soledad penadés

repeat 4[fd 100 rt 90]

Some weeks ago, I dared myself to listen to as much non-commercial music as I could. What I did was as simple as going to scene.org archive and started downloading files from the ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/music/groups directory. Of course, there's a lot of stuff there, but I'll point some interesting things I found.

First I tried with 2063music, but they didn't manage to have any song that catched my attention. Too much ambient for my taste, songs seemed a bit too pale. Sorry mates…!

Then I downloaded the contents of 8bitpeoples. This one had great stuff in it! My favourite artists from 8bpp were definitely yuppster and trash80. Yuppster does some very original music, ranging from melodic ambient soundscapes made with buzz to super noise-destructed songs made with gameboy (how was the name of that tracker software for gameboy? i never remember its name). Trash80 is in a different wavelength, making more electro music. I really loved the vocals in his songs.

After that I jumped to jean9's music. I already had listened things from jean9 of course. Not only in matt current's demos, but also had listened to jean9's tracked music before. He manages to make music in a lot of quite different styles quite decently, but what I like most are the more powerful songs - i.e. that kind of songs they use in matt current's supermegasyncronized demos.

And one thing comes after the other. After listening to rhythmic noise one just can go for non-rhythmic noise. I was feeling really curious about noise music, specially after the noise demos ecclosion which had happened relatively recently. And also after having listened some interesting explanations from ps about noise music, its why's and how's, I decided to go for the noise  music dose! So I just went and downloaded all ps's music in his netlabel, enoughrecords (they are also in the ftp archive, in the enough_records folder).

I must recognize I was deeply impressed by these songs. I listened to them without any prejudice, just letting them flow and hearing how they sounded like. As I have told today to ps, somehow the songs reminded me to situations like browsing through the shortwave radio frequencies, and hearing weird voices and unexpected sounds, which you can't really locate where they come from, or what are they telling. There were very interesting textures on them. (Of course, if you are a dumb listener you aren't going to appreciate this at all). Lots of sounds that I thought: how did he manage to do them? I know he uses buzz but I never managed to get that kind of output from it, yay!

There's another thing with noise music which is really curious. It somehows triggers something in my head, and I remember things that I hadn't remembered for years. Like situations, people, things, conversations. How does it manage to do it, I don't have a clue. But it's absolutely amazing, it might be like a kind of auditive hypnose - by isolating your ears from known and recognizable sounds your mind is free to think and remember. A very weird sensation, indeed.

After listening to all ps's records, I decided it was time for some kosmoplovci music. Trace had already recommended me kosmoplovci's transmisije before, but unfortunately I hadn't paid enough attention (shame on me!!). Transmisije are some radio sets they prepare, where they mix very interesting electronic, experimental and techno music. Styles are very varied, as you can imagine, and they are not as noisy as ps's music, instead they are more coarse, defined, maybe even stunning. I hadn't finished yet listening to those transmissions - there are a lot and they all are more than one hour each. But they are also highly recommended if you want to listen to different music and sounds (and you should do it).

When I finish with the transmisije I'll probably go for domin8tor/kosmoplovci music, as it looks as if he does very good music too, from the few songs I've listened until date. But I'll tell you in future posts!

And well, you can put all of these songs on your ipod (or favourite portable music player), excepting the transmisije, which are encoded in ogg vorbis format. While apple decides to do a firmware update and allow ipod's to play ogg's, you can try and convert them to mp3 with any of the good utilities which are everywhere on internet.