En fullständigt subjektiv topplista över en makalös musiksommar.
Här är det ögonblick och händelser som står i centrum, inte band eller låtar.
Bara ett exempel har valts från varje festival.


1. Soluppgång söndag morgon vid Happynovisad-scenen på gigantiska Exit-festivalen i Novi Sad. Ed Rush & Optical spelade d'n'b. 15 juli.

2. Åttatimmarjammet vid Svinesund, där vi var uppemot 50 personer varav åtminstone hälften av oss från och till spelade på allehanda instrument. Svårbeskrivligt. 18 augusti.

3. Vårt gästspelande på scen med vännerna i Patrask, som skedde ett par gånger under Visby medeltidsvecka. Svettigt och högljutt. 6 augusti.

4. Mylla-spelningen på festen i Vinterviken. Ja, detta överträffade även Bo Hansson samma kväll. 25 augusti.

5. Flera timmar av dubstep i Camp303-tältet på Norbergfestivalen. Trickykid, L-wiz och Gena DJ:ade. 27 juli.

6. Timbuktu på Hultsfredsfestivalen. Överväldigande avslutning. 14 juni.

7. Icke-musiken i Fallmossen. Vi lyssnade inte på någon musik alls under tiden där! 26 juli.

8. Den korta stunden av galet bra dansmusik ute vid Flatenbadet (där musiken kanske annars inte var mycket att hurra för). Tror det var Psilodump som tog över en stund. 4 augusti.

9. The Tough Alliance i hörlurarna under en tågfärd ner genom södra Frankrike. 19 juli.

10. Bro bro breja kring stången, midsommarafton på Öland. 22 juni.

11. Jeff Mills allra sista kvart på Electromind-festivalen i Montpellier. Efter nästan två timmars kylig Detroitminimalism släppte han till sist loss en väl avvägd men delikat portion Underground Resistance-lekfullhet. 21 juli

12. Skinnarviksberget Ortonox Massive – ett tjog unga vuxna, en varm kväll, några påsar öl och ett bilbatteridrivet ljudsystem med elektronisk musik och talsyntesad omniHAL! 1 augusti.

Tidigt i måndags morse återvände vi till Visby – Joel, Jon och jag – till den medeltidsvecka där vi varje sommar under det tidiga 00-talet återkom för att spela med vår numera relativt vilande ensemble Vox Vulgaris. Att komma tillbaka i denna konstellation kändes rätt stort, det ska sägas. Resan kom att vara i nästan fyra dygn, lite längre än planerat (Joel lämnade dock Visby tidigare, och andra vänner är fortfarande kvar där, i skrivande stund.)

Måndagen blev en mycket lång och intensiv dag, vars alla vändor varken kan eller ska återges här. Strax efter skymningen trillade vi in på trädgårdskrogen Bittra Bävern (eller hette den kanske Ilskne Ibsen?), där våra musikervänner Patrask från Falun just var på väg upp på scen för sitt andra set. Hastigt och lustigt blev jag och Jon uppslitna och förvandlades till oförberedda gästartister. Att få apa sig på scen och tuta sig andfådd tillsammans med gäng som dessa, framför en alldeles vild publik (som Joel eggade till helt vansinniga röjnivåer), det är en kick som jag omöjligen kan tänka mig att avstå från helt, även om det räcker med några gånger per år och även om ens personliga musikaliska insats blir ganska marginell och tidvis medioker. Kvällen fortsatte sedan ett bra tag till.

Tisdagen blev lång den med, på delvis andra sätt. Såg större delen av den improviserade och alltid välbesökta föreställningen med gycklargruppen Jauvet – ett annat gammalt gäng vänner och kollegor från vår tid som mer aktiva medeltidsmusiker – och blev djupt imponerad över hur de inte bara håller ställningarna, utan tvärtom bara blir bättre år för år. De hade kunnat hålla sig till säkra kort, men väljer att "balansera på knivseggen" (som Niki uttryckte det) genom att hela tiden leda in handlingarna (remixer på välkända sagor) på slumpmässiga spår, som rids ut i typ dubbelt South Park-tempo.
I trädgården ovanför hittade vi sedan ytterligare ett gäng musikerkollegor, som vi spelat en hel del med under åren: hamburgska Poeta Magica, Holger och Fredrike Funke med skiftande medmusiker. Vi snackar om tyskar som älskar Sverige ungefär lika mycket som de vurmar för hednisk naturmystik, saker som i varierande grad framkommer i deras musik som aldrig gjort anspråk på medeltida tidstrogenhet. Årets upplaga av Poeta utgick i mycket från vackra svenska folklåtar med effektfulla speltekniker på elförstärkt nyckelharpa, och det mesta lät hemskt bra – både när vi hängde i deras trädgård, och när vi var förbi deras ruinkonsert senare på kvällen.
Patrask hade ett hektiskt spelschema, som på tisdagen kulminerade med en spelning på Effes, sunkhaket som vi en gång var på väg att rasera när folkmassan hoppade så hårt att golvbalkarna tydligen börjat vaja. Alltid är det lika svettigt, men sällan har en spelning där låtit så här bra. Patrask har blivit bättre år för år, men deras senaste album "Ös" är i en ny klass. Trestämmigt blås och brutna beats, till max. Egna beskrivningen uttrycker det väl: Medeltida glamrock med stenhårda balkanbeats. Så var de också glamrocksminkade!
Även här hoppade vi framemot slutet upp som gästartisterna från det där bandet som innan de började glida iväg mot medeltida krautrock satte visst avtryck med låtar som Rokatanc. Känslan av att än en gång få blåsa sig utmattad till den på Effes går att leva på ett tag.
(Efteråt hittade vi några armenier som började sjunga sköna armenska sånger och var intresserade av våra instrument, så vi började dra på en efterfest, som dock visade sig ligga långt utanför staden samt förutsätta eld och grillning av gris, ett något för stort projekt klockan fyra på natten, så vi lommade tillbaka, hyfsat utmanade...)

Onsdagen hade inget spelande inplanerat, även om det jammades en del i anslutning till den återkommande eldshowen med Västeråsgruppen Trix, där Patrask än en gång stod för musiken. Publikmängden i Nordergravar var enorm, vi talar tusentals personer samlade till medeltidsveckans kanske mest sympatiska arrangemang: helt gratis, och arrangerat helt autonomt från den officiella festivalen. Och vad man än tycker om de horder av eldsprutare som lattjar bakom var och varannan buske, så höll detta förstås en helt annan klass, inte minst koreografiskt. (Själv avvek jag, rusade till färjeterminalen och bokade om våra hembiljetter – ett dygn till!)
Resten av natten hamnar utanför denna nedteckning.

Torsdagens stora attraktion var en befriande omedeltida föreställning, på Romateatern: Lars Noréns föreställning av Shakespeares tragedi Hamlet. Utomhus, i en ruin, under tre timmar, medan solen gick ned, efter en mastig picknick i närheten. Wow.
En saftig bonus som låg långt utanför den ursprungsplan som egentligen hade inkluderat en dubstep-klubb i Stockholm denna kväll. En perfekt avslutning som knöt ihop säcken genom ett märkligt sammanträffande – allra först när vi anlänt till Visby hade vi nämligen läst och diskuterat en kort passage i Nietzsches Tragedins födelse, som diskuterar just innebörden i Hamlet!
(Där nämns även att den dionysiska upplevelsen även medför "ett letargiskt element" – jotack, det känns i kroppens alla muskler idag!)

Faktum är att Vox Vulgaris börjat odla planer på att återvända nästa år, men inte längre som rent musikprojekt, utan som ... gesamtkunstwerk!

Rent musikaliskt är det idag utan tvekan Patrask som regerar medeltidsveckan. Deras nya skiva är som sagt fenomenal. (Något säger mig att den mycket snart kommer finnas på fildelningsnätverk nära dig...)

Just ja, fick visst även en annan konceptskiva i min hand, av helt annat slag, från det fulla kristna rollspelsgäng som kallar sig "Wisby pirater". Deras nya grej, utöver den antitidstrogna piratstilen, är visst en teori om att medeltidsveckan egentligen handlar om det gamla Egypten, och att det under ringmuren finns en stor pyramid...
Nog är Medeltidsveckan en väldigt, väldigt udda typ av festival, på ett sätt som nog knappast kan förstås av den som inte – på gott och ont – utsatt sig för den.

One Wednesday, which happened to be the first day of August the legendary summer of 2007 (which, according to some, might be absurdly prolonged), the #dh crew decided to get together the soundsystem recently used at the Ortonox camp at the Norberg festival, and take it to a park to boost some bass.
Location was, through the IRC protocol, set to Skinnarviksberget, inner city Stockholms highest point with tremendous views over the water and the rest of the city, and loads of teenagers climbing at a huge antenna.

Fire was built, drinks were consumed, and the soundsystem ruled the mountain.

We started and ended with dubstep, with tracks by Loefah, Skream, Kode9 and – most importantly – the chinawobbling Bushido. Later on, when it was about as dark as a Swedish summer night can get, a one hour mix by Trentemoller was played, and followed by a long set of speech synthesis readings from the quote archives of omniHAL (which was a very odd experience). As the fire was about to die out, the soundsystem played 3 AM Eternal

All in all, a brilliant initiation to the month of August.

So my little project, FREAKost, which include me and Jockeus(inactive little fuck :D) is up on last.fm. Hadn't really thought about putting my songs here but now atleast ONE is up :) Hope there'll be more in the future so stay updated ;)

Freakost:
Clash of evil

Feel free to critizise. :)

ps. I'll be @ Emmabodafestivalen this week

I think last.fm kindof sucks for me. Lately i've made something wonderful!

I add my whole library and guess what, i SHUFFLE! It's like magic, it's faboulus and its a new way to discover your music.. AGAIN!

No but really because of my shuffle'ing i get noone who has the same taste like me because i got too many artist from too many genres which results in too little friends :(

Not that i use the friends function that much, but a worse problem is that my recomendations are fucked. The ones i got at present, at just this very moment are:
Beastie Boys
Swingin' Utters
LOK
No Use For A Name
Autechre
Sick of It All
etc.

Woho, new music!..wait a minute.. i've already got those artist? Yeah i sure do and i've listened to them too... so why isn't there any new music?:(

Any suggestions for me?

Har invites till två trackers med ganska mycket musikrelaterat material som bara ligger där och ruttnar.

Den ena börjar på ett ljud som grisar ger ifrån sig och den andra är löst relaterad till en kråka...


Jaja.. invites försvinner så här av er om det finns någon där ute som läser och skriker efter lite musik.

Talk by me and monki, held at the Reboot conference in Copenhagen last week. First published here, also on Nettime.
This version has some links added, and the opening paragraphs erased. Enjoy.





Piratbyrån is often perceived as being primarily anti-copyright and we often have to answer questions on how artists should make a living if there was no copyright. On this topic we have very little to say for several reasons: Talking about that implicates that we have (at least until now) a perfectly working copyright economy that has somehow provided wages for artists, an economy that would be nullified by a future removal of copyright laws.

What we instead prefer to talk about is the present: The concrete and complex workings of cultural economies, the cracks and grey zones in contemporary copyright, and the massive sharing of files that is already going on.

In fact, we got so tired of answering the questions of right versus wrong, that this spring on the last night of April, we climbed Stockholm's highest mountain in order to perform a kind of ritual. There we burned and buried the very same file-sharing debate that we had initiated four years ago, read a communique, and celebrated the ancient Walpurgis festivity around a fire. It's all documented in a video, that we will now show some brief clips from.

VIDEO LINK

As I said before, we buried the debate by performing this ritual since we felt that the debate was stuck in the same frozen positions it had been for years. Still discussing if file-sharing was right or wrong, if we should allow it or stop it, if it was good or evil. But to us the consequences of file-sharing, or rather the general accessibility of culture today, is much more far reaching than just another way for consumers to get access to content. Today we are going to talk about how it shapes the very ways we use, value and experience culture, especially music.

Since we used The KLF as a soundtrack for the film, and since we built a fire, we sent this video to Bill Drummond from the KLF. He sent us a very interesting response, saying that he enjoyed and understood the message. Then he attached this letter:

AN INVITATION

A time has arrived where we can (in theory and almost in practise) listen to any recorded music, from the entire history of recorded music, wherever, whenever while doing whatever we want.

This has meant our relationship with music is rapidly and fundamentally changing faster than it has done for many decades.

This is good for numerous reasons.

But a by-product of this is, recorded music will no longer contain the meaning it once held for us. This will entail it no longer gives us what we need and desire from it. Once a music has lost it’s meaning it has no value.

Thus as we edge our way deeper into the 21st Century we will begin to want music that can not be listened to wherever, whenever while doing whatever. We will begin to seek out music that is both occasion and place specific, music that can never be merely a soundtrack. We will demand music where we are no longer just the consumers, unwitting or otherwise.

The era of recorded music is now passing and within the next decade it will begin to look and sound like a dated medium. Recorded music will be perceived as an art form very much of the 20th Century.

The above notions excite me. This excitement has brought about The17. The17 rejects all that the era of recorded music had to offer and attempts to embrace the unknown opportunities of what lies ahead.

Please accept my invitation to embrace the unknown opportunities of what lies ahead in whatever way excites you.

Bill Drummond
www.the17.org

This is not only due to file-sharing but the general presence of free music. You can't walk around the city, enter a store or café without hearing music. Today, free music is omni-present. All this decreases the value of recorded music, perhaps of music-in-itself in general. We will probably no longer hear a new song, a new sound or a new style of music that will turn our world upside down as music has done many times in the past.

The pop-star Momus touches upon this when he summarized the music year of 2006 on his blog:

"If music didn’t exactly die in 2006, it certainly felt sidelined, jilted, demoted, decentred, dethroned as the exemplary creative activity, the most vibrant subculture."

Are Momus (born 1960) and Drummond (born 1953) just getting old and bored? Maybe, but there seems to be more to it. Momus concludes by quoting his artist friend Anne Laplantine, who expresses similar feelings towards the uncertain state of music with these words:

"I think we’re also living now in a transitional period which I’m not sure I can define. All I know is that I feel the need to wait a bit."

We agree with Drummond, Momus and Laplantine that we are in the middle of some kind of transition. Something that has been fundamental to humans is losing its meaning, and only the active destruction of it may open up ways to create new meaning – the philosophical term for such an ambiguous process is nihilism.

Ernst Jünger once wrote about overcoming nihilism, that optimism and pessimism should not be considered as opposites, but can rather be complementary ways of moving forward to new possibilities. Thus, disgust and enthusiasm are both feelings which have their legitimate place when we assess the contemporary state of music and what digitalisation does with it.

What clearly stands in the way of a successful transition is, however, copyright-centred reasoning with its extremely biased idea of creativity. As long as we limit our discussion to the rights or wrongs with copyright, we will continue to reduce cultural processes to the end products they leave behind. Because the only things that count, from the standpoint of copyright, are these end products which were once called "artworks" and today usually goes under the disgusting name of "content".

Books, records and pictures are all end products. But not performances, communication, festivities, or anything else happening in the moment, in real time. These more volatile or ephemeral aspects of culture basically falls outside the scope of copyright.

The copyright industry wants us to mentally reduce culture to content, while ignoring the context. They want to define "creativity" as the ability to create as many reproducible end products as possible, while everything performative is degraded to an instrumental status. That perspective is not only boring and sterile, it is also dangerous for the very idea of internet as a communication medium. Sadly, that perspective is also getting very popular on the top political level of the European Union. The recent so-called "Strategy for a creative Europe" concludes with the simple equation that using bigger weapons in the war against piracy will naturally lead to more creativity (that is, more "content"), which will in turn lead to economic growth, and save us all when the factories move to Asia.

Record companies want to rechannel our musical passions, from the excess of the living moment, into stockpiling of dead objects. George Bataille brilliantly analysed, 60 years ago, how such denial of sacrifice will only lead to its much more fatal return in form of war.

However, we'd like to emphasize that not only the copyright industry is guilty of copyright-centred reasoning – also many copyright critics fall into the trap, by taking a "consumerist" standpoint. It's all too easy to polemize "for" file-sharing (as if that was needed) with arguments about broadened access to copyrighted material, something which will only strengthen the abstracted and reductive idea of culture as accumulation of content.

Avantgarde composer John Cage – who was otherwise reluctant to make any value judgements, once presented a clear hierarchy of musical activities. Basically, he put participation over passive consumption:

"It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment or acquisition of 'culture'".

This quote works on two levels. On the one hand we can agree, and applaud, Cage for creating this scale, for daring to value different uses of culture differently. His argument is in line with Gregory Bateson's definition of information as "difference that makes a difference". But we also want to pose a question to Cage about the hierarchy: Can really making and performing a piece of music be seperated; and in the case of your music, performing and listening? And can one musical experience only fall into one category?

Copyright – based as it were on literary text and not musical experience – built its own peculiar world of abstractions, where the composer, the performer and the producer appeared as three different roles, each represented by their own copyright collective. But today they converge into the singular figure of "the bedroom producer".

A convergence driven by the development of recording and mixing technology, from the multitrack tape recorders of the 1960s, to the contemporary average computer able to simulate what only some years ago demanded very expensive studio time.

What does technology do with participation? Today, it should be obvious that such a question is wrongly put. Different technologies affect musical cultures and habits in different ways. But during large parts of the 20th century, many music professionals and especially their unionist representatives assumed the opposite: that all sound recording, editing and transmission technologies basically were parts of one singular tendency, usually named "mechanization". Thus technology was understood as the opposite of performance, in a very pessimistic way. Synthesizer players and discjockeys were initially not allowed into the narrow definition of musical performers, but were rather seen as something external, threatening to displace genuine musicianship altogether. We can exemplify with the following words, written by a music sociologist as late as 1989:

"As the rationalization of technique continues to its logical conclusion, a specific musician is no longer necessary. Technology can create a simulated musical world without performers. /.../ Through technology, music can be removed from the web of human relationships in which it has been traditionally rooted"

We must remember that live performances were though of as the way to make money as an artist, up until the CD came into the picture. Then, during the golden age of the CD – which in retrospect looks like a short historical parenthesis – record companies in their reasoning reduced live performances to marketing spectacles, which did only exist in order to sell more recordings.

Thinking of reproduced recordings as the core product fitted well with the discourse about so-called creative industries, popularized around Tony Blair's election victory in 1997. Creative industries were defined as businesses “which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property”. Clearly, what that politics favoured in the area of music was not live performances, but end products. Relegating real-time experience to such a secondary position, as was increasingly the trend during the end of the 20th century, was something unique in the history of music.

But since year 2000, when the file-sharing explosion began, the pendulum has turned the other way. Turnover for concerts and festivals have went up to the same extent that record sales has gone down; as has been demonstrated with hard data from Danish copyright collectives. And more and more managers and artists are confirming that the pendulum is swinging back; many has already started to regard recorded music as mainly a way to market performances, where the real money are. Beyond doubt, we witness an economic shift, to some extent, from reproduced objects to real-time experiences. Such a shift inevitably brings a move of resources from the hits towards the long tail, as each artist can only be at one place at a time.

To us, this is great news. It promises greater diversity and less conformity. To the record industry it's obviously bad news, and when this topic is brought up, they typically start arguing on behalf of all the poor songwriters who supposedly do not perform at all. However, we shouldn't spend too much energy trying to prove that the changes are benefiting a majority of all musical artists (if only because it's impossible to quantifty the abstracted group of "the artists"). A more interesting question regards what we mean with "live".

Why is it so hard to discuss live music's role in the music economy, without always falling back at the image of an rock band standing on a stage in front of an audience, with someone selling ugly t-shirts in the back of the room? According to rock ideology, live music authenticates the recorded object, and the recording is imagined as a document of something that once happened live. But the recorded object may not be re-performed, according to this ideology. (Just think about the silly character of the air guitar player...)

This dualism between live and recording is pure mystification, and an obstacle for any serious attempt to reconsider the role of the performative. Obviously, examples from DJ culture works a lot better. For the dub DJ, the sounds produced by operating Echo Deks or turntables are not less "live" or real-time, than the sounds produced by a human voice, a trumpet or whatever.

But this is not about putting different musical genres against each other. Culture, including end products like music recordings, always gets its meaning from humans, in real-time and contained within the limits of a certain context – regardless if the context is a physical or virtual space, or if it includes just a couple of persons or millions of them.

It is not so much about a return of living music on behalf of the dead, recorded object. Instead, what happens is that the concepts of live, communication, interactivity and performability in themselves become transformed by technology. The main challenge is about how to widen our definition of the "live". How can music as a real-time experience be re-thought, as an aesthetic and an economic activity?

Our experience from the copyfight is that the discussion has focused entirely on the production of new culture, while ignoring how culture is used and by whom. So the real question should be: How do we create meaningful contexts around music?

Let's try to define what a live performance is: Something that happens in real-time, a specific time and place. Something establishing an relation between different people sharing a similar taste for something. An experience you are part of creating. These features can also be observed in the actual uses of recorded music; in the domains where people share music, meta-data, tags, ratings and stories.

Think about sharing musical taste with Last.fm. The most significant effect it has on us, is that it suddenly makes listening to MP3's a two-way activity: While music is streaming from our loudspeakers, metadata are sent back to a central server, continually building on your personal profile, which you know will be used not only by the system for calibrating you personal radio, but also by other humans to judge you. In short, that makes listening to MP3's a performative act. Listening overtakes traits from artistic performance, to some extent.

Do we actually want this? Let's leave that question open. Maybe it would be nicer to keep a more ephemeral way of listening, less focused on producing visible metadata, while letting the will to perform take other outlets. Anyhow, this is something we should talk a lot more about.

The time and place of culture today is dictated by digital media. Culture, as human communication par excellence, is as it were technical. A live gig, a club or a conference today can hardly be imagined without internet buzz, friends coordinating online, blogs writing it up, digital cameras and mobile phones documenting it and users commenting afterwards.

So what we have here is not so much, or at least not only, technology being humanized but new domains of the human experience being subjected to a new technology.

What we are looking for now is something completely different from the imaginary utopia of a perfectly working copyright economy, that all coordinates remain the same, only shifted to a new map. What we are looking for here is realistic utopia. From an analysis of the present condition think the unthought. There are still hidden performativities remaining to be discovered.

Last.fm har köpts av CBS, USA:s klassiska broadcast-bjässe. Känns inte jättemuntern, men följderna kan bli flertydiga, med tanke på skivindustrins pågående krig mot all nätradio som erbjuder personaliserad lyssning (de är skraja för att vi ska upptäcka annan musik än de vill att vi ska upptäcka, förstås).

Här skriver jag mer om frågan vad uppköpet av Last.fm ska leda till, lägg hemskt gärna till egna spekulationer.