I love it when I get to combine different parts my life. Whether it’s playing music combined with teaching it, or doing fun online conversation things a la Amplified and at the same time helping musicians understand what the web makes possible for them…
Bringing together New Music Strategies with Amplified always makes me very happy.
Last year, we did a transatlantic round table discussion – I and 3 musicians were in Nashville, while Dubber, Ian and Saskia headed up a room full of NMS-types in Somerset, England. We threw ideas back and forward, answered questions, and had a great chat about how life is for independent musicians, and how it could be.
This year, we’re taking it all a step further.
Last year, there was a a whole lot of conversation going on in the chatroom attached to the UStream account we were using for the video conversation. Some very smart things were said. We singularly failed to archive the chat or to properly include it in the web-cast, and even lost one half of the video (rendering the other half equally unusable).
So this year, we’re aiming to do a number of things better:
We want the conversation to be wider,
the output to be more easily sharable,
and the end result to be easy to access as an archive.
We’ve no idea how many of those things will happen, but that’s where we’re heading.
We’ve also broken it into two parts – one in the UK and one in the US, and we’re using pre-recorded video provocations to spark the discussion. It’s all a bit experimental, and all relies heavily on us at NMS interpreting some of the cool ideas that Amplified have been working on… We’ll see how it plays out.
But for now, we’re looking at 2 things happening a day for 2 days: on the 21st and 22nd of June (that’s next week), at 4pm and 8pm UK time (that’s 11am and 3pm Eastern Time, US. Knock an hour off for Nashville and Central time…)
You’re invited to be a part of it, to contribute, to discuss, share, and to take the stuff of the conversation and go start your own conversations. Sound good?