The FAWM Blog

The FAWM CD4 listening committee is pleased to announce this year’s “fawmpilation” CD. Curating this year’s disc was a tougher job than ever: we received about 120 tracks (over 6.5 hours of music), which had to be narrowed down to a mere fraction of that. The end result, though, is a great representation of FAWM 2008. Here also is a sneak peak at this year’s album cover art. In continuing with our tradition of using the work of fine artists, this year’s compilation features the work of Norwegian graphic and installation artist Asbjørn Hollerud.

“14 SONGS IN 28 DAYS” (VOL. 4) TRACK LIST:
01. Isaac Quatorze - Showered In Nisku
02. Pine Box Orchestra - Dank U Wel
03. Phil Henry - Hold Up (Friday Night, 4:55)
04. Joe Kennedy - Velvet
05. Elaine DiMasi & The Circa 1600s - Amarelli Licorice from Calabria
06. Steven Wesley Guiles - Eddie Vedder Told Me There’d Be Days Like This
07. Old Lost John - Railway Car
08. Caterwauler - Aaaaaaaaaaah!
09. Dan Kennedy - I’ve Already Lost My Heart
10. Steffan Pitzel - City
11. Erin Maeflower - Upside of Down
12. Charlie Cheney & Burr Settles - A Perfect Valentine’s Day
13. Will Farmer & Phil Norman - Josephine’s Waltz
14. Tim Wille - We Got So Much Riding On You

AUTO PSEUDO MONDO BONUS TRACKS:
15. Hoopshank
16. Andrew “Awesome” Yonda
17. Mike Skliar

Congratulations to the artists above represented on this year’s compilation. And many, many thanks to all you fawmers who submitted your music for consideration. We couldn’t have done it without everyone. Unfortunately, we were unable to release this year’s compilation as a double-disc since we didn’t receive enough collaborative songs. Instead, we decided to include 14 tracks of both solo and collaborative efforts, plus a handful of diverse and representative “Auto Pseudo Mondo” tracks, which share the same chords and lyrics, but are vastly different in feel and interpretation. We’re really excited about this year’s disc… I think it marks a new level of maturity in FAWM.

For those of you who are curious how the selection process happened this year, here’s a summary. First, all submitted songs were peer-reviewed by a group of 25 volunteer fawmers who were randomly assigned about 25 songs apiece (each song received at least three independent reviews, most received five). These reviews included scores for multiple criteria like lyrics, melody, orchestration, production, etc. Second, we averaged a song’s scores for each of these categories, and took the top 14 songs per category as a pool for second-round culling (resulting in about 35 songs, since some songs were in the top lists for multiple categories). Finally, a listening committee of three fawmers (myself, Nancy Rost, and John Crossman) plus three non-fawmers (music critic Kiki Scheuler, filmmaker Nate Clarke, and music geek/friend Pete LuisiMills) assembled at my apartment. We listened to these second-round songs and settled on the final tracklist you see here after 4-5 hours of attentive listening, goldfish cracker eating, and a little beer-drinking to boot. Discussions got a little heated, but in the end we were all happy with the final product. We’re sure you will be, too…

Again, congrats to everyone on the disc, and thank you to everyone who contributed music and/or time to this year’s project. The CD will be available when the new FAWM.ORG launches in 2009. More info to come…