Porter Mason, writer of Bassist Wanted, a ‘comic strip about music, man’ dropped me a line pointing to his site. Made me laugh, so I’m happy to pass it along to you – the skits on Sony’s DRM rootkit fiasco are particularly good (read ‘em from the bottom up to make sense).
Archive for July, 2006
Orchestra on the Beach
Blogging press releases instead of actual content again (bad Tim, bad!):
Orchestra on The Beach
On the Sunday 30th July @ 10pm a 40 piece Orchestra will be performing on the sandy beach of the Thames- just on front of the Festival Hall. They are called The Ricciotti Ensemble, from Holland, & are touring round the UK for 5 days this summer. They are a ’street orchestra’ and take only 4 minutes to set-up & will be playing a very mixed repertoire of old & new music, including pieces especially written for them, and will have special guest soloist, the young dutch opera diva, Maaike Poorthuis. This is going to be a VERY unique & magical event – and certainly the first time a full orchestra has ever played on the Thames Beach in central london. This event is brought to you by nonclassical & Reclaim The Beach (who run the now infamous Beach parties every summer). Please Bring your own drinks.. as we don’t have a license… arrive from 9.30pm, when the tide starts to go down! + IT’S FREE.
And if you can’t make Sunday they are playing in by the Tate Modern on Wednesday 2nd Aug @ 9pm.
-this is for real – it is at 10pm on the beach just in front of the festival hall [under the 'festival pier']- tell everyone you know & make sure you are there…
[see www.ricciotti.nl for more info on where else this Street Orchestra is playing in London]
Links for the week
Found via WFMU, a really outstanding collection of photos by Simon Wheatley focusing on Lambeth and life in and around the Grime scene. Comes with some excellent audio commentary too.
News of Anthology Recordings, a digital download retailer that will specialise in re-releasing the obscure and previously out-of-print.
The Observer’s war correspondent Jason Burke writes on the space for music in war zones.
Mwanji has been picking recently at the age-old Euro/US jazz debate, and finding some excellent points along the way.
And Helen has posted a perfect pastiche of the life of the young prep school harpist.
Mazen Kerbaj
Mazen Kerbaj is a Lebanese artist and trumpeter living in Beirut. His blog is a moving and beautifully judged document of the current Lebanese-Israeli conflict. Mostly Mazen has been posting drawings made as the bombs fall; many, like the one on the left, are struggling with the question “how do I represent sound in a drawing?” This is not a blog about politics, or resistance, it’s about expression and survival, and thus humanity.
On the first night that the bombs started falling, Mazen stood on his balcony and recorded an improvised duet between his trumpet and the bombs and the sounds of Beirut under fire. He has posted 6 1/2 minutes of this online, and it’s available through various sources here (and likely elsewhere too). Listen. It’s a powerful testament.
BPI and AIM take on the ISPs over filesharing
I’ve not seen any mention of the latest alarming, yet darkly comic mess that Big Music has got itself into through any of my usual online sources. But thanks to my ever-reliable offline source, my girl, I’m up to speed once more.
So, we all know that Big Music – aka the British Phonographic Industry here in the UK – is worried about illegal downloading and sharing of music over the net. They’re well known for pursuing their customers through the courts over this sort of thing. Well, that’s not proving enough for them, and they’ve started to attack the ISPs themselves (until now, their allies in the war against music piracy): just over a week ago, the BPI wrote to Tiscali demanding the immediate suspension of 17 of their users’ accounts. Tiscali, the poppetts, quite rightly told them where to go.
[Incidentally, here's where to go to sample some of Tiscali's fine product for yourself; and here's where to go to make sure you never buy another BPI CD again. If you're interested 
]
So, not satisfied with suing their customers or alienating their allies, the BPI, with almost Blairite zeal, have attempted to sidestep British legal formality itself. As Tiscali themselves put it, as quoted in The Lawyer,
It is not for Tiscali, as an ISP, nor the BPI, as a trade association, to effectively act as a regulator or law enforcement agency and deny individuals the right to defend themselves against the allegations made against them.
Damn straight. In The Lawyer’s analysis,
[T]he BPI is only risking its own credibility by going after the ISPs in such a public way rather than sticking to the established private routes. It is a little tactless. These are companies that have established legal departments and access to sizeable legal budgets. Unlike individuals, they are unlikely to be intimidated by BPI’s aggressive approach.
Who knows where this one’s going to end up: technically, the BPI might have a case, but this is legal territory without precedent and they’re playing a high stakes game against good players. We shall see.
More info:
Yahoo News (10 July):
The U.S. music industry tried to force telecoms companies to reveal the names of their customers allegedly using file-sharing networks to illegally share songs, but it lost a legal battle to do so in 2004. Record companies must now first obtain court-approved subpoenas against the unknown holders of ISP addresses, which then can be served on ISPs, allowing consumers to challenge the claims before their names are disclosed.
Yahoo News (12 July):
Tiscali … said it had received only extracts of a screenshot of one of its customers and nothing to support the allegations against the 16 others. “Further, you have provided no evidence of downloading taking place nor have you provided evidence that the shared drive was connected by the relevant IP address at the relevant time … If you wish to establish that downloading is taking place, please also provide evidence of this.”
Also, Open Rights Group (11 July); BoingBoing (11 July) and again.
Meanwhile, on a possibly uncoordinated front, another wing of the British recording industry, the Association of Independent Music, have launched their own attack on ISPs [pdf; html summary here]. To be fair, they’re showing the initiative and imagination you can expect from British indendent music and have come up with idea of charging ISPs, mobile phone networks and even MP3 player, mobile phone and computer manufacturers (!) every time their products are used to illegally distribute music. In some spectacularly weaselly language they talk of bringing these “unlicenced intermediaries” into the “official value chain”. Between the artist and the consumer sit, they argue, the real bad boys who are screwing us all, “Internet Service Providers (ISPs), mobile companies and device manufacturers”. “Real bad boys”, by the way, is industry-speak for “potential revenue stream”.
As Executive Director of the Open Rights Group, Suw Charman puts it, the whole idea is “ill-conceived and grasping”.
Unsurprisingly, the ISPs, once again, tell the British recording industry to pull the other one, it’s got bells on.
Links for the week
Blogariddims 2 is out now, courtesy of Nick Gutterbreakz, and is a retro techno monster. As the man says,
It’s about having some fun, getting a bit sentimental, having a bit too much to drink, making a pass at an old girlfriend and generally making a fool of yourself, but not really caring too much, because you’re among friends…and complete strangers
Get the full scoop here; sign up for the casts yourself here (and why wouldn’t you?).
And while we’re on the Gutterbreakz ting, be sure to check out his latest (and last?) dubstep mix, with accompanying interview over at Riddim.ca.
Elsewhere…. Tokafi interviews young avant gardist Dobrinka Tabakova; the Telegraph interviews old avant gardist Peter Maxwell Davies.
Women under-represented at this year’s Proms, report the Telegraph. The Independent prefers to dwell on the under-representation of non-Western classical music at a festival of Western classical music…
Interesting article from Tokafi on the poor service classical recording artists get from their record labels.
Hypebot has the EFF’s ‘9 Frequently Awkward Questions for the Music Industry‘.
More contemporary classical on YouTube
There are several new additions to my Contemporary Classical on YouTube post. Be sure to have a look. Thanks to Disquiet for the Lucier, and Il Blog della Domenica for the Ligeti.
Respect for others vs respect for ourselves
There’s an interesting article in today’s Telegraph by cultural critic Frank Furedi entitled ‘Music Matters too Much to be Made Easy’. It’s rabble-rousing stuff – which makes sense when you read the footnote that this is the text of Furedi’s keynote speech for the Cheltenham Music Festival. This note also explains why Furedi, who confesses at the start that he knows ‘very little’ about music, chose it as his subject, when in fact he could be talking about any cultural activity here. There’s very little that is exclusively music-related, and much of it preaches to the choir. But Furedi does make at least one excellent point on the current failure to balance respect for other cultural conventions and values with respect for our own:
The Assessment and Qualifications Alliance’s GCSE specification for music states that the curriculum will enhance students’ “ability to appreciate music” in a way that “reflects knowledge of cultural and spiritual contexts and sensitivity to the values and conventions of others”.
Gaining sensitivity to the “values and conventions of others” is an admirable objective. But what about the values of the students and of their community? While this guideline makes constant references to the “values of others”, it is silent about “our” values.
Links for the week
Couple of nice downloady things on Disquiet at the moment. Wobbly contacted me a while ago with a link to a ‘hidden’ DJ set of choral music that he’s put together. Well, the mix seems to have gone overground now; you can get to it directly here, or via Disquiet. Apparently, Wobbly has been known to put out a live version of this set.
Disquiet also link to a collection of Alvin Lucier mp3s currently available from the Tate Modern.
I’m slow in posting this one, but Sequenza have a report on Ligeti’s funeral and memorial concert.
Medieval is the new rock and roll, apparently.
And again this is old news now but it’s good enough to bear rereading: Virgin France sued for music piracy.
Musician Deathwatch
del.icio.us/skills/obituary | About this list
This week we bid farewell to the following members of the musical community:
Updated
:: Syd Barrett Former Pink Floyd frontman
:: Surinder Kaur Punjabi folk singer
:: Colvin Greig Music lecturer, composer and archaeologist
:: Don Lusher Trombonist and bandleader
:: Mark Ray Pianist and teacher
:: Elizabeth Fretwell Opera singer
:: Ross Tompkins ‘Tonight’ show pianist
:: Paul Nelson Rock critic
:: Joyce Hatto Pianist
:: Robbie ‘Rocket’ Watts Cosmic Psychos guitarist
:: Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson Opera mezzo-soprano
:: Willie Denson Songwriter
:: Eileen Barton Singer
Rest in Peace.
