Background images. Paper, stone, lines, patterns, pool table. Very nice. ‘Free textures for your next web project.’

“A year ago, when nobody knew who they were, the demonic L.A. skate-rat rap collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All cranked out music at an alarming rate. And now that nobody will shut up about them, they’re still doing the same thing. Since 2008, Odd Future have released no fewer than 12 full-length albums, as well as assorted between-releases singles — all available free on their Tumblr. Some of those releases are brilliant, paradigm-shifting works of violent vision. Others are entirely forgettable. Almost all of them are worth your hard-drive real estate, and almost all of them will confound you in one way or another. Below, you'll find a guide to every single one of those albums, from their introductory 2008 ‘The Odd Future Tape’ to Frank Ocean’s ‘Nostalgia, Ultra.’, the experimental R&B tape that the crew released just a few weeks ago.”

“The piece is by Mathias Delplanque. Titled ‘Call Center,’ it’s recent a stereo reduction of a sound installation of his from several years back. It was part of an exhibition titled ‘Bombay Maximum City.’ The sounds, he reports, were ‘recorded during the summer of 2006 in a call center in Gurgaon (suburbs of New Delhi).’ The result is a half hour of sound that flirts with narrative, but also manages to transform the everyday into something sonically complex. That the source of the audio is itself such a quintessential emblem of technology, of globalism, of communication services, and of interpersonal mis-communication only adds to its impact.”

Another ‘response album’ from Marc Weidenaum's blog minions, this a collection of recordings that use a human sigh as their source material. The response is to the grumpy, narrow-minded art critic Richard Dorment, who questioned the integrity and quality of artist Susan Philipsz’ Turner Prize-winning ‘Lowlands‘, as well as a number of other artistic endeavors that he considers unworthy of anything more than a ‘long low collective sigh’.

A really excellent Flash game.

I may never get around to listening to this, but the idea is fantastic.

"An article in the May 2010 issue of the magazine The Atlantic critiqued the current generation of young music fans for rampant copyright violation. In a small irony, the illustration used to decorate the article interpolated a detail of a preexisting work that appears to not yet be in the public domain. This notice isn’t intended as a criticism of the illustrator — quite the contrary; the illustration is excellent — but instead of the theoretical foundation of the article, which suggests a clear line between right and wrong where there is, in fact, significant ambiguity. I forwarded Traum’s image, and article it accompanied, to various musicians and asked them if they would record a piece of music that took Traum’s picture literally: use it as a score.”

"Create Your Own @font-face Kits."

Great free releases. Post-pop, lo-fi, experimental, etc. etc.

Fantastic collage/ambient label whose releases are mostly free.

A great selection of VST and AU audio effects plugins for free download.

230 songs across ten discs, all from 1981. Free for download. Lots happening then.

Yeah, it's a crappy linkbait gimmicky list of fonts, but these are good ones (not all of them, and relatively speaking). I didn't Delicious this last month when I found it because I thought I was better than that but I've since needed to find the link again four times, so HERE IT IS. Bite me.

Anticon beatmakers Jel and Odd Nosdam have forty dollars to spend on records at a thrift store and an afternoon to make a song from them. Links here to a short video of them finding the records, taking samples, and piecing them together. The track isn't half bad, even though this is slightly akward and gimmicky. In fact, yeah, just skip the video and download the exclusive so that you have it forever.

"Freedom is an application that disables networking on an Apple computer for up to eight hours at a time." Only restarting can circumvent the time limit you've sent.

A fantastic music blog, with expertly crafted thematic mixes, often centered around certain periods in music. A great source for inspiration and knowledge for the music-obsessive.

A new all-ages venue. Struggling financially, of course, but this is awesome. Idea: offer to do a weekly solo show.

A collection of pretty/interesting/abstract vector fonts for Illustrator.

Pretty muted colors and textures. "When texturizing an image, I usually play with a few layers of different textures. These are some of the base textures I use along with other stock textures."

"Watch free documentaries."

"One hundred ambient tones is a collection of short ≈40sec ambient audio snippets designed to be listened to in 'random' or 'shuffle' ordering. The transitions between tracks, chosen randomly by your machine on playback, become the focus."

"One of the great features of Mac OS X has aways been the built-in spelling checker. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to see what words you've added. But with Dictionary Cleaner, a convienient System Preferences pane for Mac OS X, now you can."

"DMG Canvas builds disk images from template documents that you create."

Spaced repetition! "Designed to help you remember facts (such as words and phrases in a foreign language) as easily, quickly and efficiently as possible. To do this, it tracks how well you remember each fact, and uses that info to schedule review times.

Thanks, as always, WFMU. "Here my friends are 100 tracks to burn on 4 discs to play at your next social gathering."

An excellent playlist that subtly funhouse-mirrors each track of "In Rainbows", exploring and expanding on themes, influences, and directions. This is awesome.

On the price of software.

In case I end up wanting to make Firefox 3 look more look like Safari.

If, for some reason, FlickrExport ever fails me.

Remix album free for download after cease-and-desist drama. It's okay.

An excellent post on Vampire Weekend from Sean at StG. He gets "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" just right. I _love_ this kind of music writing.

"Toneshared is the world's most interesting collection of mobile phone tones made by well known musicians and artists working in the electronic and alternative music scenes." Free, short, sweet. Inclues Caribou, Faux Pas, Califone...

Run IE5, 5.5, 6, and 7 in OS X under X11 emulation. It actually works perfectly and installs in minutes with a few clicks.

Free Mac software for taking webpage screenshots. Can capture the entire length of a page (beyond the "fold").

An excellent resource for wireframing.

Nice recordings of several different sorts of insects. Lots of crickets and bees.

Good collection of screensavers, if you're into that sort of thing. I'm partial to Fliqlo, a big stylish flip-clock.

From the US National Library of Medicine, a huge collection of free, public-domain images from anatomical atlases. A great wealth of material. Wish it were designed better and that the books were all scanned rather than some photographed.

Hit and miss, but still a good collection.

A Japanese musician and composer's free anti-war MP3s.

Excellent!! The 'inverted world' is cool.

"A documentary about the current state of copyright and culture." It's free, of course.

Some very useful utilities. Service Scrubber helps you manage OS X services, Witch turns command+tab into something that can access the windows of individual applications, not just the applications themselves.

"The Freesound Project is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds. Freesound focuses only on sound, not songs."

"The public domain music score library."

Most of the Daytrotter sessions are fantastic, but this set of four tracks is absolutely amazing. (Here began my discovery of the genius that is Will Oldham.)

Transcendental at points.

"An anthology of new work from seventeen writers with websites." I actually discovered this back in 2002 (in high school) but I just found it again, and it's still great.

"...we got together with our favorite mash-up artist, team9, and concocted a Year In Review bastard pop mix featuring 2006's most notable ear candy. You'll hear blog faves mashed for the first time, and a bit of classic rock thrown in for good measure."

Live, unreleased, released, new songs, studio recordings. Generally good quality.

"Free online file conversion." Text, audio, images, video.

French netlabel, free albums. "Electronic soundscapes" and 'Cake on Cake' is great.

Before The Books, Nick had a solo career in glitch, and this is an album of remixes and rarities from his "Willscher" album.

Play Divx, AVI, and tons of other video formats in QuickTime.

"21,000+ Game Music MIDI files." From NES to Xbox 360.

Albums of electronic music by the host of NPR's "All Songs Considered."

Free MP3s from a few of Eno's unreleased projects.

A number of Erik Satie's works performed on acoustic guitar. Played by Pierre Laniau.

Hundreds of free fonts.

700 free little icons.

"Maxel Toft began as a home-recording project in 1999. All recordings are named and numbered according to past U.S. Presidents. Starting with Clinton and continuing in reverse order, Maxel Toft plans to make a recording for (but having nothing to do with)

The Japanese a capella artist featured on the last Björk album. Dozens of songs.

Independent rock about space and time made by two guys (The Platypus and Dr. Mordo).

Dozens of classical music recordings. Excellent.

Queen + 50 Cent.

"With little mathematics, the text explores the most fascinating parts of mechanics, thermodynamics, special and general relativity, electrodynamics, quantum theory and modern attempts at unification."

"The Public Radio Exchange is a nonprofit service for distribution, peer review, and licensing of radio pieces."

"Bricksmith allows you to create virtual instructions for your Lego creations."

"In order to fulfill his obligation to his early solo label Bang Records,Van Morrison sat down in 1967 or so and cranked out 31 songs on the spot."

"We are offering the entirety of our third album, 'Little by Little...', as a free download."

Using words from politician's speeches to cover popular songs.

Free "nerdcore" rap.

Guitars, electronics, sweet vocals.

"Drawn-out conclusion: this is abrasive, jarring stuff. It’s amateurish, harsh, artless, unpleasant and immature." I like it.

"The complete soundtrack to Super Mario World, covered by one man using dozens of instruments. Roughly in game order, faithful to the originals, with some bizarre artistic license thrown around. A private hobby made public."

"In 1983 the Serge Modular company produced a demo cassette featuring many artists using the Serge Modular synthesizer." Experimental electronic.

"Each month, I ask one of my favorite DJ's to contribute a 30-40 minute mix of whatever they're feeling at the time." Free and excellent mixes.

Free MP3s of live performances by a funny folk band called "Flight of the Conchords."