open call

Posted on June 19, 2008

‘sup folks -

this one goes out to hip hop artists in particular.

i’ve had this idea for a concept album floating around in my head for a while but haven’t had the time to sit down and write it all out, and as i was thinking about it again yesterday i realized it would make a great compilation.

the comp would be called ‘letters from the underground’ and the idea is an album made up of songs that are all letters from members of an underground revolutionary cell.  the setting is a dystopian not-too-distant future where the threat of ‘terrorism’, rising oil prices, and looming economic collapse have allowed corporations to seize control of everything directly and set up a ‘ruling committee’ made up of the heads of all the biggest corporations that rules all of north america (and from there most of the rest of the world) by direct decree.  it’d be light on the sci-fi ish, heavy on politics.  Something like an updated version of 1984, but told with personal stories and a variety of perspectives and in the form of music.

the letters could be about anything – how much someone misses their family, a poem for a comrade who’s been killed by the pigs, political rants about the system, ballads about if and how nonviolent resistance is still possible, songs about direct action and underground organizing in the face of heavy repression, even accounts of hunting down and assassinating members of the ruling committee, anything.

it’d be distributed online for free as a promo over the rapanarchists.net site and include links to websites and info for all of the artists who contributed.  i’d like to have it be a compilation of only explicitly anarchist hip hop artists, but if there isn’t enough interest I’ll open it up to other genres of music as well.

If you’re interested, let me know.  we need 8-14 tracks total to make this work.  feel free to forward this if you know someone who’d be a good addition to the comp.

the deadline to send in tracks would be end of july, august at the latest.

everything is now free

Posted on February 21, 2008

alright, the verdict is finally in on my months-long experiment offering higher-quality mp3′s for sale on this site, and it’s a failure. I’ve taken down the online store for good and just posted up a donation button on the mp3 page. the good news is that since i moved all my albums to Jamendo I no longer have to pay for bandwidth to let ya’ll download them, so that eliminates one of the big costs that moved me to add for-sale mp3′s in the first place.

I’ve also added a player/download widget on the MP3 page for the new Beltaine’s Fire album, which is now also free.

I haven’t felt much like writing on this blog lately, been putting most of my writing time into working on new lyrics for the new Beltaine’s Fire album. We’re going into the studio to start recording it on March 16th and I still need to put a bit more polish on some of our new songs. Good times! If you absolutely can’t wait for some more of my writing or just have lots of time to waste, I did post up a new article on CelticAnarchy.org yesterday, prompted partly by the recent events in Kosovo. I’ll have more new stuff up here sooner or later. Probably sooner. We’ll see.

Changes

Posted on December 23, 2007

It’s been a few days since my last post, been busy with work, family drama, and music stuff. spent most of the day today working on stuff related to my band. One of the things that i did was add the new Beltaine’s Fire album to my online store so you can now either buy the download or a physical copy of the CD through this website. Good times.

I also removed the direct mp3 downloads of my solo music from this site and replaced them with a widget, powered by Jamendo, that’ll stream entire albums at once instead of just 1 track at a time. personally, i think it’s better that way. You can still download free mp3′s, as always, but from now on it’ll go through Jamendo’s servers instead of directly over mine. In a nutshell all that means is that i won’t have to pay money for extra bandwidth to give away my music. The only downside is that the widget requires the latest version of the Flash viewer plugin to run. it’s free, of course, but it takes a whopping 10 seconds to download and instal so doubtless I’ll get at least a few complaints about that. what can i say, life is tough.

I’m probably not going to take time to write another post before christmas, look for another post sometime late next week.

cheers,
lynx