The world is awash with free music these days!

There was a big discussion lately on a Bristol geeks mailing list I subscribe to about the Digital Economy Bill with the result that several people concluded that they'd be boycotting BPI members music for the foreseeable.

Being active in music-blog-land it's hard to get so passionate about it I find - I haven't bought (except for from charity shop, & car boot sales) any major label music for years. Not because I'm too cool for it or it's too mainstream for my tastes, I love a bit of Dario G, me, but because I'm so completely swamped by the amount of music I can (legitimately) get by bypassing the music 'industry', often for free. Of course, there's still major questions about how independent artists should go about releasing music these days, but I just feel like something like the DEB could not be less relevant to the way we interact with music these days. Let them have their fun making no-longer-applicable rules, lets have ours with some amazing music, shall we?

So anyway, after the jump, here's a whole bunch of free (mostly hip hop based) albums that I've been checking out lately...

M.anifest - The Birds & The Beats

Born in Ghana,resident in Minneapolis, his beats & his delivery remind me of Mos Def & K Naan (but maybe the latter is just suggestion due to the 'dude from hot place living in cold place' effect), none of this is really groundbreaking but it's solid hip hop of the kind I grew up with, with a smattering of Africanesque sounds in the production... lovely stuff.

Crookram - Through Windows

According to last.fm, on Through Windows 'soul, funk, hiphop and library music have been combined with modern downtempo beats and movie samples to create a funky yet dusty seventies vibe', it's instrumental hip hop with elements of RZA and DJ Shadow (especially the track 'Sun' with a melody really reminiscent of that really famous DJ Shadow tune what I can't remember what the name of it is (I AM THE GRAMMAR KING)), real nice, dramatic, cinematic but still summery & chilled vibes.

Staying on the instrumental hip hop theme: Nicaraguan-born, Miami-raised Beatcasso has a more experimental, wonky take on the genre - he's got two free albums to download on his website, Thoughts of a Waiter & Poetry in the Club (which contains no poetry & probably wouldn't get an airing in your average club). Quite uneasy listening occasionally, but then there's always tension in a hip hop beat, Beatcasso is just spinning that tension out a little more, in the way that Autechre sometimes do (or used to at least - the title track of 'Thoughts of a Waiter' really reminds me of circa-twelve-years-ago Autechre) though possibly not going quite as far, and the results are wicked. Also check out Beatcasso's apocalyptic closer to the awesome Just Like Music / Apple Juice - Oscillations Part 2 compilation.

Last one, and it's a mixtape rather than an album per se: Bird Peterson - Drankenstein Vol 1

It's based on an idea I started working with when i created the Dope Boys remix for Diplo's recent Guccimane mix. This is my amalgamation of two trends i've always loved: the dirty south and the use of trance synths in current rap. Here I have taken 15 or so of my favorite southern rap songs and 15 or so of my favorite trance synth lines to create something thats not corny or funny, it's simply the motherfudgin' jam!

You probably have to have a soft spot for cheesy commericial trance to dig this, but I'm not afraid to admit that I do, since at the last count I'm pretty sure I have a soft spot for every genre. Sometimes this works really well, taking the trance synth riffs and looping them, without ever letting the 4 4 drums bang out and so spinning out the tension of the breakdown, juxtaposing that tension with the often quite predictable vocal content of dirty south rappers - don't get me wrong, i love the flow and delivery of most of these guys, but they aint shakespeare. Highlight for me so far (i'm about half way through) is at around 32 minutes. fraid I don't know what the component parts are though.

Download that badboy

More free albums!