“Holiday Music” (Used 35 times)

Pictured above is the holiday music bin that WFMU-FM music director Brian Turner puts together this time of year for the radio station's DJs to peruse.

The FMA has a virtual holiday bin as well, pointing to mixes from years past along with albums like The 8bits of Christmas, People Like Us at Christian Marclay's Sounds of Christmas, a psychedelic cassingle from Wooden Shjips, recordings from the U.S. Marine Band, Voices of Christmas Past, and many more holiday gems.  Browse by album at the Holiday Music Tag page, or browse by track at the Holiday Genre.

We are always on the lookout for quality recordings of free & legal holiday sounds, both traditional and unconventional.  Since so many popular holiday songs that are believed to be in the public domain are actually under copyright, it is important to provide these types of resources for Creative Commons and Public Domain holiday music.  DIY Musician compiled a helpful list of songs that are public domain, as well as songs that are still under copyright.

Below are a few holiday Creative Commons BY-NC-SA recordings from over a century ago, including popular Christmas carols from Germany at the turn of the century and a great Albert Whelan story from the UK, and BIlly Murray, courtesy of the Cylinder Archive.

I hope your holidaze are filled with good cheer, and good music! Feel free to share your holiday music recommendations by leaving a comment.

Twelve years ago, the vintage recordings website Dawn of Sound released a compact disc collection of public domain early recording artifacts called Voices of Christmas Past. The recordings were cylinders and acetates from 1898 to 1922. Every year after the release, the website was inundated with requests for the CD. Once it was out of print, Dawn of Sound released it online for free.

Apart from the religious material, there are some fun winter-themed treats, two pieces from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, and some spoken old time radio theatre selections.

Dawn of Sound writes:

The artists featured here were pioneer recordings artists whose names were well known in the era they lived. They helped start what is now known today as the record industry. They were popular artist in their time, and their records sold well in an era when movies were silent and radio and television did not yet exist.

Of all things Christmas nothing is more traditional than the singing of carols and songs....

There's a ton of free holiday music out there on the Internet. But a lot of it is low-quality, made using cheap MIDI sounds, or ripped from a CD illegally without the artists' permission (not in-line with the Holiday spirit). If you spend some time digging around aimlessly you might start to wonder...maybe it's not all worth digging through, especially in this time of year that we'd, at least in theory, rather spend with family than in cyberspace.

More free (as in beer) holiday music resources after the jump, and please share your favorites by leaving a comment!

This time last year, San Francisco's Wooden Shjips released a Holiday Cassingle featuring psychedelic covers of "Auld Lang Syne" and "O Tannenbaum". The 4-piece -- who famously gave away all 300 copies of their debut 10'' -- offered free mp3 version of the cassingle to the WFMU blog. Meanwhile, the cassette itself, limited to 100 copies, sold out in no time, and -- in the spirit of The Holidaze -- all proceeds went to the San Francisco Food Bank.

This holiday season, Wooden Shjips' guitarist and vocalist Erik "Ripley" Johnson is continuing this tradition. He sent over an mp3 from his new project Moon Duo, a brilliant melding of "Silver Bells" with a bit of Hawkwind's "Silver Machine" thrown in the mix. [*Because of these references, we can't certify it as "FMA-safe", so you can grab it from this off-site locale: Moon Duo - Silver Bells (mp3)]

Moon Duo have also put together a new benefit for the SF Food Bank, in collaboration with Zola Jesus, Gary War, and Sacred Bones Records. From the Moon Duo blog (after the jump):

The world is awash in Christmas music this week, and I'm not planning to buck the tide. As far as I'm concerned, it's just a matter of picking which Christmas music you care to be drowned by. What's your poison? Will it be Bing? Frank? The Waitresses? Dogs? Power tools?

My Christmas poison will be none of these. I actually like Christmas music, amazingly enough, and every year I do my best to find a few songs that I haven't heard before. What fascinates me about Christmas music is that once you get past the usual suspects, your Bruces and Bobbys and Bings, you find that there are tons of forgotten Christmas songs just waiting to be discovered.

In fact, I just discovered one on the FMA.