Boiler Room

Boiler Room is a regular livestream from a very small club in London. They do a good job bringing interesting people in like Four Tête, James Blake, Mount Kimbie, Martyn, Theo Parrish, Jamie XX or Little Dragon who play their favorites and edgy tracks. It is watched and discussed simultaneously online and they have a nice podcast running.

I tuned into today’s (tuesday, 19/02/2011) show to listen into the Black Acre session with @bluedaisytwit, @FM_Fox and @Hyetalmusic. To sum it up: Interesting new sounds, I especially liked the Fantastic Mr Fox, cool to watch the musicians editing plus I really got this live feeling: seeing some people dancing in the background, watching the musicians, with a twitter stream, facebook and ustream chat boxes all around the video and people constantly writing stuff.

Mostly people write that they are there watching it, but sometimes also commenting the music, sharing links, tweeting to the bands. Who, and this makes the concept interesting, are mostly also on Twitter and get linked to by the boomboxtv account or by one of the founders and organizers Thristian Richards. But while most performers have accounts, only a few of them would check the discussion while doing music, I assume.

To be honest, there was no real discussion it was more the feeling to be watching the same stuff at the same time that made the experience interesting. And of course, the intimacy of being somehow at a living room party, like you can see in this video, Hudson Mohawke playing a 90ies classics Hip Hop set.

In a Time Out magazine article, Blaise Bellville, the other cofounder, talks about up to 25k viewers when James Blake was on, in this video interview Thristian Richards talks about the concept behind it. Richards is also a dj and Belville used to run “Platform”, a web magazine. It’s offline now, pointing to a new project called Leisure only but I found a nice readplatform.com snapshot from the Wayback machine.

The club is now located at Corsica studios, a small venue inside of railway arches near Elephant & Castle, maybe on their Facebook there is a chance to be invited to the actual performances.

Awesome grant for birdhouses

The second Awesome foundation grant this year goes to (drumroll..) Jay Cousins and his idea to build bird houses in the city! Here is a bit of his plan:

“Make a little birdhouse in your Keats” will show people how to make bird houses from trash and then place them in public spaces – trees, lamp-posts, street signs and buildings. This process will educate people about waste, and engage them directly in improving directly their urban environment. The birdhouses themselves will create a provocation, bring birdsong to the streets and make the keat’s just that little bit nicer for everyone in it. The project would manifest in workshops – street actions and documented online with a how to replicate in your own keats.

Awesome! We look forward to seeing this in action.

Preparing Melt 2011

I am getting excited about this years Melt festival. Again, I will be taking care of some artists, to my very pleasure, the ones I would have liked to see most as a visitor as well. My place again is the stage down by the lake, the beach stage with lots of dubstep, experimental electronics and some pop appeal. Among the musicians are Nikolas Jaar, A.T.O.L., Jamie Woon, Modeselektor, Gold Panda, Cosmin TRG and Apparat. Here is the official trailer, hope to see some of you there!