At the demise of the original MP3.com, a vast amount of good, free music disappeared from the Web, and some of it to this day proves very hard if not outright impossible to obtain again. For example, if hard drive trouble has troubled you. On this page here on telcontar.net I plan to archive a few tunes I still have in my possession that are hard or impossible to find.
I develop the site on my Mac, so the filenames are all 31 characters max (bummer) but all the files are properly tagged. Many of the tunes also suffer from the MP3.com effect
: their horrible Hissmangle codec (the worst MP3 codec on the planet). However, not all are MP3.com originals.
Simon Edwards, AKA Oxygen, Oxygen UK and Oxygen-Skyline on various free MP3 sites, is an English electronic artist whose influences include Jarre, Vangelis, Crystal Method and even Mike Oldfield I think. His style is quite unique and refreshing. Moments of Calm part 3 was some of the first modern studio electronic music I listened to (found while searching the Web for music by Mike Oldfield not long after going online at home for the first time) and it addicted me, beginning my exploration of ambient electronic music including Cyscape.
His most recent work is on his SoundClick page (see the music page) but his older work has generally vanished into oblivion. I have posted my entire collection of his older work. All five tracks; I was choosy!
Within about two weeks of posting this page, I received an e-mail from Simon thanking me for putting the tunes up, as he himself had lost all his old music and was glad to some of it back again!
Deep and somewhat surreal ambient music with an eerie science fantasy tinge from Phil Riches. I only had three Cyscape tunes from MP3.com (as I hated them at first and rediscovered them on my drive a few years later!) so I cannot say what else was legally available. That said, the following are high quality CD rips, instead of poor MP3.com-quality audio:
Cyscape is still around and I was put in touch with him by his former label (Farfield Records) and was thus able to purchase three CDs from him. I’ve since discovered that he has posted his music to LegalSounds.com.
Funky trance duo Steve Moir and Mike Carone were responsible for one of my all-time favourite tunes, the kicking dance tune Differential. After a long wait, I got an e-mail out of the blue from Mike offering me copies of all their music to enjoy and share, so here is the first bunch. Curiously, despite their name, Differential is not trance but in fact drum and bass/breakbeat instead, something I very much appreciated long before I knew what it was.
Science-fiction themed, chilled dance and ambient music. There seems to be nothing much on Google for DarkUFO so I consider their music pretty much abandoned. There was a lot of their music on MP3.com and I have selected four below; if you desire more then please contact me!
Some music still eludes me over a year on, and I would be delighted if anyone could provide me with copies again. At present, I seek:
If any of the artists for any reason do not want their music posted here, just drop me a line and I will remove it.