Beth Quist - Monsters

Sometimes it pays to look back through our Black Sweater White Cat playlists, when we hosted a two or three hour Creative Commons only show on WBCR-LP in Great Barrington Massachusetts. One of these look-backs brought me to Beth Quist, who is credited as the reason that Magnatune was started.

"It was Beth Quist who inspired me to create Magnatune... 
John Buckman - Magnatune

You can read more on her Magnatune bio page, and you can listen to her music and buy any of her four albums. Beth was Magnatune's best seller for three years. This is not a huge surprise, her voice is pretty damn amazing.

In BSWC history, we played a number of her songs in 2005 and 2006. This song, Monsters, was not on any of those playlists, so it makes its debut today, 12 years after being released. It is the third track on her album Silver.

I hope you enjoy!

Beth Quist - Monsters

BSWC One-a-Day: SinQ - Who's Afraid of Noises?

I was dipping into a Monotonik release by Sin Q, Passage [mtk164] and detected the touch of a Lisa Debenedictis sample and I was hooked.

Hooked by the sample and then by the quiet simplicity that Sander van Oirschot, a Dutch electronic musician, brings to this release.

The Lisa Debenedictis sample comes from one of her Magnatune releases and lives at ccMixter.

The release notes discuss today's selection:

SinQ's blend of triphop, electronics, and ambient is evocative and beautiful, with first track 'Who's Afraid Of Noises?' using haunting female vocals, samples from noted Dutch jazz pianist Jeroen van Vliet, and a loping Bristolian sound to air things out in a rather wonderful way.

I should point out that this is the second reference to the Bristol sound on this blog in a week. How cool is that?

Put your headphones on and join me in contemplation.

SinQ - Who's Afraid of Noises?

BSWC Radio Show 1.13.07: Ridin' the Faders

Thanks to Victor Stone and Magnatune, this week we got to go to town with the latest Magnatune remix release, Ridin' the Faders 2 featuring Fourstones, Pat Chilla, Lo Tag Blanco and Clarance Boddyker all from ccMixter. In a post on his blog, Virtual Turntable, Victor has this to say about the release:

So under the cover of darkness, late last night Magnatune Remixed: Ridin the Faders 2 went online for download, streaming, purchase or license. About %5 of the proceeds for RTF2 album will go to me, the rest goes to Magnatune, the artists I sampled and my collaborators. This is how I want it and why I’m involved in the Magnatune Remixed project: to help support the business folks and artists who have acknowledged the new fundamental truth of the music industry that “giving away your music is good for your career.” That’s my agenda and I’m sticking to it.

It is a fantastic release and kudo's to all of those involved. You can find it for download in a variety of flavors from Magnatune.

And, with that said, here is the show:

Black Sweater, White Cat - January 13, 2007

You can find the playlist here...

Lisa Debenedictis and YouTube

Recent work from a long-time BSWC friend, Gurdonark...



A search for Lisa pulls up a handful of videos with attribution to her music. This is one of the great things about CC...good CC music can become a social meme and take off...In Gurdonark's words:

Lisa DeBenedictis' song Tigers appears o Lisa DeBenedictis' song Tigers appears on her album Tigers from magnatune.com. Lisa is one of the most remixed artists on the 'net, because she kindly posts her a capellas with Creative Commons licenses for others to remix. One of those remixes of her voice, "Brilliant Daze", by professional hip hop musician and producer Pat Chilla the Beat Gorilla, even found its way onto a lonelygirl15 video.

This music video is itself a kind of Creative Commons visual remix. The photographs, which are credited in the film, are all by Flickr.com artists who kindly granted BY or BY SA licenses to use their work. This kind of sharing makes for a Creative Commons (see www.creativecommons.org) which is a wonderful alternative to major-corporate-hegemony musical culture.

The visuals of this film are therefore licensed Creative Commons BY SA, while the music is BY SA NC, which permits non-commercial uses.

Thanks to Lisa and her husband B. for allowing use of photos of her in the film.

Later this week we'll take a look at some of the lonelygirl15 stuff.

Lisa DeBenedictis on Black Sweater, White Cat

We have invited the CC Chanteuse extraordinaire, Lisa DeBenedictis to join us this coming Saturday. We were pleasantly surprised when she accepted our invitation. You can join us too. Our terrestrial mothership, WBCR-LP now has a live internet stream so you can hear the interview live. We expect to talk to Lisa between 9 and 9:30ish EDT. Naturally, we will be playing a selection of her music from Magnatune.com and some of the remix material from ccmixter.

Magnatune and ccmixter got together to have a remix contest featuring the Magnatune releases by Lisa with the entire Magnatune catalog of over 1,700 pieces of music available for source material. There were some really wonderful pieces generated for the contest and the 13 creators who made the top 15 winning entries were signed to a Magnatune recording contract and appear on a commercially available remix album.

Try Love Bird by callmeyang featuring the vocals of Lisa DeBenedictis.

Don't forget, if you can't make the live broadcast you can always pickup the podcast right here at biotic.blogspot.com.

Thanks for listening.