nice collaborative music project

February 6, 2004 2:37 PM

Muted Tones is a collaborative music project where a different "curator" picks out ten minutes of their own music once a month, and after seven months they have a full CD-sized collection of content (complete with blog posts by curators as well). The first one is done and they're almost done with the second one. There's a lot of variety and great artists I've never heard of in the mixes. It's sort of a public CD swap that anyone can listen in on and it's probably totally illegal it's really cool.
posted by mathowie (15 comments total)

Actually, the sounds appear to have been created by the contributors, so nothing illegal is afoot! This is really, really good. By the way, Matt, there's only one user I would want to post 5 times in 2 days, and that would be user number one. /ass-kissing
posted by monju_bosatsu at 2:53 PM on February 6, 2004

Really? I saw the disclaimer in the footer of some pages saying all copyrights were to their creators, assuming some of it was label music.

If it's all home-grown that's even more kickass.
posted by mathowie at 2:53 PM on February 6, 2004

The site creator emailed me to say that yeah, the people curating do the music, so I updated the post. Very fucking cool.
posted by mathowie at 2:56 PM on February 6, 2004

amy domingues!!

or, this really *is* cool...many thanks, mathowie. your links to creative music collaboration/distribution are always greatly appreciated.
posted by ifjuly at 3:34 PM on February 6, 2004

wonderful. pauli is out somewhere and i'm sitting out at the back of the house listening to this as dusk falls. thank-you...
posted by andrew cooke at 4:06 PM on February 6, 2004

hi. i contributed to the second one. mathowie is right, everything on there should be legal. it's a great project and was fun to do. when i was asked to do it, the only requirement was that i had to fill 10 minutes of time with anything i chose to fill it with. i've listened to all of the contributions at least twice and all of them are worth listening to.
posted by alicila at 4:42 PM on February 6, 2004

I contributed to version one (hi alicia). The people involved w/ this are all around great folks (hi josh).
posted by twitch at 4:48 PM on February 6, 2004

So I've only listened to the first two minutes of Sept 2002 so far. So maybe my recommendation doesn't mean that much.

But it's really fucking good.
posted by lbergstr at 5:37 PM on February 6, 2004

It is very good, but I'm just depressed at how quickly I will run out of things to listen to with only monthly contributions. Maybe this needs to quit the elitism, and expand and conquer.
posted by Jimbob at 7:04 PM on February 6, 2004

Sweet.
posted by LouReedsSon at 7:05 PM on February 6, 2004

i've never sat down and listened to all of the tracks here from start to finish. i'm really impressed by the consistency of the quality and the mood of all of the music here.
also, my website link on the Muted Tones site is broken - the current website (w/ more audio stuff) is at erstwhile.net.
also, muted tones has (from what i know) been running as a friends-of-friends project for almost 2 years now. i hope that more exposure does bring a more diverse group of people together to collaborate on projects like this one.
posted by twitch at 7:30 PM on February 6, 2004

Maybe this needs to quit the elitism, and expand and conquer

maybe quality is more important than quantity?

and where are you going with the dig at "elitism"? i understand the masses appreciate britney - is that what you want? and there's quite enough corporations out there doing the expand and conquer thing, thank-you.
posted by andrew cooke at 4:23 AM on February 7, 2004

Ha! There must be a lot of musicians and/or music obsessives floating around on Metafilter.

Like Alicia and Tom above, I contributed to the project. I was nervous about contributing, as the quality of the pieces is very high and there's a lot of good music on the site. It was a blast, though, and the fellas that run the site are super nice.

The rest of the Tense Forms site is really cool as well, with everything from other music releases to neat little sticker designs and other community-style design projects.
posted by almostcool at 8:02 AM on February 7, 2004

i'm not sure if this is entirely related, but i've had songs from atlas on my iPod for a long, long while now and i've been waiting patiently for more. "where water comes together with other water" {mp3} is, most definitely, one of those endless repeat songs that you wish would go on forever and ever.
posted by ronv at 9:29 AM on February 7, 2004

What I mean, andrew cooke, that this is such a good idea, with great music, that seems to be chained to a very restricted schedule. I didn't say anything about Britney-fying it. Surely there are thousands of people out there who would love to contribute to projects like this, but are lacking the means and opportunity. Someone needs to take this idea and run with it.
posted by Jimbob at 9:44 PM on February 7, 2004