jason (FMA Admin)

It was around this time last year that suRRism-Phonoethics introduced us to Detatching Realities Vol. 1 by Jared C. Balogh. The multimedia artist from Bethlehem Pennsylvania has since unleashed an outpouring of new music. His hyperactive-yet-focused release schedule mirrors the frenetic energy of his music; there is a lot happening in any given Balogh composition, but also a fantastic sense of minimalism. Balogh has worked with some of the world's finest netlabels, including Portugal's long-running Enough Records and Moscow's 45 RPM Records. Already this year, Lee Rosevere's Happy Puppy released the wonderfully organic-yet-synthetic Rhythms Of Life, and Headphonica introduced us to Detatching Realities Vol. 2.

Balogh only began releasing music under his own name in spring 2010. But Trans Atlantic Rage, a "extreme audio surrealism" project that finds Balogh performing under the name Shadow Entity Wizard alongside his wife Echo Tranquility, dates back to 1997. All told, Jared Christopher Balogh's creative force is behind an estimated 175 releases. In addition, Balogh operates Altered State Reflections, a recording studio which begat a CD-R label, and soon also took the form of a netlabel to showcase music, videos and artwork.

I interviewed Jared C. Balogh via email to learn more about his sonic evolution, his approach to distribution, and his range of influences; they include everything from Hall and Oats to Hatebreed (which I never would've guessed!) alongside Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa (which I might have guessed), and labels like Cuneiform, Ipecac and Tzadik.

Newtown Radio joins the FMA with a mix of original session tracks by The Beets, My Teenage Stride, La Big Vic, The Immaculates, Punks on Mars, Light Asylum, Boy Friend, Chelsea Wolfe, Dead Gaze, Dive, Night Manager, So So Glos, Expensive Looks, Minks and Phonetag. 

"Newtown Radio is located at the Danbro Studios in Bushwick, NYC. We're here to bring you hot new bands from around the world, undiscovered local talent and hidden gems from the past"

Newtown Sessions are curated by founder/producer Colin Ilgen, and engineered by Matt Stein at his Swan7 recording studio. The sessions air Sunday nights at 9pm ET, and are also archived in video format here -- check out clips from FMA favorites Computer Magic and Dustin Wong after the jump.

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:

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."

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 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.

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]

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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:

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!

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.

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 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