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!