27 years after the infamously unknown experimental Australian band Freedom Of Fire (FoF) publicly burned the master recordings of their debut album 'The Internet Is A Fad' and disappeared, the outfit is quietly releasing 'new' albums, remixes and EPs on YouTube, Facebook and Soundcloud. These releases have appeared and disappeared online during the past 6 or so years, often with little information about their year of creation, or the musicians involved, if any.
For example, 'Opening Title Theme For Abandoned 1980s Buddy Cop Sci-Fi TV Series' sounds like it comes from that decade, but it could have easily been thrown together from modern day sample packs that effectively capture that era's most familiar sounds, beats and synths:
Some others, like 1992's 'Never Say Everything You Know' do have a date, but it's not clear whether the cartoon-sampling piece was created in 1992, or is "remastered" from an earlier tape. While Freedom of Fire still only have an audience, globally, in the double digits, so it probably really doesn't matter:
THE INTERNET IS A FAD
As mentioned above, when Freedom Of Fire came to release their first attempt at an official album in 1995, the clearly obvious popularity of the internet, even in those early years, rendered the American TV-sample rich album pointless.
Most of FoF's 'The Internet Is A Fad' album from 1995 is released now and sounds enhanced/remixed/partially re-recorded from the original foggy copies that surfaced in 1996.
According to On The Street music press from the time, Freedom Of Fire had spent 3 years conceptualising 'The Internet Is A Fad' album in the early 1990s, and had to live in denial during the final mixing sessions in 1995 as marketing campaigns to connect Australians to the Internet began to appear everywhere.
"It was fucked," Freedom of Fire said in a statement to On The Street in late 1995. "We've got this album proclaiming The Internet Is A Fad... you know, it's nothing, nobody uses it, and we're using the Internet daily. We tell someone on a message board, 'oh, just finished an album' and they ask the title and you can't tell them. Maybe we can release the album again in 30 years and claim it was a joke."
Brisk sales of Freedom Of Fire's 'The Internet Is A Fad' t-shirts at Utopia Records apparently helped ease the pain and covered some of the losses.
THE REPLICANT'S LAMENT
An attempt to create a 'Bladerunner Soundtrack Sequel' in early 1996, telling the instrumental tale of the mind of a replicant as it died slowly, ended up sounding too much like a replicant dying slowly for mass or (personal) consumption, and nobody from Freedom Of Fire had bothered to seek the necessary permissions anyway, so it was never released.
Parts of the original mix of The Replicant's Lament were debuted on a Sydney community radio station at 2.45am on a Wednesday morning in late March 1996. The below is a more recent remix/recreation of The Replicant's Lament:
In late 1996, Freedom Of Fire relocated to London, then Somerset, England, Marin County, California, and then, briefly, New York City, and then disappeared for another decade.
BEGINNINGS
The experimental, sample-crazed Freedom Of Fire 1 formed in 1981 and released more than two dozen audio cassette tapes, of varying quality and listenability, in extremely limited numbers, through the 1980s and 1990s, without ever releasing an official album or single.
Various people, who may or may not have been contributors to Freedom of Fire, also released their own compilations of FoF music, noise-scapes and sound collages, sometimes under fictitious band names, sometimes adding their own noises and sounds over the top of the recordings. This was seen as funny at the time, and a bit of japery, but leaves attempts now to finally catalogue Freedom Of Fire's 1980s and early 1990s output a confusing venture.
Begun before the music industry started its widespread crackdown on sampling in the mid-1980s, Freedom Of Fire's early tapes were crammed with audio snatches, samples and soundgrabs from Australian movies, TV, radio ad jingles, interviews and vintage American rock, soul, metal and R n B. This made most of FoF's 1980s output unreleasable by any record label, if any were ever interested.
Having created dozens of hours of music, tape experiments and general noise that were a landmine field of copyright violations,
Freedom of Fire announced in the classified sections of Sydney music press in 1989 that FoF would be giving away their music - if you could find the tapes.
Freedom Of Fire's "self-bootlegs" (taped over the top of whatever the cheapest old audio cassettes were available at the time) were found on trains and buses and on car seats next to open windows and in the street-side discount bins of record stores and on window ledges and in doorways in Sydney's Western Suburbs, in Melbourne, Adelaide and Far North Queensland. Some were found tucked between books in libraries in Blacktown and Parramatta; hiding inside Col Joye and Kamahl cassette covers in Newcastle charity shops, while dozens of other tapes were just given away to anyone who bothered to ask for one.
Below is another FoF release from the past 3 years. 'There's Violence On Both Sides' saw Freedom Of Fire returning to the controversial arena of political-instrumentals:
4 years ago, Freedom Of Fire offered a new theme song to Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party, but it was rejected for lacking a 'clear message.'
In the always brimming "Incomplete Files", Freedom Of Fire's 2016-promised Trumpistan album remains unreleased. The only glimpse so far was the brief 'We Got Killers':
In 2020, Freedom of Fire are expected to release 'The 1980s Demos' (the gritty mostly unlabelled audio cassettes that mystified and often irritated those who accidentally came across them in that era), and hours of other first-decade music and sound collages.
21st Century audio technology finally means poorly recorded 30 and 40 year demo tape home recordings, captured on half-broken Phillips cassette recorders, can now be made more listenable.
MORE TO COME
