The episode features the 100th release from the Camomille netlabel, Cycles. This is a big compilation, over 2 hours long and 57 musicians. The tracks are well-selected and hang together nicely in that Camomille headspace: a little abstract, a little beat, laid-back and quiet.
Tonight’s tracks:
Délusions circulaires – Muhr
Daddys Sailboat Down The River – Blisaed
Just a thing from yesterday – Mikael Fyrek
A possible – Vim
citrate de bétaïne – kaneel
Dauphin’s Flag – Talve
Halftone Patterns – The Open Directory Project
Innere Leer – Beatslaughter
Sleever – Seathasky
the knak – imtech
After pi trak – Lackluster
shimmer – transient
Libertae – Mikael Fyrek
Rebirth – MigloJE
telluric – epoq
Hotel Walls – Mattia Marchi
Our Happy Life – Kyle Dawkins
Warm Elixer (feat. Travis Nobles) – Shiftless
Noon At House Tuesday – Pocka
Farine five roses – Ilkae
Saraa – Julien Neto
Glass – Twerk
B Fulcra Mulch – Fah
Seduction theme from Milano Brothers IV 1998 – Makunouchi Bento
This week’s episode features music from the Camomille netlabel. Camomille was founded in 2002 by Vincent Fugère “out of the love of ambient music, camomille tea and as a representation of what inspires him to do music”.
Camomille has (or perhaps had — there have been no releases for a while!) a very specific sound: “naive, idm electronics mixed with new age and emotional hip-hop”, which fits very well with RadioSpiral’s combination of ambience, beats, interest, and beauty.
The episode features a sampling of tracks from a number of releases:
“Sanctity”, from Benefit of the Boomerang’s Legend of the Final Thread
“Lilt” from the album of the same name by Shiftless
“And Now My Love IS When We Say” from …Goodbye by Brainwash
“Despite All Resolutions”, “van der Rohe”, and “Off the Eastern Shore”, from Cheju’s Despite All Resolutions
“Yellow Leaf Fell from the Tree” and “The Window’s Open and My Hands Are Cold” from Echion
“Amoureux” from Amoureux, by Mistrial
“myopic” from myopic, by Melissa Welch (an outstanding long-form piece that flies through many genres)
“The Mailbox” and “Space Dominates” from Shiftless (Ryan McKenney)’s Cloudburst
“blessed”, “the day we met”, and “presets” from Xerxes’s Presets, and “Scar Tissue” from his Scar Tissue
Line Noise’s Soul Clouds EP, with “Lexei londer”, “Pegasus”, and “Venutian [sic] girl passage”
And finally, from the Featherfoil compilation, “Dubchant” by Plosive and “Philosophy of Time Travel” by Alex Young
All of these release are available on archive.org. Enjoy this upbeat and unpredictable set of tracks from Camomille!
This episode uses the piano as a touchstone — tracks from both the RadioSpiral Library and from Creative Commons releases. We will have a little more ambient music, as fits the title, but there are still some gentle beats for those looking for them.
The criterion for selection was that the track at least starts with a piano interlude, whether acoustic or electric. Some tracks are piano alone, and others are piano as part of a larger ensemble.
The tracks from Appro, Kai Engel, Kevin Bryce, Mischa Dioxin, and Ketsa are all from the Free Music Archive, and are only a selection of the tracks available from those artists.
Tracks from CASSIEL are available from his CUBE series, and Joe McMahon’s 3AM release is available on both Bandcamp and the Internet Archive. Metlay!’s track is on The Hundredth Mantra, available from the Internet Archive.
In this episode, we’ll be hearing tracks for several engaging nu-jazz and post-rock artists. These two genres are deconstructions and recombinations of their base genres with influences from others, sometimes far outside the originals. We’ll be listening to some folks who have integrated ambient and abstract electronica sounds and feels into jazz and rock.
We’ll start off the the artist Springtide, from Tokyo, Japan, and segue into tracks from releases on the La Bél netlabel, listening to a selection of tracks from several artists there – the Italian group Another Brick, with trumpet, bass, and Ableton Live/Push; ykymr, again from Tokyo; Safir Nou, from Spain, with their combo of cinematic soundtracks, post-rock, and Mediterranean jazz; and Cuarto, with a fascinating take on Spanish guitar combined with abstract electronics.
The second hour features two albums from Menion, a group from Italy who describe their music as “visionary electronic post rock mixed with dark ambient ingredients”. They combine acoustic guitar and a wide range of electronics, from drum machines to percussive Stockhausenesque timbres, with subtle processing tying it all together into flowing textures with surprising harmonic twists; lyrical passages with bleeps and squarks fitting in beautifully; heavy metal shattering under its own weight: adventurous music with something unexpected around every corner.
The music is all available from the Free Music Archive (https://freemusicarchive.org/), but we strongly suggest you buy the music direct from the artists at their Bandcamp pages where possible:
Tonight’s episode on Etheric Currents is “terrible name, great music”, because we’ll be hearing music from the Ogredung label. Pause to let that sink in. Or not.
This label is an Italian one, and released from 2001 to 2007. It’s is a very eclectic label — everything from straight melodia to ambience, dark and light, to absolute mind-ripping noise. We’ll stay on the melodic end this evening, with some side trips to abstraction, beats, and the less-noisy end of their spectrum with a sampling of tracks from their more than 80 releases.
It’s a a wild trip from gentle melodies through wacky fractured beats and back out again; see you on the other side.
Again, all of these are available via the Netlabel Archive and are hosted at the Internet Archive, archive.org. If you’re looking for a deserving charity, the Internet Archive is a non-profit supported by contributions, and if you download music from them — or host it there — consider sending them a few bucks as a thank you.
Neither RadioSpiral nor I are associated with the Archive other than via our gratitude that they exist; they’re just good folks who could use your support.
This episode’s music comes from the Finnish netlabels Milk and Five Musicians.
Five Musicians was the earlier of the two, and specialized in distributing music from the demoscene – music composed using trackers, specialized programs that did sample playback, controlled by scores written out as text files. Demoscene music was often distributed on floppy disk through physical mail.
Five Musicians tends toward uptempo pieces with quite a bit of swing. We’ll start off with several tracks by the artist Necros, including a very unusual live performance with an actual band and a collaboration between Necros and Basehead. We’ll then hear Jeroen Tel’s aptly-named “Chaos Control”, and then a longer, contemplative piece by Basehead alone, “The Zen Garden”. We round out our sampling with pieces by the remaining two of the Five Musicians, Stalker and ceniq.
We’ll then switch to the Milk netlabel to fill out the first hour. Milk was a more eclectic label; it did cover the demoscene a bit as well, but branched out into other forms and more experimental, but still rhythmic and upbeat music.
First we’ll hear “microwaves” from walkkah, and then “la noche verde” to round out the first hour.
In the second, we’ll hear Milk’s willingness to try anything once, twice if it was fun, as we shift into other styles. We start with JJe’s ambient “children of the light”, then Lime’s jazzy “Bulentoi”, K.Ylikulju’s semi-classical “at[1]” and “at[2]”, amon’s minimalist/field recording “sequencer by the sea”, and tiger’s electronic tribute to Apollo 11, “aw 1”.
The Kiova Project then gives us a cinematic “amor manifesto”, and then ressu’s “ameepa” straddles multiple styles – pure electronica, drum and bass, and flowing melody. S.Louhela’s “vetac (phylatys)” then crosses abstraction and 60’s lounge music in a fascinating combination.
Last, we hear “fingers” from Spark, another hard-to-describe, bouncy yet mournful, crossing of genres, and daze’s wild electro-funk “luminette”.
There’s so much good music here it simply wasn’t possible to fit all the great stuff on these labels into a two-hour show. Particularly recommended is tiger’s “Sirius” album on Milk.
Check out the catalogs for both these labels on the Netlabel Archive: Five Musicians and Milk, and prepare to be surprised and pleased at both of these great collections of music!
Tonight we’ll be hearing some excellent Berlin-School tracks from a band by the name of Klangwald. In 2012, they released two EPs and one full album on the Kreislauf netlabel:
We’ll be hearing all three in full tonight, with a few tracks from Different Skies and Chromadrift to fill the time out to two hours.
After releasing these works under a Creative Commons license, they released a few more albums on the Stereo Poems and Digital Kunstrassen labels, eventually choosing to start their own label, Klangwald Recordings, continuing to release their own music as part of that label up to 2013; the label is still releasing recordings – one was released in 2021 – but there’s been no new music from them since 2013, which is unfortunate. A few tracks are up on Soundcloud, but, alas, are not CC licensed, so we can’t play them.
We can, however, play these, and they’re really great. I hope you’ll enjoy an upbeat evening of what Klangwald calls Couchmusik.
This show (the first official Etheric Currents) features tracks about round things: circles, rounds, and spheres.
All tracks are from the RadioSpiral library, but some are from artists we don’t play as much, and some are seldom-played tracks from artists we play a lot of.
Tonight’s show runs more ambient than not, and more abstract than beaty.
Note to podcast listeners: we cut short a track, Eric Peter Schwartz’s “Hex Circle”, because it was distorting unpleasantly. Rather than subject everyone to the distortion and the chopped-off song, we’ve omitted it entirely.
Tonight’s show is a selection of tracks from the Backtrack, Dewtone, and One netlabels, all of which briefly flowered in the early 2000’s and then disappeared.
Backtrack lived for two years, from 2004 to 2006, but put out some really excellent music. The two albums featured, Crepuscular by Troupe (released when he was sixteen and already a damn fine musician) and ::micromania:: by vitax are excellent uptempo electronica.
Then we switch over to Dewtone, in existence from only 2004 to 2005, but which put out a lot of nice tracks. We’ll hear from (val)liam’s “early reflections”; transient’s “rotation” single and a track of theirs from the Ogredung “whole symesta” release; and shift’s excellent field-recrding-driven “amphibian (stereo mix)”, from the “[dt002]” compilation.
The second hour features tracks from the One netlabel, which was around from 2004 to 2007. We’ll hear recue’s excellent “Between Stations”; a track from plosive’s “one remixes” and his “pavlovian fear” from “101”; two great tracks from the “deepmove mode” release; kwook!’s “Immiscible”; Rivel’s “Sum”; a track from Karl-Johan Nilsson’s “The Seams”; and finally two tracks from plosive’s own “neutral” release.
The full archive of each of these netlabel’s releases are available via the wonderful Netlabel Archive: Backtrack, Dewtone, and One, all three. There is much, much more music at the end of those links. As always with netlabels, your mileage (and enjoyment) may vary, but a little virtual crate-digging may find you even more tracks that you’ll love.
