Thinking about online collaboration

This is a piece I wrote for the Western Riverina Arts' blog about my experiences with online collaboration:

Online collaborations have taught me a lot and provided many opportunities to develop and promote my music.

When I moved to Wagga Wagga it was a rather lonely time and I started evenings on the forum of the UK-based Ninja Tune record label's website. There I found like-minded music lovers and also remix competitions.

Remixing was a great education in electronic music, as I could hear how different producers approached the same source material.

In recent years I've been involved in a couple of 'remix chains' that originated on the Ninja Tune forum, where each track remixed the previous in a 'Chinese whispers'-style approach.



For a regional musician with limited interest in playing at a pub, online collaboration has been a satisfying outlet.

Another a group I've been involved with is the Disquiet Junto. The US-based blogger Marc Weidenbaum sets weekly projects, which vary greatly but provide interesting challenges. There's a lot learn from the activity but even more to be gained reading the reflections provided by other participants.



Whatever your medium, there are probably other artists online who are willing to share. Look around, introduce yourself to people whose work you like and see what you can learn.

There's a lot of inspiration to be found but even more to be gained through collaboration.

Mock pelican

This is a pelican impression recorded using a balloon. It's for an audible protest, see http://www.burragorang.org/bimbleboxbirds.php

Morton Subotnick

Spoke with Morton Subotnick yesterday about how pitch dominates music, Ableton Live and other interfaces. See Cyclic Defrost's website

This photo of Mort in his New York studio comes from Ethan Hein's blog, which has many excellent posts.

NO MOBILES ON THE DANCEFLOOR, PLEASE

David Byrne on How Music Works

Music tells us things — social things, psychological things, physical things about how we feel and perceive our bodies — in way that other art forms can’t. It’s sometimes in the words, but just as often the content comes from a combination of sounds, rhythms, and vocal textures that communicate, as has been said by others, in ways that bypass the reasoning centers of the brain and go straight to our emotions. Music, and I’m not even talking about the lyrics here, tells us how other people view the world — people we have never met, sometimes people who are no longer alive — and it tells it in a non-destructive way. Music embodies the way those people think and feel: we enter into new worlds — their worlds — and through our perception of those worlds might not be 100 percent accurate, encountering them can be completely transformative.

Reimagining in Wagga Art Gallery

Western Riverina Arts' Reimagining the Murrumbidgee exhibition is now open at the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery.

My contribution is a soundtrack composed from recordings of the River, as well as photographs in the catalogue which I also designed.

If you can't make it to Wagga, you can download my Reimagining soundtrack and a copy of the catalogue from Bandcamp.

No Junto

Missed the Junto last week and will skip it again this week. In part it's because there's a video I should be editing, but also because last week's exercise involved remixing some tracks I found kinda headache-inducing and this week requires interpreting a weekly calendar. The latter isn't something I keep but is an interesting idea, wish I'd had time to prepare for it but, yeah, I should be editing a video.

Amazing tongue twister

Brian Eno Visual Music

Been enjoying reading Brian Eno Visual Music by Christopher Scoates. It's a lush book filled with many examples from throughout Eno's education and career, as well as discussing his influences and exhibitions.

The text on the bookmark ribbon comes from the Oblique Strategies developed by Eno and Peter Schmidt, which is a nice touch.