Music was always a very important part of my life, but because I didn't learn to play any instruments as a kid, I had been relegated to the role of a consumer. According to Michael Spitzer's book "The Musical Human", my relationship to music was very typical for a westerner: while most of us participate actively in music-making as children, by adulthood we are quite firmly separated into musicians and audiences. This was not always the case: music used to be (and still is in some parts of the world) a communal activity where everyone participates in its making.
While the days of the communities we live in making music together might be mostly behind us, the internet-age has brought on a new kind of participatory music: free tools for learning and making music, crowd-sourced collections of sound-recordings made available to use however one wants to, forums for discussing the work of independent artists, and even platforms for sharing your music for free.
Inspired by this realization, I decided that it's not too late to expand my relationship with music beyond passive consumption. I spent much of the COVID-lockdown teaching myself guitar, sound-design and music theory via free video lessons, and composing a number of pieces making extensive use of free tools and sound-recordings. Four of those pieces make up this album, a sonic time-travel through the different ways we humans have lived, and how music has always been there with us:
"Fire" surrounds us with the sounds of wildlife and the polymetric grooves of a drum circle, until we are faced with a power that we'd eventually learn to harness, but never quite tame.
"Sickle" settles us down to pastoral harmony. We build ever-larger societies around one place that yields great harvests. The drums make room for calming melodies in order to not stress the livestock we now live with.
"Hammer" takes us to the factory with rhythmic hammering, rumbling engines and all the other dirt of the industrial revolution. Also, the riff makes heavy use of hammer-ons, so it's a musical pun. Sorry!
"Ether" brings things to the present by remixing the three previous tracks into glitchy beats, with the sounds of the past building on each-other in a new context to make something that sounds hauntingly familiar, yet entirely different.
I had a lot of fun making this album, and I hope it can inspire others to take ownership of the basic human instinct of making music, or creating any other kind of art. If you want to use this album in creating your art, you're free to do so - its licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution -license. If you're interested in any of the individual sounds I've used, you can always contact me!
credits
released July 30, 2021
This album would not have been possible without the generosity of a number of amazing strangers providing the fruits of their labour for anyone to use for free. I want to especially thank the developers of Vital (a free software synthesizer) and Linux MultiMedia Studio (a free DAW), as well as Spitfire Audio for providing an excellent orchestral sample library (BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover) without charge. A huge thank you also goes to Justin Sandercoe at justinguitar.com, whose excellent free beginner guitar lessons enabled me to include my own playing on this album as well.
The rest of the sampled recordings are licensed under a Creative Commons 0 -license (creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode). While they don't require attribution, I nevertheless want to thank FreeSound users martian, aurelien.leveque, dav0r, J0ck0, wilhellboy, silencyo, 16FThumaF, michorvath, felix.blume and prometheus888 for contributing sounds used in this album.
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