Decora just finished up “Hibernator,” a seven track album of all instrumental grooves and textures. Hibernator is an apt title for several reasons… Decora has been sitting on these guys for a while. But thanks to AW’s live-in engineer, Will Radin, they’re good to go. Enjoy it, and as always, download it for free right here.

93 To Present

If you find meaning and beauty from a musician’s work and you want them to continue creating it — then you are obliged to support them. If you like the idea of record stores, the people they employ, the values and spirit they promote — then you also are obliged to support them. If you’re consistently doing one without the other, then on some level you, not Metallica, are the asshole. Out of basic politeness, I (probably) won’t say any of this to your face and neither will your friends, your record store clerk, or your favorite band. But it is the truth.

I’ll save my personal opinions on this one… they’re mostly known on this blog, I think. But I will quote Mr. P’s response to the debate going on the TMT forum about this article, because it sums up AW’s views pretty well:

I can only see an increase in music’s popularity with the rise of the internet, as all major shifts in media precipitate, but making a living off art in a country that has very little support for it in the first place (both financially and ideologically) is definitely an uphill battle. Public funding goes to sports stadiums, not music venues… I support both the push to support artists financially whenever possible (physical or digital) and the desire to look for new models, even ones that acknowledge/incorporate free downloading. I wouldn’t want fans to feel guilty for downloading when they can’t afford it, but anything that counters capitalism’s rhetoric of individual consumption with a sense of communal support is always a plus in my book.

Could this injunction be painted as a victory of the small, artisan download blog (ahem) versus the corporate feed farm of file sharing? Probably not, but it’s interesting to consider it that way. Users have pointed out that with the passworded files and zip archives uploaded to Rapidshare, filtering the infringing content would be pretty much impossible.

I don’t mean to suggest that smaller blogs are more policeable, because they’re obviously not, but at least knowing where your music comes from is a rare thing these days. And if Rapidshare had been able to figure out where the offending files came from, the users might be penalized instead of the system.

Not that that’s any better, though. I still don’t see any of this having an impact until there are individual police who post up in people’s living rooms, watching for inconspicuous mp3 hand offs.

But damn, ten times more likely? Does this have to do with vinyl? Casettes even? I don’t know, but maybe this has something, even peripherally, to do with the fact that ISPs just aren’t joining the RIAA’s crusade.

…heaps of genre bending cello playing..

…they’ve been making forward thinking, genrebreaking music for nearly two decades…

…Evading the pitfalls of a genre controlled mix…

…he seamlessly blends different genres…

…seamlessly, the instruments collide…

…seamlessly and unequivocally…

…transitioning seamlessly from dreamlike moments of psychedelia to bursts of powerpop spontaneity…

…they seamlessly destroy traditional barriers…

my name is AMANDINE I am 22 and I hope you will like my music!

and finally:

The idea behind the album The Go 2 Man is simple: “It’s who I am,” Jigg says. Bigg Jigg got the nickname The Go 2 Man because he always has what the people need.

I’m sure real writers’ inboxes are alot funnier than mine :p

How does that make you feel? Or to quote David Liebe Hart, “Don’t you have any sympathy for them?”

I’ve also worked for Calabash Music’s Tune Your World campaign, now The Hector Fund, a microfinancing project designed to help artists from around the world create music.

The folks over at the music snob brought this topic up a few weeks ago, and seem to really covet it as a truly new model for the industry, a way to cut the middlemen and have fans interact directly with the artist.

I feel more and more negative writing on this blog, but from my experience, I just don’t think microfinancing works. It might be a question of the model’s nuances… Sellaband spends part of the $50,000 dollars that you raised to get an A&R person. What! You get 500 or more fans, “believers,” who love your music, then you need a suit to tell you what you should record in hopes of making you a pop star? I don’t know about that.

Ultimately though, Sellaband rests on pretty much the same assumption that any other new music monetizing agent does: that people are willing to buy music when they get it for free. Yikes, this is not business. This is charity! And don’t get me wrong, the idea of consumers supporting a band monetarily, especially bands who absolutely couldn’t afford to make a decent recording, is terrific. But treating it as method of business, as a model for all genres and applications, seems really treacherous.

My friends and I often joke that when everyone who is over 30 right now dies, music as an industry will either only release music on CDs that are completely unrippable, or cease to exist. I honestly want neither to happen. But microfinancing as a business model (not as an artistic or philanthropic one) seems to throw oil on guilt trip fire of buying music.

To take a case in point, consider the Tiny Mix Tapes Wikipedia article. The section about jokes used to be entitled “Jokes Well Played,” detailing the now infamous Neutral Milk Hotel scandal. I noticed a few weeks ago that the title had been changed to the less fun “Jokes.” So I changed it to  “Masterful and Ironic Humor.”

Now, I’m not taking any poetic credit on this one, but the fact that my heading still exists just makes me so happy. Even on bigger entries, these little bits of personality flourish. You can read about P Diddy’s girlfriend who is prominently described as “on-again, off-again.” Or you can read about the health issues of eating pizza:

“Some pizzas can be very high in salt and fat and concerns have been raised about the negative effect these pizzas can have on people’s health.”

No robot is gonna mess with that.