At the risk of boring those who already know this...
I founded the netlabel Hallo Excentrico! (named after a track by the group
Neu!) in March 2006 so I could bypass the mainstream media and make my music directly available to the public for free. I also passed this opportunity on to my colleagues in the
Digital Vomit collective, and anyone else I came across who made interesting music and wanted it.
In October 2007, my web space provider forced me to shut the site down because I could not produce copyright and/or contract forms that proved I owned the rights to the music. Neither I nor any of the artists on the label had considered these trappings of the capitalistic entertainment industry worth the bother. We opted for "hippie law,"
Creative Commons licenses, and the artistic possibilities of appropriation. We weren't doing anything wrong
per se, but we couldn't prove it, and apparently several gigabytes worth of free MP3's made us guilty until proven innocent in my ISP's eyes.
My online friend, the infamous experimental musician
V/Vm, suggested I re-invent the netlabel as a "music blog." After some consideration I have decided to do just that. Hopefully it will be interesting and fun for you, and low-maintenance for me. I'm not getting any younger. ;)
At this moment I am making arrangements for new, more artist-friendly storage accommodations for the audio, and when that's squared away, I will resume releasing challenging new music free for the downloading - as well as re-issuing the 40+ releases in the HE! archives.
If you make music and would like to be a part of all this, I invite you to e-mail me at mhilton at indy dot rr dot com (yes, there really are two "dots" in there). If you send audio along, please use
YouSendIt or a comparable remote file host - please don't attach it to the email.
Like the song says, the best is yet to come....
EDIT: HE! was started in 2006, not 2005. Fixed accordingly.
