10 albums a day #9

All various artists.

Six Degrees Sampler (2008, Amazon free download)
Smatterings Volume One sampler (2009, Amazon free download)
Green Hill Music Sampler (2008, Amazon free download)
Green Hill Music Celtic Sampler (2009, Amazon free download)
Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Masters (1995, CD)
R&S Revisited Sampler (2009, Amazon free download)
The Best of Both Worlds: The Second Audion Sampler (1987, CD)
The Digital Domain: A Demonstration (1983, CD)
Tribal Winds: Music from Native American Flutes (1996, CD)
Windham Hill Chill (2003, double CD)

I heard about some of these "slack key" guitar players on some radio program, so I hunted down a CD that would let me hear some of it. It's called "slack key" because the strings are slacked, or tuned lower than the traditional tuning. It's good. The Tribal Winds CD has Native American flute music which is based on traditional music, but is accompanied by other instruments and synthesizers, so it fits well into this category. Also very good. The rest are label samplers. I came across the Audion sampler at Hastings when it was first released, and it has always been one of my favorite CDs (I need to make a better thumbnail for it--that one is too small). The Windham Hill sampler is a 2-disc set: disc one for ambient music (more electronic and spacey) and disc two for acoustic-based music.

And then there are some other things. I have a collection downloaded from blogger and musician Don McClane of The Kawaii Menace. His "album" called Horribly Good is pretty good. Other downloads: 10 tracks by Loreena McKennitt, and a few tracks each from Phil Thornton (one of the artists on that First Quest album) and Robert Miles. Another album from Michael Forrest called Majectical Eclectical (2008) which I think I downloaded from his website when he offered it for free, but I can't find the site right now.

Long ago, Musical Starstreams used to make all their programs available for download. This was very useful for me, because when the station in San Antonio that used to carry their program changed formats, I wasn't able to listen to it anymore. There is a station in S.A. that carries it now, but it's one of the low-power college stations that I can't pick up out here, and on dial-up I can't really do streaming. Anyway, I kept all those downloads and broke them all into individual tracks, and I have another folder just for that that has a little over 300 tracks. All told, my ambient collection has slightly more than 1,000 tracks and runs at more than 83 hours of music.

Back to the general collection next time.

Album count: 89.