emudir

We’ve featured a good few albums on this blog before, and they tend to fall into two distinct categories. Either they are from established artists – such as Nine Inch Nails, or Coldplay – as a “thank you” to the fans.

But just as often – as here – the people giving their music away do so as a trailer to their live shows, and the highly regarded indie rockers TheWeeknd do exactly that. In fact, the strategy is so successful, they’re commanding huge fees for sell-out concerts all over the USA. (Forgive me if indie rock isn’t exactly right – it’s difficult to judge genres for people like me who use Deicide as chill-out music…)

And you can find out for yourself exactly why – both their albums Thursday and House Of Balloons are available from their website. (You’ll need JavaScript enabled to experience it properly, and a zip application to extract the files, by the way).

Home page: http://the-weeknd.com/

The hyper-active Mystified (real name Thomas Park) seems to release an album a month, and most of them are uploaded for free to The Internet Archive. This one is just over half an hour, and it’s an ever-shifting soundscape.

The title is apposite, as the atmospheric industrial rumblings that begin the piece remind me of the waste disposal escape scene in Toy Story 3. But it’s not all pounding industrial noises …read more »

Did you see Coldplay at Glastonbury? If you didn’t, it’s perhaps amazing you managed to avoid it, given it sems to have been shown live on the BBC and then again and again for days. Which means you probably did it on purpose, so if I were you, I’d move on to the next post.

Still here? Good… …read more »

On Christmas Day 2010, Damon Albarn’s “Gorillaz” project released a new album – “The Fall”.

Recorded entirely on tour -and primarily on Albarn’s iPad – The Fall documents the experience of the 2010 American tour, and was given away to fans as a “Christmas Present” from the band. …read more »

Between now and the end of the year we’ll be rounding up some older stuff that we really love, but that (due to shiny exciting sparkly newness) we haven’t featured on emudir…

In 2008, newly free from record company ties, Nine Inch Nails released a new album – “The Slip“. Critically acclaimed as a return to form, The Slip seems to be part of Trent Reznor’s new prolific period, seeing NIN produce more focused, stripped-down work, and focusing on what they do best: music. …read more »

A very quick post, this – just a little extra something to add to your music collection… should you want to:)

Boing Boing recently reported on WFMU’s “Product Music: Vol 1“, a collection of corporate songs for familar products. Although perhaps questionable taste. Enjoy!

If you haven’t seen the movie about Facebook – “The Social Network” – as yet, here’s a reminder that there’s a free 5-track sampler of the soundtrack, scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, available from the official Nine Inch Nails website.

To get it, simply register with your email address, and they will send you a link that’s valid for 24 hours. You can only download once per email address though, so I’d make sure you’re in a position to download it right then and there before registering…

The DJ Girl Talk is giving out his new album “All Day” as a free download. Not just that, but it’s licensed under Creative Commons, which is also pretty cool as it means you’re even free to create your own remixes.

The album is intended to be listened to in one, and so while it’s available as a single long MP3, you can also download as separated MP3s for ease of navigation. …read more »