Don’t worry – my bit’s in English.

I will never have a business card, will I?

Today I launched a new weekly jazz show. But it’s not on the radio. In fact, all it is is a Spotify playlist linked from a Posterous blog page.

You can find the show here: Dubber’s Sunday Jazz.

It’s a two hour playlist of jazz, chosen by me. No talking – just the tunes. And of course, you can only ‘tune in’ in places you can use Spotify (currently UK, France, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Spain).

I was talking about it on Twitter earlier on, and coined the term ‘Spotcast’ to describe it, as a play on ‘podcasting’ (which is neither broadcasting, nor restricted to iPods). I’m using the term to describe the use of Spotify playlists as if they were specialist radio shows. So actually, Spotcasting is a far more accurate and descriptive name than Podcasting is.

It occurs to me that if you actually gathered together a bunch of different people choosing tunes for their own Spotcasts, you could assemble your own Spotcast station. My show’s for a Sunday afternoon. Someone else’s could be for a Tuesday evening. Someone could do the reggae show or the love song request show. Who knows?

It’s kind of nonsense, of course: anyone can listen to the playlist at any time they wanted, any day of the week and at any time in the future. But I’m making the playlist in the same way I would as if it was for a broadcast programme. It’s two hours long each time, I’ll do a new one each week, and I’m not just considering which songs should be played – but in what order I should play them.

Steve Lawson cleverly suggested recording mp3 voice breaks to play between the songs on Spotify, and hosting them on the blog, then using technical wizadry to insert them in the right places so audiences can listen through to a Spotify-powered hosted show. Nice idea, but that seems extraneous to me, and smacks of effort.

I just like the parameters, possibilities and limitations of a two hour specialist music show. I can contextualise it with a brief blog post, and then let the music speak for itself.

Jon Hickman suggested that the moment I invented the term Spotcast was the moment I stopped being cool. It’s adorable that he thought I was ever cool.

But despite the fact that it’s a corny term, I do like the idea – and I’m definitely going to insist that my Music Radio Programming class do this every week next semester…

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on a Music As Culture project with the band UB40.

They’re going to be playing a gig at the Rainbow pub in Digbeth on Tuesday to raise money to help the venue pay for a new soundproof roof over the courtyard, so that they don’t get shut down due to the noise complaints.

They’re in Switzerland at the moment, performing their last festival gig of the season, but they’re back in Birmingham tomorrow. Meanwhile, they’ve been taking short videos of the band rehearsing, soundchecking, performing and hanging out, and I’ve been uploading that to the site.

There’s a lot of work to do over the next few days, and we’ll be doing lots of interviews, video, blogging and photography to try and capture everything around the event, as well as some of the music too. You don’t work on a project like this and not capture the music…

It’s been brilliant so far working with the band, who’ve been incredibly generous with their time (in particular, saxophonist Brian Travers, who is the driving force of this project).

For an act that’s sold over 100 million records worldwide and play to tens of thousands of people, hanging with a couple of guys from the local University and providing us with unlimited access and lots of band-created footage has been just amazing.

We’re interested in things like: how a major act like UB40 connects with their hometown; how local venues are important to cities and scenes; and the ways in which city regeneration affects local music culture.

All this is happening in a backdrop of threatened venue closures, noise complaints and tensions between city council and inner-city music venues and pubs – so it’s quite topical and relevant to stuff going on in our local community.

Check out the website: http://ub40.musicasculture.org.

It’s just one of a bunch of projects we at the Interactive Cultures Research Unit are doing under the umbrella of Music As Culture, and we’re working with an organisation called Amplified to help us capture and document all of the conversations and ideas as they happen.

This is the raw interview I did with Zane Lowe for a New Zealand radio programme called Musical Chairs.

The final version will have a good deal of music and a lot of interviews with some of the people who get mentioned along the way.

Since the target audience for this programme will be New Zealanders, there are quite a few references that aren’t going to make a lot of sense for anyone else – but I thought there might be some people who would find the interview of interest – and that the overlap with people who are going to hear the fully produced radio show on Radio New Zealand National is probably quite slim.

Caution: there are one or two swears along the way. I haven’t bleeped them out because we’re all grownups.

Enjoy.

I’m a little unwell. I have Hepatitis A. That’s not good.

I also have Typhoid fever, which is a pretty bad disease, so I’m told. To make matters worse, I also have Diptheria, Tetanus and Polio. I’d stay away from me for a bit if I was you.

Of course, I only have little bits of each of those, they were administered into my bloodstream deliberately, and that will theoretically prevent me from getting any of them seriously when I go to India next month.

We’re not sure about Malaria yet. According to the NHS, the Assam region is high risk – and Shillong, one of the places I’ll be going to, is up that way – but it wasn’t on their lo-res map, so they’re checking with the travel disease centre for advice before they tell me whether I should get the £15 tablets or the industrial-strength £50 tablets.

I suspect the latter.

Really rather excited about going to India, and I’m especially looking forward to not getting any of those diseases that are currently being systematically overwhelmed by my immune system. Hopefully.

I mentioned to nurse Rebecca that I didn’t actually feel the first needle, so she said she’d make sure the second one hurt. It didn’t – but don’t they teach you not to say stuff like that in injection classes?

I was looking forward to the old “You might feel a bit of a prick…” gag – but it was not forthcoming.

Just returned from London where I was interviewing Zane Lowe for a radio documentary I’m making with Sam Coley for Radio New Zealand. The programme is called Musical Chairs, and it’s a series that focuses on New Zealand musicians, and tells their story through interview and music.

Of course, Zane’s not really known over here in the UK as a musician – but then he’s not really that well known back in New Zealand as a broadcaster, so I guess that evens out. The story we’re telling is about both.

Zane is, as far as we can work out (with the possible exception of Phil Keoghan), New Zealand’s most successful broadcaster.

We were promised 45 minutes with Zane, and we were a little worried, because it was late getting started… but I guess Zane was enjoying himself, because we ended up with almost double that. His producer Kat started to look a little anxious, because he was due to go on air at 7pm, but Zane gestured her away with a ‘two more minutes’ sign. Several times.

We all know each other in New Zealand
Zane and I have history – which is why I’m presenting this documentary. I used to work for his Dad many moons ago, and first met Zane when he was not much older than Jake is now. I’d stay behind after work at the radio station recording Zane’s rapping and hip hop beatmaking. Recording those early demos, and the first Urban Disturbance single ‘No Flint No Flame’ was something I was really pleased with, and it was nice to catch up properly all these years later.

It’s Sam’s programme really – he’s producing it, he’s organised everything, and he’s doing all the production and editing work. But he asked me to get involved, do the interviews and front the programme on the strength of some sort of rapport I may have with Zane. I suspect Zane can ‘do’ rapport with pretty much anyone who walks through the door – but it was good to have these points of connection all the same.

We’d spoken once in the past couple of years when I worked on a research project at the BBC, but this felt like a real catch-up and it was really good of him to spend that much time.

Zane: the early years
We talked about the old days in Auckland. What it was like for him growing up at the feet of New Zealand radio royalty. Making beats and doing battle with Mark de Clive-Lowe and Andy Morton at Auckland Grammar. Rapping over jazz and hip hop beats at De Brett’s, the Box and Cause Celebre nightclubs.

He spoke about working with Graham Bollard, who went on to become New Zealand’s biggest earning composer (perhaps ever) for penning this catchy little tune. Recording a guaranteed smash hit record and then never releasing it. Producing what has come to be broadly recognised as NZ’s best hip hop record.

And we talked about his first forays into broadcasting at Max TV. His road trip across America. His arrival in the UK and his subsequent employment by MTV and XFM. And then his time at the BBC, where he appears to consider himself one of the luckiest people on the planet – interviewing Eminem, Paul McCartney, Bono, Mike Skinner and many others – and playing the “hottest record in the world today” every week.

It’s about the music. Always the music.
Ultimately, Zane’s a music fan. He’s passionate about it, and he gets to be as close to it as it’s possible to be, and enthuse about it to as many people as it’s possible to reach. Can’t ask for much better than that.

Of course, this will all be cut right back for the radio programme, the voices of some of the other characters in the story will feature in the finished show, and there’ll be lots of music in the mix – from the Beastie Boys to Smashing Pumpkins – and of course some of Zane’s own musical contributions: from the early Urban Disturbance days, through the radio phenomenon of Breaks Co-op, to the remix work he’s done recently for P-Money.

But just in case you’re interested, I’ll be posting the full audio of the interview I did with Zane here sometime over the next week. Lots of stuff you won’t hear on the radio.

Rather pleased with how that went.

Thought you might like this live mix recorded at that NetAudio Festival I went to in Berlin last week. The guys from Fresh Poulp Records were really great. We stayed at the same hostel boat on the river, they were brilliant company (despite my terrible French, and them finding English understandably complex after a few drinks) – and this Roots Ista Posse dub session above, Normaa’s 4am dubstep set and Rafiralfiro’s Latintronica were real highlights for me.

Best of all, you can download all the music for free.

It’s a Net Label thing…

There’s something I’m looking for. Logic dictates that it MUST exist. It’s an application that will go through your hard drive and completely remove all traces of files that were associated with software that you have uninstalled.

Let me be clear: I’m not looking for something that will do a clean uninstall of programmes I have on my machine and would like to remove. I’ve had one of those for a while now.

What I’m looking for is something that will deal with files left behind by programmes I deleted long ago. Any ideas?

I had a problem on my laptop. Something called AddressBookSync was going crazy – sucking up almost all of my system resources. I don’t really know what it was, which piece of software it was connected to (though I have my suspicions) or even how I eventually managed to get rid of it – but the difference to my Macbook now that I’m rid of it is astonishing.

I only really noticed the problem over the last few days. The computer’s been getting more and more sluggish over time which, when it happens gradually, you’re only marginally aware of. But recently, the fan has been going nonstop, programmes were taking minutes to load, and it had started to do that thing where you type, go make a cup of tea, and return to see your words emerge, one character at a time, on the screen.

I went for the Activity Monitor and immediately identified the process to blame, quit it, and things calmed down. Three minutes later, it was back – and it was angry. I killed it again, but like the last 15 minutes of Terminator – just when you think it’s dead, up it pops again like an unstoppable, all-devouring technozombie.

I Googled it, but the only AddressBookSync I could find was a piece of software I have never downloaded. It puts Facebook pictures on your contacts. Or something like that. Anyway – not something I’ve ever used (and given my experience with its namesake, something I’d be very cautious of).

So I went digging and started removing programmes. By midnight, I was sure it was dead. The last thing I did was to remove all traces of the Missing Sync for Windows Mobile. I no longer have a Window Mobile (can I get an ‘Amen’?) and run everything natively for the Mac/iPhone world.

There were some complicated steps to take to remove all traces of it. I found Response #6 on this forum very helpful.

I don’t have hard evidence that Missing Sync was the culprit, but I have strong suspicions. It was only one of many extraneous things that I removed from my laptop last night and I’m glad it’s gone.

But the lesson for Mac users is to keep an eye on the Activity Monitor from time to time. See if there’s anything hogging resources and keeping you from enjoying the lightning reactions of an unencumbered machine. I didn’t know what I had, but now that it’s gone, the difference is night and day.

It’s awesome. I feel like I’ve got a brand new computer. Only smudgy.