Brian Eno, David Byrne, Free MP3s, WOOT!

Here's the link to sign up for the free songs.

Teach as if Armageddon Has Arrived

There's a wonderful article - Steam Dream by Sharon Steel on the Steampunk movement in this week's Boston Phoenix. Steampunk is “like punk, but with better manners.” An art movement and a lifestyle that just might save the world as you know it.

Of particular interest to school reformers is an idea that could be adapted to create a nomadic school:

Whereas Cyberpunk posits a dark future, Friedrich says that Steampunk has “a hopeful heart . . . where a balance can be struck between progress and tradition.” Friedrich incorporates Steampunk as a strategy of quality consumption and slower living, with a distinct focus on the handmade. “If the idea of always having more is proving to be flawed,” she says, “then why not focus on having better of what we do have?”

Friedrich also dresses the part, and she doesn’t begrudge people who pick up Steampunk purely for its cos-play affectations — there’s an entire LiveJournal community, Steamfashion, devoted to Steampunk-styled photo shoots and garment showcases. The Steampunk “look” varies as much as the personalities of its wearer, although Friedrich herself says she enjoys transforming from “a turn-of-the-century jungle explorer” into “a post-apocalyptic warrior in shredded petticoats and bustled skirts.” She sells her creations, including her Chrono Corps Emblem ring and an “Ambience Enhancer” — a Steampunked device for holding a modern mp3 player on one’s wrist — on etsy.com, the eBay of craft sites.

Another of von Slatt’s colleagues in the Contraptor’s Lounge, David Dowling, is a Jamaica Plain resident, sculptor, and master’s candidate at the Boston Architectural College. Dowling, who has a background in blacksmithing, scenic design, engineering, welding, and machine modification, shares Friedrich’s Steampunk aesthetic, which sees the movement as one that can galvanize proponents.

To that end, he is working on the building plans for a large-scale Steampunk undertaking he’s calling the Meandering Manor — a mobile platform for art exhibitions, maker workshops, performances, and other creative purposes. The Manor, now in the design-and-planning phase, will be erected out of a series of junkyard Steampunked diesel vehicles. They’ll fit together like a puzzle, allowing the vehicles to travel independently or in a caravan and be locked together on site. Dowling hopes to start construction this summer.

“The Meandering Manor is about using spectacle as a tool to get people to engage with radical politics,” says Dowling of its anti-globalization aims. “This project is intended to activate people’s interest in creative reuse, sustainability, and alternative-living methods by showing them how cool and accessible it is without preaching about it. It’s to build an environment that was made by normal people, with normal means, in a sustainable, socially productive fashion.”

Dowling says that Steampunk, until recently, had little to do with “contrapting” and creative re-use. Now, however, these elements are a well-oiled cog in Steampunk’s main engine. Steampunk opens the door to a fantasy-future that can actually — if one wishes and works hard enough — co-exist with the present.

“As we desperately fumble for a way to throw this machine into reverse,” says Dowling, “not just in the Steampunk scene but pan-culturally, I think it’s only natural that some people should manifest that desire by going back to the beginning — the Industrial Revolution and the Victorians. That’s where all this speculative fiction intersects with politics and the DIY movement — a desire to stand on the cusp of the industrialized, mass-marketed, engineered, branded iSpend future and the labor-intensive, technologically impoverished, hand-crafted past and ask: where did we go wrong? What could we have done differently? How can we re-imagine the fiction we will become in the future?”

Oh, and there's some very nice free Steampunk (post-punk)MP3's to be downloaded here.

"Steampunk is the creative mind’s answer to a world that has flat-lined." - Captain Robert Brown, Abney Park

Teach the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame a Lesson

Isn't it about time that The Monkees get inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?

A lot of fans think so. If you want to sign a petition to teach the Hall a lesson then by all means sign here.

And because Peter is playing the area soon, check out his website - fascinating stuff.

In fact he offers a few free MP3s here.

But let me up the ante a bit. Not only should the Monkees be inducted to the Hall of Fame but they should drive there in the Monkee-mobile! Oh, yeah. Change the oil and let's take that baby for a spin!

Unknown Artist: Last Leg (Jeff Iwanski of Honey Stump)

I've recently been getting some correspondence from friends in Nebraska about some of the bands who play the area. I went to Doane College in the early seventies and as a freshman taking an education course was promptly put into the Crete Public Schools as a teacher's aide. The practice was to immerse education students in public schools early to see if the freshman student was in fact had any real interest in pursuing a career in education.

So I was placed in a high school art class with Larry Boehmer the art teacher at the time. Larry was a University of Nebraska fine arts painter who had one of his pieces set up in the classroom. It was a painting of a woman farming and in the semester I was an aide it never received another stroke of refinement. Larry played the Layla album every day, every class period for the semester - he was hooked on blues.

Larry quit teaching that year and bought The Zoo, a bar in Lincoln where he invited Chicago Blues musicians to entertain the largely University f Nebraska art crowd. Later, when I took advanced art courses at the University I would make an occasional beer run.

All of which gave me a great perspective on the music that rocks the Midwest.

All of which is prelude to a freely downloadable masterwork by Jeff Iwanski recording as Last Leg. The last time I heard music this honest and whole is when Michelle Shocked released the Texas Campfire Tapes.

The Last Leg EP songs are gray, post-modern country-narratives. And as such they are stark, refreshing reminders that loneliness is busy with impersonal socializing. These songs are not a vampiric restyling of Woody Guthrie, Dylan, or Buffalo Springsteen. Here you will listen to the dark wonder of nothingness that Cormic McCarthy writes about in The Pretty Horses Trilogy. In the digital age, emptiness may feel warm as well as cold, pointless but exhausting for the blurring motion.

Today's prairie traveler has no horse but very well may have some fries to sing about. And breakfast may not be the same without your latest flame. These songs will remind you of Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, and Johnny Cash even though they'll offer completely different takes on similar subject matter.

There are sonic echoes of Eno's ambient sound experiments at play here as well. The spare instrumentation creates the mythic darkness at the edge of town that no longer exists in the megalopolises of American experience.

This is singles bar music like the one David Byrne described so many years ago, "Heaven - heaven is a bar - where nothing, nothing ever happens."

Unknown Artist: coveandberam

For a number of weeks I've wanted to get around to starting a series of posts that allow me to recommend some of the world's great new artists that no one seems to have ever heard of. I'll start with someone who I listen to and have become a great fan of.

Coveandberam is Jennifer Warren's recording persona. On soundclick.com, she offers over 50 free MP3 songs for our listening.

I was rummaging around in [legally] free MP3 sites a few years ago and her work just knocked me out. She's a violinist whose complex lyrics and layered recordings are a fascinating blend of the raw emotional release of punk lyrical sensibilities fused to a classically trained instrumental pastische of guitars, violin, and assorted percussion instruments.

These most recent recordings offer a glimpse of a young artist who has worked for years in relative anonymity and who doubts her own talent if we take the lyrics autobiographically. Nonetheless there's a real power in both Open Arms and To the Wolves that deserve your attention.

The catalog of songs is a mixed bag filled with lots of small gems worth adding to your MP3 collection.

In any case, when you hear someone putting down today's young musicians, coveandberam will give you plenty of reason to rethink those accusations.

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Free MP3s; Too tired for anything else today

I spent too much time working on sculptures today. So I'm sore and ornery.

But earlier in the day I discovered a Salon MP3 site that has a lot of wonderful free MP3s. What better thing to do on April 1?

May I recommenfd Billy Bragg's "The Lonesome Death of Rachel Corrie" and Bush War Blues".

More free MP3s

I updated my free MP3 links post adding Soundclick.com

Free MP3/Podcast sites

This list will be updated from time to time. Use the leftmost permanent menu link to check it.

Here's my masterlist of legally free music sites. The caveat here is that these are largely new bands, songwriters, and who-not who may not necessarily be tasteful or sensitive to your cultural hot buttons. On the other hand, many songs found on these sites are topical, excellent, and very worthwhile. The blurbs explain the genres. Sample at your own risk but to the degree that these sites can guarantee; everything available is legal.

Soundclick Artists offering wonderful free music

Pitchfork Media from Northampton, MA

InSound from New York City

Rhino Podcasts - Rhino music samplers

Free MP3 site

One of my favorite sites for finding contemporary music of all kinds (and plenty of international bands) is Pitchfork Media. They offer bands an opprtunity to get exposed in one of the nation's best music news web sites.

Now, I have to warn everyone - your mileage will vary with anything I recommend (it's a very mixed bag of pot luck genres). Our family votes whether to keep songs going on our jukebox player with Mom having the final edit. Our boys are guided and expected to make intelligent decisions without too much interference with their own developing tastes.

In any case, an inexpensive way to sample and enjoy new bands - click the title.