Ben Daglish music fundraiser

Updates

Go to bottom of page to see campaign updates...

The campaign

This campaign has been created to help start a trust fund for legendary 8-bit composer Ben Daglish's "Young Musicians" project. This project helps young musicians to perform at the Stainsby Festival, a yearly event held in Stainsby, England, in which Ben was very involved.

Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stainsby_Festival 

As an incentive to help with donations I will be releasing a never-before-heard CD of Ben's music into the public domain. Everybody who donates to the cause will get early access to download the music in high quality formats. Be the first to hear it!

As an extra incentive; I will send the original master CD (as seen above) to the person who makes the biggest donation. I believe this CD is the only existing copy of the music so it's a small but unique piece of Ben's story.

(note: The only other person who might still have a have a copy of the music would be Ben but I don't know if he kept his copy or not).

About the CD

First let me present myself: My name's Colin but I'm more widely known as "Fungus". Some of you may know me as a games programmer from the 1980s where I met Ben while working at Gremlin Graphics. I worked alongside Ben for many years and I also considered him a close friend outside of work as well.

As most of you probably know, Ben passed away recently. I wanted to do something in his memory and remembered I had this CD sitting on my shelf gathering dust. The CD contains four music tracks (approximately 30 minutes of music in total) and ten short voice-over tracks which were recorded for a project called "Septima" that Ben and I worked on together in 1991, after we moved on from Gremlin. It marks the start of Ben's transition from a "chip-tune" composer to the great folk musician that he became later in life.

The Youtube video at the top of this page contains a few short excerpts from the CD that I mixed together to let you hear some of the content.

The music was composed by Ben with the help of a Welsh guitarist/composer called Alex Roberts. It was recorded over several long nights in a very small recording studio on a Welsh farm (if you listen carefully you can hear cows in the background in one of the voice-overs). Every night we'd finish work in our Sheffield office, grab some food, drive over icy mountain roads for two hours, work on this music, then drive back home again, usually at about 5am.

The Septima project was never finished and vanished into history, only this CD survived. I believe the time has come for it to be heard again.

Campaign rewards

As mentioned earlier: Everybody who donates $5 or more will receive a link to download the entire CD in high quality MP3 and lossless FLAC formats. The campaign supporters will be among the first people to ever hear this amazing music.

The person who makes the highest donation will receive the original master CD. This a professionally manufactured CD, not a CD-R (we didn't have CD burners back in 1991!) and it was VERY expensive to produce at the time.

Campaign duration

This campaign will last for three weeks. On the 6th of November I will send out the CD and the file download links to everybody who participated.

Two weeks later (November 20th) I will post download general download links on social media to download the MP3 files of the music. At this point the music will enter the public domain under a creative commons attribution license, to be be enjoyed by everybody.

Updates

November 6th arrived, the CD has been awarded, download links have been sent to all contributors (if you didn't get your link, email me ([email redacted]) and I'll fix it).

November 20th arrived, you can now download the music here: http://www.artlum.com/septima