06 Monday Aug 2007
Posted in Music
According to this (Link to Virgin Megastores Post US-Based Quarterly Increases — Digital Music News) Digital Music News article Virgin have posted an improvement of 9% for music sales. Given that they can’t have pushed up prices by 9% (if anything the likes of CD-Wow are forcing retail prices down), I can only read that CD sales aren’t all doom and gloom like the RIAA would like to paint.
04 Saturday Aug 2007
Posted in General
Friends – Richard & Veth, have attended this year’s Tapper’s show and again blogged about it. See what they have to say here:
Link to Beyond the Sea with the Basingstoke Tappers at Exigency In Specie
04 Saturday Aug 2007
Posted in Photography
We’ve had an email today from Peter Lik’s gallery in Sydney announcing some more photos (an image one of the pictures can be seen below). Like his other work the images are just stunning, beautiful shapes and colour that can be seen in nature. For those not in the know, Peter was born in Australia started shooting the amazing scenery down under; but has over the last few years been shooting in the South West America and has garnered a raft of awards for his work.
We first came across Peter through friends, when they came back from Australia they gave us a book of some of his work. So when we headed to Australia, and again when stopping over on our way to New Zealand we paid visits to his gallery in Sydney (in the beautiful QvB), and been fortunate enough to be able bring back limited, signed prints of his work.
These small images don’t do any real justice to the power of the work, you have to see them in their full size (1 meter across or bigger). So if you’re in Australia or the USA we’d very highly recommend going to a gallery and seeing for yourself.
02 Thursday Aug 2007
Posted in General
It doesn’t take doesn’t need bullying, blunt spoken or multi-platinum selling artists to enable music to be used to help those less fortunate parts of the world such as Uganda. Joseph Arthur has contributed to the A River Blue project to help displaced children by recording a song with the children being helped. 
The background to how Joseph got involved and be read about by going to A River Blue website. The site allows you to download and listen to the song, and if you like it, they ask that you make a donation.
31 Tuesday Jul 2007
Posted in General
Another July and another show – completed now. You can see a blog entry about the performance from a friend of ours at : Beyond the Sea with the Basingstoke Tappers.
For the Tappers, this was the 15th year, although only the 7th for me, and third as stage manager. Unfortunately, on the first night we experienced a technical hitch that we managed to gloss over, but it prevented us showing a short celebratory film.
There are also a couple of pictures on Flickr that can be found here.
If you would like to know more about the Tappers please visit their website – www.BasingstokeTappers.co.uk
31 Tuesday Jul 2007
Posted in Technology
25 Wednesday Jul 2007
Posted in Music
Many will be going, who, what to the subject of an article on David & David that has been written for Crawdaddy (here). However, you may be more interested if I was to say that one of the David’s (David Baewald) did a lot of work with Sheryl Crow’s debut album and was a member of the Tuesday Night Music Club.
Apart from David & David I’d highly recommend David Baewald’s solo work – particularly Triage.
25 Wednesday Jul 2007
Posted in Photography, Technology
With the Basingstoke Tappers’ show rapidly approaching and another year as stage manager it has been busy, busy, busy. With this year’s show I’ve also had to create some video clips. I have to say that I am very impressed by Womble Multimedia’s MPEG Video Wizard. Particularly it’s editing capabilities. The process of creating a MPEG file suitable for transcoding to DVD is a little more fiddly – although it does provide some default settings.
This batch of video clips I’ve been are actually stills assembled into sequences. Although there are cheap or free tools for doing this sort of work they aren’t easy or flexible in the results you can produce, particularly in areas such as transitions between images, manipulation of sequencing on the fly and previewing of results.
19 Thursday Jul 2007
Posted in Music
The spoof blog – The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs has a rather scarily accurate picture of the where the record industry is today. It would very funny if it wasn’t for the fact that in the process of messing around as Universal are they’re likely to trash the livelihoods of some of the more niche artists, and because of their ‘loan sharking’ business model it will be the artists that will pick up the tab for it as well in lost sales.
It is interesting that Apple don’t seem to have tried to deal with artists directly yet, for example Paul McCartney who signed to Starbucks earlier in the year, and licensed the physical media sales back to the ‘box shifters’. Is it only a matter of time before Apple take the last step and setup a record label, like Starbucks and other media delivery operations such as Yahoo.
18 Wednesday Jul 2007
Posted in Music
Crawdaddy have got another good article on their site looking how in some ways the music industry has come full circle since the days of punk. But in other ways – so far away such as the rapidly fragmenting music scene and the technological impact upon music tribalism.
See the full article here – Crawdaddy! – Feature Story – Jesse Malin Comes Full Circle.
