There is an entire thesis to be written on the philosophies of netlabels and the offering of music for free, unrestricted download. For the purpose of this review, however, what should be made clear is that, in spite of fears to the contrary, increases in the amount of free music made by anyone with a laptop and a modem does not necessarily lead to a decrease in quality control. Let’s face it – artists who are going to make their work available for free are not in it for the money, so there’s got to be a reasonable degree of love involved. And, thankfully, it’s not too difficult to find a reasonable amount of talent, either.
Which brings us to Appropriate Re-Appropriations. The Furthernoise netlabel puts up a compilation for free download for three months, then replaces it with the next on its schedule. For this release, artists were invited to visit the Freesound Project sample archive, download some noises and make music and sound compositions. There’s a dominance of ambient sound across the compilation, but there’s enough variety to keep it interesting for 65 minutes. There’s sheer beauty in tracks such as ‘Autumn Skies’ by Matthijs Sliijkhuis and ‘Vespers’ by Cheap Machines, both of which float along dreamily in the early stages of the album. Things take a darker turn as an ominous church bell introduces the not quite harmonically stable piles of acoustic guitar in Layne Garrett’s ‘Faxedo Foxedo Fuxedo’ which then leads to other forms of dark ambience in warm distortion fuzz, echoey thunderstorms and sterile synth drones from artists such as Ubeboet, Josh Dippold, Failsafe and Sluggo. ’21 Owls 21 Pussycats’ is a descriptive title for Mel Ducasse’s track, the 21 different simultaneous voices rendering the well known nursery rhyme barely intelligible, but highly entertaining. The album’s centrepiece is Kevin Anderson’s ‘Before The Sleep’ which places some bass guitar samples into a variety of sound fields. It had me picturing a lone bass player standing in front of a blue screen which sees them transported continually from one exotic location to the next. Special note must also be made of ‘Sparklers’ by Bryce Beverlin. It’s possibly my favourite track, mostly because it’s simple structure is as fluffy and happily pointless as the hand-held fireworks it samples. It’s placement as track two seems to ruin the flow of the beginning of the album a little for me but, being a bunch of mp3 downloads, it’s very easy to put it further down the playlist where it would make more sense.
There’s some real inventiveness going on here and being able to spot a few common samples across the tracks helps keep the overriding Freesound sample concept at the fore. It’s an album that would be highly recommended if it required some research and cash to track down a copy. The fact that it’s available absolutely free for the next couple of months makes it all the more attractive.
Get it at http://www.furthernoise.org.
Adrian Elmer
