Echo Location: Matthew Schoening’s Looped Cellos « The Echoes Blog
Echoes finds a lapsed classical cellist who is looped.

You can hear the Echoes program here.

You can buy and download The Art of Live Looping in our Listening Lounge.

Make it happen!!

BBC NEWS | Americas | US musicians demand radio royalties
I bet you cannot guess the answer to this one.

In which countries - apart from the United States - do terrestrial radio stations NOT pay performers for their songs?

Iran, China, North Korea and Rwanda.

Artists and their record labels are calling on members of Congress to bring the US into line with the rest of the world - and with satellite, internet and cable radio stations - by passing the Performance Rights Act.

This doesn’t affect me much, since this regards payment for performers - composers have been getting paid all along. But it seems wrong to me that cable and web radio have been paying performers and old radio has not.

Best architecture critique ever? At least the funniest one. Me, I don’t like any of Mr. Graves’ designs. Like the worst of the Eighties fashion…

Masonry "Masterpiece" or Mistake?
Over at David Byrne’s blog I came across this monstrosity by none other than Michael Graves, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in Houston, Texas. The former Talking Head memorably says, “This very out of place structure somehow lingers, like a fart left by someone no longer in an elevator.”
(Via Clippings)

(((I added the color for emphasis)))

BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Giving up my iPod for a Walkman
It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

Read more.

Nice video about the cargo-race at the European Messenger competition last month.

More posts on cargo-bikes here, here, here, and here. Direct link to Larry Vs Harry, where I bought my bike from Hans, who is Harry. Watch it large here.

For the 2009 slideshow that will accompany my solo concerts - only in venues where a video-projector is available. Inspired by this video on Flickr.

Ottmar Liebert - Tour Schedule: Summer 2009 - w Luna Negra
We added a few more dates to the Summer schedule: Tucson, Phoenix, Boise and San Antonio.

I uploaded a new slideshow for May: Ottmar Liebert - Photos (02009-05)

Nearly of the photos were taken during the May tour in the East.
Subscribers have access to those photos (and more - over 10,000 photos) and can download them.

This article in the Guardian argues that since every person has a finite amount of spending money and since Games and DVD sales have gone upe dramatically - game sales more than tripled and movie sales and rentals nearly doubled - there was simply less money left to buy music.

But, one could also say that it is easier to obtain and download free music than it is to obtain free games and movies - the gaming and movie industries use much more serious DRM than the music biz, which has actually dropped DRM in most cases.

Are downloads really killing the music industry? Or is it something else? | Technology | guardian.co.uk
The first clue of where all those downloaders are really spending their money came in searching for games statistics: year after year ELSPA had hailed “a record year”. In fact if you look at the graph above, you’ll see that games spend has risen dramatically - from £1.18bn in 1999 to £4.03bn in 2008.

Meanwhile music spending (allowing for that * of adjustment in 2004 onwards) has gone from £1.94bn to £1.31bn.

DVD sales and rentals, meanwhile, have nearly doubled, from a total of £1.286bn in 1999 to £2.56bn in 2008.

Trent Reznor on social networking: I’m out | Technically Incorrect - CNET News
“I will be tuning out of the social networking sites because at the end of the day it’s now doing more harm than good in the bigger picture and the experiment seems to have yielded a result. Idiots rule,” he said.

Reznor is very forthright about the kind of idiots he has in mind. For him, they have ruined the beauty of eschewing record companies in favor of direct contact with real people out there.

In the NIN forum Raznor also wrote:

Online communities, etc.
I had thought a while ago about attempting to start a mainstream public forum that required real verification of it’s participants for purposes of context. The idea was to have a place where you can actually discuss whatever and have some idea of who you’re conversing with.

Hm, kinda like Ottmar-Friends…

Of course The Well has been doing this for a long long time:

The WELL - Join Us
You know who you’re talking with: As a WELL member, you use your real name. This leads to real conversations and relationships. It’s the individual people here who determine the experience and create the community. This highly collaborative work in progress has been rolling since 1985.

Copenhagenize.com - Get Yer Torches! It’s a Bike Helmet Witchhunt!
In a perfect world, an individual who chooses to promote everyday cycling, and who has dedicated a great deal of time, energy and personal resources to do so, would be set high atop a pedestral to be respected by the local and global community.

Instead, Matthew Modine, actor and founder of Bicycle for a Day, is subject to a cyber witchhunt these days.

Instead of focusing on the good this guy is doing, all the focus is on his personal choice of whether he wishes to wear a helmet or not. Which he doesn’t.

Ironically, the man is more well-informed about helmets than the pundits who seek to hunt him down.

Continue reading.
And these guys wore helmets…

During the Winter I read some of 2666: A Novel by Roberto Bolano. In the book an English artist cuts off his right hand and nails it to a self-portrait. The painting becomes his “last self-portrait”, or at least the last one painted with his right hand, and increases the value of all of his other paintings…

‘Suicide’ sculpture of Damien Hirst causes controversy in Spain | Art and design | guardian.co.uk
It is Damien Hirst with a bloody hole in his head – the richest bad boy of British art finally turned into a piece of half-pickled art himself. Spanish artist Eugenio Merino’s sculpture, which shows a Hirst figure pointing a gun at himself and blowing his own brains out, is meant to be a comment on the British artist’s own £50mdiamond-studded skull, For the Love of God. Merino has called his piece “4 the Love of Go(l)d”, suggesting that Hirst’s attempts to increase the value of his own work would only be enhanced by his own death.

“I thought that, given that he thinks so much about money, his next work could be that he shot himself. Like that the value of his work would increase dramatically,” Merino told The Guardian. “Obviously, though, he would not be around to enjoy it.”

Related entry.

From the BBC:

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click | Spotify streams for music lovers
Music streaming service Spotify is only a few months old but it has already attracted much attention from music lovers.

The site allows its members to create and listen to heir own playlists of songs streamed to them online.

The same peer-to-peer technology as found in file-sharing is used to deliver near-CD quality and tracks that playback almost instantly.

The service is free for listeners willing to hear audio and on-screen adverts (which appear between roughly every five songs), although users can otherwise pay £10 per month for a premium service which enables them to listen to songs without adverts.

And from guitarist Robert Fripp:

Robert Fripp’s Diary for Thursday, 21st May 2009
The industry-word is that Spotify currently has little advertising to support it & few punters are signing up for the subscription service. In my view, Spotify provides an exemplary model of how the new, emerging music industry of digital provision works against the interests of music’s originators & generators.

The Italian magazine New Age and New Sounds has a four-page spread on The Scent of Light in issue Nº 191, and track #5 on the CD that accompanies every issue is Streetlight.

Back in 2004 I wrote about hearing Ahmed Dickinson Cardenas play during the guitar festival in Tijuna. In 2006 he sent me a lovely live recording of guitar music, his own arrangements and adaptations of music Ñico Rojas had written for piano. Today I received this email from Ahmed:

Cuban guitarist Ahmed Dickinson Cardenas received two prizes at Cubadisco 2009, the most important award of Cuban Music Record Industry. His album debut paying homage to the late Ñico Rojas was awarded in the Best Instrumental Soloist & Best Instrumental Album categories. Cubadisco International Fair, founded in 1997 and organized by the Cuban Music Institute, is the most integrating event of the Cuban Music Industry and it constitutes a preferential space to expose the main achievements of Cuban Music. The winners of its 13th edition were announced in Havana on May 16, 2009.

Congratulations Ahmed! His web site can be found here.

Found the album on amazon:
Plays Ñico Rojas
Downloading now!

Truffle (fungi) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The record price paid for a single white truffle was set in December 2007, when Macau casino owner Stanley Ho paid US$330,000 for a specimen weighing 3.3 lb, discovered by Luciano Savini and his dog Rocco. One of the largest truffles found in decades, it was unearthed near Pisa and sold at an auction held simultaneously in Macau, Hong Kong and Florence.

Dezeen » Blog Archive » Proposals for Florence by Gruppo Giovani Architetti Firenze
A new inhabited bridge over the River Arno in Florence is among proposals by Gruppo Giovani Architetti Firenze (Young Achitect Group of Florence) designed to provoke debate about architecture in the historic city.

Check out the photos… wouldn’t that bridge be a great place to live!

Ottmar Liebert | PRI’s The World
The World’s Ken Bader tells us about a travelin’ man named Ottmar Liebert.

(Via the music of sound)

Here is an example of the music available at Ottmar-Friends:

(Subscribers receive a link to download a high-quality 320 kbps mp3 of this track.)

This is a unreleased and unnamed bossa from 1993. It was recorded during the sessions for The Hours Between Night + Day in Santa Barbara, California. I have no notes from the sessions, but it sounds like the musicians were:

OL - guitars
Jon Gagan - upright Bass, synthesizer + piano (listen for the unison between upright bass and piano about two thirds into the piece)
Davo Bryant - kick drum + dumbek
Mark Clark - percussion effects
Osamu Kitajima - koto