Baltimore’s psychedelic rock & soul saviors Celebration have two brand new songs up for free download on their website, Celebration Electric Tarot. What’s more, they’re gonna be releasing all their new music in this manner. Once they’ve got enough new songs for an album, they’ll do a proper vinyl release, but if you’re happy with 192kbps MP3s, it’s all gratis when it comes to their shimmering guitar trance workouts. From their manifesto:

We, as Celebration, have felt the continual growth of web culture’s need for barrier-free exchange. We also feel that the traditional methods of releasing music have put too much distance between us. As we see it, the current music business model is crumbling. We believe their methods waste resources and time in a “print for market world” that no longer makes sense. The birth of the MP3 has dreamt the death of the CD format, and so all across the board, CD sales have dropped. What has given way is something so magical and evolutionary, music has grown, that we have only begun to understand the cultural impact of this sharing. So, past the piles of broken CD cases and badly scratched polycarbonate rainbow discs, there lies a fantastic world of freedom –freedom to share instantly with little or no impact on the environment, in a seemingly infinite, eternal and virtually cost free universe of the world wide web. This is our emancipation. Without the need for manufacturing CDs and the danse macabre of the promotional corporate machine, we can be free to release our music when and how we want –no waiting. We know nothing of the marketing world and don’t care about the vampires any more.

For more on Celebration, we would like to direct your attention to Ian Svenonius’s Q&A with the band from Arthur 27 (December 2007). You can download the PDF or purchase a hard copy by clicking here. Visit Celebration’s website to download “I Will Not Fall” and “What’s This Magical”. Read their full manifesto after the jump. (once again via Gorilla Vs. Bear).

Greetings Dear Ones,

We, as Celebration, have felt the continual growth of web culture’s need for barrier-free exchange. We also feel that the traditional methods of releasing music have put too much distance between us. As we see it, the current music business model is crumbling. We believe their methods waste resources and time in a “print for market world” that no longer makes sense. The birth of the MP3 has dreamt the death of the CD format, and so all across the board, CD sales have dropped. What has given way is something so magical and evolutionary, music has grown, that we have only begun to understand the cultural impact of this sharing. So, past the piles of broken CD cases and badly scratched polycarbonate rainbow discs, there lies a fantastic world of freedom –freedom to share instantly with little or no impact on the environment, in a seemingly infinite, eternal and virtually cost free universe of the world wide web. This is our emancipation. Without the need for manufacturing CDs and the danse macabre of the promotional corporate machine, we can be free to release our music when and how we want –no waiting. We know nothing of the marketing world and don’t care about the vampires any more.

Our plan and experiment is to post new songs monthly, as we create and record them. Under the creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike license. all of our new music will be free to download on our website for non-commercial use. When we have enough music for an album, we will release it on vinyl for those who want to have something to hold. As artists we can only stand for our music, our art, our creation. So here it is laid bare. Some may say we are fools. If we be fools, then let us be the Fool of the tarot. The Fool card of the tarot represents a leap of faith, a leap into the unknown, a trust in the adventure of chance. It is in this spirit that we are unvailing a multidimensional, interactive musical Tarot deck, on our new website. We are constructing an experimental place to experience and share our musical vision with you. We strongly encourage you to blog, podcast, email and share links to our music and our site with others. We will post stems in the near future for remixing. If we like your remix, we will post it on our site. This experiment is funded solely by us and those of you who choose to be a part of making the music available. We’ve added a donation box to the site in hopes that you, our audience, can help support the artist’s right to autonomy. Thank you!

So with a leap of faith and fortune, we turn the fate of our future to you. We look forward to the time and moment when we share our music with you –it is our greatest joy.
Love,
Celebration

“The web is incredibly subversive, simply for the fact that all information is there and available in a world where control of access to information has always been a game. So the way I see it is, the psychedelic people need to use the new information technologies to build art, of a type, that is more powerful, more compelling than the world has ever seen before, call it virtual reality, call it multimedia, whatever you want. It’s basically walk into, walk around art, and then the boundaries will fall.” -Terrence Mckenna

“for it is in giving that we receive”- St. Francis of Assisi