Free Galore Downloads and Streams Gathered Fancy

I have been watching films and playing guitar in my sparse spare time. The last week provided a few finds on the web for free media. I list them here on a fine Sunday afternoon that has been spent playing. "And now for the evidence" said the King:


The Medium is the Massage; with Marshall McLuhan. Long-Playing Record 1968.
Side 1 (Mp3)
Side 2(Mp3)
Produced by John Simon. Conceived and co-ordinated by Jerome Agel. Written by Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, and Jerome Agel.
Columbia CS 9501, CL2701.

"The mere classification becomes secondary and inadequate in the speed with which data can now be processed. We are moveing out of the world of data classification and into the world of pattern recognition." Marshall McLuhan (1968)

Now for a festival of downloads swirling around The Spring blog:

Internet Archive: Details: Bell Jam an' Irielan'
A collection of acoustic roots reggae songs written in Belgium and Ireland, recorded one evening at The Green Ark (Alan's music room) in Motueka, Aotearoa/New Zealand. These songs have primarily evolved through extensive busking, so the idea was to try to create the organic atmosphere of a busking session (without all the distractions and noise of a shopping street).

Ail Fionn - seven albums
Ail Fionn is a folk/traditional music duo consisting of Matthew on the saz and Inge on mandolin. For a good while Matthew and Inge were traveling musicians playing throughout Europe and The British Isles often with other local musicians or buskers. A number of their recordings documenting their in-the-field improvisations can be found at The Internet Archive’s Open Source collection. Five of the recordings span the years from 1995 to 2005. The Snailfriends albums are a collection of jams from various places and dates involving Ail Fionn and friends.

Children of the Drone
Children of the Drone is an expanding collective of musicians based in and around Exeter, UK which meets fairly regularly in varying configurations to play entirely improvised music. We're attempting to gently break out of the usual constraints and formats which conventional 'bands' tend to get stuck with these days, and do something a bit different...

Earthcycles
Transmissions for justice and peace - community begins with communication.

The KLF: T H E M A N U A L (HOW TO HAVE A NUMBER ONE THE EASY WAY) (Downloadable Book)
The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way) is a 1988 book by The Timelords (Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty), better known as The KLF. It is a tongue-in-cheek step by step guide to achieving a No.1 single with no money or musical skills, and a case study of the duo's UK novelty pop No. 1 "Doctorin' the Tardis".
The advice dispensed by The Manual includes: "Firstly, you must be skint and on the dole. Anybody with a proper job or tied up with full time education will not have the time to devote to see it through... Being on the dole gives you a clearer perspective on how much of society is run... having no money sharpens the wits. Forces you never to make the wrong decision. There is no safety net to catch you when you fall." and "If you are already a musician stop playing your instrument. Even better, sell the junk." The book also foretells its own imminent irrelevance, The Timelords admitting that they are writing "a book that will be completely redundant within twelve months. An obsolete artifact. Its only use being a bit of a social history that records the aspirations of a certain strata in British society in the late eighties..."
The book is prophetical when it comes to recording technology: "It's obvious that in a very short space of time the Japanese will have delivered the technology and then brought the price of it down so that you can do the whole thing at home. Then you will be able to sod off all that crap about going into studios."
Bill Drummond explained his motivations in an interview: "It was an excuse to say a lot of things I wanted to say about how the industry worked. It was an excuse to go out and say to people all they can say to themselves: If you want to do something, go and do it! Don't wait to be asked, don't wait for a record company to come and want to sign you or a management company. Just go and do it. Also, it was saying: If you wanna have number one...you can have it. It won't make you rich, it won't make you happy, but you can have it."

Pentangle - The Lost Broadcasts 1968 - 1972 [2 CD]
Excellent compilation from Pentangle. From 1968 to 1973 The Pentangle were very often session guests on BBC radio. Some sessions were released in 1995 on "Live at BBC". On 2004 other tapes with unreleased songs and versions were found in BBC archive and included on this CD.

Fag Tapes (Mp3s)
From this month's online Wire: Adventures in Modern Music magazine. Hear music found on the Michigan-based Fag Tapes label. Check a number of tracks by Sick Llama and others on the Fag Tapes label