At 20.15, Slackk took to the decks to provide the night with its musical finale: a 42-minute set featuring tracks by Inkke, Dark0, Shriekin’ and other stars of the instrumental grime scene. It was great to see people dancing at an academic event. Afterwards, he returned to the stage with Winterlight and Glitch Lich for the electronic music producers panel chaired by Luis-Manuel Garcia.
The highlight of the live event we ran in London on 6 June this year was the panel discussion between grime producer Paul Lynch (Slackk), ambient producer Tim Ingham (Winterlight), generative noise musician Chad McKinney (Glitch Lich), and ethnomusicologist Luis-Manuel Garcia (click here for Luis’s fascinating talk on club culture, from earlier in the night). After the event wound up, we headed off to Boxed, Slackk’s regular clubnight in Dalston, headlined on that particular occasion by the incredible Spooky Bizzle.
In common with the other talks and performances of the night, the panel was video-recorded; scroll down for a transcript.
Also available from the Open University podcast site.
On 23 September 2014, I gave an invited presentation to a meeting of the Creative Data Club, organised by Sound and Music, the national agency for new music. Also speaking were Chris Unitt from One Further, presenting a study on how arts organisations are using Facebook, Jay Short from inition, showcasing 3D-printed visualisations of social media data, Dan Simpson, talking about his crowdsourcing of poetic composition, and shardcore, telling the hilarious and poignant tale of Alex the twitterbot. Here are the slides, plus a few audience responses and livetweets at the end. The text is based on the same handwritten notes that I extemporised from on the day.
(Photograph by Sound and Music)
To remind you of what you experienced – or to taunt you with what you missed – here is a selection of photographs from the Valuing Electronic Music free public event, taken by Jake Davis of HungryVisuals. Wish you’d been there? We wish you’d been there too. Maybe next time!
Fruit of the Lexington's kitchen
It’s a scary thought, but we’re halfway through the funded stage of this project. The timescale is tightly compressed and it’s been a bit manic at times (especially right now, with a workshop next week and a public event in less than a month).
But we’ve already learnt so much. So I’d like to reflect briefly on an observation Byron made last month, reflecting on the interviews he’d been carrying out with electronic music producers: ‘when I ask questions about valuing and appreciation, people answer about relationships.’ Outside the spheres of commercial music (where value is expressed in economic terms) and art music (where it is expressed in terms of grants, academic appointments, etc), human relationships are the beginning and the end of musical value. So perhaps it’s true that when musicians build relationships through music, they are producing not the opportunity to produce value (the aim of ‘business networking‘), but value itself.
Valuing Electronic Music 