SX Virgins
Our first night (3/17) at SXSW was amazing! The scene walking up and down 6th street was a music lover’s dream. We could hear street musicians sounding off all over the place–everything from the beat traditional African drums, to the cheery tweet (no not THAT kind) of an Irish penny whistle coming from a nearby corner. Music–everywhere. Aural teasers poured out of the downtown Austin venues pulling SXSW goers in all directions, trying to get them to come in and enjoy the show. With over 2000 officially sanctioned bands, there’s a lot of competition.
I rolled to Lamberts BBQ (Guadelupe and 2nd) just in time to catch Canada’s own The Coast.
The indie-pop sound riled the crowd and sent an energetic pulse through the quaint lounge environment of the upstairs room. Attendees chilled out at the back of the room enjoying drinks, on the wraparound leather bench seating, or from a standing position in the middle of the floor nodding heads with those adjacent. Ben Spurr’s vocals seduced the crowd into fixation with the emotional words and sounds The Coast pumped into their head-space–beautiful and real.
After The Coast wrapped up and chatting with Craig Grossman of Green Room Music Source (who sponsored the showcase at Lamberts), I started to feel the pulse of dubstep in my veins, or maybe it was my phone vibrating with a text to go to Barcelona on 6th. I made my way back to the craziness of SXSW central and descended into the depths of the club, beckoned by the drone on bass wobble.
DreadBass Soundsystem was rockin the mic and bass guitar along with dubstep groves in the background. It was a real interesting spin on live dubstep DJing. The crowd was gettin busy on the dance floor through the rest of their set as Eprom took the stage and turned the heat up. The woofers began to bellow as thick bass hits and wobbles filled the dark room. The energy level picked up and drew bar patrons to the dance floor to enjoy the low end melodies. People started dancing out of control, letting Eprom take the reins and slam groves into venue. Definitely an awesome show that we all enjoyed and got me pumped for the experience that I was about to have at Buffalo Billiards next.
I recently received a link from one of my friends in LA to http://musicmachinery.com, who’s creator Paul Lamere did a piece on a music discovery application The Echo Nest Artist Discovery Guide , created by Sched* founder Taylor McKnight. This is a very easy to use tool that allows people to input their LastFM, HypeBot, or Sched* user names and based on the artists listened to or viewed on using those services, creates a list of comparable artists who are playing at SXSW. This got me pretty excited because when I first looked through the weeks showcases I had no clue who many of the artists were and felt like I’d just end up having to blindly show up to venues and see what went down (which probably isn’t a horrible plan).
If you don’t have an account with LastFm and the likes, you can type any artist (for the most part) into a field and Sched* will aggregate a list of similar artists based on genre and description tags.
All in all, a very useful tool to navigate the crowded waters of SXSW.
This is an awesome video, I mean talk about DIY. These guys experimented over and over until they got the sounds they wanted. I especially liked the MiniMoog reference. That thing is awesome. One of my friends dad had one just sitting around, so we used it in our fusion/funk band Funktion. The sound were literally out of this world; some crazy stuff you see on some of those SyFy made for TV movies (and yea I mean recent ones). Check out the vid, let me know what you think, this really opens up the doors for sonic exploration for all of us.
Eenie Meenie Minie Mo
Twitter: I have had an account for a while, but have not decided to leverage it as of yet. It is only worth using if you have something interesting to say to your fans, and if you are excited to use it. Just filling up space on the internet with your daily schedule and other trivial matters not only ensues boredom for fans, but only contributes to the black hole of useless user content. Also, Twitter must be updated reasonably often so that fans keep interest. The internet provides so many venues for entertainment, if fans aren’t satisfied they will move to someone’s feed who appreciates them.
YouTube: This is a great place to set up shop if you have any marginal interest in video creation. This is a great place to display your story or thoughts, whatever they might be and have access to millions of viewers from every demographic and niche imaginable. The sheer amount of content on YouTube can be daunting as it creates competition not only for viewing in general, but also for each subject covered. This is why many people are suggesting that you release high quality content, instead of just any old video. This way you don’t flood the market with lack luster content, you establish a reputation for creating and distributing high quality videos and in turn rapport with viewers.
Flickr: For the photographers out there, novice, intermediate, or professional, this service provides a venue for showcasing and distributing content. Photos are easily uploaded and shared anywhere over the net, exposing work to audiences from all over the globe. The site is very simple to use and clearly lays out its privacy policy (a definite plus) that users can actually understand (SHOCKING!).
Vimeo: I’ve never posted anything to this site before, but have watched videos on it. The video quality is good, as is the video player itself and the site looks pretty user friendly. It speaks as more of a tool, than as a social network type situation. By this I mean that this is not as much as cacophony of videos displaying ten year olds on a sugar rush. Negatives arise from time wasted by not using (leveraging) the service and repercussions from others viewing material you post and deem appropriate.
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There are positives and negatives associated with each of these as with any piece of software that consumes your time and energy. Each person has different needs and strengths, each of which should be taken into account when deciding on using these services. A common mistake, especially amount musicians, is signing up for every available networking source. This is not only extremely difficult to manage, but doesn’t allow the artist sufficiently develop each source, because their resources and time are spread amongst many venues. Quality trumps quantity.
Modlife // Angels and Airwaves LOVE Album FREE Download
This is a video that Neill Blomkamp (Director of District 9) created for the TED conference. Really interesting stuff.
Crown & Anchor Featured on Bassfaced
My friends from New Paltz, NY were shown some love today on the bass music blog, Bassfaced. They gave them some props on bringing the bass and dub scene to New Paltz and on their work with many established and up and coming DJ’s.
Also, Bassfaced acknowleged C&A’s self established event series Watchtower Wobble, which happens to be invading Caboloosa’s in downtown New Paltz tommorrow night (2.12.10).
“DJs Bloom and Rodan seized our attention with their Watchtower Wobble event series, taglined “exploring electronic bass music in New Paltz”, their small town located an hour north of NYC.”
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In addition to letting Bassfaced know what’s goin down for over the next few weeks with live shows and such — they also dropped a couple bangin mixes…check em out !!
Workin hard, or hardly workin.
To begin, I’ve been busy lately scheduling to graduate early from IPR in the next quarter ending June 10 [Side Note: June 10th or June 2010, very confusing, I meant the latter though]. So you can imagine that I have a pretty serious schedule, but it’s actually not too bad and I’m enjoying the courses. But enough about that.
I’ve been working with a couple friends of mine based in New Paltz, NY, managing their dub-step DJ duo, Crown & Anchor, for my artist management class. Very cool stuff. We’ve been working on some PR ideas to promote the fourth installment of the Watchtower Wobble event series, which C & A started from scratch just a couple years ago. This show has packed the venue every time and will do the same on February 12, 2010.
They have also been producing some of their own tracks on Logic and working with other big name dub DJ’s from NY and ATL, breaking into the scene with high praise.
Kill Dem (Rodan Review)
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Other than working with C & A, I’ve been creating some hiphop and more electonic based music on my own, but nothing in final form yet. I’ll definitely post some of it up once it’s ready. I’m using Logic Pro and the Native Instruments Maschine, along with some sound libraries I’ve picked up along the way, all on my laptop. It’s working out pretty good (no crashes yet).
Check this out….Internet 2
This is an old article about a online network between certain universities and institutions that transfers data at (potentially) ridiculous speeds.
I was actually thinking about this when i got up today…
The “History” of Google.
Google is the brain child of Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1996. It began during the National Science Foundation funded SDLP (Stanford Digital Library Project), which had the goal of creating a digital library that was connected and universally accessible.
Utilizing Brin’s knowledge of data mining (extracting patterns from data), he and Page soon developed a search engine based on a new system of finding results that proved (proves) to be much more accurate and reliable than that of many others, including yahoo and many others that generally cease to exist. Google’s results are not based on the occurrence of the search term in websites, but instead uses Page’s “Back Rub” technology (later morphed into the PageRank algorithm) which bases results on sites with the highest number of back links among many other considerations, ranking them in order of importance.
For the inquisitive, check out: How Google Works.
Side Note: This is now being obscured by blogs like this one that make links to many sites and that are updated extremely often, even though many of them do not contain information that is pertinent to most users search requests.
Convinced that their system worked, Brin and Page first released the google domain on the Stanford University server (google.stanford.edu). In September 1997 they registered the google.com domain and a year later they incorporated the company under the name Google Inc. They were able to do this with funding initially from the cod-founder of Sun Microsystems, Andy Bechtolsheim, in the amount of $100,000 and later in 1998, $25 million from the venture capital firm KPCB, Sequoia Capital among others.
Following incorporation Google began becoming more and more popular, amassing a following of dedicated users who deemed Google’s simplicity and results as better than the competition. Growing in popularity, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords giving them a source of revenue, which would propel their revenue skywards after their eventual IPO in 2004 and essential monopoly over the search market, which still exists today.
P.S. The name Google is adapted from a Googol, or a 1 followed by one hundred zero’s (a pretty serious number).
