Tuesday, December 26, 2006

The Spirit of Giving

To keep the gift economy going beyond the hype of christmas I list some great free things online at the moment:

Instal Live
Download muic and stream vidoes from October's Instal festival in Glasgow. Musicians may be new to many people but if you are intersted in hearing interesting music click to.

NPR (National Public Radio) Live Concert Archive
A little bit more mainstream than the Instal stuff. A broad selection of full length concerts including music from the dearly departed James Brown.....

EngageMedia
Whilst not the same as the music downloads, in that it breeches serious and often painful topics, the free videos from engage media may expand your world view a little:
"EngageMedia is a website for video about social justice and environmental issues in
Australia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific."

UBUWEB
The mighty UBUWEB continues to define excellence in online archives. A few weeks ago, in the depths of a short cold spell (winter this year is very "mild" as the TV news keeps saying) I watched a video of Terry Riley milking a goat on his farm in 1975 as he spoke about his music and teachers. The sunny meadow and Terry's calm way about things was like a journey for me. Two nights ago I stayed up late watching Peter Whitehead's film Wholly Communion: A Few Poets Trying to Be Natural from 1965. I witnessed something of the beautiful chaos of the Albert Hall poetry reading featuring Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Harry Fainlight, Adrian Mitchell, Michael Horovitz, Ernst Jaridl, Christopher Logue, John Esam, Pete Brown, Anselm Hollo, George Macbeth, Simon Vinkenoog, Paulo Leonni, Daniel Richter, Spike Hawkins, and Tom McGrath, as well as the playing of tapes of, and by, William Burroughs. I wonder where the women poets were that night??

onliness 1.0 onliness v1.0.1 is an beat-based exposition of 4 years in
The Life of demon doc in NYC. The entire album is
available for free download, no questions asked.

Famous for 15mb
A lot of Mp3s for download by people you may have never heard of but are often very pleasing to the ears. Tracks are uploaded and removed all the time so check back often.

Internet Archive
Even if you lived to be 300 years old you would not have time for all the interesting stuff on the Internet Archive. Overwhelming!

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