Feb 22, 2019 View credits, reviews, tracks and shop for the 2019 Vinyl release of Illegal Moves on Discogs.
New York quartet Sunwatchers make instrumental music that exists where the spiritual reach of free jazz and the screaming chaos of psychedelia intersect. Bandleader Jim McHugh was a founding member of the late-2000s freaked sounds collective Dark Meat, and he carried on their deep-fried blend of structure and skronk when he uprooted from Athens, Georgia, to New York City in 2010 and began working towards what would become Sunwatchers. Wildly prolific, the band quickly established their untethered sound over the course of multiple releases captured both in the studio and in live performances. Illegal Moves is their third studio album, and its seven selections capture the group at their tightest and most electric state of sonic and psychic connectivity yet. Album opener 'New Dad Blues' charges out of the gates with a high-energy riff in a twisting time signature. The entire band is locked in and playing at full force, with McHugh's wah-wah guitar lines interlocking with Jeff Tobias' blasts of saxophone. The rhythm section is part of this telekinetic playing as well, with drummer Jason Robira and bassist Peter Kerlin pushing the song to its edges but never faltering in their airtight syncronycity with the rest of the band. Much of Illegal Moves keeps up this incredible display of exuberance and stamina. The synth-dotted 'Beautiful Crystals' leans more towards Krautrock-styled repetition and cosmic upheaval, building into rushes of ecstatic guitar fuzz and frenzied sax as the steady groove of the rhythm section holds things down. The album explores a variety of different moods as it goes on. 'Stollin' Coma Blues' is a dark take on folk-blues that disintegrates into gelatinous free skronk, and the peaceful breeze of 'Everybody Play' carefully wanders in and out of organized forms and lilting, springy improvisation. For an instrumental band, Sunwatchers have managed to communicate sociopolitical ideas in their sounds surprisingly well. Whether it's through album titles, artwork, or just a moral code intrinsic to their playing, the band's sound suggests a struggle against corporate exploitation, and much like the earliest figures of free jazz, it wordlessly embodies the restless spirit of revolution. On Illegal Moves, this stance is best felt on the group's cover of Alice Coltrane's 'Ptah, the El Daoud.' Coltrane's tune from a 1970 album of the same name is a slow and lingering wander, coolly ambling between its Eastern theme and long passages of various players taking solos. In the hands of Sunwatchers, the song is transformed into a feverish protest march, building tension increasingly over its seven-minute running time until it feels like a call to arms. Illegal Moves is another strong chapter of Sunwatchers' unique voice and probably their most clear-minded presentation of their collective powers to date.
Sample | Title/Composer | Performer | Time |
---|---|---|---|
1 | 06:16 | ||
2 | 06:45 | ||
3 | 05:05 | ||
4 | 04:50 | ||
5 | 04:59 | ||
6 | 07:02 | ||
7 | 05:34 |
When it comes to torrents, one of the most commonly asked questions is “Is downloading torrents legal or illegal?” Torrent clients, such as uTorrent Vuze and the official BitTorrent client, are used to download immense amounts of data on the Web, and there’s no question that much of it is illegal. Here we’ll talk about how torrent downloads work, when they’re illegal, and how to protect your privacy when you’re using them.
So What Is Legal and What Is Illegal?
The short answer: as long as the item is copyrighted and you don’t own it, then downloading it (for free) via torrent is illegal. Using a torrent client and downloading torrents in itself isn’t illegal, as you could be downloading things that aren’t protected by copyright.
The long answer: This varies from case to case. Most countries have basic common laws against intellectual property theft. If a piece of music is copyrighted and you don’t own it, you can’t download it legally. The same goes for a movie, a game, or anything else you may want (unless the copyright-holder decides to make it free either temporarily or permanently, as is often the case with video games). The line gets kind of fuzzy here, since people ask themselves many different questions about their own country’s laws.
In general, a copyright is registered to an individual or organization that creates something. This copyright has a time limit, usually equivalent to the lifetime of the creator and a set amount of additional years. Some copyrights are for life plus fifty years. Others are for life plus seventy years. Look up your country in the previous link if you’re unsure of your laws. Of course, your mileage may vary, as some things may not be protected by the law where you live, or copyright law may not be enforced at all.
So if you’re downloading a free Linux distribution through your torrent client, you don’t need to worry. But if you’re getting John Lennon’s “Imagine” from The Pirate Bay, you’re doing something that in all likelihood is breaking a law.
Related: How to Download Torrents onto Your iOS Device Without Jailbreaking
Torrent Privacy
Whatever it is you’re doing is not any of my business. But it is my business to make sure you know just how “anonymous” you are in the torrent network. The short answer is: you totally aren’t!
It’s handy to have a basic knowledge of how the torrent protocol works. Theoretically you should have some level of privacy since you’re not downloading any data from one particular server (in contrast to downloading something from a central server like you’d find on Microsoft’s website, where they’ll know exactly who it is that’s downloading their products).
But through the torrent system you download directions to a file. That means that the torrent file is actually just a list of trackers and some hash codes. It doesn’t really prove that you downloaded the torrent file. What you do inside your torrent client is more important, and that’s all managed by a decentralized list of servers. Once you start the download of the actual file you want to get to, you end up downloading little pieces of the file from a bunch of people.
Can You Get Caught?
Government agents and copyright trolls tend to snoop around the Torrent networks, and some of the more popular sites hosting Torrent files, downloading files and listing all the IP addresses they find under the Peers (downloaders) and Seeders (uploaders) lists. This will, of course, compromise your address eventually.
The actual number of people who get caught is miniscule, but if you want to secure yourself and don’t care much to contribute to the Torrent community, then you can disable seeding which stops your PC uploading files to the torrent network. Avid torrenters would call this selfish, and maybe they’re right, but you’re also covering yourself.
Another good option is to use a proxy or VPN, then set your torrent client to connect to peers through that. This essentially makes you anonymous by routing your connection through a different IP address.
Then there’s the onion routing network (Tor) that you can configure as a proxy for your torrent client. However, since the Snowden revelations it’s become known that even Tor has been targeted by the NSA and GCHQ for illegal activity. While the network is mostly secure, there have been incidents of these spy bodies attacking individual computers, so it’s not as anonymous as it once was.
Conclusion
Rest assured that torrenting does not equate to piracy. It does, however, provide a very convenient way to do it! The torrent protocol is just a clever transmission method for users to download files more easily. If you’re worried that you may be downloading something that’s against the laws in your country, ask below.
This article was first published in Jun 2013 and was updated in Nov 2017.
![Sunwatchers Illegal Moves Torrent Sunwatchers Illegal Moves Torrent](http://thumbs4.ebaystatic.com/m/ml96OF2gFCppPdMUnDsI0kg/140.jpg)
Image credit: Pirate Bay main page