my response to the $700 bank bailout and the pending $35 billion (yes, 35, they raised it by $10 billion over the last week) bailout for the car companies. the finished version is gonna be on our next album but i didn’t want to wait a year to put it out for ya’ll so here it is. hella raw, recorded in 1 take, live in my living room.

If you’re as pissed as I am that banks that finance the rape of our planet and carmakers that produce gas-guzzling tanks that pollute our air and have outsourced most of their best paying jobs to other countries get billions in corporate welfare while the rest of us go broke, maybe it’s time we organize and DO SOMETHING about it.

www.workersolidarity.org
www.protest.net
www.iww.org

and, of course, www.beltainesfire.com for more music.

Posted: December 12th, 2008 under hip hop, music, video.
Comments: none

Just a quick post today to let ya’ll know that my partner, the lovely and supremely talented Laura Noel, has just made her first album available on Jamendo.com as a free download.  check it out:

Posted: October 7th, 2008 under Beltaine's Fire, music.
Comments: none

I suddenly find myself with a new respect for Courtney Love:

Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist’s work without any intention of paying for it.

I’m not talking about Napster-type software.

I’m talking about major label recording contracts.

Courtney Love Redefines Music Piracy, Salon.com

It’s the text from a speech she gave a while back, i don’t know how i missed this at the time.  Some of her info is a bit dated - high quality mp3’s actually sound pretty good and nobody uses napster any more - but the basic points she makes about the music industry and the people who run it are solid.

Posted: July 14th, 2008 under music, open-source & coprights.
Comments: 1

Saw this article and thought it was pretty cool.  check it out.

Ancient hunters painted the sections of their cave dwellings where singing, humming and music sounded best, a new study suggests.

Analyzing the famous, ochre-splashed cave walls of France, the most densely painted areas were also those with the best acoustics, the scientists found. Humming into some bends in the wall even produced sounds mimicking the animals painted there.

…

Because Paleolithic humans had a deep connection with the melodic properties that helped them navigate in a cave, they likely celebrated the unique acoustics by singing in conjunction with their painting sessions.

“Why would the Paleolithic tribes choose preferably resonant locations for painting,” he said, “if it were not for making sounds and singing in some kind of ritual celebrations related with the pictures?”

The phenomenon isn’t limited to the interior of caves, etiher. Studies have been done at some outdoor Paleolithic sites in France and Finland, and the sound-painting connection is also strong, Reznikoff said.

Full article at LiveScience.

Now that’s cool.

Posted: July 9th, 2008 under music, science and history.
Comments: none

’sup folks -

this one goes out to hip hop artists in particular.

i’ve had this idea for a concept album floating around in my head for a while but haven’t had the time to sit down and write it all out, and as i was thinking about it again yesterday i realized it would make a great compilation.

the comp would be called ‘letters from the underground’ and the idea is an album made up of songs that are all letters from members of an underground revolutionary cell.  the setting is a dystopian not-too-distant future where the threat of ‘terrorism’, rising oil prices, and looming economic collapse have allowed corporations to seize control of everything directly and set up a ‘ruling committee’ made up of the heads of all the biggest corporations that rules all of north america (and from there most of the rest of the world) by direct decree.  it’d be light on the sci-fi ish, heavy on politics.  Something like an updated version of 1984, but told with personal stories and a variety of perspectives and in the form of music.

the letters could be about anything - how much someone misses their family, a poem for a comrade who’s been killed by the pigs, political rants about the system, ballads about if and how nonviolent resistance is still possible, songs about direct action and underground organizing in the face of heavy repression, even accounts of hunting down and assassinating members of the ruling committee, anything.

it’d be distributed online for free as a promo over the rapanarchists.net site and include links to websites and info for all of the artists who contributed.  i’d like to have it be a compilation of only explicitly anarchist hip hop artists, but if there isn’t enough interest I’ll open it up to other genres of music as well.

If you’re interested, let me know.  we need 8-14 tracks total to make this work.  feel free to forward this if you know someone who’d be a good addition to the comp.

the deadline to send in tracks would be end of july, august at the latest.

Posted: June 19th, 2008 under hip hop, music.
Comments: 4