Screw it here is everything I made for free
TLDR: in addition to my Fuck Spotify position, I have decided after around 25 years of trying to play along with the fetid amorphous abonination that is "the music industry" I have decided to pull all my creations from the corporate stores and am just giving it away.
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I started making music in the 90s with a 4 track on tape. When Propellerheads came out with Rebirth I was blown away - two Roland TB-303's and an SP-808? Who needs thousands of dollars of hardware anymore when you can literally emulate synths on your mom's crappy HP desktop computer?
This is going to democratize music! Look out gatekeepers, the indies are coming!!
It was right around the time that my friends and I started throwing warehouse raves and so all of the sudden I was a 90s electronic music producer.
It used to take a lot of effort. I would spend days at a time, high on drugs that make you not sleep, autistically hyperfixated on music.
This was before AI, when releasing a new track every week was the kind of thing that made people think you were some kind of super human wizard. It's the kind of thing that will make someone unfamiliar with my archive stumble upon it and reflexively think, in the latter half of the 2020's, that they have instead stumbled into another slop factory.
I met the mothers of my children at raves. It was the defining characteristic I oriented myself around for a long time. Techno-hacker-anarchist-dude. Cyberpunk.
Since "the music industry is a shallow money trench, where pimps and thieves run free and good men die like dogs", I took the the cue as meaning it was my turn to help The Revolution(tm) take place in one small part by founding an indie label that focused on releasing really good, creative underground music.
My company Splendid went balls deep on it - throwing raves, helping others throw raves, producing fliers for raves, doing drugs at raves, making music for raves... actually it led to a lot of drogs. So then I find myself at a crossroads of getting high then making music vs being a normie and not doing drugs when my gf got pregnart and I chose to be a dad instead of being famous - and thank god, because I know a few people who "made it" and holy fuck, that is not at all for me. Instead I would plod along in the background for a couple decades, after the kids went to bed and on the occasional weekends playing many raves and "festivals" (they were not then what they are now). Shambhalah .. I played it I think three? Maybe four times? But it was small then.
I even got invited to share it at the Defcon Hacking Conference in Las Vegas. Super leet.
So long story short, I was going through my hard drive and the music I have made and looking at pictures of people that I remember as kids who are all of the sudden VERY GREY (not like me, I am distinguished) and I got a flash of the ol' "life is fleetingness" and realized that if by the time my own father was my age he'd already had two heart attacks and if I just suddenly keeled over and died, nobody would even know where to look on my computer to find all my arts, so I am just doing an archive dump.
There was a time when I felt like I should hold on to the IP (intellectual property) on the premise that maybe some day one of my tracks would get licensed for a movie or something and it would pay for my kids to have some kind of trust fund but ... well, here we are.
Art to me - and in particular, music, because that is the art I specialized in - has always felt like it was something channelled, like it came from elsewhere, a radio signal I happened to have the right antenna for. We borrow it from the ether and share it with others like "look what I found" and sometimes others are like "ooh neat I vibed on that one too but didn't have the kit to convert it to share".
At one point I was writing music by turning the volume up very high in my headphones with nothing playing and then trying to sound out what I thought I could hear in the static.
It was messy. I sometimes spent weeks iterating through it. Sometimes years. Some of them I started in the 90s and came back and finished in the 2010s.
People used to hear something I made and be like "holy shit, you did this?" and I could be all proud and smug for a couple seconds. Hell yeah I did, I invested all this time and effort and creativity and experimenting and now there is a new thing in the world.
It is all dated. And it is imperfect. That was something I always made sure to do, to have those "human errors" built in to my songs, because even back then I knew that I was "working with computers" and it was all too easy to just let everything fall into perfect timing. So if you listen to my songs, listen for the fuckups. "Humanizing" I called it, even two or three decades ago, long before people were genuinely concerned about whether or not a human had made something.
So, here it is, such as it is. Half of it anyway, the stuff that already had official CD or vinyl releases, I am still working on cobbling together the stragglers into a compilation or two so I can move on in my life. All of the songs and albums are available to stream or download without logging in, there are no tracking cookies or signups.
If you like it, download it. Share it. Spam it to your friends, make it your ringtone, make copies (especially to cassette tapes, which I often designed sets around fitting onto), play it in your coffee shops, whatever. The only limitation really is that you aren't allowed to use it in commercial projects without talking to me first.
Technically the license is Creative Commons BY-NC-SA, which means
BY=Give Credit (this is pretty basic)
NC=Non-Commercial (you can't sell my shit to make money for yourself)
SA=Share Alike (if you remix it, the license is inherited)
I have thoughts on "AI art".
But, this is art that I made.
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