The Sebinomics Blog 1.0

Narciso Lobo, aka seeso, and Zoe, aka ukulelezo, recorded the song Angel From Montgomery and posted it onto Youtube. The collaboration is remarkable, because Narciso recorded his part in his home in the US and Zoe in her home in Canada. 

Technology makes it possible to record and film a sequence and send it to someone else, who will then add his or her material. That is how Narciso and Zoe created their video. My friend Dan Keller, aka Sultan of String, engaged in a similar collaboration with keyboard virtuoso Joseph Anastacio Glean from California. Dan was looking for a keyboarder to play on his 2004 album Electric Storm and found a great player on the other side of the globe. Since technology made it possible to instant message each other to discuss what to play where, Dan and Joseph didn’t have to be at the same place. This way they didn’t have to travel around and use their own equipment. All they needed to send around were digital files. 

Bass legend T.M. Stevens offers his bass lines to artists, who would like to have him playing on their album. T.M. works in his studio and sends the bass track to his customers and none of them had to travel around. This saves time, money, and you can have a great bass track on your record.

That is also how Alessio Piazza, Simon Kurt, and I work on our music. When one of us has an idea, we record it in GarageBand and then share the file with the others. They work on their parts and share the new version with the others. That way, we can all work on the songs whenever we have an idea, without having to wait for the next jam session. 

“But what about feeling,” you may ask. It is simply a different kind of working. Sure, it is a great pleasure playing live with awesome musicians, or recording an album live in the studio. Nonetheless, a collaboration like the one between seeso and ukulelezo show that the song can be filled with emotions, even though the artists where miles apart when they recorded it.

We Are the Strange

I’m reading Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing and found the following passage very interesting:

The twenty-eight-year-old self-taught animator [Mike Belmont] has created a movie entitled We Are the Strange. … But because he video-blogged the process of making the movie, he’d developed a sizeable fan base before he’d even finished editing his movie. … Soon Belmont had obtained professional management and begun making the rounds to various indie film outfits looking to distribute the film. “It turned my stomach,” he says of the experience. “They wanted everything. I couldn’t have sold the movie on DVDs or over the Internet or anything.” Against his manager’s advice, he wriggled free of those deals as well. “The idea is that you join the system, and it’ll be good for your career, even if you sign away all the rights to your work and wind up poorer,” says Belmont. “Well, excuse me, but fuck the system.” … Having rejected a theatrical distribution deal, Belmont instead released the movie through the file-sharing technology BitTorrent.

Kris Kobayashi-Nelson wrote in her Dreamlogic.net article, „Crafted in his bedroom/makeshift studio, M Dot slaved and toiled. Don’t take this statement lightly; he spent many a sleep-deprived night struggling through a caffeine-fueled subconscious. Maybe this is why We Are the Strange plays out like a nightmare with a plot, as if we’re trapped in his head during those long late nights. The disjointed visitations of other lofty concepts swirl in; unconventional windows. “Str8nime” is what he dubs this culmination of “Strange”, “8-bit”, and “Anime”. It is absolutely fitting that M Dot has selected a name for his created genre, as this is like nothing you’ve ever seen before.“

I found the following information on Janko Roettgers’  blog saying that when Michael M. Belmont, a.k.a. M dot Strange, heard that his animated movie We Are the Strange had been leaked onto torrent sites, he immediately fired up his email client. But he didn’t send out DMCA takedown notices to stop the unlicensed distribution of the movie he had worked on for three years. Instead, he thanked the pirates for the free publicity: “I’m glad to see it being released and possibly finding more strange people who appreciate it.”

According to Wired Magazine, Michael Belmont spent three years and roughly $20,000 crafting his 86-minutes movie, and I think the result is remarkable. I’m a fan of this kind of projects. Why join the system, which might be crooked and fragile, if we can actually build an alternative system, like Belmont did?

My friends, Alessio Piazza and Simon Kurt, and I didn’t know about We Are the Strange but started a similar project just a few weeks back. We are currently working on a short movie, which will be distributed solely online and will include music we create on our MacBooks. Like the video, the soundtrack will be distributed only online through our own Nimbit online store and through a few other selected channels. That will give us complete control over our creation and will provide our fans with the fastest possible distribution.

I’m anxious to see where this is going. I’ve read that different TV channels are working on shows that will only be broadcasted on the Internet. Well, since especially Gen Yer are spending way more time on the computer than in front of TV, that is the only way to go.

What’s better than having only one bass guitar? Having TWO bass guitars! And how do you give them enough musical space in a band or a song? Well, you simply leave out all the other instruments—maybe integrate some percussion.

That is the recipe for my band BAZZ UNIT. I had this idea about three years ago and started BAZZ UNIT as an experiment. Soon I realized that many critics and event managers were actually more and more looking for the uniqueness of a band and therefore, I wanted to actually reestablish the trio after I came back from my 1-year stay in Japan. I asked two dear friends and awesome musician to join me for that (ad)venture: Alessio Piazza (bass) and Simon Steiner (percussion).

We recorded one demo song called “The Dog By The Tree”, which was recorded within one hour to give people the idea what our band sounds and looks like. Some people call our music jazzy, some call it funky, but we just call it bazzmusic. About ten years ago Dave Pomeroy, one of my heroes, wrote a song called “The Day the Bass Players Take Over the World” and that song inspired me to actually go for it and be one of the bass players to get a piece of the world for our bass players little groovy world!