The Blog/News

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Music As Culture, at UnConvention

This is my live blog of the ‘Music As Culture’ session at Unconvention in Manchester – it was a discussion hosted by Andrew Dubber and Jez Collins of Birmingham School Of Media. It was a great discussion, and my precis of it is here:

[6:00]Featured Artist’s Coalition (FAC) – policy decisions driving by people with the loudest voices. BPI/big music etc.
FAC says there’s another agenda here – that of the artists. Important for Policy.
The problem is that they’re all coming at it from the point of view that ‘music is something through which money is made”

We asked ‘is there a way of engaging with people who do things with music as culture rather than commerce? do they have a voice?’ ‘is there a will – partic. with indies, to say that culture is important.’
Deleting music – because there’s no imperative to release back catalogue, 90% isn’t currently available. No-one even knows who owns it.
problem with blanket extension of copyright is that that legacy music gets left to rot in the archives.
So let’s have a conversation about it. Continue reading “Music As Culture, at UnConvention”

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The Importance of Accountability In the Creative Process.

This came up the yesterday in a couple of discussions on solobasssteve.com, the idea that random things can often provide the impetus to think about what we do in a more focused way. Particularly in this post by Mike, which this post is basically a very long response to…

One example of this random accountability was the way that record companies – even if their input was unhelpful – provided a degree of focus to the creative process that disappears if you’re not answerable to anyone. Continue reading “The Importance of Accountability In the Creative Process.”

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The Earnestness of Being Important

…AKA, What’s Important about your Music… To You?


Following on from the discussion about ‘what makes you interesting?’, I’ve been thinking about the other ‘value metrics’ for what we do as musicians, and the directions they flow in.

Interestingness is one bi-directional value:

  • What you think is interesting, or find interesting about what you do
  • What your audience find interesting about you AND about what you do.

The important element being that YOU being interesting isn’t a prerequisite to making great music, it just provides additional context for the music. It’s why we all bought music magazines – we didn’t buy them for dry descriptors of new music by people we’d never heard. We bought them to read stories, thoughts and opinions from the people whose music we love already, and to discover in the taste of the journalists some new music that they get excited about. Continue reading “The Earnestness of Being Important”

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Guest Post – Jemimah Knight: "Bass Soul".

[I have a lot of very bright, creative, wonderful friends, doing fascinating things with music and social media and news and all kinds of other areas of human life that make the world a better place. One such friend is Jemimah Knight, a hugely talented journo – and bassist – who authored this lovely essay as a guest post. Thanks J!]

“Hi, I read Steve’s blog and listen to Lobelia‘s beautiful voice when I can. It’s a privilege I take for granted really, but maybe we do so when we know good people who can make music.

I grew up with a musical family around me, my father is like some musical polymath – he can play most things – although the violin is a bit tiny for him maybe. My mother has a beautiful voice, she sang a lot more when I was small and she was professional. My brother, plays bass, I play bass badly and my dad – as mentioned, annoyingly also plays bass well. Continue reading “Guest Post – Jemimah Knight: "Bass Soul".”

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Guest Post II – Jennifer Moore on 'Interestingness'

[This post was originally posted as a comment on my “What Makes Your Music Interesting?“, but was far too wonderful, and involved, to leave as a comment. So please do read the other post first, and Jennifer’s earlier comments. Jennifer Moore is, as I said in the comments there, the first person I ever saw play a whole set of solo bass. A fabulous musician, and a regular commenter here, she always brings clarity and insight to whatever she comments on.]

::ponder ponder ponder::

I’ve been thinking more about all these comments, esp John G‘s use of the word “engaging”.

I’m thinking that “what’s good” vs “what’s interesting” (in the hooky/intriguing/initial-engagement sense of “interesting”) leaves something out.

“I was found by being interesting, not by being good” – Partly true, but you were partly just found by being there. That is both “there” at the event, and “there” on Flickr. Continue reading “Guest Post II – Jennifer Moore on 'Interestingness'”

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Two More Contrasting Solo Bass Experiment Videos.

Since Saturday’s upload, I’ve put 2 more videos on Vimeo for your delectation and delight, which contrast the different ways that the Looperlative can be used to either simply provide a loop for a piece of music, or be integral to the way it’s created, and the sound that emerges.

I’m fascinated by the relationship between technology and end result, and by the methods that we as musicians can use to keep our own technical thoughts and experiments subservient to the greater artistic and communicative aims… Continue reading “Two More Contrasting Solo Bass Experiment Videos.”

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New Ambient Music Video

Having had the aforementioned week away from playing, I sat down yesterday to do some bass-things. I started out on my fretted 6 string bass, and couldn’t really find anything that was particularly interesting to me (though that may feel very different when I go back to watch the video!), but once I switched to the fretless, things got a lot more fun.
This first video is actually the second one I recorded yesterday, and starts out pretty spacey and mellow. There a big healthy dose of fretless melody stuff in the middle – just exploring the emotional landscape of the underlying loops (which are three overlapping loops of different lengths, so the texture keeps shifting, along with the subtle changes in the harmony as the different parts of the three loops coincide to form new chords). Continue reading “New Ambient Music Video”

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What Makes Your Music Interesting?

These last couple of weeks, I’ve been SO busy with geek-things, that I’ve had little time for picking up a bass and making noises. It feels like a bit of a shame to have lost the momentum I picked up whilst posting my series of new video experiments to vimeo, but it also feels like a good break, time to think.

The 3 ‘live blogging’ events I’ve done have all been very different, but have all contained lessons for the discerning social-media-monkey-muso. Continue reading “What Makes Your Music Interesting?”

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Live Blog III – Political Innovation Camp, Belfast (picamp)

So today I’m in Belfast, at an Amplified event called PICamp – Political Innovation Camp. It’s an ‘unconference‘ style event, with the added Amp-twist of us hopefully taking the great stuff that comes up here and sharing it beyond the walls of the discussion, and running a session or two that invites you to contribute. There’s a big presence here for the political blog/forum, www.sluggerotoole.com

It’s fascinating being here, as the political landscape is slowly shifting with the proliferation of social media tools and the ensuing sense of increased engagement with the political process. The newsmaker events that Reuters have been running of late have been getting increasingly deep into the potential and possibilities of social media tools for connecting the electorate with the people who supposedly work for us. So today will hopefully be a great chance to think about, discuss and discover some new ways that emerging technologies can further the cause of transparency and accountability in government. Continue reading “Live Blog III – Political Innovation Camp, Belfast (picamp)”

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