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about - Introduction The Sheep Fiends record music in an improvisational style with little-to-no preparation. Lyrics are typically composed as the music is played, musicians find their way by ear, and it is not uncommon for an instrument to change hands mid-song. The Sheep Fiends play no particular genre, and every Sheep Fiends jam is a performance. We started making music in 1992 and over 100 musicians have floated in and out of the group since bringing with them a virtual orchestra of instruments. The Sheep Fiends do occasionaly play for the public, and the audience often ends up on-stage playing along. Considering our format, your expectations could reasonably be low. That said, you should judge for yourself. Much of our material is available for free download under the Creative Commons Attribute-NonCommerical-ShareAlike 2.0 license. You can browse The Sheep Fiends Recordings and Sound Files section to check out our material. If you are tired of music made by market analysis, if you have been listening to the same radio format for too long, then perhaps our material is what you have been looking for. Our music is rated with 1-5 Stars (5 being most listenable) to assist you with finding material we think you will enjoy. All Sheep Fiends material released under the Creative Commons License is managed by The Sheep Fiends Foundation, an organization dedicated to free media licensing. The Sheep Fiends Technology The Sheep Fiends is a band that has always embraced technology. We have used a mailing list to organize jams since 1994 and have had a web presence since 1995. An early version of our website from June, 1996 can be viewed here. The website adopted a black-background look-and-feel in late 1996 and an archived version of that site can be viewed on The Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Starting in 1997 the website has made extensive use of CGI (Common Gateway Interface) technology written in Perl, giving this website its overly cross-referential appearance. XML stylesheets were introduced in 2003. The CGI scripts that make this website work are available under the GPL license. Click on the link to download the sheepfiends-engine 1.2 tarball. Some quotes of inspiration... Hakem Bey, speaker of Ontological Anarchy, says: For art, the intervention of Capital always signals a further degree of mediation. To say that art is commodified is to say that a mediation, or standing-in-between, has occurred, & that this betweenness amounts to a split, & that this split amounts to "alienation." Improv music played by friends at home is less "alienated" than music played "live" at the Met, or music played through media (whether PBS or MTV or Walkman). In fact, an argument could be made that music distributed free or at cost on cassette via mail is LESS alienated than live music played at some huge We Are The World spectacle or Las Vegas niteclub, even though the latter is live music played to a live audience (or at least so it appears), while the former is recorded music consumed by distant & even anonymous listeners. The above text was extracted from Radio Sermonettes...live and kicking at the Hakem Bey and Ontological Anarchy website. "Making music together is the best way for two people to become friends. There is none easier." said by the Music Master, "The Glass Bead Game" by Hermann Hesse, in the chapter "The Call".

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