Part of what I love about sharing music via the internet is the immediacy. Today a
fellow contacted me through ccMixter. "May I use your song in a non-commercial short film?". I reply in substance, "yes, of course, here's how to credit my work". He replies back in substance "Great! I'll send you a link when it's on line".

Never mind that he's in Spain and I'm in Texas USA. Never mind that we've never met, and never corresponded before. Never mind about money, never mind about editorial control. Never mind about production delays, lengthy negotiations, all that.

I post a song, liberally licensed. He confirms the credits, and puts it in a film.
Seamless, easy, and fun beyond belief.

We live in a time of format transition. The mp3 holds sway, while other lossy formats develop their own followings. People make bold declarations about the death of music via this format or that format, when in fact music lives, a bit wild, despite corporate attempts to domesticate it. Traditionalists, meanwhile, seek to bring back the LP record. I loved LP covers.

I have a soft spot in my heart for the cassette movement, which seeks to bring cassettes back into use as an easy way to make independent releases in an alternate format to the digital. Digital recording combined with cassette media for listening offers a lot of possibilities, whether seen as fad or the future.

Yet my heart is aglow over an odder format, thanks to Pharmacom-rec.de's maestro Sascha Mueller, because I got a package from Germany this week. It's the release by Pharmacom of "The Low Times of High Fi", a various artists compilation of MIDI songs. The songs are released on
individual disks. Three songs of mine are disk 8.

The album released a year or two ago, but due to one of those "in the mails" issues, my copy had never arrived. Now it's here, and I'm overjoyed. Never mind that I don't keep a floppy disk drive on my current computer. I can solve that. Instead, just revel with me in that secret joy of a solid, tangible, and yet entirely obscure release. This is just the type of thing that makes a weirdbient heart beat in tune with the rhythm of the universe:

Ever since I began making Creative Commons music, people have been using it in podcasts, films and fun projects. By saying to people "just give me credit and you can use my work", I open it up to all sorts of interesting uses. Once in a while, a use is commercial in a small-business way, like the woman from Estonia who makes hand-made dolls, or the American who emigrated to Germany and now sells baby slings. Usually, though, the use is non-commercial--a fun video about a family thing, or an art piece, or a mini-documentary. The Danish voodle maker Sam Rensiew makes innovative films about form and space, and posts them over at blip.tv. I'm always delighted when, as has often happened, my work accompanies his film. Over 400 films have now been made, from video-makers here, there and yon, using my songs, and they keep on coming. My work has been on the radio, in art galleries, and in video games.

I like to use the search engines at google and vimeo and youtube to hunt for instances of use of my music in films. I am grateful for tags. Today, for example, I found two new films over at vimeo.com. I found the German film "Raum-Licht-Schrift", by Mediaarchitecture.de, a project of Jens Weber and Andreas Wolter. This film shows a set of art projects, apparently as part of a lecture. In Sack, by Gary Voland, the film is a mini-doc of artist Sam Mitchell who makes cool craftings from used coffee bean bags.

A lot of this happens because I participate and post at ccMixter, a site known as a good source for Creative Commons works. My non-mixter songs also get used, but the mixter songs are the majority of such uses. My songs tend to be instrumental and either ambient-ish or just simple little electronica dittys. This kind of thing fits well into a 1 or 3 or 5 minute little video show. Though once in a while I wish I sang folk songs over an acoustic backing, my songs go the places I want them to go--and take me into films and projects which I enjoy. Once in a while I suffer a mis-step, as when I offered recently (gratis) to edit a soundtrack onto a film, but never could make the two folks responsible for the film happy with the things I tried. Usually, the experience is wholly positive. I get fun e-mails, like "can you make a song by this pop band, only using computer noises?" or "would you like to be a feature in our podcast?". For the latter, podcast matter, I hope to complete a song cycle, and merely have to put a little slight dose of perfectionism aside. Perfectionism is rarely my friend, in music or work. I am better just doing my best to do my job, and getting out there.

The whole thing has made me believe even more strongly in the power of sharing, and in what liberal licensing and 'feel free to use this' can mean.

I suppose life cannot all be about my music. I'd rather life be more about kindness.
Here is an animated film I made called "Let Us Be Kind". The words are by a 19th Century American minister named W. Lomax Childress. The music is by magnatune.com artist Lisa DeBenedictis. I did the animation and the narration.

Let Us Be Kind from Gurdonark on Vimeo.

Poem: W. Lomax Childress, 19th Century, public domain.
Images, animation and narration: Gurdonark.
Music by Lisa DeBenedictis