Innersight - Light of the Force

It's Star Wars Day again, and I managed to find some really cool music to share with you today.  Actually, I came across it last year, but there was a problem downloading the files from the site, so I've been waiting for almost a year to write about it.

I don't know much about Innersight, but what I do know (and what matters most today) is that a few years ago, they released an excellent album of guitar-based Star Wars music called Light of the Force.  There are seven tracks on the album, with each movie being represented by at least one track (Episode IV - A New Hope is the only movie with two tracks).  Most of the songs have a heavy metal feeling to them, which works amazingly well for songs like "Duel of the Fates" and "The Imperial March", which have always been quite heavy and intense on their own.  "Across the Stars" is mostly mellow and jazzy, and "Palpatine's Teachings" is darker and more atmospheric than the rest.  "Emperor's Throne Room" is a real highlight - if Black Sabbath had scored Return of the Jedi, it might have ended up sounding a bit like this.

The entire album clocks in at less than half an hour, but it is definitely worth a listen for Star Wars fans - especially those who also happen to like instrumental guitar music.  Happy listening, and may the Fourth be with you!

URL:

http://www.innersight.hu/?q=albumok/star_wars_tribute

Happy Star Wars Day!

So, apparently today is one of a couple of days that lay claim to the term "Star Wars Day" (the other one being May 25th, which is the date in 1977 that the first Star Wars film was released). In honour of this special occasion that I just found out about, I thought I'd post about a few free Star Wars MP3s that I've been able to find.

Furman Music has a couple of recordings of some classic Star Wars music. Both are very well done, with "Princess Leia's Theme" coming across very tender and beautiful with a soaring crescendo near the end, and "The Imperial March" as brutal and hard-hitting as ever.

I found those recordings via Classic Cat's John Williams - "Star Wars episode 1" page, which also lists 5 MP3s from Harmonie Shostakovich, but when I try to access the hosting site, I merely get a message saying "At this moment Dot TK is a bit overwhelmed by all the new users. Therefore we are currently unable to handle your request. Please come back again later. Thank you for using Dot TK!" If anyone manages to access that site successfully, please leave a comment here; if I can access it sometime, I'll either update this post or make a new post about it.

Finally, Daniel Bautista has done an excellent guitar-based medley of several Star Wars themes (it's track number 13 on Classics and Soundtracks, listed as "La Guerra de las Galaxias (John Williams)"). I don't actually recognize all of the parts of this medley (I think the unconventional instrumentation is throwing me off), but some of the more dominant parts include "Duel of the Fates", the Force theme (which appears many times throughout all of the Star Wars movies, perhaps most notably in the "Binary Sunset" scene in the first movie), and a cool thrashy version of some of the music from the Hoth sequence in The Empire Strikes Back (I don't know the actual name of this piece, and I'm not sure that giving it a name would be very helpful at all, as I've seen different names for a lot of tracks across various releases of the Star Wars soundtracks).  (Have I used enough parentheses in this paragraph?)

Happy listening, and May the 4th be with you!

[UPDATE: 2007-05-06]

The URL for the Harmonie Shostakovich MP3's has been changed to http://www.shosta.info/enregistrements.htm; you can go there to grab recordings of 5 songs from Episode I.

URLs:
http://www.furman.edu/depts/music/mp3andvideo/orchestra.htm
http://www.classiccat.net/williams_j/_sw.htm

http://www.shosta.tk/enregistrements.htm (dead link)

http://www.shosta.info/enregistrements.htm
http://www.danielbautista.com/discography.php

Some free music for Easter

I have a little bit of Easter music to share with you on this Easter weekend. I wanted to have more music to share and to have this post up earlier, but that didn't quite work out. I hope you will still enjoy this music anyway.

First, classical.com currently has Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's Stabat Mater available as a free download. As with all free downloads from classical.com, you need to act quickly if you want to get this one, as it will only be available for a couple of weeks.

Second, much of Handel's Messiah can be found between Classic Cat and Wikipedia. While Messiah is most commonly performed during Christmas, it was actually first performed during Lent - in fact, the entire second part of the work's three parts ("The Passion") relates to the Easter season, and the "Hallelujah" chorus is found in the middle of parts II and III. You won't find the complete work between these two sites, but most of the first two parts (including "Hallelujah") are there.

Finally, and more on the contemporary side, an acoustic version of Marillion's "Easter" can be found on their Downloads page (not the most well organized page I've ever seen, but the MP3s can be found on the left side under Audio Tracks; "Easter" itself is under RTL2 Radio Session, 7 June 2004). First released nearly 20 years ago on Seasons End, this has long been one of Marillion's most popular songs. The version found here is very stripped down, but still very beautiful.

However you have been spending this Easter Sunday, I hope you have been enjoying it. If you find any of this music enjoyable, then so much the better. Happy listening, and Happy Easter!

URLs:

http://www.classical.com/album/FF16835 (no longer available for free)

http://www.classiccat.net/handel_gf/56.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sound/list

http://www.marillion.com/fans/downloads.htm

Free Christmas music

Those of you who have poked around the links on this blog enough may know that I also maintain another blog and a website dedicated solely to free Christmas music.  If you haven't visited any of those sites, now would be a great time to do so.  Since I only really update them during November and December, the blog tends to get updated far more frequently than this one does.  I've posted about a lot of great music there and I still have plenty more to go before Christmas, so if you've been looking for a free music fix lately, please go check it out!

I just added a little gadget to this blog that will display the last few posts from the Free Christmas Music blog near the top of the page; if you're reading this in an email or a feed reader, check out the blog's homepage to see it.

I hope you all have a very merry Christmas filled with great music and anything else you want, and I promise to be back here as soon as possible with more great, free music for you!

URLs:

http://freechristmasmusic.blogspot.com

http://freechristmasmusic.googlepages.com

Halloween Treat Bag

Okay, it turns out that I have more Halloween music than I have time to post about, so I have decided to round up some of my favourites into one big post. If you still haven't found any good music for your Halloween activities, or you are just looking for some more, I hope that this helps you to find what you're looking for.

First up is an EP that I originally spotlighted back in the spring: Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts I. This first part of the quadruple EP Ghosts I-IV is available to download for free and consists of 9 instrumental tracks that range from haunting and beautiful to loud and noisy. While not Halloween music per se, ghosts are such a common theme at this time of year that this release is nonetheless very appropriate.

Next, we'll stop by last.fm for Februus' cover of "This is Halloween", originally from Tim Burton's 1993 film The Nightmare Before Christmas. To me, this sounds like a great cross between the original version from the movie and Marilyn Manson's cover version from the bonus disc of the 2006 reissue of the soundtrack: the instrumentation is a gothic metal style much like Manson's version, but the variety of voices in the vocals is much more like the ensemble style of the original.

Our next stop will be Jonathan Coulton's website for a pair of songs. "Creepy Doll" is a song inspired by "various 70s horror movies that scared the hell out of [him] when [he] was a kid," and "Skullcrusher Mountain" takes us to the secret lair of a misunderstood evil genius. You'll probably meet his half-pony, half-monkey monster and his hungry wolves along the way, if his doomsday squad doesn't ignite the atmosphere first. Like most of Coulton's songs, these two are a lot of fun to listen to, so if you like what you hear, I would highly recommend checking out some more of his songs - a lot of them can be downloaded for free.

Mary Shelley Overdrive is another band that I have discovered thanks to the Free Metal Albums blog. They have two Halloween-themed EPs available from their blog: Shock Theatre and Bride of Shock Theatre (download links can be found in the right sidebar of their blog). I was initially drawn to these releases for the covers of Rob Zombie's "House of 1000 Corpses" and Blue Öyster Cult's "Godzilla", and after a couple of listens their version of The Misfits' "Halloween" quickly became another favourite of mine. I love the movie samples that are sprinkled throughout many of the songs. Most of the music has a punk or metal feel to it, and much of it is rather noisy, but it could make a great soundtrack for whatever you're doing this Halloween.

Ondrej Kapov De Triste's Creeps Theme is a short but very sweet release featuring the opening and closing themes for a horror movie. There is some wonderful potential here and I would love to hear what this artist could come up with for a full film score; for now, please enjoy "Emotion" and "Emotioncreep" this Halloween.

As a bonus treat, why not help yourself to some free Smashing Pumpkins music, perhaps to listen to whilst carving jack-o'-lanterns? Hundreds of their live recordings, spanning nearly two decades, are available from the Internet Archive. The Smashing Pumpkins were also one of the first artists I featured on this blog for their freely available studio album Machina II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music, which makes for an excellent listen at any time.

I hope that these last few posts have helped you to find some good music to listen to this Halloween. If you've found anything cool here or elsewhere, I'd love to hear about it in the comments. Have a safe and Happy Halloween, and Happy Listening!

URLs:
http://ghosts.nin.com/main/order_options
http://www.last.fm/music/Februus/_/This+Is+Halloween
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/songdetails/Creepy%20Doll
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/songdetails/Skullcrusher%20Mountain
http://freemetalalbums.wordpress.com/
http://maryshelleyoverdrive.blogspot.com/
http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/24743
http://www.archive.org/details/SmashingPumpkins
http://totallyfreemusic.blogspot.com/2008/01/album-spotlight-smashing-pumpkins.html

Album Spotlight: Silber Sounds of Halloween

Are you all ready for Halloween yet? Need some spooky music to help set the mood for whatever you'll be doing? Then Silber Sounds of Halloween, a free compilation from indie record label Silber, may be just what you're looking for. Much like the previously mentioned Calling All Fiends compilation, this is a collection of offbeat, cool, and often very creepy music that is great for establishing a Halloween mood.

The album opens with a beautifully haunting, almost Pink Floyd-like song called "The Dreaming Body" by Lycia, and is then immediately followed up with "Dawn of the Dead", a hip hop song by Peter Aldrich. This abrupt shift in styles in the first two songs alone is very indicative of the album as a whole: this compilation is not restricted to any one genre or style; you will find quiet atmospheric music, heavy metal, post rock, soundcapes, and a number of other genres. With such a broad range of styles represented, there will very likely be something that will interest you, and maybe you will find a new favourite band to follow.

A few of my personal favourites from the compilation are Rachel Goldstar's dreamy "Amsterdam"; The Wades' "Sídhe", a haunting track full of screams and whispers, all played over a slow metal groove that would not sound out of place on an old Black Sabbath album; and Cam Butler's "Does Your River Run Deep", a classical/rock hybrid which has an awesome groove. But with 30 songs and over 2 hours of music, I find myself discovering new things to like about the album every time I listen to it, and I am really looking forward to checking out some more work by many of these artists.

More information about Silber Sounds of Halloween, including links to many of the artists' own websites, can be found on the Silber Records site. The compilation itself can be downloaded from the Internet Archive. Check it out, see what songs work for you, have fun listening to it, have a safe and Happy Halloween, and happy listening!

URLs:
http://www.silbermedia.com/comps/halloween/
http://www.archive.org/details/silber065-silbersoundsofhalloween

Halloween Special: Album Spotlight - Calling All Fiends

I think this is a good time to start sharing some Halloween music that I've found recently. I've found some pretty cool music and I'll try to post about as much of it as I can.  The first one I'd like to mention is a fantastic compilation from Oddio Overplay called Calling All Fiends. The premise of this compilation was to create Halloween music that is "frightening, damaging and disturbing", as an alternative to the more popular novelty songs like "Monster Mash" that typically get played at this time of year.

After a couple of listens, I would say that they certainly succeeded. This is not the kind of music I would play for my kids, thanks in no small part to all the screams, backward vocals, strange sound effects, and just plain startling and unsettling moments found throughout the album's 31 songs. However, those very qualities make it absolutely perfect for use as background music for a Halloween party, while handing out treats on Halloween, or just if you enjoy being scared and want something to help get you in the mood for Halloween.

There is a great amount of variety to be found among the songs. A quick look at the track listing on the website reveals that the album is broken up into 3 parts, each carrying its own cautionary description: the first, which encompasses more than half of the songs, is Cinematic, Soundscapes, "frightening works [which] draw the imagination into dangerous territory, risking paranoid madness"; the second, consisting of 6 songs, is Rock, Dance, "ghoulish songs [that] steal control of your body, leaving you a helpless dancing zombie"; the remaining songs are Fiendish Songs, "disturbing tunes [that] open doors into your own terrors, causing nightmares and nervous disorders."

With so many songs all fitting into such broad categories, everyone is bound to have their own favourites. Some of mine include Bureaucratica's "Southern Gothic", which is a great little story set to music that is reminiscent of Steve Earle at his very darkest; Nigel Simmons' "Devil's Candy Shop", which feels like it could be film score music; Sublinear's "Fragility", which has an excellent beat; and Jeffrey Letterly's "The Story of the Stairs", which creates a wonderfully tense atmosphere. Splogman's "Metempsychosis" deserves special mention for being perhaps the most unsettling track on the album - I find the ending of it extremely chilling.

The website for the compilation has a ton of information about both the compilation itself and the artists on it, including website links, which makes this a great way to get introduced to some new artists. It's nice to see how much care has been put into assembling this compilation.

If you're looking for Halloween music that is a little different (and perhaps a little scarier) than you're used to hearing, then Calling All Fiends may be the perfect thing for you. Go check it out, have a Happy Halloween, and happy listening as well!

URLs:
http://www.oddiooverplay.com/ears/fiends/index.html
http://www.oddiooverplay.com/