Much of my writing efforts of late have been devoted to my blog on The Huffington Post, a web-based "newspaper" covering culture and politics. You can find the blog...

Here

Note that Huffington Post has a feature where you can click to make yourself a "fan" of my blog. If you do this, you will get an email alert every time I make a new posting.

Also, Huffington Post keeps track of how many "fans" each writer has, and the more "fans" I have the more readers will be likely to find my blog.

Thanks!

I have started a blog about the current US presidential campaign. You can find it

here:
http://bobostertag.com/writings-election-blog.php

or here:
http://think-harder.dailykos.com/

I am pleased to announce that All the Rage, my string quartet recorded by the Kronos Quartet, is now available for free download from this web site.

This makes a total of 15 CD's now available from free download.

All the Rage was originally released in 1993. The composition was created by transcribing the sounds of a queer riot in San Francisco into string parts. It was premiered by the Kronos Quartet at Lincoln Center. In its review of the concert, the New York Times wrote:

"Bob Ostertag's "All the Rage" turned the evening on its head with a devastating roar of gay anger. Of recent concert pieces having to do with AIDS, "All the Rage" seems by far the most powerful example. Mr. Ostertag's stern, purifying gaze has swept away the sentimentality and melodrama that have compromised more famous compositions in the genre."

I hope you enjoy the music.

GayGamer has posted a nice review of w00t:

GayGamer.net

Sascha Baumann from Germany tells us that he has posted w00t on another site from which downloads may be faster, particularly for people in Europe.

This is the mirror link:

http://rapidshare.com/files/63288151/w00t.mp3

Thanks to Sascha.

QuestionCopyright just posted an interview on the w00t release.

Question Copyright

w00t is now released for free download. Last year I put all my recordings to which I own the rights online for free. w00t is my first release to skip the CD-for-sale stage and go directly to free Internet download.

Obviously, the "promotion" budget for this release is zero. Please help us get this around the Internet virally by sending a link to whoever you think might be interested.

There is both a 4.5 minute "trailer" and the full 50-minute piece.

w00t was composed entirely from fragments of music from computer games. The names of the games are listed on the download page. The w00t art work is a collage of images from these same games, made by artist John Cooney.

To download, click above on [Music] [Recordings]

Links to early commentary on the release:

Creative Commons.

Wired Blog

BoingBoing.

HIBOU, ANEMONE & BEAR (In Italian)

Improvising Guitar

Digg

Kotaku

Pop Syndicate

Open Sonics

w00titu

Dozens of people have posted comments on AlterNet in reply to my essay on copyright and recording.

http://www.alternet.org/story/50416/

Thanks to all who responded to my essay. Many interesting remarks were made.

I would like to reiterate a couple of things that several readers seem to have missed.

1. I am not opposed to musicians making money from music! Never have been, never will be. I do not perform for free unless it is a benefit for a cause I support. I am not sure how anyone could conclude from my essay that I am opposed to musicians making money. I am not.

2. The question is how. Sharing recordings via the internet is now so easy that the only way to prevent it from happening is to have the RIAA and the FBI snooping on the computer use habits of teenagers across the country, and teenagers and their parents being faced with huge lawsuits, and college campuses being forced to police how their students use their computers (which should be an open educational tool.
All of this for doing something that is so obvious and so available that it is, in fact, done all the time by any teenager with even a modicum a instinct for questioning authority.
I am not sure which is worse: a world in which the state snoops on personal computer use on behalf of the recording industry, or a world in which teenagers are so bullied by draconian legal threats that they don't dare to use their computers for obvious purposes.
So no, I am not opposed to musicians making money. But if the way of making money you have in mind entails all of the above, then it is time to find a new way.

3. Those who have commented that I must have a good day job in order to afford to give away my recordings missed another central point of the essay: I never made much money from selling my recordings, and very few musicians do.
Like almost all musicians in the world, the large majority of income I make from music I make from concerts. That was true before I gave the recordings away, and it is true now.
As I tried to point out, it is a myth that musicians make their living from selling recordings.

4. Of course, there are all kinds of musics that still require recording studios and significant resources to make a decent recording of. In pointing out that there is a bigger and bigger range of musics that do not require that, I do not mean to denigrate the musics that do.

Thanks again for all your thoughtful comments.
- Bob Ostertag

AlterNet published an essay of mine today titled "The Professional Suicide of a Recording Musician."

http://www.alternet.org/story/50416/

The same essay was also published on QuestionCopyright.org
http://www.questioncopyright.org/

Thanks to everyone who has been sending me comments in regards to this essay. Please feel free to use the "comments" button at the end of the post to make comments that not only I but everyone else can read.

- Bob Ostertag

Living Cinema, my project with Pierre Hébert, performs at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as part of the SF International Film Festival. May 4, 2007. 6:30pm.

We will present the North American premiere of Special Forces, a major new work using images from the Isreali invasion of Lebanon last summer.

The world premiere of Special Forces was presented a few days ago at a performance in Beirut as part of the Irtijal 07 festival.

SF International Film Festival info here.
Beirut Festival info here.

I have begun a blog, which you will find under the "Writings" link on this page. I will be posting frequently, though not everyday. The blog will include posts on all the topics that have consumed me for the past decades: music, culture, politics, technology, ecology, and sexuality. I invite you to give it a look.

Thanks to everyone who has sent nice messages since I put my music online.

It has been interesting to see what gets downloaded the most. Oddly enough, the piece I usually think of as my best work, Say No More Volume 3 (Verbatim) has been downloaded the least. You might want to check it out.

One interesting thing is that Daniel De Los Santos has made a remix of my first solo volume, Like A Melody, No Bitterness. His remix, which is quite a radical reworking, is available here: http://netlabel.audioactivity.net/navigation.php?page=sorties

- Bob Ostertag, January 10, 2007.

I have decided to make all my recordings to which I have the rights freely available as digital downloads from my web site.

These works are now covered by a Creative Commons "Attribution Non-commercial" license that permits you to freely download, copy, remix, sample, manipulate, fold, spindle, tamper with, defuse, detox, or deconstruct - as long as you credit my work as a source, and the work you make is not marketed commercially.

This will make my music far more accessible to people around the globe, but my principal interest is not in music distribution per se, but in the free exchange of information and ideas. "Free" exchange is of course a tricky concept; more precisely, I mean the exchange of ideas that is not regulated, taxed, and ultimately controlled by some of the world’s most powerful corporations.

"Intellectual property rights" have become so absurdly swollen that they now constitute a smokescreen hiding a corporate power grab on a scale rivaling the great robber barons of the nineteenth century. Instead of grabbing land or oil, today's corporate crooks are seizing control of culture.

I have made money selling these recordings in the past. It may be my income suffers from giving away these recordings for free. Conversely, it may turn out that my former royalty income will be replaced and perhaps even surpassed by increased income from concert fees due to wider circulation of my music. Who knows? What is known is the cost the corporate "intellectual property rights" battering ram is imposing on culture.

Saying goodbye to record royalties is in any event no great sacrifice for a musician such as myself, whose music has always been too adventurous to be valued by the mass market anyway. Strangely, many musicians I know whose work lies outside the mainstream remain much more invested in the idea of selling their recordings than their actual experience in the market would seem to justify.

I will continue to sell CDs in addition to offering the free downloads because the sound quality is superior, and many people continue to want a physical object to associate with the music. As my work is about sound first and foremost, there is still good reason to want a full-fidelity CD instead of a compressed MP3 file. I may also make new releases CD-only for an initial period, to defray initial production expenses.

I do have serious reservations about this step, however, but they have nothing to do with money. My music is made for sustained, concentrated listening. This kind of listening is increasingly rare in our busy, caffeine-driven, media-drenched, networked world I suspect it is even rarer for music that was downloaded for free, broken up and shuffled through fleeting "playlists," and not objectified in an object that one can hold in one's hand, file on the shelf, or give to a friend. But ultimately this concern has nothing to do whether we charge money to hear recorded music, and everything to do with how we live in a culture in which there is a surplus of information and a scarcity of time to pay attention.