Turning the digital tables
There’s a club in London, England that recently hosted a No Wax night. People bring their iPods and get to play three songs for everyone to dance to. They trade off with another mp3J (DJ is so TwenCen) for every song and it is their responsibility to make sure that dance flow is maintained. Here’s the CNN article that I stold my title from that describes the event.
I read this article in the same sitting. It describes a new realtime digital accompaniment akin to solo guitarists using loop machines, but only if the loop machine could improvise, add harmonies, and, oh, play 30 cellos at once or something. Pretty frickin’ cool!
I spend a lot of time thinking about where music is going. What is the Next Big Sound? Should we prevent it from being co-opted by Big Music or let them come on in so that it becomes a commercial populist movement that everyone can participate in for a fee? The music industry is trying to work with mashup artists like Kid606 to produce bootleg mashups of popular tunes in a post-modern deconstruction of modern music. But mp3Jing seems like a new sort of beast… interactive in a really basic and unsophisticated way, sure, but totally connective. It allows the fans to create a sort of fabric of musical tastes in their own democratic mashup of music. I dunno… could be way cool.