Milieu

A growing number of musicians are taking advantage of the unprecedented distribution opportunities provided by the Internet to put their music in the public domain, post it online for free (whether on their own Web sites, on free Internet labels, or on large free-for-all sites like download.com and archive.org) and bypass the quagmire of the music industry entirely. Not surprisingly, the people who are willing to give their music away for free are frequently the ones who are able to make it very cheaply, so you'll find a preponderance of electronic music, often made with nothing but a laptop and some entry-level music software. It takes a brave soul to sift through all the mediocrity out there, and I for one have very limited patience for wading through endless soggy vistas of ambient electronics, dripping with cheap digital reverb. One such brave soul is Alex Young, whose blog Milieu is dedicated to freely downloadable, public-domain music, with a focus on music from netlabels. Young also links to pieces of conceptual sound art (like FinisTerrae's Cronotopo, an elegantly designed aural trip along 185 kilometers of Italian coastline, rendered in 30-second field recordings) including some of his own, like Vicimus GEGAN, a project in which he explores "simple mathematical ideas to produce music generated from spam."