Autotune the Science
'A Glorious Dawn'
Carl Sagan ft Stephen Hawking (Cosmos Remixed)
'We Are All Connected'
Symphony of Science ft. Sagan, Feynman, deGrasse Tyson & Bill Nye
Things I find interesting, funny, or worth a mention
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Things I find interesting, but which don't really fit on my personal blog.
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Photoblogging absolutely everything I eat and drink for a whole year.
Filed under
music
John Peel's Record Box (In Memoriam)
It's five years since the death of John Peel today.
I met him the year before he died. So glad I did. He came out to New Zealand, and was kind enough to come in and talk to my radio students. What an utter legend.
Somewhere, there's a photo of me, him and my friend Mark, who had just moments before jostled Peel's arm and tipped red wine all down his shirt. It really is a great photo. John was bewildered and stained, Mark was mortified and I was a bit starstruck. It's kind of priceless.
If you don't know who John Peel is - then this is compulsory viewing. Most of you probably will and so you can enjoy this with me.
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Michel Camilo - From Within
From the film Calle 54
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Hanging with Fresh Poulp
I spent the last few days in Berlin at the NetAudio Festival. I gave a talk and was on a panel, but I also spent a lot of time with some very cool French and Spanish guys from the netlabel Fresh Poulp. Here's a video snapshot of one night at NetAudio Berlin, featuring the Fresh Poulp guys, but with some other stuff along the way too, to give you a taste of what it was like there.
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Aftershock in Marseille
I've spent the past four days working on a project in Marseille called Aftershock. It's the second one I've worked on - the first of which was in Genoa, Italy back in June.
Composer Nitin Sawhney brings together a group of musicians who have never met before from the UK, France and Italy. Over the course of a week, they write, workshop and rehearse a bunch of brand new songs - and it culminates in a one-off performance at the end of that week. This time, it was as part of the Marsatac music festival.
My role is with the website. I helped my friend Stef come up with the concept for the website, and we're trying out ideas, fine tuning it, and trying to put Aftershock online in an original way.
Instead of making a website about Aftershock - either as a brochure or some sort of flyer for the event, we decided that it was more interesting to follow the story of the musicians as characters. Most people would never get the chance to see backstage or to get to know the artists - and nor would they ever have the chance to see where that music comes from and how it develops.
So we put digital video cameras into the hands of the musicians and producers of the event, and it's been my job to take extra footage and bring together all of the material, make sense of it, and assemble it into something that makes some kind of sense.
Essentially, it involves tagging the video by artist name, song title, whether it's a rehearsal, performance, soundcheck - or just the musicians socialising. That's been some of the most interesting stuff: getting to know the real people behind the music.
It's a great experience, it's a really fascinating project and I've made some really good friends as a result of it. I'm considering making the website a compulsory text for my music industries students. It's a real antidote to the idea that the music business is about fame. We may be in a very cool part of the world - but the work's not entirely as glamorous as it may appear on first inspection.
The other thing I want to do with this site is to show people in the music industries how easy it is to make engaging content and put it online. The cameras we used range between £35 and £70 in value - and the website is made using Posterous (as is this site) - which enables you to post anything by email: text, mp3, video, photos and so on.
Have a look at the website. I still have lots more material to sort through and upload - but I'm really pleased with how it's shaping up.
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Jake meets Martin Atkins
Jake meets legendary rock drummer Martin Atkins and rapper S-Endz.
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Jake drums for Martin Atkins
Jake had a lesson this evening, and Martin Atkins - drummer for Public Image Ltd, Killing Joke, Ministry & Nine Inch Nails - popped in to give him a few pointers...
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