Every milestone is just as important as the last, no mountain is too high to climb. For this, our 150th release on the label, we present to you a new compilation featuring 12 exclusive new songs and mixes from our artists, including 3dtorus, Antti Tammimaa, echosonic, Heskin Radiophonic, hxw hxw, Katarrhaktes, Quiggers, and we are not broken. Here’s to 150 more to come! Cheers!
download: bandcamp | archive.org
The Dusted Wax netlabel brings a digital remaster of an EP originally released in the heady days of 2010. This EP is absolutely essential old school hip-hop – sample-laden funky, jazzy beats with trip-hop and lofi elements thrown in. Excellent stuff.
Download: Internet Archive
Our good friends at GrappaFrisbee keep delivering the goods! This is another excellent EP of electronic, instrumental hip-hop. This never fails to deliver quality beats and slick melodies.
Download: Bandcamp
Three tracks of ambient, avant-garde sounds mixing field recordings with circuit-bent weirdness. It may be difficult to listen to, but all the more rewarding for persisting!
Download: Internet Archive
Bleeps, sqeaks and squawks a plenty with this huge outing from the Sostanze netlabel. Crossing somewhere between fidget-house and wonky, humorous instrumental hip-hop. Whatever it sounds like, it sounds amazing.
Download: Sostanze Records
From the consistently excellent Italian netlabel A Quiet Bump comes Voodoo Tapes. This is modern, electronic dub, but it perfectly channels the blood, soul and ganga of King Tubby or Prince Far I through it’s veins.
Download: A Quiet Bump
A collection of four immersive, mesmerising drones. Three drones measure in at around 12 minutes each, giving plenty of room for The Inner Shore to work his magic, creating haunting sound spaces.
Download: Bandcamp
Is it anarcho-folk, freak country or acoustic punk? I don’t know, but Woodspider make a glorious racket. It features bellowed vocals, scraped violins, and acoustic guitars strummed apparently by scissors. Underneath all the racket though is a delightful sense of song-writing, mischief and rock and roll excess.
Download: Bandcamp
You may have guessed by now that we like a bit of Ohsaurus around these parts. This release, from the prolific artist, is one of about 19 he’s released in 2012. Obviously, it’s difficult to pick one as the best, so I went with the “pin the tail on the donkey” technique! This release is totally what you’d expect from The Big Oh – it’s funky, instrumental hip-hop that’s so cool it could freeze a T-1000.
Download: Bandcamp
Okay, I’ve just realised this was released in December 2011… but it doesn’t matter. This is an awesome release of pounding trancey synths and beats. This is old school analogue trance-house given a 21st century digital makeover. The whole thing throbs with sexy, e-powered, unrelenting energy.
Download: Ektoplazm Netlabel
I love Corrupt Autopilot. This is pure garage rock and roll, filtered through with hints of gothic Americana. More boisterous than their previous (also excellent) EP, this is chock full of great riffs, fuzzed guitars and drawled lyrics. It rocks. Go listen.
Download: Bandcamp
There was only one contender for this position – a netlabel release without parrallel anywhere. In fact this is the best record of the year, period. It hasn’t been off my MP3 player since it was released.
This album doesn’t contain a duff track, a bum note or a single foot wrong. It’s perfect.
It redefines and reclaims pop music as a genre – begone you Simon Cowell generated karaoke-bots, begone you factory assembled hit machine girl bands! This is original, electro-pop music as a work of art, something that is lovingly created, rather than cynically, synthetically packaged.
This album absolute pings with imagination, creativity, wit and it’s impossible not to get excited by that. And if you don’t want to take my word for it, read all the other reviews on the webpage.
Download: Records On Ribs Netlabel
So December is here, 2013 is almost upon us. First we have the Season of Good Will and Obligatory List Making!
I’d like to begin by saying, there is no way that this list is comprehensive or objective. There have been thousands of netlabel and netaudio in 2012, and I’ve listened to a couple of hundred. Also, the list is purely based on my own musical preferences.
Anyway, the point is I heartily recommend these to you all. They are all free to download, all great listens, and if you haven’t got them already, go and get them and listen to them!
We’ll be back next Friday with the Top 5!
Okay, you’re probably thinking this is a bit biased, and you’d be right. FWONK*100 represented our 100th release, and was a summation of the talent and creativity that has accrued within Fwonk* over the past four-and-a-half years. It had everything from industrial metal, to ambient drones, to synth pop and our first classical contribution from Eivind and his room-filling, home built MIDI pipe organ.
Download: Fwonk* Netlabel
The Ghost Of 3.13 originally burst onto Sociopath Recordings with this album, now available on Bandcamp. This is ambient, electronic glitch-hop from Romania. As the name suggests, there is a ghostly, ethereal glow throughout the album, even on the low down and dirty glitchy, crackly hip-hop numbers. It sends shivers down the spine, even in the heat of summer.
Download: Bandcamp
In a similar vein, this is spooky European glitch-hop at it’s best. Throbbing saw-basses glower menacingly, guitar loops echo and fade. Distinctly melancholy and threatening, this is a downbeat trip into the dark-side of an upbeat musical style.
Download: Camomille Music
This is a huge, pounding EP of sparkling synths, throbbing dubstep, rock, glitch, hip-hop. Pretty much every musical style of 2012 is present in this album, and it makes for a non-stop adrenaline rush. Only one word of warning – this would be far higher up this list without the guitar solos.
Download: Ektoplazm Netlabel
Snailking are a stoner-doom-metal three piece. These three songs are smothered in the finest trappings of the genre – wreathed in a cloud of bongsmoke, down-tuned guitars, growling vocals and a tempo that’s so slow, it’s almost in reverse. This is like listening to Kyuss put through Paul Stretch. Love it!
Download: Bandcamp
As the name Büromaschinen suggests, this is electronica with a distinctly early 80s, Kraftwerk inspired feel, though there are touches of funkier 80s Miami Vice style rhythms. It’s a great, fun listen, but it never moves out of it’s “80s cop-movie soundtrack” groove.
Download: Upitup Records
Everyone’s favourite German minimalist techno netlabel celebrates 2012 with another outstanding release from their long standing contributor Cavalerra. This is effortlessly cool – pads whoosh, beats pound and percussion clicks.
Download: Broque Netlabel
Quite an oddity this – it mixes almost Tool-esque post-rock guitar parts mixed with hip-hop beats, trip-hop samples and oceans of psychedelic delay. Unlike this weeks other two releases, this definitely ploughs its own furrow, but whether it is as successful an EP is more subjective.
Download: Archive.org
This compilation celebrates the 5th birthday of the Rec72 netlabel (an anniversary we will be celebrating here at Fwonk* in the New Year!) with an LP crammed with new instrumental, electronic and ambient music, filled with bleeps, filter sweeps and crackles.
Download: Rec72 Netlabel
Breathe and Tease is one 26 minute long track by live-looping artist Georgina Brett. The looping of vocals adds an immediate organic quality, and the track owes as much to Gregorian Chant or Arvo Pärt as it does to electronically generated ambient music.
Download: Ethereal Live Netlabel
A welcome return to action from Italian master of the ambient drone Ornitology (aka Andrea Scevola). Drownedsun is a three track EP of ghostly ambient tunes coated with a crisp, wintery frost.
Download: Bandcamp
Lost Twin is the work of Seville born, Brighton based beatmaker Carlos R Pinto and it’s mix of off the wall ambient weirdness and instrumental hip-hop is a delight to the ears. It manages to be relaxing and funky at the same time. Lovely stuff!
Download: Bandcamp
Fiction City brings us just a single track, but its a cracker. Here On Earth is an ambient track filled with great squelchy acid grooves and relaxed beats, and choir pads. It’s quite a retro affair, but if you imagine The Orb, Aphex Twin and Enigma having a jam session, it would probably sound like this.
Download: Circles & Lines Recordings
Subtle and melodic by Sociopath’s usual standards, this 4 track EP is a blast of classic-Warp infused IDM and drill and bass. Smooth pads, twisted beats and pulsing basslines give you everything you need.
Download: Sociopath Recordings
Hello and welcome to our first netlabel – or as the title more accurately suggests, netaudio – round-up since our FWONK*100 blow out! Why the change to netaudio? Well I think it more accurately reflects our changing times – in the current era of Bandcamp and Soundcloud, an act or band can get their music on the internet without needing the resources of a label (i.e. web design, hosting etc.). Does that mean that netlabels serve no purpose in the modern era? I don’t think so… but this is the subject of an entire blogpost to itself. On with the music!
We featured Corrupt Autopilot’s previous album Inside The Crystal Palace back in May, and that’s album’s had a lot of rotation on my iPod since then. This new EP takes the fuzzed up Americana and gives it a garage rock and roll kick up the pants. Love it!
Download: Bandcamp
On the Kreislauf netlabel comes this squelchy, funky, drippy instrumental electronic hip and trip hop EP. Stunning production, funky beats and glorious melodies abound.
Download: Archive.org
From the Kahvi Collective comes this mammoth compilation – 29 tracks, 185 minutes – from a whole range of their artists, across multiple genres, from ambient, IDM, big-beat and more.
Download: Kahvi Collective
Welcome to FWONK*100 – our hundredth release on the good ship Fwonk*! As we settle down, to read our congratulatory letter from HRH The Queen, we give – as the first salvo in a five-album salute – this massive compilation to you.
Featuring Fwonk* regulars and old-timers such as Heskin Radiophonic, Styli, Vasko The Pig, Katarrhaktes, Fudgedubnofunk, Organic Shift Man and Nemmo this also features – at long last! – the first Fwonk* recording from Norwegian progmeister and father-to-us-all Eivind Fivelsdal.
Fwonk* would especially like to thank Katarrhaktes for the going and building that amazing sculpture and making the artwork just for lil’ ol’ us.
download: bandcamp | archive.org
