The Aftershock musicians on a lunchbreak
I wish there’d been time to blog what I’ve been doing over the past few days, but I’ve been so busy doing it that the opportunity just never presented itself.
My friend Stef and I are working on a project in Italy called Aftershock. It’s a collaboration between musicians from across Europe, led by Nitin Sawhney and culminating in a major concert event on Friday night. The musicians meet (mostly for the first time ever), and then compose a whole set of new pieces over 5 days.
There’s a real mix – vocalists, a drummer & beatboxer, a harpist, a percussionist, guitarist & bass-player, trumpeter… and Nitin leading the group, conducting workshops and overseeing the whole project. People from the UK, Italy, France and elsewhere. It’s quite an amazing and unique event.
Stef and I are building the website. Which is to say – Stef’s building the website.
What I do is less concrete but seemingly no less intensive. But the reason we’re actually in Genoa doing it is because it’s not just a website about Aftershock, it’s the Aftershock project itself put online.
That may not sound like a major difference – but where most events would be likely to have a website that is effectively an electronic brochure focused on promoting the event, we are more concerned with the underlying story: the creative process that takes place in the lead-up to the event, the characters of the musicians themselves, and the progress from the blank page to a full concert worth of music.
The people are amazing and very individual – there are some really strong characters, and lots of really amazing stuff going on. So what we’ve done is to give all 12 musicians a handheld video camera and told them to film whatever they thought was interesting. In a way, it’s like a reality show where the contestants get the cameras.
What’s great and interesting about that is that it allows the public to see into the development of the works, get to know the people involved, care about the characters and want to know the ‘end’ of the story – which is to say, come to the concert.
In other words, I’m approaching this as storytelling, rather than as marketing.
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The title of this post is borrowed from a 
