2/3 a.m.

Matt Stevens’s music really needs no introduction.

You can get it as pay what you want download on his bandcamp.com page or order the CD.

I haven’t heard much free music last month. I was quite busy with work and personal stuff so my list of remarkable releases for September is rather short and even more incomplete than usual. Still, here’s what I discovered last month:

• Altus - Symmetry and Shadow (self release) - Ambient / CC-licensed
• Beth Kleist - Drei (Distance Recordings) - Ambient / Krautrock / Acoustic / Drone / CC-licensed
• M-Pex - iPhado EP (Free Music Archive) - Folk / Fado / Dubstep / CC-licensed
• C. Reider - A Strange Feed (Dystimbria) - Dark Ambient / Noise / Experimental /CC-licensed
• Slept - On A Bright Day (Test Tube) - Ambient / Experimental / CC-licensed
• Matt Stevens - Relic (self release on bandcamp.com) - Postrock / Progressive Rock / Loop-based / CC-licensed
• Neil Wiernik - Broken Strings, Plastic Tubes and Bedside Serenades (Feedback Loop Label) - Ambient / CC-licensed

I guess, Dead Can Dance really don’t need no introduction, so without further ado: Grab this! It’s free! It’s over 20 Minutes of great stuff. It’s a Live-EP. It’s awesome.

Enter your email and get the stuff:

Everybody’s talking about Nirvana’s seminal album Nevermind, which was released 20 years ago, on September 24th 1991. To be honest: I wasn’t a big fan of Nirvana in those days (nor am I today), in fact, I really didn’t care about Grunge. But although my attitude against Grunge hasn’t changed (After a couple of tracks, I simply find it completely boring, sorry folks), I’ve come to learn that Nevermind is a very important album in rock history with some excellent song writing on it and - for what it’s worth - one of the very few well produced early Grunge releases.

My favorite website when it comes to good cover versions, Cover Me, release a nice full album cover of the album with contributions of Patti Smith, Caetano Veloso (!), Animal Collective, Ill Nino, the UK Subs and more. Some covers are surprisingly good - and the best thing: You don’t have to like the original material to listen to this.

Click on the cover art above ↑ to get to the original article or download queue immediately the tracks:

1. Patti Smith – Smells Like Teen Spirit
2. Gringo Floyd – In Bloom
3. Caetano Veloso – Come As You Are
4. Steve Earle – Breed
5. The Polyphonic Spree – Lithium
6. Animal Collective – Polly
7. Ill Nino – Territorial Pissings
8. Coco – Drain You
9. The Retroliners – Lounge Act
10. UK Subs – Stay Away
11. Rogue Wave – On a Plain
12. Tricky – Something In the Way

Happy birthday Leonard Cohen …

Anybody into Shara Worden aka. My Brightest Diamond here? Well, since I first heard her music, I fell in love with her voice and her music. Soon her third album will be released and I’m really looking forward to that. In the meantime, I will enjoy this free download of a remix of her today released single “Be Brave”.

PS.: The player/download doesn’t work (»This track is currently not available«)? Go to this page to listen & download.

And here’s the offical video:

In a couple of days the first edition of the festival Generation Prog will be held in Nuremberg/Germany. The interesting line-up with eight fresh new prog bands from Germany, Scandinavia, UK and the Netherlands will present in two days an all new generation of progressive music.

Along with the festival comes this free download sampler (with the full support of the musicians and labels involved), that offers an excellent introduction to most of bands playing at the festival. The sampler is distributed via the international prog website prog-sphere.com.

Dear artists, would you please do me a huge favour and stop using myspace.com to promote your music? It’s simply too awful. Use Reverbnation, use Tumblr, use Posterous, use Blogger, use Wordpress, use Facebook or whatever you like, but avoid Myspace. I literally hate it trying to find any useful information on that crappy, messy, slow, unintuitive pages, packed with huge ads and spam by other users…

With due respect: What a strange band name M-PeX and what a lame album title iPhado … yet, this mix of dubstep, electronic music and Portuguese guitar music is astonishly coherent and - contrary to what I expected from a release named like this - quite an original and refreshing contribution to the very interesting Portuguese folk music.

Mike Carss aka. Altus, located in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, is one of the most interesting and most individual electronic musicians I’ve happened to stumble upon in the free music world. Though his music is mainly “ambient” he adds more harmony, more melody, more “music” to his works, than most of his colleagues. I’ve made the experience that his music works even for those listeners who usually aren’t much into ambient or electronic music. You could call his music “listener friendly” but don’t mix it up with shallow or boring easy-listening-ambient or pseudo-esoteric junk. Altus produces high quality music, well composed and well recorded.

I fell in love with his wonderful release “Black Trees Among Amber Skies”, one of my favourites free releases from last year, and since then I am enjoying his “aural journeys for the mind’s eye”. His newest release, “Symmetry and Shadow: Singles Collection Volume 2” is an excellent collection to begin with. I’m sure, you won’t regret it.

Download his latest release “Symmetry and Shadow: Singles Collection Volume 2” here:

• http://www.altusmusic.ca/symmetryandshadow/

and, if you’ve missed it last year, make sure to download his masterpiece “Black Trees Among Amber Skies” too

• http://www.altusmusic.ca/blacktrees/