Thanks to Derek Miller of Music Think Tank for turning me on to an interesting short article in the Atlantic: For Indie Bands, the New Publicity Is No Publicity.

It usually starts the same way. Some band posts a song to a music sharing site like Bandcamp or SoundClick. One person sends it to two people, who each send it to four, and so on, until it gets picked up by a music blog like Gorilla vs. Bear or Brooklyn Vegan and then aggregated on the Hype Machine. A week later, the band has caught the attention of record labels, tastemakers, and promoters.

But everyone wants to know, who is this act? They won’t do interviews, so all anyone has to go on is two MP3s and a low-resolution profile picture where they’re too far away from the camera to make out anyone’s face. And still, Pitchfork just gave their song the Best New Music designation. They’re booked for a South by Southwest showcase. Fifteen days have passed, and the band is now the blogosphere’s next big thing—even though the blogosphere couldn’t recognize the band on the street.

This is how underground bands come of age in 2011. (for the rest)

It’s all about creating interest through creating mystery.

A nice piece by Betsy Mason on Wired‘s Wired Science blog on the under-appreciated value of hand-drawn illustrations in nature studies in the digital age — Beautiful Data: The Art of Science Field Notes. It set me to thinking about the value of  ”artful” field notes outside of nature studies (where there is a strong tradition of artist-scientists, including the venerable work of Darwin and Audubon). In the “softer” sciences (humanities, social sciences and their hybrids), less value has been placed on the art of field notes. In my own work as an ethnomusicologist, the sketches, diagrams, and doodles that accompany my written observations of a musical event often provide insights that might otherwise fall through the cracks of a strictly left brain operation, focused on accuracy and completeness.

 

Related articles

• Harvard’s collection of scientists’ field notes (boingboing.net)

I’m a little wary of touting the work of “success gurus” (I can’t help flashing on the Chris Farley SNL motivational speaker character Matt Foley) but I make a few exceptions — Derek Silvers is one of those and he has a great trailer for his new book, “Anything You Want” published by fellow guru Seth Godin’s Domino Project.

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A while ago, I wrote a post about my fascination with the ongoing development of ethnographic fiction as a means of capturing qualitative research that is more evocative and significantly meaningful than typical ethnographic prose (Short Takes: Ethnographic Fiction). This fascination arose from my longstanding dissatisfaction with the lifeless quality of so much ethnographic prose and conviction that good research could be related in good writing. While I applaud the efforts of writer-scholars such as Tobias Hecht (After Life: An Ethnographic Novel)  to open up new territory for ethnographic representation, I have to admit that I have  yet to read a work that successfully utilizes fictional techniques to create a convincing and engaging ethnography. The question arises if it’s simply a problem of blending two very different skill sets: those of a researcher and those of a writer? But so many fiction writers have done such thorough research and then related it in masterful prose — if you want proof, read the opening section of Don Delillo‘s Underworld , which recreates the deciding game of the 1951 National League pennant race. Maybe, it is best to turn to fiction writers for tips on how to tell a story. Below is a lesson from Haruki Murakami in how to set a scene in what may be the first entry in an occasional series here on Deciphering Culture.

A lesson from Haruki Murakami in setting the scene

One need in any storytelling is to set the scene. Sometimes, you do that by (in cinematic terms) taking a long shot to set the context before moving in to capture the details. Murakami is a master of this and often uses this device to set a scene. For example, this passage from The Wind-up Bird Chronicle:

Like a make-believe bird in a make-believe sky, I see the rooms from above. I enlarge the view, pull back, and survey the whole, then zoom in to enlarge the details. Each detail carries much significance, of course, I check each one in turn examining it for shape and color and texture. From one detail to the next,there is no connection, no warmth. All I am doing at that point is a mechanical inventory of details. But it’s worth a try. just as the rubbing together of stones or sticks will eventually produce heat and flame, a connected reality takes shape little by little.

The narrative thread that holds together my various pursuits as a scholar, journalist and consultant is a fascination with the power and meaning of stories. Storytelling — the oldest form of history, religion and entertainment — is valuable for its ability to instill meaning into a narrative (which may have begun as a jumble of events), to create connections with other times and places, and to take us away, if only for a brief time, from the pressures and mundanity of everyday life. The first inkling that what I was doing was storytelling was when I was collecting oral histories in North Richmond, California to document the life cycle of a nightclub district and what its presence and eventual loss had meant for the community. It was my first serious research project and I was approaching it with all the gravitas of the typical graduate student. Fortunately, my wife was enthusiastic about the project, particularly the power of telling stories to document history and not lose a human face, and awakened me to the fact that what I was actually doing was collecting stories and weaving them together to tell the story of an important period in the life of their community. It was a defining moment that changed how I approached my work — although it took a number of years until I was fully aware that what I was doing as an ethnomusicologist was storytelling. Recently, I have been struck by how often I stumble across the adoption of storytelling as an label for what people do in a wide variety of pursuits — healing, journalism, spiritual practices, design, public relations to name a few — and sometimes the cynic in me raises its snarky head but, more and more, I see it as possibly being a marker of a paradigm shift, returning the human face to a wide variety of pursuits.

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Interesting project winding up in September 2011 looks at the different strategies taken by eleven European cities to develop and support their creative industries. The Creative Metropoles project is based on a premise I share and would like to see shared in the U.S.: “a facilitator of innovation, creative industries are essential for the development of other sectors.” The cities (as different as Berlin and Riga, Amsterdam & Warsaw) will each identify their own best practices and learn from each other’s experiences — “the ambition is not only to present the good practices but also deal with current problem issues and generate new knowledge and approaches.” The project is working in 5 policy areas:

1. structure of the public support for creative industries

2. business capacity and internationalisation of creative industries

3. space for activities by creative industries and creative city districts as creative incubators

4. funding schemes for creative industries

5. demand for the outputs of creative industries, including municipalities in the role of consumers.

The final report, particularly the appendices (Good Practices from European Cities) offers an interesting view of the diversity of approaches to developing creative industries that have had significant success and point to the need to both localize (i.e., collaboration for mutual benefit among Berlin) and reach across national boundaries (i.e., relationship building between artisans and designers in Fes, Morocco and Amsterdam). There’s a lot of material and I’ve just been browsing but my first impression is there’s a lot to learn.c

Orhan Pamuk (Image via Wikipedia)

Keeping focus when working at home

I am currently spending a lot of time at my desk at home working on a writing project and finding it difficult to maintain a separation between personal and professional time — there always seems like there’s time to do another load of laundry, the dog is asking for a walk and….

Work / life balance is always difficult to maintain but with our identities increasingly defined virtually, even maintaining physical demarcations between our professional and private lives can become problematic. Needed down time and self care often fly out the window, often accompanied by decreased productivity. Lately, I have found that one effective response is to ritualize the separation between my professional and personal spaces, even going so far as leaving home in the morning to walk to work (ending up back where I started) — an idea I appropriated from novelist Orhan Pamuk.

Orhan Pamuk: I have always thought that the place where you sleep or the place you share with your partner should be separate from the place where you write. The domestic rituals and details somehow kill the imagination. They kill the demon in me. The domestic, tame daily routine makes the longing for the other world, which the imagination needs to operate, fade away. So for years I always had an office or a little place outside the house to work in. I always had different flats. But once I spent half a semester in the U.S. while my ex-wife was taking her Ph.D. at Columbia University. We were living in an apartment for married students and didn’t have any space, so I had to sleep and write in the same place. Reminders of family life were all around. This upset me. In the mornings I used to say goodbye to my wife like someone going to work. I’d leave the house, walk around a few blocks, and come back like a person arriving at the office. (from an interview in: The Paris Review, Fall/Winter 2005)

Image via Wikipedia

Brian Eno has been a creative force for decades now, producing a wide range of entertaining and challenging music with an admirable collection of collaborators. Thanks to 99% (Developing Your Creative Practice: Tips from Brian Eno by Scott McDowell) for pointing me to a new e-book by Eric Tamm, BRIAN ENO, HIS MUSIC AND THE VERTICAL COLOR OF SOUND, that “delves deeply into Eno’s creative process.” What Eno himself calls (from Tamm’s book):

…a practice of some kind … It quite frequently happens that you’re just treading water for quite a long time. Nothing really dramatic seems to be happening. … And then suddenly everything seems to lock together in a different way. It’s like a crystallization point where you can’t detect any single element having changed. There’s a proverb that says that the fruit takes a long time to ripen, but it falls suddenly … And that seems to be the process.

McDowell presents a list of  tools Eno has relied upon to assist the creative process when he gets stuck — No 5, the Oblique Strategies deck of cards is the bit of whimsy, something all creative workers needs to get the juices flowing again.

1. Freeform capture. Grab from a range of sources without editorializing. According to Tamm, one of Eno’s tactics “involves keeping a microcassette tape recorder on hand at all times and recording any stray ideas that hit him out of the blue – a melody, a rhythm, a verbal phrase.” He’ll then go through and look for links or connections, something that can form the foundation for a new piece of music.

2. Blank state. Start with new tools, from nothing, and toy around. For example, Eno approaches this by entering the recording studio with no preconceived ideas, only a set of instruments or a few musicians and “just dabble with sounds until something starts to happen that suggests a texture.” When the sound texture evokes a memory or emotion that impression then takes over in guiding the process.

3. Deliberate limitations. Before a project begins, develop specific limitations. Eno’s example: “this piece is going to be three minutes and nineteen seconds long and it’s going to have changes here, here and here, and there’s going to be a convolution of events here, and there’s going to be a very fast rhythm here with a very slow moving part over the top of it.”

4. Opposing forces. Sometimes it’s best to generate a forced collision of ideas. Eno would “gather together a group of musicians who wouldn’t normally work together.” Dissimilar background and approaches can often evoke fresh thinking.

Image by courtneyBolton via Flickr

5. Creative prompts. In the ‘70s Eno developed his Oblique Strategies cards, a series of prompts modeled after the I Ching to disrupt the process and encourage a new way of encountering a creative problem. On the cards are statements and questions like: “Would anybody want it?” “Try faking it!” “Only a part, not the whole.” “Work at a different speed.” “Disconnect from desire.” “Turn it upside down.” “Use an old idea.” These prompts are a method of generating specifics, which most creatives respond favorably to.

Related articles

• Brian Eno Oblique Strategies (itsnicethat.com)
• Listen: New Brian Eno Non-Album Track (pitchfork.com)
• Genius at work (theage.com.au)
• Brian Eno Readies New Collaborative Album (pitchfork.com)

Cover of Afreecanos

Omar Sosa’s exploration of the shared roots of the musics of the Black Atlantic is documented in an impressive body of work. A number of his albums are regularly featured in my own personal soundscape: Prietos (2001), Sentir (2002), Afreecanos (2008), and the brilliant, transformative Across the Divide: A Tale of Rhythm and Ancestry (2009). If you are not familiar with his work, I heartily recommend that you check it out. On Wednesday May 18, the Omar Sosa Afreecanos Quintet, featuring Bay Area Latin music icon John Santos, played Yoshi’s San Francisco. Below is the preview I wrote for SF Weekly.

I spent a good portion of Monday at the latest edition of the SF Music Tech Summit. My name tag this time said “SF Weekly” instead of “Deciphering Culture” (I asked for dual identification) so a lot of people buttonholed me to get coverage for a new service. Not surprisingly, most of them fell into the “recommendation and discovery” segment although none of the pitches left me convinced of the efficacy of any of the new spins on the work of the established players. Also,  not surprisingly my blog post for SF Weekly’s All Shook Down blog focused on a SRO panel that featured some of the heavy hitters in R & D. The relevant excerpt below.

Flickr/aquababe

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