By Bro. Jo Stern, on June 25th, 2009
 Music – like birds, spiders and Deirdre Rachid – makes the most sense when it’s free. Since long before I was born music been shackled, packaged and presented to us as shiny eye catching parcels, watering down it’s spirit and diluting it’s soul.
Spotify is my new favourite ever thing on the Internet, it’s incredible and is helping to push along the idea that – having to pay for, download and store music is soon to be obsolete, thank Jah.
A Spotify client for iPhone is almost ready, surely there will be ports to Symbian, and as our embarassingly slow-interneted country finally gets to grips with decent mobile broadband I wouldn’t be surprised if we started seeing standalone Spotify or We7 or other streamcatching boxes springing up in the next few years.
I’m currently onsite at the Glastonbury festival, it’s not exactly Free Music at 175 quid a ticket but with 700 acts over 4 days it’s not bad value. Rolf Harris is playing, oh, and Status Quo.
By Bro. Jo Stern, on June 13th, 2009
 I’d been milling the idea around in my head for a few months before I started, the iPonce is a great little tool but as a musical instrument it’s pretty shitty for a number of reasons – (tiny screen, clumsy latency in a lot of apps) So I shot about an hour of footage of twelve music apps, one note/hit at a time, all in B minor, set the tempo of the matrix thing at the start to run at roughly 160fps (it was actually 161 but I got away with it) meaning every five frames would be a lovely division of a musical semi-quaver, every ten would be a quaver and so on.
Then I just played around with groups of instruments for a couple of days until a couple of themes started to reveal themselves. Once I had a couple of themes I built an arrangement and fleshed it out, you know how it goes from there.
I wish I’d been a bit more theatrical with some of the hand movements looking at it now, the fast jungle type drums towards the end don’t really offer much visually and some of the other stuff appears a little out of sync due to the latency of the iPhone apps.
Also the Twitter stuff at the start is a bit gratuitous but that’s kinda half the reason why I started it, I was always gonna pimp it on twitter, just to see how much work it would take to get a thousand hits, which I managed in about ten days.
I’m working on a new vid where my kids are all playing the instruments, again, one note or hit at a time, it’s slow going as I’ve got a lot of real-life work on but come July I’m hoping to have some footage to start playing around with.
Maybe if enough of us start writing music this way we can get some snapping and timing features implemented into some of the better video editing packages? It’s probably about time some of the DAW packages offered a video sampling type feature too. I love tightly synced musical videos, I reckon it’s the freshest artform out there at the moment, there’s only a handful of true pioneers – Lasse Gjertsen and Kutiman are really the only worthy contenders, the latter utterly destroying the apparent former inventor by the way.
I’m also bang into the idea of musical projects that ignore time and space like the utterly stunning Playing For Change project, words can’t describe how awesome, and more importantly, simple and achievable that idea was. Be sure to check out every episode.
Sometimes there’s too much new music for me to comprehend, other times I’m ready for it and I gorge myself blind on whatever I can get my ears on, I’m not listening to much new stuff at the moment but I expect a good mental kicking down the bunker with the Foilface miscreants will fix that. Let’s get bizzay!
By Bro. Jo Stern, on March 13th, 2009
 I have a tune here, ready to be uncovered and swooned to. Its a lovely acoustic cover of Aha’s seminal 80′s track ‘Take On Me’ (no giggling, it’s a top tune – yes it is! Stop pretending to be cool).
The question is – who is Cubass? All I know is that he’s only ever recorded one tune, likes snickers and lives somewhere near Manchester. He’s like the Lord Lucan of alt-acoustic loveliness. Here’s the tune:-
(MP3) Cubass – Take On Me
Rumour has it, he’s a big fan of Foilface. That said, he’s also supposedly a big fan of Mama Mia and Mariah Carey, so there’s no accounting for taste….
By Bro. Jo Stern, on February 21st, 2009
Surely there can’t be even more insanely talented, fresh-faced young men connected to the Foilface movement? Surely somebody somewhere should really be keeping tabs on all this amazing Manchester music?
Well luckily some of us are, wrap your ears around the sonic beauty of Audiopoesis, the core of which is two humble science nerds who get together sporadically to churn out some extremely high-quality ambient electronic instrumentals. Their unique and inspiring sound swings gently between brooding soundscapes, scattered twitchy electronic percussion moments to heart-rending live violin passages.
Now we’ve finally managed to get our shit together down at Foilface HQ there’s a good chance that we’ll be getting these boys involved with some musical sorcery at some point in the future. Check out their myspace for some excellent and absolutely free music, delicious, boom.
By Bro. Jo Stern, on February 13th, 2009
 Okay, just for a minute I need to stop banging on about the amazing, awesome free MP3 downloads of new recent music by Foilface. Did we mention Foilface?
This week, I have mostly been listening to some sonic mind treats in the form of Tokyo2005‘s new free uk music downloads. If you don’t listen to anything else this week, then definitely listen to these fine new UK sounds. Tokyo2005 is the sort of emotionally engaging music that will lift your soul and make you think you can do stuff that you clearly can’t, but will enjoy believing that you can for a few dreamy moments of ‘mind MTV’.
There.
So anyway, there’s this ace new Manchester band called Foilface, right, and…
By Bro. Jo Stern, on February 3rd, 2009
 Look at the quizzical look on this small 1970′s child’s face. He isn’t questioning his haircut. Nor is he questioning the early emergence of a double chin. No, this child is pondering the phrase ‘Foilface’. Is it a state of mind? Or is is just a face covered in foil?
Five minutes after this photo was taken, the child realised he was asking the wrong questions. And many years later he just accepted the fact that Foilface was a part of his life, no matter how mysterious or vague that seemed.
Foilface is the psychedelic music that floats around inside his mind and occassionally escapes from his mouth ready to hook onto the beautiful music of others and create landscapes of sonic wonderment and babble. Foilface is the holy roasting of meats and the saviour of musical left-overs. A nonsense of wildly sensible proportions…
By Bro. Jo Stern, on February 2nd, 2009
 Another Foilface session came and went last night and another tune is in the can (but for the sake of a sensible polish). What fun this Saturday recording malarky is. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of it. It certainly beats being squeezed into a bar somewhere, eating twiglets and sucking in my gut as I wink at ladies and pretend to be interesting to strangers.
Our latest opus is called ‘We are the Broken Steeples’ (or maybe just ‘Broken Steeples’ as it sounds a bit less like something a cheesy 1970′s country and western band from Newcastle might holler as they step onto the stage of a spit and sawdust pub in Rochdale). After 20 or so listens it sounds a bit like Odelay-era Beck meets Gruff Rhys’ solo stuff to me but it’s tricky to pin down. The words sinister and perky spring to mind. Maybe we’ve created a new genre – ‘Sinister-Perk’.
Anyway, at some point over the next few months you’ll get the chance to hear it on this site if you fancy (there’s already a couple of tunes on our mp3 page if your curious and fancy some free Manchester music for your ipod).
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Music – like birds, spiders and Deirdre Rachid – makes the most sense when it’s free. Since long before I was born music been shackled, packaged and presented to us as shiny eye catching parcels, watering down it’s spirit and diluting it’s soul.
