Crowdsourcing the archives
I interviewed Matt Mason, author of the book ‘The Pirate’s Dilemma’ and he talked about the idea of a crowdsourcing project that could both make sense of and preserve large commercial music library archives.
Not only am I hard at work…
Just so you don’t think it’s all fun and games over here in Brazil, this is what my hotel room sounds like right now. How restful.
30 days of ideas – 09: Recordings in Concert
Today’s idea is about sound. Specifically, acoustics and recorded music. Simply put, my idea is for people to turn up to a concert hall, sit down, and listen to a record.
There are a few ways you could approach this, but ideally, the listening experience would be curated and explained track by track by the person or people responsible for the recording – or the person who selected the collection of music, assuming that’s someone whose opinion you’d have cause to respect.
And then, after the concert, everyone would be handed a CD copy of the music they’ve just heard. Ideally, they’d be limited edition recordings with programme-like liner notes that you could only get if you went to the event.
This may not necessarily work for all music, but it does work for music that’s primarily designed to be listened to (as opposed to music that’s designed to be danced to in clubs, for instance), and those forms of music for which audio fidelity is an important consideration (though of course, I’m not just talking about classical or jazz music here).
30 Days: Sister Cities of Sound
An art project using 30 cassette tapes
As you may know, instead of making a New Year’s Resolution, I’m doing twelve different things for thirty days each in 2010.
My first 30 days, which started just a couple of days ago on January 2nd, is a 30 day detox.
My second 30 days will be quite different.
From the 1st of February for 30 days, I will make one C90 compilation cassette per day. The compilations will conceptually bring together two places: Britain, my adopted country – and New Zealand, my country of origin.
The idea is to create sister cities of sound – at least in the minds of the recipients of those tapes.
I have selected 30 cities and towns from each country, and have paired them up. Each tape will have a British town on one side, and a New Zealand town on the other.
Roots Ista Posse – live set at NetAudio Festival Berlin
ROOTS ISTA POSSE
LIVE & DIRECT BERLIN’09
Roots Ista Posse live @ NetAudio Festival
Club Maria am Ostbahnhof
8th October 2009
Thought you might like this live mix recorded at that NetAudio Festival I went to in Berlin last week. The guys from Fresh Poulp Records were really great. We stayed at the same hostel boat on the river, they were brilliant company (despite my terrible French, and them finding English understandably complex after a few drinks) – and this Roots Ista Posse dub session above, Normaa‘s 4am dubstep set and Rafiralfiro‘s Latintronica were real highlights for me.
Best of all, you can download all the music for free.
It’s a Net Label thing…
I'm the Director of MTF Labs, a Senior Researcher at the Industry Commons Foundation, advisor to ArtEO and founder of New Music Strategies.
I'm an author of books about technology, culture, music and radio. I'm also an award-winning broadcaster and filmmaker, a public speaker and lecturer, record producer and festival director. I am closely following developments in emerging technologies and the cultures and ethics surrounding them, and my projects typically focus on issues of justice, inclusion, and sustainability.
Most of my work involves surrounding myself with incredibly smart and talented people who would have no other reason to ever be in the same room as each other. That's when amazing things happen.
I tend to talk a lot about music (often jazz-adjacent and particularly on vinyl, but also playlists and mixtapes). I'm enthusiastic about food and cooking, the intersection of art and science, new technologies, vintage technologies, education, social progress, silence, innovation, narrative, data commons, culture, sound art and the spoken word. This blog will continue to reflect those diverse and shifting enthusiasms. I may also digress.
I'm from Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland in Aotearoa New Zealand, I have Scottish ancestry, I've spent a decade in the south of Birmingham UK, and another in a forest in the north of Sweden.
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