Friday, December 02, 2011

Giving it Away, Until I Think Better of it


I have been living under various rocks for most of my life but recently emerged from my latest rock to see the weird harsh light of our new digital world.  I guess it first happened when my hard drive crashed and I lost all my information, including old demos, new things, and music for listening pleasure.   My turntable is broken and getting it fixed is annoying, so, for the first time, I gave illegal downloading a go.

Seems crazy and hypocritical, right?   Especially when I ask people to buy my music?   Yeah maybe.   But all this illegal downloading has exposed me to such great music, from unreleased Can to Les Paul and Mary Ford to Kraftwerk bootlegs to Gene Clark.   

It's a weird time in music.   If you just enter an album title and "rar" into google, you can download an album and be listening to it in 30 seconds.

In this digital age, it is just insanely easy to steal things, and I myself have recently seen the benefit of it.

So I am putting all my old music up as "pay what you want" on bandcamp.

It's kind of funny/bizarre.   Some of the old releases I did not have anymore so I had to google them and 'illegally' download them from filesharing sites.

I am still charging money for special objects... any item I produce that you can hold in your hands will be a special and unique object.   But, as far as I can tell, there is no enforceable way to make listeners pay for mp3s.

You can download most of my back catalog here:

http://blankfritz.bandcamp.com

Blank Fritz is the name of my new band, whenever it comes together.  For the time being, I am playing alone.   Perhaps a bit premature, or perhaps a bit optimistically, I named the site Blank Fritz.   Now it is just a name sitting there, a reminder that I am playing solo and have not gotten another band together.


Sunset was always an evolving concept but it went too far in one direction and when that group of people fell apart, I needed a break from the name, even though on many of the recordings I had played everything. It had morphed into another entity. And when that entity died (or, rather, continued on as Sleep Good, gawd bless em) I decided to take a deep long breath.


Ahhhhhhhhhh.