For those who know a bit about me, you know one of my favour­ite musi­cians is Gisle Martens Meyer, his most fam­ous musical pro­ject being Ugress. I fol­low the blog, I buy the music, I down­load the music that isn’t sold, I even briefly con­sidered mak­ing a trip to Min­nesota at one point to see his first (and so far only) live show in North Amer­ica. If I’m a “fan” of anything/​anyone in this world, it’s surely Ugress. Still it took me over 2 weeks to build up the need to part with my hard-​​earned £6 (it’s always a fun sur­prise to find out at the end of the month how much my credit card com­pany has charged me for for­eign cur­rency) and buy his latest album. In fair­ness, I am very cheap.

(If you’re inter­ested in his music, most of his albums offer free tracks and the rest are only 79 pence each)

First, a brief review. Remin­is­cience is much bet­ter than Uni­corn (the pre­vi­ously most recent album) in my opin­ion. Uni­corn had some good songs but the dir­ec­tion of the album was a little poppy for me, focus­ing a lot around the vocals of Christine Litle (who I must con­fess is pretty darned cute and a good singer to boot). This album’s more about the beats and the sound aes­thet­ics, which is what got me inter­ested in Ugress in the first place. I’ve only listened to half the album so far and I already I have a good 3 or 4 new favour­ite songs.

Read­ing his blog, you get the impres­sion that GMM is more a sound engin­eer than a com­poser. That’s prob­ably an exag­ger­a­tion (and it’s easier in text to describe engin­eer­ing pro­cesses than a par­tic­u­lar com­pos­i­tion on the go), but it’s pretty clear he takes sound pretty ser­i­ously. I’ve paid spe­cial atten­tion to it lately and noticed he really does a remark­able job of get­ting the most of the dynamic range that the (16-​​bit sample depth/​90dB, if I’m not mis­taken) MP3s will give you. Cool inter­est­ing post: describ­ing how he used a speech syn­thes­izer to gen­er­ate lyr­ics. Okay now I really am sound­ing like a fan.…

Any­way what I really wanted to talk about was GMM’s reac­tion to the album being pir­ated (or copy­right infringed upon to use made-​​up pos­sibly cor­rect ter­min­o­logy). He doesn’t just do the pro­duc­tion him­self, but he does all of the pub­lish­ing and dis­tri­bu­tion and what­not him­self. Tra­di­tional music labels, I under­stand, are as good as dead and worse than use­less. He gives out some free tracks, the rest are cheap and dis­trib­uted largely online, he’s okay with mash-​​ups and pub­lic per­form­ances and deriv­at­ive works and using his music as a back­ground to your stu­dent film. He dis­trib­utes the music in high qual­ity (320kbit/​s) non-​​DRM MP3s and even in FLAC.

What’s inter­est­ing about this is that he’s one of the very few (the only one I’m really closely famil­iar with) that is doing everything Right and makes it his day job (and then some; I worry a little if he has a life besides). Not that it I should be sur­prised that it would get pir­ated. People will pir­ate any­thing. People pir­ate free soft­ware. It’s almost like people put more effort into pir­at­ing than it would take to get some­thing legit­im­ately just for the sake of pir­at­ing. Well I’m not being fair: clearly people are pir­at­ing because a £6 album costs £6 more than a £0 album.

The primary reason I sup­port free soft­ware is to give free­dom to the users to use and repur­pose the soft­ware how­ever they like. This is from a dog­matic stand­point (I treat soft­ware pub­lish­ers con­trolling their soft­ware with great sus­pi­cion), from a qual­ity stand­point (there’s an annoy­ing bug in OS X’s Terminal.app for the past 6 months or so that I could likely fix in lit­er­ally a minute, but Apple has pre­ven­ted me from doing so) and from a human­it­arian stand­point (it’s near impossible to advance human­ity with improv­ing on one another’s work without per­mis­sion). I can see how this car­ries over from soft­ware into other realms of “inform­a­tion”. One thing I’m def­in­itely not is an eco­nom­ist, but I’ve increas­ingly viewed the Free Soft­ware Foundation’s free­dom 2 (that you should be able to share what you like with your neigh­bour) with some hes­it­a­tion. It’s a fant­astic idea in a great many of cases (cf., Linux), but I don’t see this as a strict mat­ter of free­dom, but as a mat­ter of eco­nom­ics and it’s one that I think can be treated on a case-​​by-​​case basis.

With this in mind I see GMM’s way of doing things as the Right way of doing things, or more accur­ately, as a Right way of doing things and would like more people to send him money in exchange for his hard work. Then again, I am just a fan. Ser­i­ously, The Bosporus Incid­ent is awesome.

For those who know a bit about me, you know one of my favourite musicians is Gisle Martens Meyer, his most famous musical project being Ugress. I follow the blog, I buy the music, I download the music that isn't sold, I even briefly considered making a trip to Minnesota at one point to ...