I am delighted that Level Zed, a game design company, used my ccMixter song "Exurb"
in its new game, called Dummy Escape.

The game is available for android in the Google Play market here:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.LevelZed.DummyEscapeLite

and available for the Apple market here:

iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dummy-escape-lite/id589863802?ls=1&mt=8

Many thanks to Slava at Levell Zed for including my song in the game. It's another example of the fun things that Creative Commons sharing can mean. Thanks also to Mixters Institute of Kitchen Percussion and Kaer Trouz, whose samples were shared by them and used by me in the song.

Game image courtesy of Level Zed.

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.

I regularly listen to the Phantom Circuit Podcast, which hails from Birmingham over in beautiful England. I was delighted when I was asked to put together a song cycle to be featured for the podcast. Phantom Circuit Episode 77 now features my song cycle, a collection of gentle songs about rural or forgotten places near Manchester--a phantom circuit for an imaginary railway on tracks of the narrowest gauge. Many thanks go out to the Phantom Circuit Podcast, and to Kevin there, who made the process extraordarily smooth.

Phantom Circuit #77 (12th July 2011) by Phantom Circuit on Mixcloud

The video vlogger Sam Rensiew creates voodles. A voodle is a video doodle in one sense, but the term connotes a bit more than just random sketches with pencil and paper. The works instead explore the parts of scenery outside the narrative--a wall here, a lamp there, the corner of the ceiling there. This oblique way of surveying the landscape
gives rise to videos in which "nothing happens"--and everything is revealed. They are videos of shape and form and intriguing cultural references.

I've been pleased that Sam, who hails from Copenhagen, has used many of my songs in his voodles. My work is "background music" and fits well into his universe which celebrates the shape, the form and the backlighting. Here my song "Awaken" illuminates a scan of a pub and of some other interior scenes:



The song "Awaken" uses these samples;

"Emergence Hymn" by Anchor Méjans
Attribution (3.0)
"Inspiration Ignites Samples" by SackJo22
link: http://ccmixter.org/files/gurdonark/30189

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 think it's good to hear your own work with new ears.

Lately I've enjoyed my LG Ally, which is a cellular telephone which uses the Android operating system. I like two apps in particular: the last.fm application and the Radio Time application. The Radio Time Application allows me to listen to Stillstream.com on the go. Stillstream is a wonderful internet radio station, devoted to playing Creative Commons music. Tonight I listened via cell phone to a selection of tracks from the interesting new dark ambient netlabel, Ambientaria.

The other app I've used a lot is the last.fm app. I love to listen using the "radio" features of the service to artists under the Creative Commons tag, or artists under the Gurdonark Mix Radio, i.e., songs the service suggests I might like, which often comes to the same thing. This morning I was driving to work listening to a "radio station" on last.fm "recommended for me". Among the songs, Last.fm "recommended for me" my own song, "Grass Skipper". It was fun to hear it in an unexpected setting on my car radio. The "Butterflies of North Texas" EP from which it was drawn is less an ambient album than a set of simple melodies with a down-tempo feel. I like melodic minimal work. Here is the zip file of the EP, if you're interested in this set of short songs:

Butterflies of North Texas: a free Creative Commons download

I'm always grateful to folks who use my music in videos. I like the variety of uses, from a baby sling promo to nature photography to time-lapse of clouds to a chat about Harry Potter.

Here some good folks in New Mexico use a number of my songs in the soundtrack to a horror short. The film is appropriately creepy:

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

The Headphonica netlabel released Ergo Phizmiz's "Faust Cycle". Subsequently, other artists were invited to do remixes of this multi-hour work. My remix, "To See the Doctor", appears on the resulting compilation album. As is my way, I put the samples from the original into my software synthesizer and created a new song. I also used the vocal sample from the original for my narrator.

Here is my 2009 EP "Seven Virtues":

Free music for professional licensing

I chose to release this via Jamendo and via last.fm to experiment with how much traffic I would get from this mechanism for release. I've been pleased with the way that the songs have gotten play through this non-net-label form of release.

It's free to share, to use, to add to a soundtrack, to put in a website or game, with attribution to Gurdonark and citation to www.gurdonark.com.


gurdonark by Gurdonark is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

On July 24, 2010, Gurdonark released a collection of images and songs called "Butterflies of North Texas". The collection has its own weblog, located at

Fluttersongs

In keeping with the title, each image and each song is about a butterfly found in north Texas.



The Gulf Fritillary, pictured above, lacks a song of its own. This is a thing to ponder, as it's lovely enough to deserve a sonata.