Hello, my dear friends, and welcome to “Every Hussalonia Song,” a tribute in blog form to one of my personal favorite creators of music in the modern era: Hussalonia.
You are probably wondering at this point exactly who or what I’m referring to when I say “Hussalonia.” To put it very simply, Hussalonia is a pop music cult. Founded in 1997 by one [Name Redacted by Order of Nefarico] of Buffalo, New York, Hussalonia has been producing pop music for over a decade. Since 2006, Hussalonia has done the unthinkable in this very commercial world: starting with “The Broken Hearted Friends EP,” a collection of cover songs, all Hussalonia music has been released for free online. That’s right; you are quite free to download all of Hussalonia’s music released post-2006, right now, without paying a cent! As if releasing music for free wasn’t enough, Hussalonia has gone the extra mile. As of the date of this writing (January 11, 2010) a total of three of Hussalonia’s albums have been released directly into the public domain. For those not in the know, this means that these recordings are not only free but free of copyright, and so may be used for any and all purposes including but not limited to film, video, television, radio, elevator music, and beyond, both commercial and non-commercial, without any permissions or licensing needed (though if you do use any of it, be nice and give Hussalonia a credit!). These albums, for the record, include “OMG LOL WTF,” a 6-track album of experimental sound collages, “Know Your Eastern European Anthems,” a collection of covers of, well, Eastern European national anthems, and the aptly titled “The Public Domain EP,” featuring four very beautiful pop songs. Hussalonia’s earlier, commercial recordings are now out of print and hard copies are becoming increasingly scarce, though a few are still available to be purchased digitally.
I am getting a bit ahead of myself. You are probably wondering WHY Hussalonia would turn to releasing music free of charge and (gasp!) even releasing recordings directly into the public domain. If you listen to their music you will likely wonder even more, for it isn’t as if Hussalonia doesn’t have the potential to win over many listeners to buying more than a few albums. It is most common, however, that in most cases, no matter how talented one might be, a lot of self-marketing is a necessity for success. Hussalonia founder [Name Redacted] has concluded that making music is more important than selling it and in light of this conclusion has decided to put aside the pursuit of monetary rewards in favor of having more time for simply making music. However, don’t take my word for it! Hussalonia’s official website (also linked via the image at the top of this page) has an “About” section that tells the official story, so to speak, and you can access that page at http://www.hussalonia.com/the_about.html . While you’re there, explore the entire Hussalonia web site. That will save me the trouble of needlessly re-phrasing everything already stated there or else cutting and pasting it in order for you to become better informed about Hussalonia.
That brings me to the other question you might very well be asking yourself after having discovered this blog: who is the guy writing it? For starters, I have no official affiliation with Hussalonia. I do not know [the Hussalonia Founder] or anyone else involved in Hussalonia personally. This is entirely a fan-made project. The closest it comes to being connected to Hussalonia directly would be that, in both of the two exchanges of emails I’ve had with [the Hussalonia Founder] in 2009 and 2010, he gave the idea of my making a blog such as this one his approval. This blog will be focused, for the most part, on my own, personal reactions to the songs of Hussalonia.
This, then, brings us back to the question of who I am exactly, and, furthermore, what gives me the right or reason to make an entire blog commenting on somebody else’s hard work. My name is Leonard Kirke, an unpublished author from a small village in Ohio. You can probably learn enough about me from my profile here on Blogger. I am currently pursuing a degree in creative writing, whatever that’s really worth, with the sort-of goal of having something published someday in the hope of making money in order to live comfortably. However, much of my work isn’t terribly viable in the commercial sense, at least as I see it. My work doesn’t express strong, polarizing, biased political views, it doesn’t contain sexy, sparkling vampires, and it is more inclined to pose questions that one might prefer to avoid rather than give many direct answers. I have started working on some projects with commercial viability specifically in mind (while still managing to avoid writing about sexy, sparkling vampires), in which I allow myself to indulge in more mainstream tropes of fiction and it is, admittedly, great fun to write things like that. Still, I feel like my best and most meaningful work is rooted in the things that I probably can’t, in terms of pure practicality, ever make a living off of (unless stories like Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” become the new equivalents of “Harry Potter”). I also worry that dealing with publishers/corporations/etc. could ruin my work due to meddling even if I were to make money that way. I am not totally closed off to any option, but I do have much anxiety about this subject.
As a result of this anxiety over producing commercial art, I was rather predisposed to be drawn to anyone or anything that broke the mold and didn’t allow the world to bring them down in this way. In other words, I wanted to find a person or persons who lived and worked in a way that they wanted or felt called to despite the fact that in a practical sense their work could not or would not support them (again, not necessarily due to lack of talent but more so due to personal standards). Last spring I was seeking Creative Commons-licensed and public domain music online. At the time I was still planning on working on a short, low-budget and lowbrow comedy video series that my friends and I had been producing since 2007 (this series went on indefinite hiatus due to schedule conflicts). Music really adds a great deal of life to video footage and film, and I hoped to find some high-quality songs that could be used either through the Creative Commons Attribution license or else, more unlikely, songs that were actually in the public domain.
One site I searched well was www.archive.org, a most excellent resource for anyone working in a creative field. It was here, at the Internet Archive, that I discovered an album of four, count’em FOUR, songs, all beautifully written and recorded, and, you guessed it, released directly into the public domain! I could hardly believe that some musical artist out there would take the plunge of releasing actual pop music tracks into the public domain, yet there it was: “The Public Domain EP,” a mini-album by someone or something called Hussalonia.
I was instantly taken with all four tracks. “Meaning Isn’t Based On The Importance Of Being, But On The Relationships In Between” had a mellow tune and melancholy lyrics that appealed to my existentialist tendencies. “Like Tetanus In A Wound” was beautiful but I couldn’t tell if it was a song of bitterness or of heartbreak or of both. “There’s More Than That To Being Poor” was a bit faster and upbeat, yet the lyrics at times struck me variously as hopeful and struggling to be hopeful. Lastly, “This Song Won’t Sell A Thing” was a real sing-along type of song, a perfect closer to an album released directly into the public domain and the perfect song for one who, like myself, struggles with the issue of making a living off of what one loves to do and/or feels compelled to do yet without compromising it in a way that changes it into something else entirely.
Before long I had downloaded all of the free Hussalonia material, albums and singles alike, and shortly after that I bought some of the remaining copies of the older commercial releases as well as buying the digital commercial releases. I was captivated by the entirety of Hussalonia’s collected works. I wanted to give something back. The official website recommends giving kind words in return for the free music (if one is unable or disinclined to make a monetary donation for any reason), and so I started there in April 2009. [Redacted] and I exchanged a few emails and he struck me as a pretty nice fellow. I had the idea for this blog then, and he gave me his approval when I mentioned it to him. Due to my procrastinating tendencies and the rush of everyday life, however, it would be some time before I actually got around to writing the text that you are reading now. It’s been nearly a year, in fact. In the fall, I discovered a blog that had a premise similar to my idea for a Hussalonia-based blog: “Every Bob Dylan Song.” That most excellent blog can be accessed via this link: http://everybobdylansong.blogspot.com/. I’m certain that the idea for a blog containing commentaries on musical works probably isn’t unique to either myself or Every Bob Dylan Song author Anthony Ling. At any rate, reading his blog further inspired me to create this one. Bob Dylan gets lots of free press, and I won’t argue that he doesn’t deserve it! Still, it occurs to me, couldn’t Hussalonia also use some free press, especially when nearly all Hussalonia music is given away freely? I wrote to [The Hussalonia Founder] via email again in early January 2010 to wish him well upon the release of his latest album, “Know Your Eastern European Anthems” and to state my intention, despite the nearly year-long delay, to create a blog in tribute to Hussalonia, and he once again gave his approval. So here we are.
I should also mention, as an aside, that the title of this blog is a bit of a misnomer. Hussalonia’s first four releases from 1997 were released on cassette and are no longer available. Thus I have never heard them. There are also a couple of Hussalonia tracks that appear on an ambient music album by some-time Hussalonia contributor John Hughes; I haven’t bought that album yet and though one of the tracks is posted online for free, the link to it remains broken to this day. There is also an album/group featuring Hussalonia founder [Name Redacted], “Skaros [Name Redacted] and Wild,” that I would include here if I could get a copy of it at some point (the link to that album has also been broken since I first took notice of it over a year ago). I am, however, including another [Hussalonia Founder] side-project, the most excellent eponymous album by the band The Hickory Windbreakers, presuming nobody objects to that.
Another bit of relevant information worth mentioning here is that in addition to the official Hussalonia website linked via the image at the top of this blog, [The Hussalonia Founder] himself has his own blog known as The Pleonastic Hussalonian. You can access it at http://hussalonia.tumblr.com/ .
As previously stated, the views expressed on this blog are entirely my own and do not in any way represent the views of Hussalonia , the founder, or any other affiliates of Hussalonia. I have absolutely no experience in the production of music (excepting having once learned to play “Ode to Joy” on keyboard, kind of) and chances are I’ll say some pretty stupid things here as a result of that ignorance of music-making. I feel that if Hussalonia can release work into the public domain, exposing personal songs to the whims and fancies of anyone who might want to use those songs for who-knows-what, I can allow myself to show what an ignoramus I am about music in order to spread the word of Hussalonia. This won’t be so much music criticism as it will be simple, personal responses. Things may get very autobiographical; it is hard for me to tell where this will go so early on. At any rate, I hope that, whatever I write in response to the music of Hussalonia, you will find it at least mildly worthwhile, and if nothing else I hope that this blog leads you to discover some great music that otherwise you might never have known.
Viva Hussalonia!
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