[FRIAM] Steaming services

[Curt McNamara]

Speaking of curation - nothing better than a radio show for me! I stream
WORT out of Madison and enjoy several of their hosts enough to regularly
buy CDs based on what they play.

You can explore many stations across the world here:
http://radio.garden

After listening you can find the station web site which probably maybe has
playlists ... and archives of past shows.

               Curt

On Mon, Aug 23, 2021 at 11:29 AM uǝlƃ ☤>$ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> Along the same lines as my comment on "gatekeeping" <
> https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Gatekeeping> at vFriAM, I
> had an excellent conversation with a bartender on Saturday. When we got
> around to discussing the purposes of music, including a debate about
> moshing/dancing and how that physical activity, that kata, *interferes* [♯]
> with one's music processing, he suggested I try out Sunn O))) <
> https://sunn.southernlord.com/> [♭]. Along the same lines as Dave's
> rendering of mysticism, the rise of predictive processing, fixed state
> disorders, and audial illusions in understanding cognition, our
> expectations are the overwhelming drivers for how we listen to music.
>
> In line with Jon, I feel anything that inhibits my access to
> interestingness as claustrophobic, including any pressure to "dumb down" or
> pander to those outside whatever clique I'm currently in. (E.g. I saw a
> metal critic poke fun at my favorite doom with "Are they trying to go as
> slow as possible?" -- If you don't grok doom ... don't listen to doom, you
> moron. Go back to your speed-growl and leave us alone.)
>
> In line with Marcus, however, connection to the artist is obviously
> important to some subset of musical purpose. This bartender has written for
> 2 bands and considers himself a full member of 2 others. In promoting his
> music to me, he begged off telling me about his earlier work (he's a kid,
> actually ... like 25 years old pfffft), he said it was im-/pre-mature and
> not very good. But, in my mind, the arc of the artist(s) is way more
> important than the finished product, much the same way the compositional
> arc of a single tune is more important than any one part or voice.
>
> On-demand streaming services debilitate both those fulcrums. On the other
> hand, curation can go a long way to both expanding and homogenizing the
> paths through the graph. When curation starts sounding/feeling like
> promotion and marketing, I inevitably lose interest. But when the curator
> authentically digs what they're curating (even if it's only to identify why
> some thing is so aweful), I stay hooked.
>
>
> [♯] By which I mean both reinforcing and inhibiting, transmission to and
> from, between the source and the receiver. Maybe "mediates" is a better
> word ... but I hate the way "media" is used these days.
>
> [♭] I'm a big fan of interactive/live noise, not so much pre-recorded
> noise.
>
> On 8/22/21 11:46 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
> > On 8/22/21 8:28 AM, ⛧ glen wrote:
> >> It does both, perhaps counterintuitively. I'd argue it facilitates
> traffic between demes/cliques, but inhibits the content of demes/cliques.
> >
> > I am a sucker for local AM radio when traveling... to put my finger on
> the pulse of the locals, as it were.  What music they listen to, what their
> news-of-choice leans toward, and what they are buying/selling/trading with
> one another.  "If you can hear this station, what you hear *might* be
> relevant to you *right now*"
> >
> > When internet radio stations started popping up (KTAO in Taos being an
> early adopter), I found myself sampling these local stations around the
> world... one in particular being in Australia (forget the call sign/town)
> and having a strong familiarity to the myriad country AND western stations
> up and down the rockies and out into the plains of the US West, but with an
> Aussie accented DJ of course.    Unfortunately it didn't replicate the
> experience because I was patently NOT there... I could NOT plan a detour to
> catch the local farmer's market or check out a local joint (where there
> burgers would have pineapple and plum sauce instead of pickles and
> ketchup)...   But what I was most struck by was that they were playing 95%
> American Mainstream (C&W) music and referencing OUR icons of music
> deeply/exclusively.   Only occasionally would I catch a "local" artist
> (Australeonesia?)  I felt simultaneously expanded and constrained.
> >
> > When I moved to a small city/big town on the border (DouglasAZ/Agua
> Prieta SA) our first neighbors were a Mexican American family who were one
> of the local bands that played every venue, mostly rock but with their own
> ranchera stylization often.   They would sit around evenings playing a wide
> range of music, including the father, a sister and a younger brother (maybe
> 5? too young to participate in the public events).   We moved away from
> that house within 6 months but I continued to hear them the whole 8 years I
> lived in that town, they probably played at both of my proms and any other
> public musical event I might have attended.   What never crossed my mind
> (until now) was that for the 4 years I was a Disc Jockey, I never heard
> them play on air, nor was I motivated/inclined to seek them out.  Why not?
> Linda Ronstadt (100 miles away) was hitting it big from similar roots, why
> not them?   I guess because they weren't on the Billboard Top 100 charts
> they sent us every month,
> > telling us what was hot and what was not?  They had no route to get
> known beyond the local bars and public venues.
> >
> > Both of my daughters partnered with aspiring musicians as they came of
> age.  There have been several bands involved and those partners even
> occasionally found time to make music together (though never recorded
> together).   These bands never made it beyond local recognition...   "Billy
> and the Belmonts", "Oktober People", "Weapons of Mass Destruction" all come
> to mind.   And yet one of them was going on a self-promoted tour of the
> west when we were in Berkeley, CA for a year and in fact, totally by
> coincidence, had gotten booked at an Irish Pub ("Starry Plough") just a
> short walk from our apartment (actually probably the closest watering hole
> to our apartment).   It was just off Telegraph, right on the Oakland border
> (as was our back fence)...  in what other world (pre/sans Internet) could a
> band like that find a pub like that?   While Terry (daughter's now husband)
> had the resources (as a Technical College instructor) to own a van, mix
> their own music on Garage Band, cut
> > their own CDs and print their own T-shirts (aka Merch)...  They would
> have been sleeping in his van the whole way (instead of being gifted
> couch-stays by their nascent mySpace fan base) and would have had to make a
> LOT of phone calls and snail-mail inquiries to secure the venues they were
> able to do online through the digital social networks circa 2005.   Their
> music was out there for sampling on MySpace and while all that (the bands
> as well as MySpace) are all defunct and rotting away in digital history, it
> made it a lot further than I think it could have in the days of vinyl or
> cassette tape.   I do still have CDs of their music and it is ripped to my
> hard drive as well... but can't find any of it to speak of online 8 years
> after dissolution.  My t-shirts are all rags now, they were made on budget
> blanks I'm sure.
> >
> > Terry (of WMD/Belmont fame) is now the bass player for Queen Chief in
> Portland OR.  Their preferred streaming platform seems to be bandcamp.com
> which seems to be *trying* to provide a direct route from artist to
> audience, but unspurprisingly Alexa doesn't support Bandcamp and while they
> also stream on Spotify, my understanding of that service is that they won't
> see any significant income from that stream.   I don't believe any of the
> band members depends on the band for a significant source of income, Terry
> certainly doesn't, though it may support his recording/instrument
> collecting habits somewhat.
> >
> > They just released a couple of singles this year.  A stoner rock
> rendition of Hank William's classic "Kaw-Liga <
> https://open.spotify.com/album/2U88jwoi9ZKRHjTgG1YIDu>" and their own In
> my Eyes <https://open.spotify.com/album/1oaVT5IS8jIm6xpJ2RlH2o>.
> >
> > Spotify refers me right away to bands (I presume equally
> struggling/indie) like King Black Acid, Royal Fuz, RZRS, and Hurriah.
> While I like QC's lyrics and musical "style" it is all too high energy for
> my old ears/soul, so I tend to listen to a new track or album a few times
> when it comes out, but don't have it ripped to my car sound system nor pull
> it up regularly (though In my Eyes is thumping/chanting away in the
> background as I type this)...
> >
> > Mary's son (who edits bills for the TX legislature by day) is also a
> drummer in an indie band in Austin and they eschew streaming in favor of
> the (semi) classic medium of CDs and live-shows.   They gently dissolved
> last year after a 10 year run...  the quarterly live-shows in various
> dive-bars were what was keeping them going (emotionally/creatively?)...
> and they also have all hit middle age.
> >
> > Digital/Online/Streaming has definitely changed the fitness landscape
> for aspiring independent artists and for music buffs.  Mary's son is a
> total movie/music buff and shares his listening time between classic vinyl
> and the flood of new music coming to him over his own social networks from
> friends of friends of friends who are independent singer-songwriters/bands.
> >
> > I like Glen's gesture toward analyzing this in terms of network/graph
> models...  I think the data is out there for anyone to gather/study up to a
> point.   Josh's (Mary's son) collection of vinyl and hand-cut CDs probably
> is hidden for the most part from any database, though he *might* not be
> astute enough to turn off Google/Android's "what music is playing right
> now" service... maybe what he listens to is being analyzed on some Google
> Brat's Friday Project right now?   He *hates* Alexa, Amazon, and especially
> Amazon Music.
> >
> > It's a wild new world, even though everything feels pretty much the same
> (only different).
>
>
> --
> ☤>$ uǝlƃ
> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
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