand Ballroom was one of four stages, and the two-night event featured over sixty groups. This year, the Free Music Archive will host archives from all four stages.

We're starting the Golden Festival 2012 Collection with the Atrium Room.

Black Sea Hotel (pictured) is the Brooklyn-based vocal quartet of Corinna, Joy, Sarah and Willa. Their set included traditional songs learned under a plum tree in Bulgaria, but with their own distinct twists and arrangements, since many of the songs were originally sung by larger choirs.

Brazda (pictured) is a New York-based Balkan band that plays fresh arrangements of traditional repertoire from Bulgaria, Macedonia, Greece, and beyond. Like many of the groups, they have provided information about each song in their set including translations. I was surprised to learn that "Yiati Foumaro Kokaini" has lyrics that translate to "That crazy rascal, cocaine smoker For my troubles, now I smoke cocaine."

Brian Chippendale's BLACK PUS live on WFMU

2012-02-05T05:50:59-05:00

Black Pus is the many-armed beast of a solo project from Brian Chippendale, one of the most distinct musicians and visual artists of our time. If you're not already familiar with the sounds of Black Pus, you may recognize Chippendale's many-armed drumming style and masked mic-in-mouth vox from his duos Mindflayer and Lightning Bolt. A co-founder of the storied Fort Thunder artist collective, Chippendale still lives in the Olneyville neighborhood of Providence, in a former mill building where lately he seems to be writing a new Black Pus song almost every night. So while we're wrapping our heads around 2011's Primordial Pus (Load Records) -- not to mention the limited edition CD-R series of Black Pus 1, 2, 3, 4 and 0 -- there's already a seventh Black Pus album ready to pop.

The live set on Marty McSorely's WFMU program is a special treat because, though he is a prolific musician, Black Pus doesn't tour nearly enough to quench our thirst for Pus. The set was expertly engineered by Ernie Indradat, and the interview covers recent collaborations with Björk and the Flaming Lips. Chippendale also talks about how he assembled such a unique setup, including an oscillator pedal that was originally a gift from Shinji Masuko of DMBQ. When Marty McSorely asks "What is Brian Chippendale's Black Pus?" Chippendale responds that it's reggaeton. He goes on to elaborate on a range of influences from the free jazz assault of Peter Brötzmann's Machine Gun to the unpredictable rhythms of Sightings and Black Dice (who started out as a hardcore band in Providence around the same time as Lightning Bolt).

In some circles, Brian Chippendale is known as much for his fine art, comics and graphic novels as for his music. His visual style can be experienced as part of every Black Pus and Lightning Bolt release. And, as those of you who are on the WFMU swag mailing list may have heard, Brian Chippendale designed an awesome biker t-shirt for WFMU's marathon which begins later this month!

Previously on the FMA: doncbruital (Angels in America) on Anarchic Self Reliance: Black Pus

For more, check out the Black Pus blog, which just debuted this trippy surrealist video for "I'll Come When I Can," off Primordial Pus.

Tracks to Sync: Twelve for 2012

2012-01-31T10:40:42-05:00

Tracks to Sync is series of mixes curated with the online video producer in mind. Along with a few new faces, this playlist features updates from artists who'll already be familar to FMA regulars. License and artist info below, and if you're new to the Creative Commons licenses that facilitate online sharing, we've gathered links to great resources in our Music for Video portal.

You might recognize that Windom Earle track if you're one of the 5 million people who watched Fight for the Future's "PIPA/SOPA Break the Internet" video. [Creative Commons BY-NC-SA]

We discovered Immortal Beats on the Frostwire Creative Commons mixtape. [Creative Commons BY-SA]

Grass Hop is the latest release by Broke For Free aka Tom Cascino from Santa Cruz CA. His "Something Elated," as featured in Sept's Tracks to Sync, went on to top the charts at FMA and has been featured in countless videos throughout the web including this really cool timelapse of a 134 hour journey through Norway's "Hurtigruten". [Creative Commons BY-NC]

Bethlehem PA's Jared C. Balogh is a Classwar Karaoke participant who joined forces with Lee Rosevere's Happy Puppy Records for the new album Rhythms of Life. [Creative Commons BY-NC-SA]

Lloyd Rodgers is a contemporary experimental composer who makes his works dating back to the 1970s available through his website with "No Copyright / No Rights Reserved." This recording of his Cartesian Reunion Memorial Orchestra was originally composed to accompany a ballet.

The Freak Fandango Orchestra is a multi-ethnic band from Barcelona who recently performed at Barbés Brooklyn and release music under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Oddio Overplay first introduced the FMA to Lee Rosevere, a Canadian composer who approaches music informed by his professional broadcast experience. His latest album was imagined as a soundtrack to Isaac Asimov's science fiction stories (link). [CC BY-NC-SA]

Ending Satellites from Bayonne France mix music with photography in a journey between pictures and melodies. Be sure to get the free deluxe version of their new album for its accompanying artworks! [Creative Commons BY-NC-SA]

The OO-Ray took part in disquiet's Instagr/am/bient: 25 Sonic Postcards in which artists composed music to accompany each other's insagram photos, using sonic and visual filters to explore the intersection of technology, aesthetics, and artistic process. [Creative Commons BY-NC-SA]

junior85 aka Tony Higgins has struck up a very cool collaboration with filmmaker Danny Cooke, which began here at the FMA and we wrote about last year. Danny commissioned a new soundtrack for his latest film about letterpress and movable type. Junior85's soundtrack to Upside Down, Left To Right - A Letterpress Film is now available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license to inspire new works.

Blear Moon also inspired a Danny Cooke film, as featured in April's Tracks to Sync. Now based in Prague, the Russia-born artist returns with another fantastic ambient release, Town of Two Houses. [Creative Commons BY-NC-SA]

Chris Zabriskie recently removed the NonCommercial clause from his work in favor of Attribution-only, and wrote an article, "Why I Went CC-BY," explaining his reasoning. His latest release, Undercover Vampire Policeman, is beautifully minimal and darkly cinematic, with excellent song titles to boot. [CC-BY]

Most of these artists provide contact info if you'd like to reach out for more permissions than the CC license grants -- they'll be happy to hear from you, and it can lead to cool collaborations like this one between Tony Higgins and Danny Cooke:

Music inspired by the writings of Asimov

2012-01-30T09:06:42-05:00

In possibly his most nerdy move yet, Lee Rosevere's latest project is music inspired by the writing of Isaac Asimov, known for his many science-fiction stories.

This project kinda makes sense, given that Lee's previous works (like the three installments of the Light Years albums I, II and III) have been likened to unofficial scores for non-existent sci-fi movies. It isn't essential to be familiar with the Asimov stories the songs are named after, but it does enhance the listening experience.

The album is available now on FMA (also available in lossless FLAC with extra goodies), and here is the first 'single' "The Machine That Won The War", sync'd to an edited version of the film "Le Voyage Dans La Lune" by George Melies (1902, public domain via archive.org).

The Roots of American Standup: Nat M. Wills

2012-01-28T12:18:36-05:00

Nat M. Wills can be said to be one of America’s first modern comedians. A popular vaudeville entertainer and recording artist from the early 20th century. He is best known for his "happy tramp" persona, performing satirical numbers, and parodies of popular songs of the day.

Modern American stand up draws it roots from this art form among various other traditions that were popular in the late 19th century. The material itself often used stereo typical portrayals of ethnic groups through crude impersonations (most commonly African-Americans). Unfortunately the racial tones in American vaudeville performances were very common during its time, and is evident on Wills' "No News" among several other of his recordings.

Wills was born in Fredericksburg, VA in 1873. His birth name is said to be Louis McGrath Wills, but very little is know about his early life. After his family moved to Washington D.C. he began his career on the stage at a young age, and performed in various shows throughout the United States.

Wills died at the age of 44 in 1917. He was an auto enthusiast who was said to be working on a car in his garage with the doors closed, and succumbed to Carbon monoxide poisoning. Automobiles were relatively new at the time, and it is possible that he was unaware of the poisonous fumes that were emitted from a running engine, some also speculate that he may have committed suicide.

His recordings maintain a lightheartedness, but my favorite track "Saving Up Coupons for Mother" is pretty dark as he sings about puffing away on cigarettes for coupons to ironically purchase a tombstone for his “Pa”.

For further reading about Wills, and the Vaudeville genre check out No Applause--Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous by Trav S.D. And to hear more Nat Wills’ there is a collection of his works available at

Demo to London: The Handgrenades / Sponsors Story

2012-01-27T09:25:20-05:00

In '79, the Handgrenades issued what would become the best UK DIY punk single not actually from the UK: their "Demo to London" b/w "Coma Dos" 45, self-released in an undetermined quantity on the band's unnamed imprint.

The single is a killer. It was also once a source of profound mystery -- to collectors and wayward punk geeks, at least. Omitted on the sleeve are the band's roster, their location and where they recorded their material, and the only nuggets of information profferred are a production credit attributed to Bob Levitan and the word "phonographix." Given this anonymity, and in light of the title and subject of "Demo to London" -- not to mention the otherworldly cut-up cover art, production, vocals, and musicianship (or lack thereof) -- many took the band's provenance to be London, or perhaps the outskirts of Manchester. The flip's manic "Coma Dos" sheds even less light on the single's origin, and the listener's left with a clang-punk artifact of the highest random order, reminiscent of contemporaries like Swell Maps, the Petticoats, Desperate Bicycles, so on, so forth.

Music Blogs React to Megaupload Cyberlocker Shutdowns

2012-01-26T09:56:12-05:00

The day after last week's inspiring protest against overreaching anti-piracy laws, the US Department of Justice demonstrated that they don't need those laws, anyway. They just went ahead and unilaterally shut down Megaupload, the world's most popular cyberlocker. Rumor has it that similar sites like MediaFire and 4shared are under investigation and have been deleting files, while FileSonic preemptively disabled all sharing features.

As a result, much of the history of recorded sound has been made inaccessible to the public. I'm talking, of course, about the music blogosphere. The best music blogs aren't pirates. They are libraries, sound archivists and music preservationists sharing recordings that would not otherwise be available. And now sites like Global Groove, Mutant Sounds, and Holy Warbles have lost large swaths of the material they'd salvaged from obscurity.

Fortunately not all of the music on Mutant Sounds has been lost. They didn't use Megaupload exclusively. This Karen Cooper Complex album comes out of the vibrant Richmond VA experimental scene from the late 70s/early 80s, and it was never even released until it appeared on the Free Music Archive (previously featured here, and on Mutant Sounds here). These are the types of genuine "Artyfacts" I would love to host more of, but since we do things by the book here at the FMA, it's often difficult to track down rightsholders to get official permission.

It always bothered me to discover artists sharing their own original work via an untrustworthy website like Megaupload. I never liked their approach of charging for quicker access to files, and their advertisements (including the Mega Song) always felt kinda icky. The Mega Conspiracy alleges that Megaupload was actually designed to profit from media piracy through tactics like a reward for users who pirated films before their release date. Paramount Pictures claimed that Mega sites made as much as $300 million a year in large part by selling ads and charging for access to copyrighted work. That figure is from a great SSRC article titled "Meganomics." Author Joe Karaganis describes how most cyberlockers and torrent sites don't profit nearly that much if at all, and he proposes that we factor this in to a clearer definition of what it means to infringe on a "commercial scale."

Back to the site that tipped that scale: even if they were just the new sleazy middleman in the distribution chain, millions of users had come to rely on Megaupload for very legitimate uses. Now their files are gone. But they are not lost, thanks to the nature of online sharing which necessitates the creation of new copies. It is inspiring to see the Mutant Sounds community come together along these lines, re-upping files from their personal collections to restore the communal archive (link).

Long live the blogosphere!

Wintry Mix

2012-01-25T12:43:29-05:00

All these tracks have a tenuous connection to France, whether they were published by a French netlabel or composed by a pianist living there. They are also dark, mysterious, and weird. Perfect for intensifying the feelings associated with the weather phenomenon "wintry mix!"

Fine Steps rise from CA's Mayyors, Ganglians, Moncrief

2012-01-24T13:11:21-05:00

Fine Steps started out as a solo recording project from Julian Elorduy, drummer of the Mayyors and leader of the Standard Tribesmen. We had the chance to witness Mayyors tear the roof off WFMU's SXSW showcase a couple years back (listen here). Standard Tribesmen took a slightly more traditional approach to their blown-out garage-punk judging by the lone 7" on Mt St Mtn released before the group splintered.

The early Fine Steps home recordings sound a bit like John Dwyer's pre Oh Sees experiments, some sort of west coat OCS transitional moment on the porch. I picked out a couple tracks below. "Our Love is Strange" comes from Muff On Both Sides. If it was in fact run through two Big Muff distortion pedals, those pedals must have had the gain knob turned down low. "I Know This is Crazy" off Crutches echoes the Pacific Northwest sounds of Karl Blau.

Hopefully all of these sketches will get fleshed out more in future times. For now, "Tomorrow for All of Today" hits that spot. It's off a forthcoming LP (label TBA) recorded with a 5-piece Fine Steps band featuring two members of harmonizing phased-out garage melters Ganglians. I haven't heard the rest of the album, but I have heard that it was mixed by Robbie Moncrieff, which bodes well; he's also collaborated with the likes of Marnie Stern, and his production for Dirty Projectors's Bitte Orca fueled some of his own fantastic releases as Raleigh Moncrief.

Listening to The Insider while spending days indoors.

2012-01-23T09:18:55-05:00

Hello, so I have not written in here in ages although I've been listening to tracks in the down-tempo, glitch, electronic, avant garde styles for the winter. Today I need to bake bread and was scanning through ITunes through the hip hop genre. I saw some playlist I downloaded awhile ago from here with a track by The Insider.

Click for a listen. This. This is what I want to listen to. It's a bit glitchy, dancey, rhythmic. Some songs feel like you're on a beach at sunset and it's still 28 degrees outside, perfect. Other songs remind me of dancing on drugs in a dark cave surrounded by sweaty bodies writihing on a dance floor sparkled with neon lights across what seems like void space.

Instead of dancing, writhing, and feeling like it's July I'm going to spend some quality time in my kitchen baking bread while this Pacific Northwest storm passes over the city. Cold, dreary days, time to heat up with these tracks.

Ted Hearne's Gaudeamus-Award-winning "Katrina Ballads" and R WE WHO R WE

2012-01-20T10:20:07-05:00

On January 25, ISSUE Project Room will inaugurate its new space at 110 Livingston with Gaudeamus Muziekweek, a four-day festival celebrating groundbreaking and challenging new music by emerging composers from around the world. Working in partnership with Gaudeamus, ISSUE Project Room will present, for the first time in the United States, a series of performances highlighting some of the extraordinary talent that has emerged from the festival.

January 26 is dedicated to electronic music, featuring Dutch musician Wouter Snoei, an authority on 192-channel "wave-field" synthesis techniques. New York-based electronic artist Matthew Ostrowski will also perform, as well as the duo R WE WHO R WE, a collaboration between New York composer-performers Philip White & Ted Hearne.

Ted Hearne was awarded the Gaudeamus International Composers Award in 2009 for his Katrina Ballads, a 65-minute dramatic song cycle adapted entirely from primary-source sound bites from the newsweek following Hurricane Katrina. Hearne chops and manipulates the utterances of politicians, celebrities, survivors and relief workers as broadcast by 24-hour disaster coverage and reworks them into an oratorio for 11 instrumentalists and 5 singers. Take a listen to the multistylistic "Brownie, You're Doing a Heck of a Job" (culled, obviously, from Bush's famous declaration to former FEMA director Michael Brown five days after the hurricane ripped through New Orleans).

R WHO WE R WE takes a similar course of lyrical and sonic reformulation of popular media sources but reapplies the critique to pop music. Hearne and collaborator Philip White deconstruct songs by Michael Jackson, Ke$ha, Eminem and others and reorder them into schizophrenic lyrical poems. Come see for yourself (and check out our brand-new space!) on 1/26! You can get tickets here.

Demetra Penner "I Am Written"

2012-01-19T12:35:04-05:00

Hailing from the geographical centre of the nation comes Winnipeg's Demetra Penner with I Am Written off of Lone Migration.

With the help of Andrew Braun from Rococode, Matt Peters of Royal Canoe and Paul Bergman, Demetra takes her experiences as a globe wandering troubadour and distills them with inspiration from her native Manitoba.

I am Written is a haunting and weighty track that somehow manages to encompass a vastness of emotion beyond her sweet and delicate voice.

Free Music Archive Is Still Online. Let's Keep It That Way.

2012-01-18T20:48:37-05:00

You may have noticed that freemusicarchive.org, is still accessible. We'd prefer to stay online even as we stand with the 7000+ sites who are voluntarily blacked out to send a message to the U.S. Congress. It's unclear whether the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) could actually stop online piracy, but it's clear that these proposed laws would threaten a lot of healthy online activity -- including those that support independent artists.

SOPA and PIPA would give the mainstream entertainment industry new powers to shut down websites that threaten their established way of doing business. No due process necessary; just add a site to their blacklist, and service providers' arms would be twisted into actively monitoring and censoring independent voices.

The web provides access to media that was once shut out by narrow industry bottlenecks. Here at the FMA, we're proud to see so many artists, curators, and producers working together to reach new audiences through open sharing. It may seem that the web was designed to allow for these types of exchanges, but as with every new mode of communication from the telephone to radio to cable television, eventually The Man steps in to seize control. Is the internet any different? That's what's up in the air right now.

US people: click here to let your reps know how you feel about internet censorship.

Read up at EFF + Public Knowledge + Wikipedia + Future of Music Coalition + Creative Commons + Center for Democracy & Technology + Google + thousands of other websites + what a fun day to be alive and online + read SOPA and PIPA

PS If you're not one of the two million people to have already watched it, check out this Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike video by Kirby Ferguson (Everything is a Remix) / Fight for the Future featuring CC music shared alike by YACHT, Broke For Free and Windom Earle.

Raw Music International's Kenyan Underground Compilation

2012-02-01T05:56:06-05:00

Raw Music International is a new TV series documenting underground music scenes from overlooked parts of the world. The pilot episode features contemporary sounds of Kisumu, a city in western Kenya. Clips have begun to circulate through YouTube, and to help spread the word Raw Music International shares this fantastic Kisumu Mixtape.

The mixtape is raw and eclectic, with traditional folk as well as fresh takes on reggae and a heavy dose of hip-hop. Pictured on the cover is Olima Anditi, a legendary performer now living in the Manyatta slum. His finger-style guitar playing is like an acoustic solo blues take on Benga, the sound that came to define Kenyan popular music in the 1960's. RMI producer Cyrus Moussavi tells us that Benga originated in the Kisumu area just as Olima was learning to play, and the 83-year old blind guitarist was a member of several early Benga groups. Often credited under his Christian name Dickson Olima, he recorded for the likes of Polygram and Kericho's famous Chandarana records. (If anyone can help us track down these recordings please let us know!)

The Kenyan approach to guitar playing mimics traditional stringed instruments that are native to the region. Take a listen to the adungu, a 9-string lyre, performed by Peter Logono. The young musician from the the northwest area of Turkana is a pretty incredible one-man-band; he accompanies himself on a homemade kick drum made of a painted metal wash basin:

Guitar may be the dominant instrument in Kenyan popular music, but Raw Music International reports that Fruity Loops is on the rise. The PC production suite figures into many of the hip-hop beats on the Kisumu Mixtape, as well as this RMI segment on Urban Music Studios:

Check out the full mixtape here on the FMA, where you can also donate to support the musicians directly; the $100 delivered to Olima Anditi so far is a pretty sizable compared to the $2/day he makes in tips at the local homebrew pub. RMI reports that more releases are on the way from this pilot episode, perhaps even some vinyl, not to mention future episodes. Stay tuned at rawmusicinternational.com

God Damn, I Hate The Blues

2012-01-16T12:41:20-05:00

Fourth installment in our split 7” series, God Damn I Hate the Blues , presents splendid new work from Amen Dunes, Marisa Anderson, Ignatz, Nathan Bowles, Warm Climate and Bridget Hayden.

Bach's Complete Organ Works

2012-01-16T12:48:32-05:00

The FMA is proud to present Dr. James Kibbie’s ambitious project, the performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s complete works for organ.

Since Bach needs no introduction, I’ll focus on what else makes this a special treat for the FMA. For one, Dr. Kibbie recorded in Germany on the region’s finest original baroque organs. These instruments, each occupying multiple stories in a church, are to an electric organ as this gong is to a Zildjian cymbal. Dr. Kibbie selected them to meet the stylistic requirements of Bach’s opus, and you can learn more about each organ at the Block M Records website.

The scope of this project is huge. There are 270 separate compositions, some in multiple movements. This amounts to over 16 hours of music. The recordings are organized by style of composition or groups that Bach put them in.

The piece I have attached is the Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, one of Bach’s most famous works. It opens with an ominous bass line, the final note of which comes out as a kind of primordial roar on the 1724-30 Trost organ in Waltershausen, Germany. This line gets repeated throughout the first part of the piece, the Passacaglia, while above it, Dr. Kibbie goes to work on Bach’s variations. The second part, a fugue, is equally impressive. You might recognize this composition from a number of places, including the Godfather baptism sequence (it starts around 1:35). These extraordinary 13 minutes are a great introduction to the rest of this project.

>> James Kibbie - Bach Organ Works on the FMA

>> The project on Block M (University of Michigan's record label)

Ben Wilkins "Through to You"

2012-01-20T17:59:22-05:00

Like many talented Canadian musicians, Ben Wilkins made the trek from his home and native land, in this case Ontario, to find inspiration in Montreal. Now the piano pop crooner plinks his way onto Radio 3 with Through to You.

Formally trained in music at McGill and with a sound that could probably be folded in with a certain keyboard-playing Ben from south of the 49th parallel, Ben Wilkins dons the role of piano man with ease.

Filled with tales of travel, trumpets and swelling strings, Through to You shows how Ben Wilkins finds 88 ways get through to listeners.