When I decide to don my folk (sometimes psych folk) music hat, I usually do it under the Olagra pseudonym, which was both a band of mine a few years ago, who played some of these songs, as well as the name of a past recording that focused on some of those tunes, as well as some of the stuff that I was doing with the group. A handful of years have come and gone since the band, and those songs haven’t seen the light of day, but early in the dark winter months of 2009 I set about to record some new interpretations of them. I recorded these tunes with saxophonist, Michael Teager, at Shoeshine Studios in East Lansing under the Teag and PK name. I’m putting these tracks online, as well as other Olagra tracks that Michael Teager and myself will be recording. Enjoy.
I stumbled upon this footage when I was spending some idle time at the Internet Archive. The footage had no sound, and according to the description it was found when an office building was being cleaned out and the film emulsion was starting to decompose.
The vivid colors and the nostalgia for the 1960s got the creative juices flowing, and I started hearing a soundtrack in my mind’s ear that I wanted to add to this footage.
Interesting article here by Johnny Greenwood, guitarist and keyboardist of Radiohead, claiming an interesting position on Mp3s. This is part of Sasha Frere-Jones (a writer that I’ve really come to respect and enjoy reading who also has a nice site here.) New Yorker series Dithering.
I have to say that for the most part I agree with Greenwood’s position, and as such this is something that I’ve embraced with my own work. He makes another really interesting point that I’ve heard among my own friends and collectors of audio:
“The downside is that people are encouraged to own far more music than they can ever give their full attention to.”
For myself and my friends this is something that we haven’t really been able to reconcile outside of dedicating a certain amount of time to hearing and experiencing the music outside of the commute and work day… actually making time for leisure listening… which I, personally, find to be real treat.
I’ve been waiting for Chris Anderson‘s Free to come out for a while, and I started reading the free version online at Scribd last night. I’ve embedded the complete Scribd version below.
So far I’ve been seeing some great thoughts, some of which I’ve come across in reading Steve Weber’s The Success of Open Source, as well as an oldy-but-a-goody link from when I first brought my music online in 1999 – The Free Music Philosophy.
In reading this book I think of a Seth Godin post called You Should Write an eBook… where he talks about pitching his book Unleashing the IdeaVirus “I brought it to my publisher and said, “I’d like you to publish this, but I want to give it away on the net.”” Because I could read the Scribd version for free I put in an order for a hard copy of the book. If I didn’t know I’d enjoy it, I probably wouldn’t have done that. If I hadn’t had the chance to read it I probably would have continued listening to him as he made the news/interview circuit and forgot about it… So for me the ideas he proposes, while not totally new to me, make sense tied together, and from a business perspective, free makes a lot of sense.
This book has already gotten me thinking about ways that I might make my music available in a similar way…
