Cool Folks in Boston

In the whirlwind of networking and stress and calling in favors that is planning a last minute tour, I've found a diamond in the rough of the internet. Mr. Moss sent me a bunch of links of Boston venues, one of which is a little place in Jamaica Plains called the Whitehaus, who seem to have some pretty rad stuff going on. They're a venue/record label/artists collective-type thing, with lots of cool music that you can get for free or cheap, and a very friendly-looking kitty cat named Red. I miss my cat... Ethel, if you're reading this, I'll be back in CT in March. Don't pee on my stuff while I'm gone.

They recently re-posted a comp called the Whitehaus Family Sampler: Vol. 1 that is really quite great. Lots of lovely folky stuff with pretty voices and glockenspeils and stuff; the types of songs you would want/expect to hear at a living room house show that was also a vegan potluck and a bike repair workshop, or something. I've been listenening to it all morning.

Sewing Machines is gonna be playing their Hoot (short for Hootenany) on March 6, which sounds like it's gonna be an awesome time. So if you're in Boston then (or any other time) you should totes czech this place out. They do good things.

Also, they already linked to FFR from their website, which was sweet of them.

deeplocal + Encyclopedia Destructica

My friend JonBro who just finished working on a dope book with Encyclopedia Destructica sent me this link about a cool old/new media residency program in Pittsburgh.

"Pittsburgh-based tech start-up deeplocal and artist collective Encyclopedia Destructica are now accepting applications by artists for the Old and New Media Residency. This 3 month corporate artist residency program was created to assist artists in producing, showing, and supporting new projects. The residency is sponsored by Encyclopedia Destructica, a Pittsburgh based group of working artists, and deeplocal, a Pittsburgh technology and design studio founded by artists, designers, and technologists. It represents a unique collaboration between a corporation and a working artist group. Applications are being accepted now through February 15th online at http://www.deeplocal.com/residency. Residencies begin on April 1st, 2009 and will last for 3 months."

Future Thinking

Space Collective Could be one of my new favorite websites.

"Where forward thinking terrestrials share ideas and information about the state of the species, their planet and the universe, living the lives of science fiction."

Future music from the past.

Tangerine Dream-Ricochet

Kraftwerk-Radioactivity

Design Rulez.

I found this artist's page through MAKE's blog. La Chanh Nguyen's work has a healthy dose of Scandinavian design, but also a quirky pseudo practical slant. My personal favorites are the Moss Carpet and the Anti Mosquitos Fan. The future is gonna be sweet!

Q/A about The Future

Ray Kurzweil (of Kurzweil synthesizers fame) on The Singularity.

regime change

About 12 hours from now, we're going to be closing the book on one of the scariest chapters in American history. Nobody's expecting things to get better over night and blah blah blah, but it's hard not to feel at least a little hopeful now that we have a genuinely intelligent and open-minded president for the first time in... well, a long time.

So in honor of this momentous occasion, the good folks at Vosotros put together a compilation called ¡Yes We Puede! Posted last week on the (really quite awesome) Creative Commons blog, this CC-licensed comp features a bunch of LA bands and artists covering patriotic tunes in the public domain, and contains by far the trippiest version of "Swanee River" that I've ever heard (courtesy of Mooey Moobau).

On a related note, at the bequest of Moveon.org, DJ Z-Trip just put out his second Obama-themed, CC-licensed mixtape, Victory Lap: The Obama Mix Part 2. Seems only fitting, since we know the O Man is down with the cause.

Here's to patriotism being cool again!

Creative Commons License in 10 Steps

This article is about negotiating a creative commons license with a book publisher; but there is some good information nonetheless.

"8. Provide sample verbiage

Make it easy for them. Give them the verbiage. Some legal departments are going to rewrite the contract. Others are going to create a rider. Cory Doctorow was kind enough to provide us with the verbiage his agent wrote: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/03/20/model-contract-claus.html This is the really simple language we ended up using: 
“Publisher agrees to add the Creative Commons license designation to the Copyright page of the Work.”
This isn’t perfect, and we did have some further conversations when it came time to actually layout the title page. We probably could have been more specific about which license, but this is what their legal agreed to, and considering we were doing a CC-BY-NC-SA, which is the most restrictive, we were not super worried. "

Futurey Bread!

I got a wonderful link today from My Friend Joe (3 of Spades) reagarding bread. I love bread, and bread has always been a mainstay of Future Folk Records in Philly. So, here is an interesting talk by Peter Reinhart entitled: "The art of baking bread" that you might enjoy (if you also like bread).

Future Sharing

Hey Future Friends!
We found this video on the website promoting James Boyle's new book regarding intellectual property and policy. i'm not done with the book yet, but it seems to be dead on. and while boyle does not share my personal stance on the IP issue he provides an excellently balanced portrayal of many key issues regarding current IP policy.


Here you can download a PDF of his book available in PDF for free under a CreativeCommons license http://www.thepublicdomain.org/

and that video:

Bmore Club

Where is Baltimore? and why are people still really into house there?

Bmore Club is the result of the cross-pollination of Chicago and Detroit House and Techno of the late 80s and the UK jungle/breakbeat/rave scene of the 90s. Adding in some miami booty bass and  the chopped up samples of Ghettotech it results in some gritty stuff. 

Paper Planes is clearly one of the most popular songs out there that has the Bmore club influence, produced by Diplo it has the kick and breaks that characterizes alot of Bmore club.  

Original Paper Planes 

Scottie B Remix

Scottie B is the proclaimed legend of the Bmore sound, and listening at the two versions of Paper Planes you can get an idea of what the sound, well, sounds like.  

The Dance

Youtube is totally an anthropological goldmine.  Just through youtube one can dive deeply into the most esoteric subculture you can think of.  

Within all subcultures of music there is a complementary dance culture that exists. Getting dumb to hyphy, krumping to south central club bangers, dancing real dirty to New Orleans Bounce, or just doing a head nod to "intelligent hip-hop".  

The dance that comes with Bmore club has spawned many youtube videos that show whats up in the mid-atlantic.

I like this guy, just kicking it in his apartment complex parking lot.

Links for Yetis

find the weirdest news in the world at the High Weirdness Project newsblog:
http://www.modemac.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/Bulldada_Newsblog

Sound Transit is like geo-tagging for sounds; tagging sounds according to their location rather than their content. What is really cool is this feels like a modern day equivalent to what Cecil Sharp did with recording English folk music, and more contemporary(-ish) some of the films made by John Cohen like The End of an Old Song (which is an intensely good film that I recommend trying to getting ahold of).

Cool Thing!

Hey Futurey Friends!

I've been spending way too much time on the internet lately, and it has resulted in good things: The first of these is this website: http://freeculture.org/


These guys have a wonderful if not strongly worded manifesto up (i suppose though that by nature a manifesto leaves little to subtlety...) anyway, they're awesome and have been being awesome all over the place.

The second thing goes by the same name as this first group, and is equally cool, a book of the same name by professor Lawrence Lessig. Lessig is tied-up in the creative commons movement quite heavily, and you can download his book for free on the internet. then you could print it, i guess, and its kind of like a free book?

2008 Retrospectacle

2008 was real weird.

These are some things that are worth paying attention to that were oh-eight-ish.

Crystal Castles + Creative Commons

Jay-Z goes open-source.

Tom Sachs x Hello Kitty

Diplo x Santogold Mixtape

PaperRad

..._...

sewing machines live video

i met a dude called h2 at an open mic called q4 and he took this video and put it on a site called youtube.



ain't it cool? max lavine is playing drums.

h2 has also asked to tape another live performance with an interview this week, which i'm pretty stoked on. if you check out his youtube channel, he's got a bunch of videos of other performers from this show. good stuff. you should support him by watching his videos, since he's supporting us by putting them there.