music&music

Detour!

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Malcolm Saba Farry) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:25:00 +0000

Have shifted these runnings to the Sugarlicks blog >>
www.sugarlicks.com/blog

fireside chat

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Malcolm Saba Farry) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 03:38:00 +0000

This is a radio show for Redbull Germany that we did on tour in 2006, still makes good listening ...

PIYN Promo trailer

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Malcolm Saba Farry) — Tue, 26 May 2009 05:08:00 +0000

Movie trailer promo for the upcoming People In Your Neighbourhood documentary.

Money & Xmedia Lab hype

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Malcolm Saba Farry) — Tue, 26 May 2009 03:57:00 +0000

Attended the Xmedia Lab conference day last Friday in Auckland City. An interesting day with a variety of mainly international speakers waxing triumphant about their online projects. For me the most interesting were the NZ speakers who seemed real compared to the other speakers who were mainly from the US. The US speakers focus was money money money, and how large their VC networks are, how much capital was needed for a startup, how the focus was shifting to gaming versions of platforms, and how insidiously cunning their online marketing strategies were.
While I believe in the importance of online media (as here), I feel a little dismay at the lack of a social conscience for almost all of the speakers. Sure online social networks and other initiatives have important social functions - connection, collaboration, belonging .... but aren't these more important than commercialism?
Question: everyone in the room was media savvy, and online functional par excellence;
so as far as money itself goes, I am sure no one in their business even handles physical money - transactions are of course online - the wealth is intangible.
It exists only as a collection of online transactions.
Money and the exchange is therefore a thought, a transaction over the internet, rather than anything physical.
So if we keep the motivation behind the transaction, the thought of exchange itself, can't we one day remove the numbers and the associated commercial obsession, and keep only the thought - the thought of equal exchange - my ideas / knowledge for your attention, collaboration and input.
The focus is therefore not money, but human endeavour, and the continued advancement of human society - an equal exchange to benefit us all, and lift the human spirit.
We can do all we do now, but without any "money" changing hands. Keep the thought of exchange at the time of the exchange, but remove the mundane monetary transaction. Focus on money removes us from serious focus on what is really important - the reason for exchange, rather than the continual chasing of the commercial dragon (bigger, better, louder, faster).
When money dies, and the Capitalist monetary system finally becomes irrelevant, we will be left with only the thought. The thought of equal exchange.
Will those that focus only on commercialism be ready for that? I doubt it.

Transculturalism & the 21st Century

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Malcolm Saba Farry) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 08:08:00 +0000

What does transculturalism in the 21st century mean? especially here in the globe's second most culturally diverse city, Auckland New Zealand?

With all the talk of Creative Cities and interculturalism, and the triumphing of the same by organizations and public bodies around the World, where does that leave real dialogue between public bodies and aspiring cultural entrepreneurs?

These entrepreneurs are getting co-opted by public institutions, who are anxious to fill their "ethnicity" and "cultural" quotas. The institutional approach is dominated by form-filling and talk-fests, whereas culturally diverse process often involves opensourced cultural knowledge exchange and community based solutions. Diversity needs to be represented in the process as well as the idea. Otherwise the very creativity that is the cultural lifeblood will continue to be reinterpreted, filtered and ultimately squashed.

The bees and trees approach (small nimble social entrepreneurs and networks working with bigger organizations and Govt), can only go so far. What happens if the innovation proposed is to totally dismantle the hierarchies in place?

Transculturalism by its nature defies categorisation. It is beyond definition. It describes a sense of identity and belonging for a growing majority of the World's population - those who, whether through mixed blood, global upbringing or plain refusal to adhere to mainstream consumerist/patriotic notions of shared culture, seek to create a new World where difference is celebrated without conforming.
Transculturalism extends throughout all human culture.

from "Transculturalism - How The World is Coming Together" by Claude Grunitzky and TRACE magazine contributors

"Some individuals find ways to transcend their initial culture, in order to explore, examine, and infiltrate new, seemingly alien cultures. These people are “transculturalists” and their experiences show that in the future it will become increasingly difficult to identify and separate people according to previously accepted delineations. In essence, we are saying that transculturalism defies race, religion, sexuality, class and every sort of classification known to sociologists and marketers. Transculturalists lead unusual lives, and some people continue to call them heretics. They date and marry outside of their race or religion; they date and marry inside of their gender; they travel on a whim and venture into faraway lands; they dress unconventionally, and customize new dress codes regularly; they live in areas their parents were once barred from, and take jobs previously considered outside of their leagues; they listen to, and create and criticize music they are not supposed to listen to; they display high levels of creativity in the arts and other progressive disciplines.

What succeeds empire? Time will tell. And time does tell, for those who are willing to listen, and look around, and be surprised. Today is less like yesterday than it has ever been. When people are not busy predicting, they find it easier to discover. Fresh attitudes only now gaining scale and traction–transglobalism, transculturalism–promise much for the future. The very value of these attitudes derives from the fact that they are not inherited. "

Josh takes his music back to Korea

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Malcolm Saba Farry) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 08:00:00 +0000

Auckland Korean rap artist Josh "Daemang" Jang, who was part of the People In Your Neighbourhood album, and had his track "Flying Kowi" blessed by strings from Urban Soul Orchestra, is planning to take his music back to the urban charts in Homeland Korea. bless brother!

check out his track here.

PIYN bfm morning glory interview

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Malcolm Saba Farry) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:20:00 +0000

PIYNWomad

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Malcolm Saba Farry) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 17:24:00 +0000

People In Your Neighbourhood was recognised as one of the standout shows at Womad Taranaki 2009, with an intercultural mix of dynamic live electronic soul.
The show involved Urban Soul Orchestra (UK) string players writing and performing with 15 aspiring urban ethnic performers from Auckland - which included flamenco guitar, Chinese guzheng, dj scratching, fijian percussion, Maori waiata, palestinian rap et al.
An NZ herald review praised the performance, although the review author thinly disguised his backward racism and undercover ignorance by describing the Korean rap as one of various "oddities" in the show. The New Zealand music industry is filled with such mono cultural views from the plethora of furrowed Pakeha critical brows .... personally I am totally bored with "Kiwi Music" and the industry bodies that supposedly represent it.
Does the Herald reporter realise that more people globally listen to Korean rap than Kiwi rap music? maybe he should take a look at the changing demography in the world around him, and then another in the mirror to see what really now constitutes "odd".

Saraswati Salaam - Saccie & Kadambari

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Malcolm Saba Farry) — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 01:10:00 +0000

Kadambari comes from the tiny coastal state of Goa in India. She’s been a cover girl for Elle, worked with Tibetan refugees, doco and ad-film makers in India, alongside singing with various independent artists and bands.
Kadambari thinks celebrating differences through film and music alone can bridge gaps between people. What makes her tick? Reggae, funk, soul, Indian classical, languages and travel.
This is the first of many planned new recordings while in New Zealand.

Khaled El-Shareif (Saccie)
New Zealand Hip Hop’s top voted hype MC, Saccie also does conscious and Arab-centric rhymes. He records with the Sugarlicks Records crew in Auckland City.
Khaled is a Palestinian Kiwi who has a strong sense of Arab identity, a keen ear for political expression, and a taste for the funk!

People In Your Neighbourhood cd and art

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Malcolm Saba Farry) — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:55:00 +0000

People In Your Neighbourhood is an intercultural creative commons music work from Auckland city NZ. A joint project between the British Council New Zealand, Echo Culture and Sugarlicks, it aims to celebrate cultural diversity in the Southern Hemisphere's most diverse city Auckland.

outside the envelope

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Malcolm Saba Farry) — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 19:23:00 +0000

“Remember that a kite rises against, not with the wind”

We need to create the conditions in cities and cultures where people can think, plan and act with imagination. The capacity to imagine is being squashed by the doom and gloom corporate system, that places an ability to mitigate loss above any blue skies creative capacity. The risk economy is a massively growing industry. Corporate risk has its specialists, consultants, serious curriculums and poker faced advocates. It is the default mechanism that has embedded itself into how companies continually evaluate their negative potential. The corporate mood of the time is how to avert the worst (rather than create the good).

However, underneath it all, ideas, knowledge and inter-cultural futures are becoming as valuable and powerful as financial capital.

Prosperity more and more will depend on creative advantage, a flow of ideas and innovation. The top down corporate structure is giving way to the horizontal open source, peer produced network of ideas.
The hierarchical model has been historically dominant for Western institutions such as the Government, Church and military-industrial complex. Indeed so pervasive and enduring has this model been, that we have assumed there are no alternatives. But today's sharpest companies make their boundaries porous, and accept input from the global creative sector, and are the ones best poised to create enduring value. Traditional forms of intellectual property create a walled compound of content, where resources are hidden and companies compete with each other to gain access to vital innovation pools. This is stifling to the life journey of ideas.
So increasingly, innovative companies are finding that the best way to build vital business structures, is to harness a shared foundation of technology and knowledge to accelerate growth and innovation.

A creative city values authenticity, originality, uniqueness and innovation. These cultural resources are the raw materials of the creative city – more valuable than the bricks and mortar or the gold and steel of the traditional value base.
However, this creativity needs to be tied to truth and authenticity – advertising “creatives” who come up with more and more elusive ways to convince unwitting consumers to purchase harmful or simply needless products are not creative, they are simply continually deceptive (to themselves as well, lets be honest).

As Nordstrom and Ridderstrale have suggested “the surplus society has a surplus of similar companies, employing similar people, with similar educational backgrounds, coming up with similar ideas, producing similar things, with similar prices and similar quality.”
The old intellectual industrial architecture has been so pervasive, that we have taken it for granted just like the familiarity of our streets and buildings, as though there were no alternative.
It is the contrast with this and the alternative view that gives artists their power, and their passion.

Remember a kite rises against, not with the wind.

LIXX live

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Malcolm Saba Farry) — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 05:58:00 +0000

People in Your Neighbourhood - new voices

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Malcolm Saba Farry) — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 04:45:00 +0000

As the music industry continues to literally turn itself inside out, from a product and commercial advertising based industry to models based on consumer choice and the immediacy of digital, where does that leave our radio stations that once ruled the airwaves?

Dead. Or soon to be.
Soon internet radio will be in every car, every ipod and computer / cellphone will stream an endless variety of niche consumer defined content direct to each of us.
No need to listen to fake American accents on New Zealand commercial radio stations; no need to have to listen to meaningless advertising surrounding the payola induced content; and most importantly no need to listen to continuous major label flogged pop music that has little relevance with the real world in your town or city (outside corporate America).

Soon we will be hearing from the People in Your Neighbourhood, the new voices of music who blend Asian, African, Latino, Middle Eastern and "the Other", into their music and expression. World music is dead, the internet is recreating it as "the music" or simply "music".

So that bland American fake gansta posturing, the sugary bv's frilling to and fro all around the notes in the scale but never on them, the US angst jackass teenage rock with toilet bowl humour will soon be gone .. when you switch on the radio soon, it will be all new.
Content from the heavens, selected to fit your taste, delivered to your digital device.

Here come the People in Your Neighbourhood.

STOP! Music IS the new economy...

noreply@blogger.com (Gareth Malcolm Saba Farry) — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 07:32:00 +0000

The web is saturated with articles and blogs about the death of the music industry & what Madonna, Radiohead and the like in collusion with web 2.0 digital models and P2P sites are doing to the industry ... "killing it"?
But this IS the new industry ... a place where the majority of content is created and consumed for free, where the creativity embodied on your musical content IS the value attributed to it.
True creativity will become a form of money; so you may download my music for free, but that creativity still has value – value enough for me to extract a service from you or your peers in exchange. A system where money becomes less important than fair trade.
A place where the merit in music conquers all. Or at least in the years to come it will.

It is my absolute belief that "where music leads all else will follow" .. that is the breakdown of the commercial music industry to elements of trade, file sharing, swapping & purchase will one day encompass our whole online commercial structure.
Merit and creative truth will rule, meaningless content (read “pop”) will simply become ignored meaninglessness, and it will struggle for any traction.
The sharing and spread across digital platforms of all online services and products will occur, with value being judged by merit.
Advertisers will no longer be able to saturate our TV screens with useless products and thinly veiled lies about necessity - purchase value & immediacy will be decided by the purchaser. The crude translation of advertising will be irrelevant.

ok, …. deeper : the human mind is a spark of the almighty consciousness of the creator, imagination and creativity are the doors from which this consciousness emerges.
As human minds develop further and become more fully tuned to the nature of spirit, by stopping thought, abandoning knowledge & trusting intuition, creativity also becomes more fully tuned to this truth. That is, music / knowledge / content / product is freed from the shackles of blind commercialism, prejudice or banality & will simply cut through and gain traction by the simple fact of its creative merit.

The deeper the self realization of a person and his/her creativity, the more he/she influences the whole universe by their subtle creative vibrations.

Every sound or action comes from silence (the potent carrier of the present tense), and then dies back into the ocean of silence.
You choose by your actions how you disrupt this silence – so choose wisely.

Death to the music industry, long live the industry of creativity.