In the mid-1990s our friend Dave Allen published a zine called “The Clutter of Pop” (followed by a record of the same name). In one of them he wrote an essay about the glut of entertainment media choking our attention spans. I’ve long since lost the zine and I can barely remember Dave’s insights, but I do keep thinking about it in light of the ever increasing glut since its publication.

It is often said that  we only use ten percent of our brains. While that’s not exactly true, we often do only use about ten percent of its capacity at any given time. Another way to look at it is as a giant sieve. When we’re awake and alert, our brains are filtering out a vast majority of the stimuli around us. Don’t check my math, but think of it as only ten percent of the world getting in. Contrast that idea to idea that when we’re asleep and dreaming, the filters are only partially on or completely off. This makes using less of your brain — or stimulating less of it — not only an advantage, but a necessity to your sanity.

As amazing as the human brain is, it still has plenty of limitations. Some of its limitations are what have created the aforementioned glut. We externalize our knowledge and the processing thereof to free up our internal bandwidth. Hieroglyphs, language, books, keyboards, archives, databases, cassette tapes, websites, and iPods are all products of our mental offloading. We’ve emptied our heads so much that now it’s difficult to find a signal among the noise. The digital shift from bits to atoms only exacerbates the issue, problematizing the filtering process in altogether new ways.

For instance, with the impending demise of the printed page the debate regarding digital books is in full swing, following closely after that of the compact disc. Though the nature of reading the printed word and listening to music lend themselves to digitization in very different ways, there is a major overlooked similarity in the transition: The organizing principles of both are being irrevocably reconfigured.

What is a book but an organizing principle? What is an organizing principle but a filtering device? The book works for printed language just as the album does for recorded music: it filters and organizes it in a meaningful way for mental consumption. As David Weinberger pointed out, analog media like books and albums filter first, whereas digital media like websites and MP3s filter last. That is, by the time you read a book it’s been through a thorough rigorous organizing, writing, editing, proofreading, and design process. When you run a search on Google or Wikipedia, what you end up reading is filtered and organized on the fly as you request it (Wikipedia actually has an ongoing organizing process, and Facebook and Twitter are filtering digital information in still new and different ways).

None of this filtering and reorganizing means that the book as we know it is going to go away anytime soon. What all of this means is that some things that were never meant to be books will now have a place to be themselves. Let’s face it, just as some records only have one good song, some books would be better off as blogs.

Time is the one truly finite resource. If we are to optimize it, we need better filters and better organizing principles. Instead of slogging through a whole book on a topic that would’ve just as well made a decent magazine piece, we’ll read it as it develops on the author’s blog. When we want to get lost in some convoluted alternate reality, we can still read a thousand-page Thomas Pynchon novel on good ol’ paper (his newest came out yesterday and is roughly half that long).

These changes change the way we think. They literally change our minds. With more and more choices for our filtering pleasure, I believe it’s mostly for the better.

Aardvark Founders. Pic: Jim Wilson/The New York Times

I have written here often of how technology only shortens the distance between people on the social web. In other words, using social web tools to communicate with friends and family is an extension of our social activities offline. As I write this on July 5th, I recall yesterday seeing tens of thousands gathered on bridges in downtown Portland, alongside the lake in Lake Oswego and milling around in Tigard, Or, to watch the firework displays commemorating Independence Day. Families with kids, couples and teens all very comfortable with each other for a few hours; it is very natural for us to gather with strangers and witness a familiar event.

Opening a browser on a computer or a mobile device today means participation in the social web. Not just because of one’s involvement in social networks but also by letting your friends or family know of your geo-location by allowing a mobile device app to broadcast your whereabouts for instance. Emailing and texting friends, tweeting and updating your Facebook status all let those following you know of your involvement on the social web every day.

This is of course very familiar to us, we surf the web in our own familiar ways using social networking tools, yet companies that wish to harness the power to advertise to this web of millions of people have been stymied for some time, stuck in social media channels wondering how to budge these masses even a quarter of an inch closer to their products. The web and those using it don’t ever stop moving but you can’t simply plant a billboard alongside this viral highway – the billboard’s message will remain right there where it was positioned, as we all go about our daily electronic sojourns.

Rob Glazer of Real. Pic: Kevin P. Casey for the The New York Times

I recently discovered two articles in the Business section of the June 28th 09 edition of the New York Times. The articles cover two companies and their products – one is RealNetworks, a familiar face in technology, the other a new company called Aardvark. Real is featured for launching new technology for hardware devices and Aardvark for creating a social web service that helps you reach hundreds of your online friends and peer group for answers to any of your questions. Real brings us technology based on the premise that the company thinks we need their product and Aardvark brings us technology that embraces the social web by connecting us easily with people we trust to answer our questions. [I used Aardvark yesterday to ask a question of my followers - "who uses online music subscriptions, which one is better and why?" and I received 6 great responses, even one from a friend in Sweden who urged me to use a service called Spotify.] It works.

Aardvark doesn’t bother all of my 1700+ Facebook friends either. As the NYT article points out –

“Those friends-of-friends may turn out to be a great fountain of hitherto untapped information. For example, none of your 200 Facebook “friends” may have recently stayed in Napa and be able to recommend a bed-and-breakfast. But if each of their friends can be tapped, the pool of prospective wine-country authorities jumps from 200 into the tens of thousands.

You wouldn’t want to bother those thousands, however, with your question about Napa B.& B.’s. Aardvark has devised ways to drastically narrow the search, asking only those who are most likely to have an answer, and asking only a few of them at a time, protecting your network of volunteers from being asked too often.”

There’s more – “Having humans, not software, supply the advice is important. Max Ventilla, who formerly was at Google and is now Aardvark’s chief executive, said, “Often the most useful answers don’t answer the original question. Example: ‘You don’t want to go to the Caribbean now — it’s the rainy season — you want to go to Hawaii.’ ”

Aardvark has embraced the idea of the social web and crowdsourcing.

At the other end of the web [not that I'm saying the web exists on a plane with two actual 'ends'] RealNetworks delivered a new version of its Real Player software called Real Player SP. Real was once a pioneer in the online world of video and music delivery but as the NYT says – “.. the company has been largely eclipsed by rivals like Microsoft, Apple and YouTube from Google.”

In his NYT article, Brad Stone argues that Real has stuck to some of its technologies for too long. The new software for instance, allows user to move video onto smartphones like the iPhone and the Blackberry line, but with any mobile device able to stream video directly from the web, why would they want to? When it comes to music I’ve argued that mobile ubiquity and access from the cloud means never having to own music again if you choose to. Real is presuming that people want to ‘own’ or store video on their devices – that seems like an unlikely proposition.

In the same article, “Mike McGuire, an analyst at Gartner, … wonders whether Real is actually meeting new consumer needs, particularly since devices like smartphones are increasingly able to directly display Web video. “Sticking to your guns is one thing, but it’s another to say, let’s add features because we can, and because consumers should want this. Do we really know they do? Is anyone really asking for that?” Mr. McGuire said.”

Meanwhile Rob Glazer, Real’s chief says – “the human nervous system is wired to focus on new things,” like Twitter, and to dismiss the profitable stalwarts that have been around the block. With the new version of RealPlayer, he said, “we have made ourselves relevant again, or even more relevant in a new world.”

I hope that Mr. Glazer doesn’t really believe that notion..

Related Posts:

Authenticity and Authority on the Social Web

On Social Media, Blogs And Advertising

The world lost a wonderfully acerbic writer this week – Steven Wells. I knew Steve back in the late 70’s as he was friends with all of us in Gang of Four and was a regular contributor to the Leeds post-punk scene. In later years he wrote for the New Musical Press [fortunately before it became a shallow imitation of itself] and up until his death he had written a weekly column for the UK’s Guardian Newspaper.

Here is the Guardian’s farewell to him – in it are links to some of his best writing.

And here is another eulogy from Clash Music.

He will be missed.

From PCPA web site.

David Byrne comes to raise the hair on your arms and the sweat on your palms. Eno and Byrne have made a new record, Everything that Happens will Happen Today, their first in 30 years—the formula was lost, but now it has been found. Byrne and Eno began their artistic relationship in the late seventies with 3 Talking Heads albums, followed by their groundbreaking album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Songs from all of the above will be performed in this concert, but not in that order.

David Byrne is well known as the musician who co-founded the group Talking Heads (1976–88) in New York. On record and in concert, the band was acclaimed by critics and audiences alike; more importantly, however, they have proven to be extremely influential. Talking Heads took popular music in new directions, both in terms of sound and lyrics, and also introduced an innovative visual approach to the genre. In 2002 Talking Heads were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2003, Talking Heads released a lovely boxed set which includes a DVD of all the band’s videos. In 2005 a Brick was released with the complete studio catalog on dualdisc with previously unreleased audio and video material.

Brian Eno is not performing on this tour

Click image to play

As Dave continues the test drive he took the Lincoln MKS out to Portland International Airport to pick up his friend, the acclaimed Belgian electronic artist, Von Von Von, who has just returned from exile in Europe. Hear what Von has to say about coming out of exile and what he thinks of the Lincoln MKS…

Pic by Alicia J. Rose

A new one from Portland faves Viva Voce, and it’s a good one. Check it out.

Viva Voce – Devotion

David Lynch and Singer/Songwriter Moby discuss “Wait For Me” Moby’s new album influenced by David Lynch, the song “Shot in the Back of the Head”, and their collaboration on the accompanying music video. Oh, BTW, they also both like old factories.

Watch the David Lynch directed video for Shot In The Back of the Head.

The six remaining Virgin Megastores in the U.S. including the Times Square location (probably the single highest volume music store in America) will be closing for good over the next few months, leaving 1,000 people unemployed.

At its peak in 2002, Virgin had 23 stores across the U.S. with $230 million in sales. Virgin’s billionaire founder, Richard Branson sold off the retail chain years ago and it is currently owned by a joint venture of real estate companies. Though CD sales are down (they fell by a staggering 20% between 2007 and 2008), the stores are being liquidated because their owners think that they can make way more money off of the sale of the property than CD sales.

And, what will be taking over the prime Times Square real estate? None other than the cheap chic apparel chain, Forever 21. The shuttering of these six stores really does signal the end of an era. The brick and mortar music retailers as we once knew them are nearly dead.

Er, cough, cough…

Portland electronic duo, Little Hunks

Social Cache is but one window into the world of Nemo HQ. The multi-talented Nemo designer, fashionista and blogger Nubby Twiglet and myself post up to Social Cache as often as time will allow between posting to our respective blogs NubbyTwiglet.com and Pampelmoose. The Nemo blog world also includes StudioNemo and Roger Bridges’ Strange|Beautiful and all these blogs feed the Nemo cultural hopper.

Another spin-off is the Pampelmoose New Music Hour that airs twice a week on 94.7FM KNRK, Portland’s biggest alternative radio station. The show is dedicated to bringing the on-air audience as much of the best new music we can squeeze in to an hour as well as playing as much local Portland music as we can. All the songs are then posted to Pampelmoose and archived for streaming or downloading.

This is the final 2008 Pampelmoose edition of the New Music Hour on Portland’s 94.7FM and it’s time to take stock of all the great music that I’ve been able to play from Portland’s vibrant music scene. I have 14 songs from some of Portland’s finest. They are by no means ranked in any order, nor are they songs necessarily from ‘08 releases, just a selection from many songs that I could have played. The choice was difficult but having room for only 14 bands forced my hand. To those that didn’t make the list be assured that in ‘09 you will be played on the show and maybe the list will be longer next year and I can accommodate more bands…just keep the great music coming.

Hockey – Song Away
Starfucker – Holly
Little Hunks – Came To Party
Lackthereof – The Columbia
Holy Sons – The Feral Kid
Peter Broderick – With The Notes In My Ears
The Mint Chicks – 2010
Red Fang – Reverse Thunder
The Shaky Hands – We Are Young
James Low – American Dream
The Wherewithals – The Point
Bark Hide and Horn – Change It
Loch Lomond – Blue Lead Fence
Microfilm – Fox And His Friends

Stream or download all the previous Pampelmoose 94.7FM shows here.

The pop star and the professor … Mike Skinner talks to John Gray. Photograph: Suki Dhanda

Mike Skinner and me have some things in common – we are both well-known musicians; me as bass player for Gang of Four and he performing under his moniker The Streets, although he is arguably more popular. That aside I now find that we are both ardent supporters of the work of the philosopher John Gray, especially his book ‘Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans and Other Animals‘.

In The Streets recent release ‘Everything Is Borrowed,’ Skinner reveals Gray’s influence in his lyrics while Gray’s influence on me comes through in my writings on the conceit of ’social media’, a term that I feel is empty and is peddled furiously only by those that would profit from harnessing social networks for the purpose of creating advertising revenue. Here we are then – two musicians, a philosopher, Charles Darwin and Facebook; such a wonderful mashup. Much food for thought. Here’s the interview:

Few records this year addressed themes such as human consciousness and evolution (as well as reflecting the linguist’s pleasure in a good piece of slang) as smartly as the Streets’ fourth album, Everything is Borrowed. OMM detected in it the influence of the work of the philosopher and occasional Observer contributor John Gray – and a quick call revealed that Mike Skinner is a huge fan of the Straw Dogs author. That bestseller, first published in 2003, argued that humans have still not come to terms with Darwin or accepted that they are like other animals – thereby knocking the humanists’ belief in progress.

It seemed a good idea to put the pop star and the professor together, and so they met for a wide-ranging conversation – covering the art of storytelling and the imminent collapse of Western capitalism – in a north London pub hours before Skinner’s performance at the BBC Electric Proms.

Mike Skinner: Reading Straw Dogs… I was aware of the idea that consciousness is an illusion, but it really made me think about a lot of things differently.

John Gray: The book is not intended to convert anyone to anything or to impose my world view. It’s intended to stir people’s thinking so that they see their lives in different ways. People have said to me – young people, old people, a couple who were trapped in a religious cult for 40 years – that they liked the book because it helped to weaken the story that they’ve woven of their lives, the story that was ruling them.

MS: What you seem to be saying is that it’s all an illusion, life goes on and shit just happens…

JG: Well, good things happen too.

MS” But what’s a good thing? It’s just something that we perceive to be good…

JG: I’m not saying we should rid ourselves of the need for stories, but when that need becomes tyrannical then we can give up too much of our freedom. One story of the past few years was that wealth was going to grow indefinitely – we were all going to get richer and the ups and downs of history weren’t going to apply to us. Well, stories are not true or false in the way that science is, but some are closer to human reality. And this Prozac-like story of the last 20 years – people believed it!

MS: The financial situation: the impression I have is that we’re not in as much trouble as we were in 1929.

JG: Not yet.

MS: OK… and the reason for that is memes – it’s the knowledge that if you don’t bail the banks out, we’re in really deep shit. So does that represent progress?

JG: It’s an interesting question. And I’m serious when I reply by saying the proof will be in the pudding. You can say we studied the 1930s and so we won’t commit the same mistakes. We’ll do what should have been done then and maybe it will work. But there is a different way of looking at it. Even if avoiding those mistakes now is the right thing to do, there will be different consequences which will get us into different types of trouble. Bailing out the banks might lead to the sort of stagflation we saw in the 1970s.

The point is: there’s an element of luck, and while I’m not a religious believer, if you want stories in your life, it might be better to follow religious stories rather than those you know to be shallow – like the story of unending growth.

MS: Your work can be very dark. But as a person you seem very amiable…

JG: Well, I’m not writing in order to provide consolation. One idea that’s really unpopular nowadays is that there are any aspects of a human being which are inherently bad. But one thing that’s distinctive in human beings – it might not be unique – is cruelty.

Now what should we do about cruelty? There’s a belief that if people have a proper education, if they live in a peaceful, safe society, there won’t be any evil. But is evil – for example, cruelty – normal or abnormal? I think it’s normal. It doesn’t mean you have to accept it.

MS: Isn’t it dangerous to say evil is natural?

JG: It’s the opposite. I’m a big fan of JG Ballard…

MS: I’m halfway through High-rise

JG: The very book I was going to mention! Ballard says that people from Catholic countries are less shocked by his books than people from Protestant countries, because they still believe in original sin – there are murderers and psychopaths inside us. It doesn’t mean you accept that state of affairs, it means you have rules and conventions which stand in the way. That’s what used to be called civilisation – though, of course, there’s nowhere that’s more than half-civilised. In general, I’m interested in looking at what’s happening now and trying to deal with it. For instance, climate change is not fully solvable…

MS: Because it’s natural or… because we’re fucked?

JG: [Laughs] Well, my best understanding is that the planet is not like a clock that we can wind back. Once the carbon is in the system, there are inexorable results. Also, there’s global dimming – the darkening of the skies by pollution, which also makes the world cooler than it would otherwise be. Getting rid of pollution too quickly could accelerate global warming.

Most greens are horrified by the thought that we can’t stop climate change, but that’s childish. Am I telling people to give up? No. In Holland, for instance, they’re giving back land to the sea and building more on stilts because they expect sea levels to rise… and I find that uplifting, even though it’s a very sober approach.

MS: Just to get a bit Dr Who, if we’ve also lost control of technology, could robots take over the world?

JG: There’s nothing inherently unique and inexplicable about humans, so we could create devices that could indeed become conscious. But if we create robots that are only conscious – that don’t have the 99 per cent of unconscious mental life that we have – could that hollow replica of how we imagine ourselves to be start painting in the same way as van Gogh?

Most creativity in the arts, and even in science, comes from levels of the mind that are not conscious. Conscious thought is a tiny, tiny part of the life of the mind. Have you heard of transhumanists? These are people who are interested in technologies that will allow them not to die – some of them end up having their brains frozen. They think they can remodel themselves. Now I’m not as unhappy as they are with the idea of human life…

MS: But you don’t want to die – you’re never going to want to die!

JG: Is that true? Do we really, really want to be different from all the human beings in the past and all the other animals?

MS: I think we all do. I think you do!

JG: If I could become the sort of creature that doesn’t need to die, I’d be different from the way I am. And I don’t want to become like a robot.

MS: I was famous, I guess, for a while, and one of the fascinating things about it for me – and one of the unnerving, scary things – was how my boundaries completely controlled me. I wasn’t as autonomous as I thought I was.

JG: The person you were before was a by-product of your limitations and circumstances.

MS: Exactly. Dying is a boundary. Everything we do is to try not to die, and once you don’t have that… I’m 30 soon and all I’ve got behind me are the years when I thought I was never going to die.

JG: If the boundaries that you associate with growing up are removed, you can live in a different way. The picture you have of yourself alters or dissolves. But if the wall of mortality disappeared… well, you can almost not imagine the change; I think it would turn us into something different.

MS: If we believe in Darwin we have to believe that every evolutionary stage brings an advantage.

JG: Darwin has been turned into a humanist icon. Darwin’s followers think they’ve renounced religion, but they cling to the idea that while other animals can’t control their destiny, humans can – a belief that comes from Christianity. Darwinism has actually been turned into another religion.

• ‘Everything is Borrowed’ (679) is out now; John Gray’s latest book is ‘Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia’ (Penguin)

Moving towards ‘feels free’ while further devaluing music.

A press release arrived within the email pile today and it trumpeted this – Nokia launches pioneering ‘Comes With Music‘ digital entertainment service. New service offers customers unprecedented freedom and value. EMI Music, independents and music publishers join offering.

Let me take a deep breath here……ok. There’s nothing but hyperbolic exclamations here. I have to ask, why does the music industry continue to shoot itself in the foot? And why, via their mouthpiece the henchmen of the RIAA, do they continue to whine over falling music sales when they happily embrace giving away music? Perhaps the labels and publishers were happy to receive bucket-loads of cash to license their music in return for allowing Nokia to train young folks in the art of always getting music for free!!?

Nokia announced the debut of its pioneering Comes with Music digital entertainment service, which offers consumers a new way to discover and enjoy music. Customers who buy a Comes With Music device will be able to explore and enjoy a diverse catalog of music of international and local artists with unlimited access to millions of tracks for a year, keeping the music once the year is over and revolutionizing their digital music experience.

Dear Nokia, consumers have been discovering and enjoying music for years, for free, via the internets. That’s why music sales are down. It’s nice to see that you are helping to make more free music available to these consumers though.

“Comes With Music sets a precedent for consumer value and convenience that the rest of the digital entertainment industry is already copying,” said Tero Ojanperä, executive vice president and head of the Nokia entertainment and communities business.”

Consumer value and convenience = internet. Otherwise that’s just marketing double-speak.

“Trying out a music recommendation is spontaneous as customers can download without worrying about the cost of an album or a track – the freedom and simplicity of the service is unparalleled.”

See above.

Comes With Music gives you unlimited access to the millions of tracks in the Nokia Music Store and the music is all yours to keep – because it’s not a revolution unless you get to keep your music.

WOW!

“With the launch of Nokia’s Comes With Music, fans now have a new avenue to find and enjoy music from EMI’s catalogue, and our artists have a powerful new way to reach their fans,” said Douglas Merrill, president, digital business, for EMI Music. “By encouraging music discovery in an innovative and consumer-friendly environment, Comes With Music will continue to push experimentation in the digital music industry.”

Experimentation in the digital music industry – fancy that? Only 10 years too late…

The winners here are Nokia [enhanced phone sales] and music lovers [more free music]. The losers are musicians and songwriters [believe me, my royalties on digital sales are miniscule] and the record labels [training kids to get music for free is so 1998...]

Simple user interface, giant database of videos, easy search that works…and all built on the back of free content handed to them by the recording industry. Ha!

MTV Music

Click image to play ‘Because of’

I found a YouTube video of a song from one of America’s greatest living song writers, a video of a song in which he delivers an ode to passion, old age and inevitable decline. A look back at what was, has been and perhaps now will no longer be.

In this recent song, ‘Because of,’ Leonard Cohen revisits his youth, a time of prodigous output when he wrote great songs such as Suzanne and Famous Blue Raincoat and one of my favourites, Chelsea Hotel #2 in which Cohen captures the freewheeling essence of Manhattan in the 60’s – “I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel, you were talking so brave and so sweet, giving me head on the unmade bed, while the limousines wait in the street. Those were the reasons and that was New York, we were running for the money and the flesh.” There were always women surrounding Cohen and the threads of those relationships wove their way into his songs. As his Wikipedia entry says his work often deals with the exploration of religion, isolation and sexuality.

The POV of the video for ‘Because of’ is via a porthole, or perhaps a lens intended to focus on the subject matter – women dancing half-naked on a bed. And Cohen, in that famous gravelly voice, intones rather than sings the lyrics of his lament.

“Because of a few songs wherein I spoke of their mystery, women have been exceptionally kind……and they say, “look at me Leonard, look at me one last time…”

The song brings to mind another talented artist in Cohen’s peer group, the writer and novelist Philip Roth; they were born within a year of each other, Roth in 1933 and Cohen in 1934. In 2007 Roth delivered Exit Ghost, a novel of immense power, in which the novel’s central character Zuckerman struggles with his past [there are references to The Ghost Writer a previous Roth novel] and his incontinence and impotence due to an operation to combat his prostate cancer. Roth/Zuckerman sums up his helplessness when he writes “I gave up swimming regularly down at the college pool for the bulk of the year (with bloomers under my (swim) suit) and continued to confine myself to sporadically yellowing the waters of my own pond during the Berkshires’ few months of warm weather, when, rain or shine, I do my laps for half an hour everyday.”

The difference in these end game soliloquies from each man’s perspective is that Cohen seems more hopeful, as if there is more beyond the life he now lives, yet Zuckerman/Roth sees only despair, decline and finality. Clearly, even to the end, true passion not only consumes us but also never dies.

Girl Talk live in Detroit. Photo – Christos/Detroitartist.org

Gregg Gillis is more well known as the musician Girl Talk. And he believes very strongly that he is a musician and not, as many people have called him, a DJ. If you haven’t heard his work you might wonder why there would be any issue for Gillis but upon hearing his craftily designed songs you will notice that each track is made up of many short snippets of samples of songs that you know you’ve heard somewhere else. On his recent album, Feed The Animals, that he released online Radiohead-style on Illegal Art he told the New York Times that it includes more than 300 samples and that he estimates that each minute of “Feed the Animals” took him about a day to create. That’s a lot of days.

More importantly though his preferred method of “song writing,” i.e. using riffs borrowed from other people’s work puts him front and centre in the debate over copyright law and fair use. His stance is that he is using such tiny samples of other people’s work that he argues his actions are protected under fair use. Not all legal experts agree but so far he has avoided the threat of litigation.

As a musician [I am a founding member of the UK post-punk band, Gang of Four] with my own copyrights I share his stance as I believe that copyright laws have become far too stringent and are now limiting artists’ abilities to be creative. Many people would like to see the law relaxed in certain areas to allow more creativity to spring forth. One area that definitely falls under the term known as gray is the practice of creating mashups. A Mashup in the musical form is exactly what Gillis is doing, literally intermingling or layering beats and samples from various songs on top of and into each other. The end result is surely a completely new work. As Wikipedia puts it – a mashup is a digital media file containing any or all of text, graphics, audio, video, and animation, which recombines and modifies existing digital works to create a derivative work.

Any digital media is open to the process of mashing, and just like a collage, where found images are most commonly rendered onto a canvas, the end result of this creative process should be considered a new original work. There should be no threat of litigation for artists such as Gregg Gillis who create these new works of musical digital art. Go here to hear Gillis in action as Girl Talk and see how many songs you recognize.

In that spirit I post here a mashup that I recently created in collaboration with the musician Jon Ragel who goes by the moniker Boy Eats Drum Machine. Rather than sampling we decided to actually perform the mashup by playing live in the studio on top of sampled drums. The song borrows parts from the artists Talking Heads, Aaliyah, Van Halen and The Cure.

BEDM feat. Dave Allen – Talking Heads/Aaliyah/Van Halen/Cure Mashup [MP3] Click to play, right click to download.

My good friend Brian Zisk, the man behind the always interesting SanFranMusicTech Conference, has announced the next gathering. It will be back at San Francisco’s Hotel Kabuki on October 20th. There are early bird tickets currently available through August 8th which you can grab here. I will be there as a panelist along with the following folks:

Bob Heyman – Mediasmith, Chief Search Officer
Steve Jang – imeem, CMO & Head of Business Development
Ethan Kaplan – Warner Music Technology, VP
Rachel Masters – Ning, VP of Strategic Relationships
Jack Moffit – Speeqe, CEO / Chesspark, CEO & Lead Developer / IceCast Streaming Media Server, Creator / Xiph Foundation, Co-Founder
Sean O’Connell – Music Allies, Founder & CEO
Dave Ulmer – Motorola, Sr. Director Multimedia Products and Services
Carnet William – Sprout, Co-Founder & CEO
Brian Zisk – SanFran MusicTech Summit, Executive Producer / Future of Music Coalition, Technologies Director

Pitchfork.tv is almost here and apparently Wired got an early look-see... I’m not sure about this move into online TV. The one’s I’ve used such as Joost have ultimately let me down because they still push content at me rather than allowing me to pull in the content I want. Also I don’t want to spend a lot of time at the laptop just watching one piece of content; the thrill of discovery through linking ever onward on the ‘net means it takes a lot of great stuff to make me hang around one site, aka being ’sticky.’

I’m worried that the Pitchfork folks are seeing the internet as a TV channel rather like some ad agencies do. When PFork founder Ryan Schreiber says this – “There are a lot of people doing really cool stuff with music and video on the web, but in terms of clean, crisp audio and video recordings, there’s really nothing out there,” he is missing the point – yes there are many great sites that we can visit to watch stuff (hello, YouTube) but do we need “clean, crisp audio and video”? I say no we don’t, we want instant gratification and we don’t need production techniques to tidy it up and make it presentable. I saw amazing footage last month of a Boeing 777 trying to land in a storm in Frankfurt – it was a shot on either a mobile phone or a cheap digital camera and I watched it multiple times because of the content and subject matter and the commentators voice – someone who was equal parts thrilled and scared at what he was witnessing/capturing.

Schreiber goes on to say – “[We're] really documenting the music that we like and that we feel is vital.” That’s noble but should Pitchfork be a gatekeeper or a filter or both? A better way to go might be as a consumer-driven social network that allows music fans to upload what *they* believe is *vital.* Meanwhile I’ll wait until the folks at Hipster Runoff have their say.