What this will be about
Through the eyes of the music industry, the last few years with both the mass distribution of digital copy tools (such as CD/DVD burners) and the internet as a very efficient mechanism of distribution, are nothing but their apocalypse. Gone are the Good Old Days - portrayed as the time where the music business was a closed, independent business where money stayed “in the family” for good.
We will look at those Good Old Days and try to put things back into perspective by pulling out the history books and looking back a little further in history than to the beginning of audio recordings.
In addition to this necessary shift of perspective, we’ll look specifically at the implications of universally available digital technology and will try to outline what we call a “digital dialectics”: Digital technology not only gives you endless reproduction without losing quality, but also endless possibilities of creating new, unreproduceable art. In our view, this brings us back to the very foundation of what music used to be in a very distant past.
We’ve stated our views in a talk we’ve already given at Hamburg’s Operation Ton (including reactions from German newspaper taz) and at the Future Music Camp in Mannheim. There are the slides of the talk (achtung - German content):
But because talk is cheap, we’ve been working on a tangible example of what co-creation and collective performance of music could be like: Using Pure Data, iPhones and some advanced hackery, we created a first version of a toolset for collective music making. We’ll post more about it soon, including scripts and patches to be reused, refined and reinterpreted by you folks.
So - join in, follow us on tumblr, and share your thoughts!
Because, in the end, we all could be electronic perfomers.
